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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

I’m not in the US but from France.

I know two things for sure : - Hiring is stupidly hard. There is basically nobody applying. - For any non junior position, we dont even care about the degree. Personally, I don’t even read this part of the CV. Experience matters way more.

For me, as long as you are doing decent work, nobody will avan care about what degree you have. Furthermore, I’d say that companies filtering you on this is a good thing : you really don’t want to work for a company that recruit people based on a piece of paper they got decades ago.

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You know, everyone seems to say this but the reality is that once you get in that room--physically or virtually--the hazing rituals and in-group tests begin. As an industry and a culture we need to accept that this is the reality at many/most companies and that those companies need to stop saying "Oh woe is us, we just want to hire someone!"

Well, I have interviewed people who I know I will not hire based on the first 5-10 minutes. I schedule 30 minutes for the screening interview so I will still give them that time and be nice to them... with the intention of not giving away why I will not be hiring them. My motive is to not let them know so that they continue the way they are so that people like me are able to avoid them too.

Maybe they could improve if they were aware of the problems, right? No... and even if it was possible to change them, that is not my job. I'd rather hire someone else.

(Not giving away what I look for because I don't want people devising deceitful techniques to get through the screening. If you know, you know.)

I'm at a FAANG and I'm in the same boat. I don't care at all if you have a degree, the resume is just to get your foot in the door.

Interviewing sucks, but it's mainly because the people doing it are poorly trained, at least in my experience.

I almost interviewed for a FAANG company recently (they put a hiring freeze in before I could get in the interview) and they literally told me to grind "Leetcode Hard" problems to prepare. I have 20 years experience but the kind of problems that are "hard" on leetcode are a very different than what I have done day to day during that time.

I wish my degree and experience would speak for itself. But in reality it seems like exactly that... the degree doesn't matter.

Edit: Last time I mentioned it I got hammered by people in HN essentially telling me I must not be good enough. But having done a lot of interviews on the interviewer side, I can say pretty certainly that Leetcode skill is not directly correlated with Software Engineering skills.

I dabbled in competitive programming a bit (~20 years ago) and can confirm this. Since everyone was talking about leetcode recently, I went and did a couple questions there. Smart people with some CS background but without specific training can reasonably expect to find medium challenging but not impossible. Hard usually requires some specific knowledge of the tricks to do those types of questions -- and these tricks are rarely used outside of specific niches. Solving leetcode type problems are generally kind of fun for me (might be considered an "acquired taste"), but I don't believe all programmers/software engineers need to grind them to become good...

I've personally never really applied those competitive programming skills in my 10+ years career (outside of interviewing...) Those who have done so are probably in the minority (and I suspect, probably over-engineered the solution a bit).

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