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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Short version: Yes, you're hireable. You're going to learn an awful lot in your first 6 months and 2 years of employment in industry.

Slightly more verbose version: You will be better served on a career-ROI-per-hour-invested-basis in talking to people, particularly people with hiring authority, versus learning any technical skill that I could hypothetically name for you.

Having at least one portfolio piece wouldn't hurt you, but talking to people wouldn't hurt you either. Remember, the first question you're going to be asked in an interview is something like Fizzbuzz, designed to separate you from the ~90% of candidates who cannot code a for loop.

[Edit to add: Don't quit college.]

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Thanks for your comment. I'm working on the portfolio. After you said FizzBuzz, I googled it. Couldn't grasp what the trick question was in the test, so I had to google solutions since I thought I must have misunderstood. Where are these statistics that claim it has such a crazy failrate coming from? This is the first thing we do in the first course, but with line breaks and colorcoding.

I would only quit college if I got a decent web dev job, since I'm living of my spouse and it can get a bit too sparse sometimes.

I know. EVERYONE thinks it is a myth before they try hiring. I did, too. Trust me, in 5 or 10 years you'll be interviewing folks, and you will likewise have your mind blown.

Just today I interviewed "web developer" who was not able to create new web project on his computer (which he supposedly is using for web development).

When I was applying for an internship position at a startup last week, I started up one of my local php projects to demonstrate what skills I had, and it wouldn't run... but then I pretty much debugged it on the fly and ran it to save face.

And apparently this was impressive because their bar for questions was "do you know what a function is" and "can you use $_POST?" and things of that nature. They didn't give me fizzbuzz, though. And I was scared they were going to make me implement a doubly linked list on the fly or something.

> but then I pretty much debugged it on the fly and ran it to save face.

That means you were able to run your php project, unlike the guy I interviewed.

> doubly linked list on the fly

Very few positions require implementing linked list, so asking to do that is usually not efficient way to conduct an interview.

"What is a function" / "What is $_POST" is the PHP equivalents of FizzBuzz. Simple questions that you can use to weed out the people who literally know nothing.

It's not a trick. There are people who are that bad who apply for programming jobs. You're in university now and probably surrounded by lots of people who like and can programme. But there are loads of people who cannot programme and try to work in programming jobs.

I went to a Fog Creek open day once, back in 2004 or 2005, and Joel Spolsky said that they said they had some candidates that couldn't tell if point (x,y) was within a certain rectangle or not.

I also thought that it myst be a trick question as even with my limited skills as a PM I could do that.

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