Nick ClarkeSep 9, 2025
arclight

@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.

Sep 3, 2025 at 4:47amWeb
Show threadprojectmoonSep 3, 2025
@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.
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.
Show threadWartezimmerSep 4, 2025

@arclight @alda

I met dozen of frauds in the past 20 years in IT. Ranging from plain stupid to criminal neglect.

A basic interview is IMO enough to filter them out. But those interviews are often without tech guys...

Show threadrequiem 🦫Sep 4, 2025

@arclight thank-you for the perspective. I feel like it's insane as well.

It also *doesn't fucking work*. I've worked with both wonderful and terrible programmers who have been selected by this process, it doesn't ensure anything.

@alda

Show threadmattgSep 9, 2025
@alda @arclight @requiem thus is the craziest part, that it doesn't even work. We'd be far better off selecting people who we think would be good to work with and then spending a full day of onboarding telling them, "glad you're here. Now this is how we expect you to act..."
Show threadMattSep 4, 2025
@arclight @alda I'm looking for an electrician to do some work at home recently and decided that before I even consider them for the job, I'm going to make each of the 10 sparkies come and talk through their portfolio of prior work as part of a 4 hour long interview process and get them to also showcase the homework I set prior to the interview which was to hook up a simple circuit using no more than 2 wires, a light bulb, and a potato. Only then will they get to the second round of interviews.
Show threadFred MoyerSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda there’s a null hypothesis at work here known as the “contractors house”. Or the cobblers children.

And yes, my industry has something deeply wrong with it.

Show threadMartin HamiltonSep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda "Explain this code your bot just wrote" - recruitment hazing ritual for the vibe coding era? 
Show threadGaëtan PerraultSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda

I've been in the software industry for 20+ years.

I have worked with multiple 19 and 20-year-olds who barely made it out of high school but could deliver more and better software faster than 40-year-olds with degrees. I have also worked with multiple university grads who simply failed to deliver software that was assigned to them.

Hiring managers often maintain a defensive posture in terms of hiring because of this variability.

And there is something deeply wrong with the industry. But it's not quite what you've characterized.

You are an engineer. You have a piece of paper signed by an authority saying then you are fit to perform these duties. That one or more trusted bodies have verified your skills and knowledge.

Software doesn't have this.

There is no piece of paper that you can put on a resume that could verify that you are fit to perform the duties of building software. So the industry has duct-taped a (crummy) solution, this constant testing.

Show threadPeter KrausSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda that's right.

Unless you're an academic, then you're expected to jump similar hoops ("a five page project proposal and a two page teaching philosophy, in addition to the 'usual documents' including three references") for a 3 year fixed term job that's paid like shit compared to anything in IT.

Show threadFrancis CookSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda i think the main problem with IT change in general is demonstating you know what you are talking about, can explain what you are talking about, can LEARN and develop.

On the employment side there is definitely a real issue with assumptions around fully formed people who just “know” a bullet list of acronyms.

Show threadkeeps vis.social runningSep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda yep
Show threadwinden^capsule^batman.groupSep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda I think that startup culture is mostly a scam business, from the funding stage, the inbreeding of companies invested by the same VC group, the "we will make you rich by giving you 0.0001%" of the shares, the short term ism, and of course by the crazy hiring methods all of you mention
Show threadSzymon Sokół 🇵🇱🇪🇺🇺🇦Sep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda well, maybe it's because there is a lot of fraud in IT. Some time ago during an interview I managed to discover that an applicant lied at least six times in his CV.
Show threadr-holdSep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda THIS 👆🏼
Show threadElricSep 5, 2025

@arclight Come now, that's a silly comparison. There are relatively few nuclear engineering positions and relatively few nuclear engineering candidates. The industry is tightly regulated.

There are fucktons of software engineering positions and fucktons of candidates. Many of which literally cannot write any code at all because they are literal frauds.

These hiring practices are annoying, but they didn't appear out of malice. They appeared because many candidates do not pass muster.

Show threadarclightSep 5, 2025

@elricofmelnibone How many candidates who have gone through this hiring process feel it was fair, effective, and valuable whether or not they were eventually hired?

Where is the data showing whiteboarding, live coding, take-home tests, etc. are any more effective than humane technical discussions in finding suitable or superior candidates? There's a fetish for "objective" candidate metrics and comic-book-guy regurgitation of trivia in the techbro community and there's a cargo-cult mentality that since Google is big and successful, I should use Google's hiring process if I want to be big and successful too.

Is there a need to screen out grifters and frauds? If the job is seated indoors with air conditioning, no physical labor, and a decent wage, sure. Moreso if there's the promise of get-rich-quick stock options. Is the current voodoo of The Tech Interview effective at filtering out frauds. Maybe? Is it effective at crushing morale, petty racist, sexist, classist gatekeeping, and maintaining an obtuse dudebro culture? Most definitely.

Show threadAutoerotic DefenestrationSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda THANK YOU!

No one expects nurses to take a few patients home, so why am I a bad programmer when I don't program at home???

Show threadarclightSep 5, 2025
@danielaKay @alda Some of the best engineers snd developers I've worked with clock out at 5pm and don't live to work. I was peculiar in those environments because I genuinely found programming to be entertaining and relaxing enough to do it in my free time; it wasn't the norm and made for a more healthy work culture.
Show threadRyan FinnieSep 5, 2025

@arclight @alda @jwz Repost of a post I made a few years ago on another instance:

I am a systems engineer with over 25 years of experience. I am the ultimate generalist, known for being able to quickly size up almost any situation. I've logged into maybe a hundred thousand individual servers over the years, usually in anger. I have my own utility Linux distribution which has been downloaded millions of times.

I just did a spot check of my Mastodon posts, and they're about 65% McRib fanfic, 32% general shitposting, and 3% tech.

I'm happy with those proportions.

Show threadMᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢSep 5, 2025
@arclight @alda It's not much different in the the film or tech industry.
Show threadRiley S. FaelanSep 9, 2025

@arclight Ah, but that's why you're not told legends about on teh inturwebs like the many stories of the efforts of the Nuclear Boy Scout to build a badgeworthy portfolio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCwWX_9grrE

@alda

A Brief History of: David Hahn AKA The Atomic Boy Scout

YouTube
Show threadsebsauvageSep 9, 2025

@arclight
THIS ⬆️ SO MUCH.

Thanks to put it in words.

@alda

Show threadmemiksSep 9, 2025
@sebsauvage
Issue I have is in IT you have everyone able to create the new best modern fluently accessible quality framework ( maintained by one guy ever) every company start to use in 6 months and requested 3 years experts... 👋

In other industey you have... Standards
@arclight @alda
Show threadAshley Rolfmore (leymoo)Sep 10, 2025
@arclight @alda oh gosh I had something on Twitter a very long time ago on this about people expecting finance staff to collect Abacuses in their spare time as a job criteria, or doctors doing out of hours surgery in the home garage as a hobby… and thats how we treat tech staff right now. thank you for reminding me!