noam's blog.a.lish

spanish french italian german 1/23/2008 11:03:15 AM

Why Interviewing is so Painful

It seems that lately I have been getting more frustrated with interviewees. I think mainly because I can't believe how people, who call themselves Software Engineers, with experience and CS degrees can't answer simple questions about the art they are supposed to be living every day.

I think I've mentioned this before but it never ceases to amaze me how engineers can't mention more than 2 collection classes in the System.Collections or System.Collections.Generic libraries. I really don't think that's a hard question. If you think it is, and you're a software engineer with a degree in computer science I recommend you start thinking of your next career.

Anyway... I read this interesting article at Codinghorror.com about how computer science should be taught. I have read these types of arguments many times, how CS curriculum's are too abstract or too disconnected from reality and I must agree. While I didn't go to an ivy league school I did get two degrees in CS and aside from maybe 3 courses (which I'm about to talk about) we really didn't cover anything that I have used since (I've been a professional Engineer for over 5 years now...).

The article addresses how deployment and source control are simply ignored by academia. Why do you think that is? I also know that many of the schools that consider themselves the "best" schools focus software courses on C and Assembly while only a fraction of it's graduates actually end up using these archaic languages.

I think the lack of realistic software engineering classes are the main cause of my frustration as an interviewer. I'm sure some of my questions may be hard but I don't expect an interviewee to answer every single question perfectly, I'm more interested in their thought process and ask them to "think out loud" when possible.

The three courses I mentioned before that I wanted to discuss briefly are:

Software Practicum - this was my Graduate capstone course (which means I need this course to get my Masters so it was pretty important). In this course the professor basically proposed a project (in my case it was Microscopic Image Analysis Software) and we had to go off and create this product. We met weekly to discuss our problems and show our progress. To me, this was my first taste at agile programming. Sure it wasn't agile per se but it was close enough. What I liked most about this course was that we got to pick the language we wanted to code it in. We also were responsible for the documentation (only it wasn't all designed up front - agile...) and we had to present a usable user interface. There was a similar undergraduate course title "Software Engineering" where students had to come up with a game, design it, document it, and implement it. I think that due to the water fall nature of that course I was lucky I didn't take it.
Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) - this was actually a pilot course given by the graduate center at CUNY. This was by far one of the most influential courses I took. The course spanned 2 semesters, the students were actually forced to go through an interview process to get accepted to this course and internships were promised at the end of this course. Naturally this seemed like a great idea to me, so I sent my resume and luckily got picked to become apart of this pilot. To avoid boring you to death I just want to point out the main things I learned during this class:
- I got my first taste of Subversion, I had used Source Safe before.
- We got picked by one of three major financial institutions to write a product and present to their board
- I got my first taste of corporate America and saw how even the biggest financial institutions had terrible engineers
All together this course was an amazing experience, and while I didn't score an internship I did get to present to the board of one of the top 5 investment banking companies. I think CUNY is still giving this course, so if you're a CUNY student I highly recommend it.
Operating Systems - this course was terrible in general because the professor had not experience and she didn't know a for loop from an if statement... BUT the TA was amazing. He had us write a file system in Java. This was a course I took as an undergrad and it made me actually write code that I had to be able to deploy on the TA's box once I completed it. So that was my first taste of the deployment hell of our industry.

I'd like to see schools take more consideration when they build the curriculum's and make sure they have some real life courses that make you follow some sort of agile software development process in which you are expected to create a product that is ready to ship.

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