I've gotten interviewed by people who thought they were great but didn't know what they were doing. And I mean for serious companies like Pebble. 22 year olds who can't even properly phrase interview questions.
Whose the terrible engineer? Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network? Or the guy who interviewed me who gave me a thumbs down for being "terrible"? Or maybe it was just cause I have grey hair in my beard?
I see a lot of attitude about how there are "bad engineers" that seems to come from younger people who are very ... proud ... of their skills, but are more bluster than brains in my opinion.
I don't think they're terrible- I think they have potential. But they have the wrong attitude.
"Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network?"
You might be an excellent engineer, but this is a terrible pitch for yourself.
A software patent is meaningless to most software developers. Most software patents are nonsense. Many of us are listed as inventors on plenty of silly patents, and that isn't very impressive. To me, the mention of a patent in this manner is a negative signal.
25 years of experience is nice, but just mentioning that is hard to differentiate from the case of 25 times 1 year of experience. Just mentioning that work was done on something like the PlayStation network is in itself not very impressive: need to spice it up with some actual details.
Not trying to put down the parent comment by MCRed, but my experience is very much in line with what you say and in fact getting a patent is even easier if you work at large company (such as Sony). Those technical writers in the patent divisions of orgs are amazing at their job:
1) Submit a thin, whacky idea, with loose documentation to the patent department.
2) Hold a 1 hour phone call with technical writers.
3) Two weeks later you get emailed a 10 page patent application of your idea complete with diagrams asking you to review it.
>A software patent is meaningless to most software developers.
This might seem so if you don't leave the HN bubble (which, along with tech media as a whole, has no idea how patents really work yet and so harbor notions like "most software patents are nonsense").
But really it's impossible to generalize a statement like this to any significant portion of our industry. Right here grandparent is an engineer who obviously doesn't agree. There's another comment just below that actually thinks one patent in 25 years is low. The overwhelming majority of software engineers I personally know are proud of their patents. Anytime somebody posts a new patent to their LinkedIn profile, I see nothing but a cascade of congratulatory comments.
Not to say that all the patents out there are awesome, but the notions most people here have about them are far from commonplace.
I am also listed on some. But I have actually prosecuted a couple, and I find most tech communities to be entirely clueless about patents.
Posting that Spolsky article shows that no, you don't really understand how patents work. Spolsky has some rudimentary understanding, and I really appreciate what askpatents is trying to do, but he misunderstood that patent as well. When that article was posted on HN the top comment pointed out that the patent application was talking about something else. Indeed, following up on the application, I see that it has been granted with only slightly narrower claims: https://www.google.com/patents/US8933971
You may think you know what your patents cover, but have you actually read the claims? If you do, you'll find the claims are about as narrow as the invention is trivial, so narrow that nothing will likely infringe it. If that's what you meant by "nonsense", then I'd agree. But the fact remains that the vast, vast majority of programmers never do anything worth filing even those kinds of patents.
I know what the patents filed on my behalf entail. I know the claims. I collaborated on their "invention".
The fact it was granted a patent is not very note-worthy. It is not representative of anything useful. It doesn't represent deep thought, a lot of research, or anything of extraordinary value.
>The fact it was granted a patent is not very note-worthy. It is not representative of anything useful. It doesn't represent deep thought, a lot of research, or anything of extraordinary value.
1. Having read a ton of patents across multiple fields, that could be said of most patents ever (not just software patents). Most patents come out of engineering work, not high-level R&D.
2. That is still a huge step above what most engineers do their whole careers. Think of the average software developer - what percentage do anything approaching "real" engineering as opposed to churning out CRUD apps and web UIs dictated by business needs?
I interviewed a "Senior Architect" from a large company, and he had a masters in compsci. Very impressive sounding, much more than me. I asked a simple question on searching a sorted array and literally got a laugh. He was incredulous that anyone would be expected to know basic, and I mean basic, data structures and algorithms.
People dismiss these questions with a "I'm not gonna be writing a stdlib". No, but the concepts appear everywhere. Someone that doesn't understand them is likely to, I dunno, use a SQL DB, then put a separate index on each column to " make it fast ". Whereas someone that understands the basics will stop and think a bit before assuming platforms are pure magic.
(And BTW, I've seen enough people with patents to know that just having one is more a measure of going through the process than necessarily having technical invention capability.)
>Whose the terrible engineer? Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network? Or the guy who interviewed me who gave me a thumbs down for being "terrible"?
Possibly neither, possibly both. Having been involved with something that launched at a company I've heard of doesn't necessarily mean you aren't a terrible engineer.
As someone who's in their late 30s and has accomplished a lot, I can agree with the experienced dev above's attitude. But also having interviewed a lot of candidates at scale much of these tests are just filtering tests to reduce the amount of interviews team members must do. We always have the majority of our team members interview candidates so that everyone has buy in, but if everyone had to interview every single resume that looked good on paper (I'm assuming we all at least agree on filtering out bad resumes) this would get cumbersome.
It is frustrating as you get older to deal with the fear of ageism, I haven't experienced it yet, but I'm starting to expect it's arrival.
I actually think the testing you on problem solving is the right way, not necessarily knowing the Big O notation, but at least being able to attempt an answer to difficult questions and explaining your thought process is very telling to intelligence and ability. Definitely there is much cargo cult behavior going on at companies.
> I can't tell a "stakeholder" who did real engineering work apart from a "stakeholder" who got their name attached to the patent for political reasons.
Lets say the dude invented something important? are you to have a better follow up question?
If your point is that they commenter is delusional, and at once over-estimating himself and under-estimating others, you should come up with a better way communicating it.
A proper punk-nosed-kid would certainly be more clever.
It adds nothing to the discussion. If the guy did something major (case#1), the discussion is over. It just makes the person asking the question look like an ass.
The other issue is that anyone who would have a reply of that caliber most likely wouldn't reply...why bother...? Thats the (#2) second case. Again, the discussion is over.
The third best case is that the guy is bluffing, and doesn't bother to answer the question. This is case (#3) but isn't really any different in motivating the discussion than case #2. Game theory says the bluff plays to look like the win, right? So just don't answer (and mimic #2).
So there are no rational replies to this question.
Whose the terrible engineer? Me with a patent and 25 years of innovation in key major products like the playstation network? Or the guy who interviewed me who gave me a thumbs down for being "terrible"? Or maybe it was just cause I have grey hair in my beard?
I see a lot of attitude about how there are "bad engineers" that seems to come from younger people who are very ... proud ... of their skills, but are more bluster than brains in my opinion.
I don't think they're terrible- I think they have potential. But they have the wrong attitude.