<story><title>Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?</title><text>When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place. Bootcamps weren&amp;#x27;t a thing. Computer Science programs were still something just for the nerds. And the industry was almost entirely autodidacts like myself who grew up immersed in technology and did it for the joy of it. Fast forward a decade, and now literally everyone and their uncle wants to be a software dev, and CS programs are churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates. The thought of competing against someone credentialed with 5 years experience vs. myself with 10 years and no degree, feels hopeless. It almost seems like the path I took back then would be completely impossible today.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it&amp;#x27;s the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stormbrew</author><text>There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator:&lt;p&gt;The first is that there are just a &lt;i&gt;lot&lt;/i&gt; of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It&amp;#x27;s usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it&amp;#x27;s just been too long since they did much practical coding.&lt;p&gt;At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you&amp;#x27;re done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn&amp;#x27;t write a loop in a language they chose.&lt;p&gt;The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it&amp;#x27;s just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don&amp;#x27;t really have the luxury of having a history that&amp;#x27;s littered with working on things they were actually excited about.&lt;p&gt;In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they&amp;#x27;re passionate about were&amp;#x2F;are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more &amp;quot;just a job&amp;quot; for most practitioners. And there shouldn&amp;#x27;t really be anything wrong with that.&lt;p&gt;All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with &lt;i&gt;potential&lt;/i&gt; a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they &lt;i&gt;think&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;communicate&lt;/i&gt;. And that&amp;#x27;s where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: Any other self taught devs terrified of interviewing these days?</title><text>When I got into this industry 10 years ago, the world was a completely different place. Bootcamps weren&amp;#x27;t a thing. Computer Science programs were still something just for the nerds. And the industry was almost entirely autodidacts like myself who grew up immersed in technology and did it for the joy of it. Fast forward a decade, and now literally everyone and their uncle wants to be a software dev, and CS programs are churning out hundreds of thousands of graduates. The thought of competing against someone credentialed with 5 years experience vs. myself with 10 years and no degree, feels hopeless. It almost seems like the path I took back then would be completely impossible today.</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>zw123456</author><text>I am an old timer, back in 1978 after getting my PhD, I interviewed with a bunch of companies. One was Bell Labs. I remember the recruiter, did not make me take a test on programming or anything. He just asked me to explain the most interesting project that I had worked on. I told him about a music synthesizer chip I had designed... after about 20 minutes of going on about it, I stopped and said sorry, I went on too long. He just said, nope, you are exactly the type of person we are looking for and hired me on the spot.&lt;p&gt;I think there is a piece missing now days, I could just be an old fart that does not know what I am talking about (probably), but it&amp;#x27;s the idea of finding someone with passion, even if they are not the slickest programmer in town.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>stefanos82</author><text>You said the magic word: passion!&lt;p&gt;For some reason they confuse passion with puppy-love or enthusiasm and they become either sarcastic with you or lose interest immediately, they interrupt the interview, and let you go without any warning.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays you need to go through SWAT and military training to be considered a candidate to get an email reply.&lt;p&gt;To me this is a clear indication that the market is extremely saturated and something big is about to happen...there&amp;#x27;s no other logical explanation behind this madness at all levels and categories of jobs.</text></comment>