[quote=deadzone][quote=sdrealtor][quote=deadzone][quote=Coronita][quote=an][quote=deadzone]I appreciate your unique journey/story. But was mainly curious what background you expect when you hire for those “mobile” positions. But relating to your story, yes not only is Ivy league obviously way overkill for a job in technology, I would argue UCSD degree is overkill too. Or an Engineering degree at all. I mean Engineering degree is a good filter to ensure a candidate has a proven analytical and problem solving skills. But certainly little you learn in College is directly related to developing mobile apps.[/quote]
Of course. When I went to college, there’s no such thing as Android, iOS, Kotlin, Swift, etc. But I did learn object oriented design, how to think and solve problems, how to make things work and how to prioritize implementations in order to have a fully working feature at the other end.[/quote]
1. Take one object oriented programming class. See if you like it or hate it.
2. If you hate it, the another object oriented programming class and see if you like it or hate it.
If you still like it and it’s easy to understand, then you have everything you need to get into this field.
3. Specifically for mobile. Good mobile engineers know how to detail with async programming and the rest is just practice after practice.[/quote]
I am more interested in what formal education/certs etc. are expected or mandatory for these positions. It sounds like the answer is no formal college degree is necessarily a requirement. If anything a CS degree would be a logical starting point. Any type of Engineering degree would be overkill or out of place. Which makes me wonder why do they call themselves “Engineers”? An overused term in technology in my opinion. Software Developer or Mobile developer would be more appropriate.[/quote]
No middle age guy becomes a mobile engineer after a career in legacy systems for fun. They only do it because they need money[/quote]
I have zero interest in mobile app work for myself. But regardless, comparing software development to driving an Uber as a career upgrade is pretty comical. I am pretty sure you are the only one on here that really wants to drive Uber for fun. That is a strange fetish indeed.
Anyway, I keep getting long-winded, meandering responses to the question on hiring. To be more specific to FLU and AN who are doing hiring. Do you hire, or consider for hiring, software engineers, mobile engineers or whatever you like to call them, without a College Degree? This is a yes or no answer.[/quote]
I already answered it. Yes, if..
1. their linkedin profile is impressive enough with a lot of recommendations from former peers. i check their college degree last just out of curiousity.
2. (as an added bonus) they have a personal github account containing an app they wrote demonstrating some of their personal projects beyond the level of a whoopie cushion fart can app.
2. they complete take home “write an app from scratch” assignment we use to prescreen candidates
3. in the panel interview reviewing their app with them and ask a subset of questions to see if they really did their own work and know what they are doing….
Examples:
a. they demonstrate they understand MVVM design pattern instead of just talking about it with their sample app they wrote
b. they demonstrate technics of good async programming. On android that would be good usage of coroutines, 1/2 credit for using AsyncTasks, and 1/4 credit for using HandlerThreads (are you an Android Dinosaur developer that never learned Kotlin? whats wrong with you)
On IOS, that would be closures and callbacks). And i mean, really understand it, as shown in your app.
c. demonstrate they understand an app’s lifecycle. IE. what happens to your app when i install it on my phone right now and rotate my phone with your app and it moves into landscape mode…Did your app handle it, or was it oops?
d. Ok so, your app seems to not crash when I rotate it, but what happens to the data you had in the app before you rotated the phone? Did you persist it and where?
e. How did you connect to that webservice and parse that JSON object into a swift or kotlin object?
f. In this GET request to fetch images, what are some things about this webservice you felt was an issue to implement with?
g. In this POST request,did you have any feedback about the ease of use of this endpoint when sending a large document?
h. Can you show me an example in your app that demonstrates how you used LiveData?
i. Have you used something like Charles? If so, show me how you would debug this app in a production build.
j. Ok, lets suppose you are to connect to this service from the platform team, but they are behind and dont have anything done, but you need to complete this part of the app. Show me how you would mock out this service endpoint out so you can complete the rest of your app. You can use mockito, use postman, or charles, or anything else you seem fit to do this. Walk me through what you would do.
h. (If you are interviewing for the principal bluetooth mobile position)
Show me code you would use to parse and advertisement.
Show me code you would use to parse a beacon.
Show me how you would read and write characteristics.
Tell me what you did to deal wth interop differences between Android phones . What were some of the phones from specific manufacturers that were really problematic….
This is just a subset of things we ask candidates, based on ehat they declared as their background and experience in their linkedin profile.
I dont require someone wth a college degree if they can demonstrate they are qualified to do the work, and how they wrote their take home assignment and answer questions on their take home assignment during the panel interview does a pretty good job telling us of they know what they are doing..
(No stupid brainteaser “IQ” questions that Google love to ask their candidates…I met plenty of really smart Google engineers that code like shit. in fact, we fixed a lot of race conditions in their Bluetooth framework AOSP code for them…)
That said, we havent run into many candidates that dont have college degrees that can get through our interview process. Is there any correlation netween college degree and demonstrating competency, i dont know ..
But I’ll say this….Some of the people that try to pass themselves off as mobile engineers who’s only education in tech was short courses they took at places like “Devry” or “FullSailUniversity” generally seemed to have a gap in their general education and also didnt seem to have a good understanding of the skills we needed…
On the other hand, one of the best software engineers I worked with at a previous company was a guy with an English major from Stanford, who just didnt want to become a lawyer and go to law school..So he picked up a few books and picked up Android pretty quickly himself…Smart guy, could probably do anything he put his mind to, and decided he wanted to do software. We lost him to Google, who poached him away from us for a software lead role. So yes he was that good despite not having an engineering degree. But again, if he was good enough to get in Stanford, he was probably smart enough to pick up anything he wanted to do…. And again, while it does happen, its rare.
last note. there was some debate before sending a take home assignment would work in this tight job market. Yes it does, if you are patient.
Those peoole who are well qualified had no problem doing take home assignment and doong the panel “discussion” (as we call it) that allows the candidate to walk us through this assignment. Because its 2 hour opportunity for them to see how my engineers work and whether or not they are going to be asshole coworkers. That seems to matter a lot to people looking for the next job… So the panel “interview” is really both ways.
Those that had a problem with the take home assignment usually didnt want to do it because they werent qualified, becauses alternatively we offered an in person interview that just asked tech questions, and they didnt do very well there too.
