Academic interviews let you actually *talk about stuff you worked on and care about.* It feels so much more humane.
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Replying to @chrisamaphone @graydon_pub
I think the key ingredients here are public work and informative letters. Not obvious how to get there for corporate jobs, but it would be much better.
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Probably also extreme credentialing helps here -- no need to check if someone with a PhD knows the basics.
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I find folks are usually happy to dive deep into past non-public work, I seem to feel pretty confident in an applicant’s competence w/o pushing against secrets/NDAs. This kind of interviewing is harder: one must admit ignorance and persistently ask simple questions
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Replying to @danking00 @samth and
b/c odds are you’re not an expert on their past work. It’s more existentially satisfying to sit there, smugly, and ask tough questions you’ve solved several times.
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Right, but the difference is that people don't try to assess competence at all in academic interviews, by any method, nice or not (for primary research competence at least). We trust that evaluating the CV and letters is enough for that.
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For reasons that do not entirely fit in a tweet (and which I’d be speculating about at best) it is regularly the case that someone gets to a very non-entry-level programming-job interview and literally can’t write a for loop.
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Right, my point is that academia has just as messed up labor relations, but doesn't have the adversarial interviews, precisely because we don't have this problem. So I think interviews are probably easier to fix than labor relations in general.
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Would you suggest transplanting academia's system of accreditation? I mean it has a pretty adversarial pre-qualifying round that lasts a decade+ and ends with a "defense". We're dealing with candidates we have nothing but a CV from, usually can't even read past (in-house) work.
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I disagree with the description of the phd process (at least in the US) as adversarial, but I also don't think every programmer needs a phd. While I think there's something to
@myrrlyn's suggestion of engineering accrediation, I think just a portfolio + rec letters would be good.2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
I wish more weight were put on portfolio and less weight were put on solutions to random CS puzzle questions in high-stakes adversarial interviews on whiteboards.
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I agree portfolios are among the more effective signals, which is partly why I’m on the fence in the argument about GitHub-as-CV: it’s kinda crap to want it, but it feels a lot more humane and informative than whiteboard coding. Take-home exercises also better, I guess?
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Replying to @graydon_pub @pcwalton and
This gets at what I meant about changes to labor relations: a more systematic pattern of paid apprenticeship and on-the-job training would make less fraught initial hires — more advancement from within — but probably requires much more secure employment relationships to work.
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