The whole system’s bullshit
Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
e: You can probably guess how that went.
There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with “10 years of experience using ruby”, a person replied, was told they didn’t meet the requirements, they said something like “look at my profile” …if you looked at the person’s profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.
I don’t even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don’t even know what they need.
Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title “web developer”. He is THE web developer… He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims “web developer”.
Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn’t have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.
Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn’t have enough experience. As I said I understand it’s probably hr and “people persons” writing stuff for “tech people”. Not an excuse just fact. It’s a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.
Well if he did literally develop the web, that would indeed make him the web developer.
He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee and was knighted for it. Just funny that my understanding is his most recent resume claims he’s a “web developer” just like someone fresh out of a boot camp. No, you are THE web developer.
Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them buying our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.
They do not.
I cannot stress this enough:
THEY. DO. NOT.
Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don’t need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.
The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.
People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.
Also the correct color is blue 😋
Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.
I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entitled we couldn’t possibly pay the market price for it.
I was like but that’s the job. Shit I thought I had made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.
Nup apparently we’d be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.
As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren’t even close to what we needed.
I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.
Same.
I personally don’t like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.
For the work I’m involved in there a lot of exception handling. Solving the bugs and looking at the relationship between the stacks. It’s more of a puzzle.
I went to college to learn to code and barely did
Sorry, but this is kinda separate:
we couldn’t possibly pay the market price for it.
&
I was like but that’s the job.
This is literally what labour unions are for?
And it sounds like everyone doing the role for $60k should have been looking elsewhere.
The execs think they’re hiring someone to churn out code, and some people are better at that, like everything else. They don’t understand that they need someone that can figure out what code needs to be written, and why, and that they need someone that gets what the difference is and that there’s always someone that writes better code.
E: Also why I’m not worried about LLMs replacing devs. It ain’t just code.
Thanks. It sounds like our backgrounds are similar.
Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.
That’s awful. It feels really bad when you feel you’re standing in the way of people getting jobs. When you would normally feel like you might be a leftist, this sort of point can be easily exploited to make you feel bad, right?
I don’t even want to address the rest of your points until we go over this one because it feels so important.
So, how long ago did you leave?
15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became unable to work due to disability).
e: I can’t write right
You can probably guess how that went.
So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?
No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.
I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.
College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities handed down from separate departments while meeting deadlines and milestones.
10 years ago I had a senior director at a large fortune 50 corporation tell me that because of the dire state of US education, the only way to ensure a candidate could read, write, and do basic math was if they went to college. As someone who now does lots of corporate hiring, it’s only gotten worse. It’s especially bad in technical fields where about half the CS grads I interview can’t even answer basic questions like “What’s an IDE?”
An ide is obviously an “intentional dog emoji”. You see someone showing their cat pictures and you tell them this is a dog environment.
BTW yes I know it’s an integrated development environment which means basically a text editor, compiler, linker, debugger and in many cases linter. I’m also unemployed and looking for a job so…
Oh my God, I’m a CS Dropout who now works as a janitor yet I’m more qualified than half the people applying for your job.
I’d say the majority of the population can do that, mostly it’s a class filter. Need money to go to school or massive debt.
Yup, you often get very little real world experience in your field from them. I got my bachelor’s degree in information technology and all I really learned that was relevant to my career was a few new Linux commands.
My associates degree in computer information systems gave me way more usable skills than my bachelor’s. At least there the textbooks for the IT classes were official certification books.
I have a bs in mathematics and I had never even heard of SQL until after I’d graduated and started seeing it as a requirement for every job that a person with a bs in mathematics might apply for
It’s funny, but a good college isn’t as much about teaching knowledge but about teaching how to think, so ironically this might still make some sense.
Though if employer is saying “forgot what you learned in college” probably will follow with something illegal.
The fact that college degrees are required for jobs that hey we’re all completely distorts hiring and the entire education system. College can’t possibly be anything other than a means to an end as long as that’s the case. No one’s going to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt they can’t discharge and bankruptcy to learn how to think
Agreed. I think a lot of the people talking about how they are self taught are working in tech and software and they were hire twenty years ago or more. (Can’t wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).
Most other technical jobs are in far more mature fields. College may expose you to ideal situations that overconstrain your ability to get the job done in a corporate setting, but it still exposed you to a set of problems you don’t have access to otherwise. Mainly because these industries are in communication with the deans of these colleges and giving them feedback on what they need to see more of.
