In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.
I'm inclined to agree, but at the same time, I've worked with people who proved themselves in the industry already. My senior developer at the time, had 15 years experience but no formal relevant education.
Id say it depends on the specifics of the job role; In most cases, "the fundamentals" arent relevant at all; they are items on the runtime library of a given high level language of choice. There are exceptions, obviously, but you do not need to be a rocket scientist to maintain an ERP or an e-commerce application; on the other hand, there are plenty of "hard problems" where computer science is also mostly useless, because the steepness of it is advanced math, not algorithm design.
Except you can use AI (against the rules, but there is 0% chance they’re catching everyone) for a degree.
The only way to be sure that I know of is to ask questions in-person. They don’t have to be absurd, just things that you should be able to answer if you understand fundamentals, like “describe the differences between a binary tree and a B-tree,” or “describe the fetch-execute cycle.”
In the past we took a chance hiring people with non traditional backgrounds but now that everyone thinks they can do complex engineering with the help of AI, we need to know people have truly studied the fundamentals over a period of 4 years at a university.