[FirmwareBurner]

No other engineering discipline has such a low barrier to entry where everyone can self tech themselves at home almost everything people that go through the higher education pipeline can, and then extra on top due to how fast the industry evolves, where even having a degree might not make you qualified for a job today. In no other engineering discipline is all the tooling FOSS.

So the PRO is that anyone can become a SW engineer, but the CON is that when anyone can become a SW engineer you're competing with soo many people on an even playing field that weeding out the wheat from the chaff is tricky and no company had the perfect solution because it doesn't exist.

What other engineering profession things change so fast that tools from ~20 years ago (C, PHP, Perl, etc) are not useful on the job market anymore? What other engineering profession gets hundreds/thousands of applicants per open position? What other engineering profession has such a lack of standardization that every company works completely different, with different tools and different processes to ultimately do the same thing?

In most other traditional engineering disciplines it's not just the university degree or credential that matters to getting in, but a lot of critical knowledge can only be gained from mentoring and learning at the job from graybeards of the industry, knowledge you'll never get if you try to teach yourself, even if technically all the relevant courses and information is freely available online. Not to mention that in a lot of engineering professions the tooling is specialized, non-FOSS and very $$$, so your only chance of touching it is at university or a company who will pay you to get certified in that tooling.

[constantcrying]

How many 100% self taught, no prior experience people are applying to these positions and are accepted for interviews? Obviously that number is extremely low especially given the last couple of years.

Having a process which only exist for the 1% of least likely candidates is absurd. Even if you wanted to give these people w chance, obviously you don't need to subject the 99% of people to the same process. What is the point of asking a CS graduate with 5 years industry experience some brain teaser questions? There is literally no point, it tells you exactly zero about the candidate.

Also, you can self teach everything in most engineering disciplines. What part of Electrical engineering or mechanical engineering requires a substantial financial investment or has things you could only learn in a university?

[pvg]

Sir, this is a Show HN.

[constantcrying]

And therefore you aren't allowed to criticize it?

If what you are making is built upon a joke of a premise that should be criticized.

[pvg]

You are allowed to criticize it but you can't fulminate and you can't go on some generic tangent, just like pretty much always? It's both in the Show HN thing https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html and the site thing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[constantcrying]

How is criticizing the premise of something a "generic tangent"? If the premise behind something is bad the whole thing is bad.

Evaluating something obviously needs to account for the context it exists in. In fact talking about this particular Show HN is impossible without implicitly or explicitly taking a position on the hiring process. If the current hiring practices were good, having resources to succeed in them would be beneficial and praise worthy. Otherwise they only help to strengthen a broken process, although obviously it might be beneficial to individuals to game that process (which further demonstrates the problems with that process).

I don't see how you even could substantively talk about this post without evaluating the hiring practices it presupposes.

[pvg]

If the premise behind something is bad the whole thing is bad.

Then find a thread where the premise is being discussed, if that's how you feel, or write your own post about the faults of the premise. "The premise of your whole thing is invalid" is not something you can grumpdump on someone showing their work. The, well, premise of Show HN is people showcasing their work specifically - it's not an invitation for everyone to express their views on general things they dislike.