this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
242 points (99.6% liked)
Hacker News
1591 readers
453 users here now
Posts from the RSS Feed of HackerNews.
The feed sometimes contains ads and posts that have been removed by the mod team at HN.
founded 8 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
5 years of experience doesn't mean you need a job for 5 years
Just show me what you coded for the past 5 years. There's no lack of opportunity for your github.
Five years of experience straight out of finishing a four year bachelor’s degree means that you need to start grinding for your career when you’re still a high school kid. To put it extremely politely: this is an unrealistic expectation.
To be programming when your in highschool, yes. If you're not programming already in highschool, you probably shouldn't study computer science
...or just expect to take an internship or do Foss work for a few years after you graduate, to catch up with your peers
Lol, then what about these people with jobs after attending boot camps? They’re all there for their talent and experience?
Boot camps and certs are scams
Professional training courses and certifications: all scams.
Expecting people to do unpaid spec work when they’re 16: not scams.
Expecting people to contribute to FOSS software to get a job, def
Not only is this an out of touch and irresponsible expectation to put on high school kids, but if FOSS was nothing but a box ticking exercise for unpaid child labour, then the proportion of abandoned and unfinished projects would be worse than it is for Netflix Originals.
Or they can just lie on their resumes like everyone else.
Resumes don't mean shit. Tech interviews are hard. If you lie, you probably won't make it to the first whiteboard interview
And if you're skilled, you don't really need "experience." Just don't lie about your skills.
How is the whiteboard interview going to uncover the fact that you only have two years of experience instead of five?
If you're skilled, then you have experience. That's the point.
Experience doesn't mean you need to have had a paid job. Decide to make a game in Java? You'll have a lot of experience. Publish it on GitHub, and that's what your interviewer is looking for
And there's no way for the interviewer to know how many years of experience that game actually represents. If it's four instead of five, they'll never know. That's the trick.
You'd fail before the whiteboard interview. Its easy to detect people with little experience
I never ask how much experience someone has in an interview. I throw a hard problem at them and watch them work
Nope. The non-technical phone interview can be bullshitted, the technical phone interview can be passed with enough skill, and by the time they get to you then you aren't even checking for experience.
There are loads of people that get through this process by lying about their years of experience. You have confirmation bias.
The only thing experience is good for is getting better at lying on resumes and lying in interviews. It's a screening process to filter out people who don't know how the sausage is made.