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by st1x7 1993 days ago
I don't think it's sad to prepare for the interview process. I see it this way - whatever you do at your current job might be very specific to your current tech-stack/product/problem-domain/team/company. When you're looking for a new job, you can't possibly learn the stack or problem domain of each and every company that you will interview with. In that sense it's great that you're assessed on more general skills like data structures and algorithms. Those few weekends of brushing up on skills you had anyway allow you to apply for a wide range of jobs. You then pick a new job and specialise in it until the next time you need to switch. Sounds healthier than most of the alternatives.
1 comments
FireBeyond 1992 days ago
My girlfriend is an accountant. Almost universally, if someone ignored her degree, and wanted to run through a skills test, it'd be considered extremely insulting.
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st1x7 1992 days ago
She also works in a field that nobody can enter without the necessary education and some additional professional accreditation. Software is a lot more open, without hard requirements for a degree and without oversight bodies. Maybe this is because it's a much newer field, maybe it's because the industry has been consistently growing for the past couple of decades and putting hard barriers to entry would have slowed down that growth. Whatever the reason is, I'm glad that we aren't at accountant-level yet.
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FireBeyond 1992 days ago
Not true - you can gain accreditation (i.e. a CPA), and an employer can mandate a level of education, be it an Associate, Bachelor or Master, but (at least in our state) these are not _required_ to be "an accountant".

There are definitely those of us without formal degrees in software engineering, programming, what-have-you, too. But similarly, I can see some of these employers saying "Oh, you have a CS degree from Stanford? That's cool. How do you perform preorder traversal in a given binary tree? Whiteboard is over here."

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st1x7 1991 days ago
> But similarly, I can see some of these employers saying "Oh, you have a CS degree from Stanford? That's cool. How do you perform preorder traversal in a given binary tree? Whiteboard is over here."

I'm not sure why you're putting this out there like it's a bad thing. Surely, we want all candidates to be assessed against the same hiring standards and not give some people a pass because of the school they went to.

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