[gigq]

"I hope to see the industry improve in this respect, but in the meantime I'm happy to exploit this imbalance as a competitive advantage."

I wonder how much of requiring a computer science degree is simply because the people hiring have computer science degrees. Seems like a self perpetuating insiders club.

[throwaway13337]

I have a CS degree and would value it not at all when judging a candidate for a web/mobile dev job.

It's interesting that this story appears at the same time that an article about how memory games designed to improve your intelligence only improve your memory with that memory game - not in broader contexts.

Chess masters are no better than beginners at memorizing chess boards with a more random arrangement of the same pieces.[0]

Expertise in humans seems to be highly specialized.

So then why do we expect algorithmic knowledge of a CS degree from people writing modern crud web apps?

It's ridiculous.

[0]https://psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.mem.exp.html

[crikli]

Conversely I don't have a CS degree and I take a rather cynical view of candidates who have do. Perhaps I've created a self perpetuating outsiders club at my company. :)

In all seriousness, though, it's because the CS majors I've interviewed have (generally) been great at theory, crap at application. I once had a guy hold forth for 10 minutes about cardinality and then flop sweat when I asked him to explain the difference between "GROUP BY" and an "ORDER BY".

[maxxxxx]

I am also not impressed by a lot of CS majors I interview. I often ask them to come up with a simple sort algorithm where performance doesn't matter or to reverse an array. A lot of them have problems with that. I am very tempted to try fizz-buzz...

[spraak]

I never thought of that, but seems very possible

[gigq]

As someone with a computer science degree I can say I've never questioned it being on my companies job postings. But when I think about it I'd rather see a candidate with an excellent github account than a degree.

[justinhj]

But that means you're heavily biased against programmers that may be very capable and successful but don't work on open source projects. That reduces the catchment size considerably.

[gigq]

I also agree with the article author to give them a take home project to work on. Just saying that a computer science degree and a 10 min chalk board test are a pretty terrible way to make new hires.

[p4wnc6]

How long of a take-home? In my current job search, I think I've finally hit my limit of overly burdensome take-home exams that significantly disrupt the childcare and exercise routines that I depend on. I think any take home that takes more than 2 hours of my time should require the company to compensate me at a fair hourly rate for completing the test for them, otherwise, given how many companies do not place this asymmetric burden on candidates, it's just not worth it.

I also think many of the same biases and inefficiencies that haunt terrible whiteboard hazing interviews still apply to take-home tests. If you say something like, "write this as if it's going into production" it's a disaster -- whatever qualifies as good enough for production is a subjective opinion that varies from organization to organization -- and often varies considerably within an organization too.

A great programmer pressed for time might slap something together and add some notes in a write-up about the extensively different way they would work on it if they were being paid a wage, given quiet working conditions, and tasked with it in the regular setting of a job. And would likely get rejected, despite being a great programmer.

Meanwhile, a candidate coming from some situation without hardly any time constraints, perhaps taking time off between jobs or during a university break if still in school, might spend 20 hours on something that should only take 4 hours, polish the entire thing, write a full test suite, and implement extra features. They might be more likely to be hired even if they are an inferior programmer, simply because they had access to significantly more free personal time to fit it in.

It can even be prohibitively hard just fitting in round after round of technical screens and 1-hour phone calls that probe your experience or ask you to solve short form problems, especially if you're interviewing with many places and they all want you to do that.

Making it take-home sounds better in theory, but there still are a ton of failure modes that people don't adequately account for.

[aethos]

Excellent github != good programmer