I think the difference is that at medium-large companies there are plenty of technical career paths that don't require a person to actually code - business analyst, QA, documentation, compliance, project manager, etc.

So people at a place like Raytheon who simply can't code (or don't like to code) end up doing something else that they are better suited for.

Early stage tech startups just don't have a bunch of ancillary positions like that. Founders and early hires had either better be great at code or great at biz dev.

Also it's worth mentioning that it's not just a tech/engineering phenomenon. It's very common for people in other professional fields (law, medicine, etc) to get a little ways into their career and realize that the job is not at all what they expected or wanted or are suited for, and there are alternate career paths there as well.

This is a great point. Again, we're getting a weird look at things because we're posting on Hacker News, not Defense Contractor News or Accountant News. Software companies are definitely a significant group, but there are lots of companies whose programming division is just a small part of what they do. They're big enough that they need their own programmers and can't outsource it to someone, but they have all sorts of other stuff they're working on.

If you can't code, you're probably still useful for other stuff. Businesses love to take people they already know and find better roles for them. It's way better than firing badly utilized talent and having to interview for some other candidate with that skillset.

I wouldn't go so far as to say, "There are no incompetent employees," as there are definitely worthless people in the workforce. But it's not as clear as a lot of people might think.

> Not at Raytheon, or Northrop, or Lockheed, or Boeing, or any of the other companies I worked with during that period.

All these companies require degrees, check GPA, and typically have managers that came from technical backgrounds. While not perfect, this combination reduces the chances that a total dunce slips through. Also, all of the above companies tend to be looking at engineers/physics folk over cs/IT, although in the past 15-20 years a lot more CS.

I work at one of the above and for a long time only EEs were hired for any software positions. In regards to math ability that's a fairly high bar. And math competency is pretty well correlated with the ability to program at all.

Not saying that someone couldn't slip through. But all of the mentioned factors tend to reduce the pool of potential flops vs some of the now-standard hiring practices (from the article).

EE/CE here. I took the intro to data structures class and stopped at that. Been kicking myself for years because that's seemingly the only thing people care about; not actual competency (at least in the context of interviews).

Thing is, I'm a decent programmer, maybe even above average. My career so far has consisted largely of being the only or one of a few technical people and doing whatever needs to be done to make X happen. I built a poor-man's version of the mail sorting machines the USPS (and other postal organizations) use to photograph, OCR and sort mail. I remember everyone's mind's being blown when Outbox (R.I.P.) showed people pictures of their letters, and I built a system like that by myself for a previous employer in about two years while also completely rewriting the website. 65kLOC of VBScript/ASP to 20kLOC of python/django plus a whole bunch of new features.

If you believe sloccount (I don't really) in two years I did about 4 person-years of work that it says is worth a substantial fraction of a million dollars and a substantial multiple of what I got paid.

But I don't remember what a red/black tree is.

Knowing data structures and algorithms isn't the only way to be a competent programmer. To get my EE degree I had to take calc 1,2,3, diffeq, discrete math, linear algebra, senior level statistics, and these were all just pre-reqs to my engineering classes.

I think a lot of people get hung up on computer science == programming. There's a lot of overlap, sure, but huge amounts of programming doesn't have anything to do with computer science.

Yea. I and many of my coworkers are similar to you. BS&MS in applied math. Did some of the little programming courses but not the full CS path (though I did last summer work through all of this just to catch up some background http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...).

The reality is different industries have different standards. I'd probably never pass a SV interview because I'm not ever going to memorize many of the CS fundamentals. I work with EEs, Aeros, MEs that code (robotics types), math physics and chem PHds, etc. Sure there's a few CS guys here and there usually that double majored in phys or math.

On a given day, what's more important to our engineering problems is my understanding of advanced linear algebra topics, not a sorting alg (lot of work in CV recently for ex). We really don't bring anyone into an interview that hasnt studied the full gamut of math required in a math/phys/engineering degree. In such an environment, the interview questions are more about how you solved problems and never the memorization of some sorting alg. Oddly enough, when you weed out everyone that doesn't have a full math curriculum first, you don't seem to find many people that 'cant code'. Go figure.

> the interview questions are more about how you solved problems and never the memorization of some sorting alg

How you solved a problem is probably the only meaningful way to screen candidates. Sadly there are a lot of people who think that a whiteboard coding session is "how you solved a problem" when few -- if any -- meaningful problems get solved in an hour or two.

When I get really stumped on something the first thing I do is get my head out of the problem. Go for a walk, work with my hands in the shop, get lunch, anything but try and solve the problem directly anymore. This strategy used to make me really nervous in college with short deadlines but now that's less of a concern.

I have yet to step back from a problem and not figure out the solution (at least where one exists).

I believe part of this is your own frustration, and I do not blame you for venting.

Another part is the inherent error is using education as a proxy for ability to contribute.

My biggest concern, however, is that we assume there is a hierarchy of programmers. That the person who surpasses John Carmack is automatically more valuable than someone else, because it's a vertical pecking order.

In reality, it's likely that given the constraints of a position, Carmack++ is not a good fit.

We see someone build a faster sqrt algorithm as ability. What about the programmer who does his best to navigate internal obstacles adroitly -- why is that not praised just as much? It's certainly a difficult accomplishment -- why praise people for ability entirely?

That tends to bug me, who has no formal education beyond High School, but I have worked a lot to gain knowledge related to software development, both conceptual and practical. There's no "in" when you don't have the minimum requirements at such companies...

I have a friend who is a mid-level manager at one of the listed companies, who came in without a degree, and was promoted because of proven competence to where he is now, and is spending several hours a week working on his degree because he's been promoted to the point, none of his superiors will let him be promoted further without a degree, despite handling the job better than his peers.

On the flip side, I've worked with people with a degree in CS (or similar), who couldn't develop a good software system if their life depended on it. The other side of this is, that many people don't continue to learn and only stagnate once they become familiar with one system. Software development tools don't stop coming out... there will always be new languages and platforms, but I have always seen a lot of resistance... I'm one of the few 40+ y.o. developers I know who keeps an eye on what's coming up in the community.

Yea, hopefully my post didn't indicate that I agreed with the process. You certainly listed plenty of counter examples why it can miss the mark.

But my point was about Statistics. The HR warlords for all those defense/aero companies that have set these limits have done so because it segments the pool of candidates to one with a lower chance of bust (or so they've decided as such).

I'd like to see data, I'm some HR or consulting group somewhere has it. Or maybe it doesnt exist. A simple logistic regression problem with a high number of variables (degree or not, age, major, self-study, continuing ed, etc etc).

edit: also - all my comments are speaking from the engineering side of these companies. not IT. So the actual work content is a bit different than the original article may be concerned with.

I didn't mean to imply that you agree with the process... I think my own comment is more along the lines of, this is one of those rules people should be able to break now and then... I absolutely agree, that there are far fewer risks of people without the necessary skill/ability to do a given job in terms of those with a degree to those without. The challenge is then to not lock those who don't fit that mold out, either by experience and/or referral.