[ericalexander3]

Coding test early in the recruitment pipeline. I've seen plenty of CS degrees on resumes that can't pass basic coding exercises/tests; at the same time, I've been impressed with the capabilities of new grads.

I'm looking for autodidects and could care less what educational format they prefer.

[orclev]

Seen similar and also used coding tests to good success. I myself don't have a 4 year degree (I got my 2 year, although truthfully I didn't learn anything new CS related when I got that degree), but I'm also an autodidact that was writing assembly programs by age 12, and OO perl/java before I graduated highschool.

The hard problem is finding a way to filter out fresh graduates (from either college or highschool) who can't code from those that can without having to slog through reams of poorly written coding tests in the process. For people who have been in the business a while it's a bit easier because you can usually take a look at their work history and the keywords they decide to use on their CV and intuitively get a reasonably good feel for where they are career wise. It's still very important to have them go through the code test as well though because CVs can be misleading and I'm still regularly amazed at people that come through with 10+ years of experience on paper who somehow still fail at basic programming tasks.

Ultimately I think tech recruiters may need to just step up their game. It's no longer sufficient to just play buzzword bingo to try to find candidates for a position, they need to actually have some amount of technical chops themselves in order to screen potential candidates. At the moment it seems like the industry standard is that recruiters function primarily as advertisers for open positions, while all the heavy lifting of actually evaluating candidates (of all levels) is ultimately left up to the devs at the hiring company.

[rafiki6]

So you're looking for something that's so rare it's probably a myth? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rsnr.2014...

I think what you meant to say is you're looking for people with passion for the field, grit and curiosity and with a proven track record of delivering. The best engineers learn from others and stand on the shoulders of giants.

[scriptkiddy]

Judging by the abstract in that linked paper, I think that it is arguing more about semantics than anything else. It basically claims that: "No person is truly self taught as they stand on the shoulders of their predecessors". To which, I would agree. No man is an island and it would be very difficult to teach oneself something without material composed by others. However, I think the colloqual use of the term autodidact is more about the lack of a formal educational system or formal teaching figure and less about a person figuring everything out on their own.

[ericalexander3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts

[rafiki6]

No one has actually provided a counter argument. A list of 1000 over billions of humans just shows how rare this idea is. That article isn't arguing semantics, and as a matter of a fact it is showing that the truthiness of an autodidact is to be called into question given the nature of mastering a domain.