Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

most other job interview processes don't involve solving a series of riddles



What do they involve? How do you interview a sales guy? what do you ask him? How do you interview a product marketer?


I was a sales guy, I typically showed up with 6 months of pay stubs, dressed nicely, and had a job within hours.


That's interesting. So would you say that this process was broken? Was it good? I'm genuinely trying to understand how other fields handle recruitment to compare it with the "broken" IT equivalent.


In most other jobs, candidates don't vary in skill by a factor of 10x or more


Lawyers were mentioned directly in your grandparent comment. Sales and athletics also easily show at least that much variation from person to person. Business owners show much, much more variation than that, even if you restrict the field to very similar businesses. Researchers show variation similar to business owners (i.e. mind-bogglingly high).

You can easily construct differences of larger magnitude for what you might think of as "simple" jobs like telephone receptionist; a fluent english speaker is going to be more than 10x as productive in that job, assuming they're supposed to do business in english, than someone who can barely get by, and probably billions of times more productive than someone who can't speak english at all. There are a lot of Chinese people out there whose highest ambition is to "work in an office". I've met some of them! Most will never achieve that goal, because they don't have the requisite skills.

Most people who don't speak english won't apply for a job answering a telephone in english (but a lot of them will! This is exactly the kind of customer service representative everyone has grown to hate). I'd like to see some software job openings that specified a skill set, and were willing to hire people with that skill set. That doesn't seem to be the direction people are headed in, though...


In most other jobs, it's harder to earn a PhD in the field while not being able to perform basic skills competently. But not computer science. It's damned depressing how low the proportion of new grads is that can write code for me to, say, sort a linked list. So the factor is way larger than 10x. We're not differentiating the great programmers from the merely competent; we're struggling to distinguish the capable from the inept.


> In most other jobs, it's harder to earn a PhD in the field while not being able to perform basic skills competently. But not computer science.

I think that you are confusing "computer science" with "software development". It may be easy to get a Ph.D. in computer science and be poorly suited for work in the software development industry, but that's no more surprising than the fact that people can get Ph.D.'s in economics and be poorly suited for work in the finance industry.

Computer science is, obviously, related to software development, and in many cases its possible to take a CS degree that is focused on software development, but CS in general is not software development, and CS degrees in general are not vocational degrees in software development.

The best software developers may need to have extensive knowledge of CS, but merely having extensive knowledge of CS doesn't make you even a competent software developer.


All that I'm saying is that it's possible to get a degree in CS from some schools without being able to demonstrate a mastery of concepts like pointers or recursion.


where did you get that idea?




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: