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0 pointstaopao12y ago0 comments

Put yourselves in the shoes of an employer. There are a hundred candidates applying to your position. Would the answer of "just trust me" convince you to hire one person above the 99 other applicants? If only one of those 100 applicants showed they had the skills you wanted, right out of the box, wouldn't you feel better about hiring him?

I think the attitude of "they should hire me, since I can learn anything" is self-centered. There are a lot more people that can't learn. Without testing methods available there is no way to distinguish the self-starters from the frauds.

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bcoates12y ago

The problem is that most companies make terrible decisions about which skills they want right out of the box. They can't get people that are 100% on everything they actually need (as such people are unhireable for the job/pay they're offering), so they settle for people who know a lot about B+ trees (or more likely, how to reverse a linked list and do a bad version of quicksort on a whiteboard) because that's what the folks who have been studying their "how to get hired at a tech company" webpage know.

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