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Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

Look at other fields for examples. Few have to interview like devs do. Other professionals may have continuing education like conferences, but that's not the same.

Imagine nurses or docs getting asked to take vitals for an interview.

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I mean, programmers also don't go through a medical school equivalent or residency. We don't take boards. I'm married to a doctor and we were together through her time in medical school and residency. If I had to choose between skill checks in the interviewing process and the 8 grueling years of hell that was med school and residency, I will take option 1 without a second of consideration.

There are developers who went through a master or PhD at a top school, with a similar difficulty and debt to medical school.

There are companies who will only hire you if you got a degree and relevant experience. The big tech companies never mention it but most of the workforce had a long education.

I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain.

Requiring a master's for a dev position is just a joke and I wouldn't take a company seriously that was asking that.

Above not true for roles like PM, where for better or worse an MBA carries weight.

>>> I've never seen post-grad requirement for a dev unless it's a cutting edge research position and they need PhD's from the problem domain.

I've seen it in almost every place I worked for in London. The floor is either only people with degrees or only people with no degrees.

The degree is never announced as a requirement, it's rather selected automatically during the interview. For instance in programming, some questions about state machines and graph traversal will do a wonderful filter.

Master's and PhDs in CS are typically not focused primarily on coding skills though. These individuals have a degree and publications that speak primarily to their conceptual expertise, which is important and significant but if the job they're interested in is mostly coding, that's an entirely separate skill. I know CS PhDs who didn't write a single line of code for their thesis.

Going back to the medical analogy, just because someone has a medical degree doesn't mean they're a good surgeon. They'd need additional certification to prove their surgery skills.

Cooks do a stage after a phone / in-person interview where they work in the restaurant for a day or so (multiple days if they are expected to work with different people).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_(cooking)

Yes. As a former cook, it's only the high end jobs that do this, not the chain restaurants. I think that is some of the problem with our industry, imagine if Applebee's started doing this because The French Laundry does? But, I think that this example is a good one, because even a chef with 20+ years has to demonstrate their abilities in an interview. Where should that line be in our industry?

Sure but with what even a low end programming job pays I would put it in the "high end" job spectrum.

People have to go through exams and other assessment before they can put the title on their CV. They've been tested multiple times on their ability to 'take vitals' and other basic parts of their job.

Anyone can call themselves a software engineer, even if no one has ever tested their ability to reverse a linked list, or solve fizz buzz, or even write 'hello world' in a language of their choice.

Many fields not only have extensive education requirements, like law school for example, but May have mandatory internships at low wages for several years.

This kind of comment is exactly the kind of thing that makes some people think that software developers have no idea just how good they have it.

Imagine a nurse that failed to properly take vitals during an interview

A more similar analogy to the practices that go on in tech, it would be asking the nurse to take vitals on a cadaver.

It would never happen real world, but "there are so many frauds out there, this is what we came up with. You should now how to take vitals."

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