So does this mean that programming education is broken? That companies should invest more in training? That bootcamps should revamp what they teach? That there should be industry standards for what programmers at different levels should be expected to know?
The most maddening thing about interviews imo is the opacity. There's always uncertainty about where exactly things went wrong, and how it should be fixed next time. It's almost a meta-engineering problem of its own. And it's a metaphor for the lack of software engineering standards.
Programming education is broken. I did one year of computer science at one of the top universities in the world (switched into mathematics after that), and I'd see that course as useless if not actively negative. The only way of learning that I've seen really work for anyone (myself included) is more like a craft apprenticeship, working closely with someone more experienced. We shouldn't be surprised that that produces widely different approaches.
Frankly the field isn't mature enough to have standards. If you tried to set a professional exam based on today's best practices, in five or ten years the answers would mostly be wrong. We still don't know the right way to write software. Million-dollar systems still come with laughably simple bugs.
What does the interview process look like for a craftsperson? That's probably the best we can expect from a field as unsystematic as ours. The one thing that strikes me is that in creative fields it's normal for people to show a portfolio of past (client) projects, whereas in software past employers usually keep all copies of your code. I have no idea how we'd go about changing that norm though.
Welcome to my shop. Here's some wood. Make a chair!
In most of the interviews I conduct, I get the candidate to write follow a spec we've written and some code. And I get the candidate to debug a program with some failing unit tests. About half of the candidates I interview fresh out of school have no idea how to get started debugging a program they didn't write. You need to do that just about every day at work, and its usually not even mentioned at school.
But I've worked as a teacher too. I will move heaven and earth for my students, but in my darkest moments I think taboo thoughts. Maybe IQ is a real thing, and maybe some people just don't have the neural hardware to ever be good at programming. If thats true, we do those people a huge disservice. We steal years of their lives and tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars training them in a skill they can never master. I'd love to see the stats on how many people graduate from a CS program, try but never find reliable work in our industry. I worry the numbers might be damning.
A few months ago a candidate I interviewed asked for feedback at the end of the interview. He wanted to know I recommended that he practice so he could improve. I said he should pick an opensource project on github - preferably something thats not too big and look through the issue tracker. Pick a simple looking bug and try and fix the bug and submit a PR. His whole manner changed after I said that - the idea of doing that was so incredibly daunting to him. But that right there? More or less, thats the hiring bar. As an interviewer I'm trying to answer the question "If I hire you, can you do the work?". Read, think, understand, modify, write code, communicate it to your team. Thats the work and thats the bar.
Approaching an open source project cold is a bit higher than the bar.
So do your students do this? Why not?
I see it as like if I were hiring for something as generic as "writer". It's easy to have a generic "writer" produce a small sample for you on the spot, similar to a CS interview. Of course you can always practice writing directly itself, but I would imagine someone who had completed a lot of coursework in linguistics, classics, literature, etc. would on average be very well-prepared if they were a good student. But you could still practice and teach yourself on your own if you wanted to
Perhaps, but it's still the closest thing the industry has to a "programming education"; I think it's the first thing employers look for, rightly or wrongly.
> it's kind of silly to judge a whole subject by the first year
How many of my limited days on the planet am I supposed to sink into something before I'm permitted to pass judgement? At some point Stockholm Syndrome would take over.
> A good CS student, who understands the coursework and doesn't cheat, should easily become a good enough programmer just from completing coursework in a mostly theoretical program to get hired basically anywhere. Programming is something you learn incidentally because it's intertwined with what you're doing anyway;
That's not what I saw happening (unless you count the official lectures/colloquia as "cheating"; certainly I saw cases where the meat of the answer to a supervision question was spoon-fed to us directly). The people who could program at the end of first year were the people who could program at the beginning or who "got it" immediately. I never saw people struggling with a new concept but then gradually being taught it (which is something I did see happen a lot in the mathematics course), and a frightening proportion of the students I was friendly with were coming out of that first year knowing seemingly nothing, certainly not being able to program or talk coherently about algorithms or computability. I suppose it's conceivable that those students were somehow getting something out of the system design type courses, but it seems implausible.
I understand there was a shake-up in that CS department a few years after I graduated, so maybe I went through it during a bad time. But the students who graduated there in the meantime aren't going to get a do-over.
> I see it as like if I were hiring for something as generic as "writer". It's easy to have a generic "writer" produce a small sample for you on the spot, similar to a CS interview. Of course you can always practice writing directly itself, but I would imagine someone who had completed a lot of coursework in linguistics, classics, literature, etc. would on average be very well-prepared if they were a good student. But you could still practice and teach yourself on your own if you wanted to
I'd suspect the overwhelmingly important part of writing is actually writing; I only know one person who I'd call a great writer, and hanging out with him the thing you notice is that he writes the way other people check their phone. All the things you list can enhance writing, certainly, but if you don't actually write then any amount of knowledge of linguistics or classical literature is meaningless (at least in terms of how it affects your writing ability).
Of course it is broken, it rarely mention naming, debugging, and never emphasize reading code. The real fundamentals are not there and you learn them on the job.
