[aisofteng]

About a year or so into my professional career and in the second position I ever had, I was asked to help interview candidates who had passed some initial screening which consisted of asking the candidate about their resume, but, importantly, no programming or whiteboard test. The company I was working for was a multibillion dollar corporation in a non-tech industry (think something like healthcare or petrochemical), and I was working in its headquarters. The following happened in a US state that, shall we say, does not have a reputation for being very progressive, and that definitely is on the extreme end of gender imbalance in tech.

The interviewee was a young woman who has just graduated from a reputable engineering school (~top 10 private engineering school). This was the first time I had interviewed anyone, so I let my two colleagues, the CIO and the director of network engineering, handle most of it. She answered their questions about her school experience reasonably; when they seemed to be slowing down, I asked a couple questions of my own:

1. "Do you follow any tech news outlets or social media sites?", which seemed to confuse her and ended up being answered with a sheepish "no, not really."

2. "Can you give us an example of something you've coded for fun? It doesn't have to be a big project and it doesn't have to be particularly recent - whatever comes to mind." She hesitated for a long time on this one, and said she had set up a server at home for storing cooking recipes. When I asked her what server software she used, she said she didn't remember, which led me to suspect she made this up (how can you install Apache/nginx/other, configure it, use it, and then forget what server software you used?)

When discussing the interview with my colleagues, I was surprised to find them both immediately wanting to hire her. Having been at this company for under six months, I didn't want to be the naysayer, so, while I expressed my reservations - namely, that the position she was being considered for required someone who had a passion for programming and that she didn't seem like someone that does - I said that I didn't feel strongly enough to want to veto and would defer to their judgement. (I mentioned earlier that this was in a state with an extreme gender imbalance; I privately suspected that, having no women on the development team, they very much wanted to hire a woman for the sake of hiring a woman, but of course did not voice this. My suspicion was also based on my being asked much more involved questions during my interview, as compared to essentially none for her and no follow-up questions being asked about her responses to any questions she did receive.)

We hired her, and we started her off with what should have been relatively simple tasks. She could not complete any of them; this, in and of itself, is fine, because it is to be expected that someone hired out of school would require at least some amount of training. However, she would not ask for help when stuck, even after being repeatedly encouraged to do so and my personally saying I remember being in the same position as her and that it is normal to do so. This is also pretty normal for someone in their first professional position. However, she never knew how to get started on any task, never asked for help, and never remembered anything I tried to teach her. More than once, I walked into her office to ask about her progress on an assigned issue only to find her doing literally nothing - not coding, not looking anything up on Google/StackOverflow, not even on Facebook, but literally sitting at her desk, staring at her monitor with no windows open of any kind, with her hands folded on her lap. How a person could do that for eight hours, I don't know.

After two months of this and finding that she seemed to be literally unable to write code, we gave up trying to train her. We didn't fire her, but we moved her to a QA team; her job was to be given a script with a specific list of steps to execute and to report back if any step failed. In my mind, this is tantamount to firing her from a software development position.

I have some takeaways from this experience for myself and can tell them if anyone is interested, but they are not directly relevant to OP's question.

[id122015]

But dont you find it ridiculous that employers get what they ask for. They ask for degrees, they get people with degrees. I looked just now for some jobs that I could do and they ask for degrees.

The reason I dropped out of a top 10 global engineering university was because I saw right there that it didnt teach me programming. So I learnt on my own. I recently applied for my first job, and its that type of job where its good to have progrmming skils but not mandatory. I'm so interested to see if I'll get an interview at least, cause hiring is broken.

[brianwawok]

But you are missing the case of both a degree and good programming skills. If two programmers code equally, why wouldn't I hire the guy with the degree? That took the algorithm classes and took the writing class and has more tools in his toolbox than coding?

It's ok you don't have a degree but not sure why you would be shocked that some prefer college graduates

[charlesdm]

Why would you pick the one with a degree? If two developers are of equal technical ability, I would honestly pick the one with better social skills over the one with a degree.

[brianwawok]

You are implying there is a downside. In my example they are the same in all aspects you measure.

[celdon25]

Since all other things are equal, the solution is simple. The person with the degree is more likely to have student loan debt, so a salary of X dollars per year will go further in the case of the one without the debt. The person with the debt is more likely to require more money for the same level of satisfaction.

All other things being equal, of course.

[always_good]

Seems like you're really stretching it.

The one that went to uni probably got laid a lot more, too. So as they're working in an office space with no women and possibly not meeting any women on the side, they are less likely to have a social crisis when they're working their 60th hour of the week.

This is kind of fun!

[tonyedgecombe]

Also everybody else would choose the degree candidate so you have no competion for the other, you are likely to get them for less money and they will be more loyal.

However I suspect there is very little rationality in hiring, even amongst this community.

[id122015]

The only thing that shocks me is to read over and over again that cs graduates dont know how to program. Its that famous article about cs graduates.

Also, the definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results.

[adnanh]

It's important to know that engineering is not just about programming. Programming is just a tool.

[jdnc]

I think here the main issue was that the company hired programmers without any kind of actual technical screening. It kind of seems quite likely that in this case they would end up hiring developers, that they would come to regret later.

Questions like what you code for fun or what technical sites you browse are all fine as supplementary discussion points, but they are in no ways going to be indicative of whether the person knows how to code, unless you actually ask them to code.

[dominotw]

how can you code for fun and not know how to code.

[jkmcf]

Did she have a CS degree? I find it hard to believe someone with a CS degree from a top school could float through w/o being able to code at all. Why would you apply for a job you know you couldn't hit the ground running and then not try at all?

I've seen many CIS-type grads not know squat and still be able to churn out something.

[omidfi]

Thanks for sharing this experience. So I guess in this case the apllicant lacked: - technical skills - soft skills to ask for help

[Chyzwar]

Lacked motivation. I can teach coding anyone but they need to want this.