OT: CS education gone wrong (Was: Re: TDD is BS?)

H. S. Teoh hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx
Thu Jun 20 22:57:20 PDT 2013


On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 01:14:28AM -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jun 2013 20:50:08 -0700
> "H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote:
[...]
> > One of my previous supervisors told me that when he gets resumés, as
> > soon as he sees "Ph.D" he chucks it straight into the trash.
> 
> Classic ;) I'd be likely to do the same.
> 
> And I have a friend who's moved up to a management position on a
> University's IT dept and he's had similar experiences: When they hire,
> they're expected to get their candidates via the HR dept (heh, yea,
> right there you know things are gonna go wrong ;) ). And their HR
> dept, as with most, makes their selections by blindly grepping for the
> biggest degrees (they don't know any better - they're HR people!).
> He's told me horror stories about how nearly all of the big-degree
> candidates they send him turn out during interview to be flat-out 100%
> incompetent.

It's not entirely HR's fault. It's the way they're setup to fail. :-P

The way it works at my job is that everything still has to go through
HR, but it's the hiring managers (who are themselves coders actually
writing code for projects) who review resumés and recommend potential
hires to HR. HR then arranges the technical tests and interviews,
usually with the hiring managers who recommended the candidates plus one
or two others whom the candidates will actually be working with, and
then take care of all the paperwork and other stuff that hiring managers
shouldn't be concerned with.

IOW, we don't have HR decide who to interview, but actual technical
people look at the resumés to weed out the BS. I was involved with the
hiring process for a bit some time ago -- we got to ask HR to first
administer a technical test before any interviews are arranged; test
results are reviewed before deciding to interview the candidate -- and
we get to ask them questions about why they answered a certain test
question the way they did. Makes weeding out incompetent applicants much
easier. :-) If the code they submitted on the test looks obviously
lousy, we don't even bother interviewing them.

In spite of it all, though, we still sometimes end up hiring people who,
6 months down the road, write code that makes you scratch your head
going "huh?! that genius coder we hired wrote *this* junk?!". But maybe
some hiring managers are less discerning than others. *shrug*


[...]
> When I was a freshman undergrad (at BGSU, near Toledo), I tinkered
> around on the side with some PalmOS development. (PalmOS was still
> around back then.) A couple years or so later, shortly after I'd
> transferred out IIRC, I noticed on BGSU's Computer Science dept's
> website that they were bragging - and I mean genuinely bragging - that
> their genius *graduate* CS students had (*gasp!*) made software that
> ran on a PalmOS device!
[...]

At least it's not as bad as "Graduates from our wonderful marvellous
amazing CS program helped design our sucky non-navigable department
website! Don't you wanna come study here and get a degree in HTML?".
Sigh...


T

-- 
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left. -- BSD Games' Fortune


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