arclightSep 3, 2025

@alda As a nuclear engineer, I have never been asked to show my portfolio of reactor designs I maintain in my free time, I have never been asked to derive the six-factor formula, the quantization of angular momentum, Brehmsstrahlung, or to whiteboard gas centrifuge isotopic separation, water hammer, hydrogen detonation, or cross-section resonance integrals.

There's something deeply wrong with an industry that presumes you're a fraud unless repeatedly and performatively demonstrated otherwise and treats the hiring process as a demented form of 80s-era fraternity hazing.

Show threadprojectmoon
@alda @arclight big difference is that nuclear engineering is regulated and has mandatory ceritications and licenses, which show you have the skills required. While certifications exist in the software world, they're not the same unfortunately...

That being said, take home assignments and all that are terrible metrics in interviews.
Sep 3, 2025 at 8:19amWeb
Show threadarclightSep 3, 2025
@projectmoon @alda I have no certifications or licenses beyond that of a college degree. People self-select into these sorts of high integrity regulated careers - frauds get found out really fast due to the work process, it's a small industry, and unless you're a high-up exec there's not enough money here to make it worth the effort. Tech-wise it's no more or less demanding than software but the work is substantially more consequential. Why go through all that abuse just to spend your days gluing together frameworks to build yet another pointless and disposable website?
Show threadprojectmoonSep 3, 2025
@arclight @alda I don't disagree, really. I went through this at the beginning of 2024. Some companies have insane requirements. I know my skill levels. The places I got hired by didn't have take-home tests. They did have discussions about personal projects, though. And in one I showed off some code I had already written. I think that's far enough, as it gives the interviewer insight into what motivates you and how you approach things. Short of some kind of regulatory framework and nationally-administered software engineering licenses, I don't really see an alternative. Part of finding an employee is making sure they can do what you're hiring them for. Take-home tests or live coding exercises are a stupid way to do it. Discussion of a relevant business problem with maybe light pseudo-code, yes perhaps.

I don't know. I really can't think of a better way...
Show threadVerity AllanSep 5, 2025
@projectmoon @alda @arclight I've ended up using take-home exercises because quite a lot of candidates didn't have a public portfolio to discuss. Where a portfolio or project exists, I love to discuss it, but early career people, people who work for companies that make it hard to open source even your personal passion projects, or people who don't have free time to write software outside their jobs, all these people tend to lack a suitable project to discuss. This makes the hiring process suck for everyone involved 😞
Show threadAlex, the Hearth FireSep 5, 2025
@arclight @projectmoon @alda because no one else will hire me
Show threadari Sep 3, 2025
@projectmoon @alda @arclight as a person that gets stressed-out during interviews a lot more than during normal job duties (including "incident response"), i actually prefer "take home assignments" to trying to code/design architecture on a whiteboard/online IDE.
Show threadDaniel Terhorst-NorthSep 5, 2025

@projectmoon @alda @arclight Now I want to know what a take-home assignment would look like for a nuclear engineer.

'Build a small-scale reactor about the size of a shrubbery. Nothing too fancy, mind.'

Show threadarclightSep 5, 2025

@tastapod @projectmoon @alda That's called the senior design project and it takes 2-3 undergraduates a summer to complete.

I can show you publicly available safety analysis code I've recovered, modernized, and evaluated, where I've documented the weaknesses in the original models from the late-60s. But that's more of a demented personal hobby project and a case study for an unmarketable book on revitalizing legacy engineering code and not something you should expect every engineer to have in pocket. https://gitlab.com/apthorpe/sofire2

If I was forced to give someone a take-home exercise, it would be handing them a 30-50 page draft calculation and ask them to do as much editorial and technical review as possible in a day. No gotchas - just see if they can identify the most important aspects of a technical report, see the questions they ask, and see what they checked and why. If a model or calculation is acceptable, explain why. Similarly, if something isn't acceptable or doesnt seem justified, explain why and suggest ways it might be made acceptable (if any).

Ask what they would require before they signed off on the work as being correct and complete. All the tech details are in undergraduate texts, reference books, academic papers, and public or proprietary technical reports. Hard to fake being a competent reviewer.

Bob Apthorpe / sofire2 · GitLab

GitLab.com

GitLab
Show threadDaniel Terhorst-NorthSep 5, 2025
@arclight @projectmoon @alda ngl was not expecting a serious answer. I must say though that this kind of summarizing and recommendation work sounds like *exactly* what a LLM would be good at, or at least would produce a decent facsimile of, provided there are enough examples of 'good' out there in the wild.
Show threadarclightSep 5, 2025
@tastapod @projectmoon @alda An LLM cannot do this work; the process is at least as much about asking questions as it is answering them. There's no statistical set of weights that can be put on the work to determine its validity. We've been working with probabilistic models in this field for decades (e.g. NUREG/CR-6850 https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/nuregs/contract/cr6850/index.html) and we're well aware of their limitations.
Show threadChris PittsSep 5, 2025
@projectmoon @alda @arclight I do sometimes wonder if software certifications are part of the answer here, but definitely not the performance theatre ponzi schemes we currently seem to have landed ourselves with.