Ask HN: Would you hire a programmer without a degree? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you hire a programmer without a degree?

14 pointsjohndoe9037 comments

Hello there,

I'm a 22-yo male. Long time I was a freelance Python programmer. Also I have some projects on GitHub.

Currently I work at a Russian company as a Java EE developer.

The problem is, I have no university degree. Of course, I went through the school and college and got secondary special education (guess it's correct). I got a profession which is more into system administration than programming. But I decided to be a programmer.

In the future I plan to move out of here to somewhere in the US and work there.

So here I am, thinking if I need to go to university, since I'm absolutely disappointed in Russian education system.

The question is, Would you hire a programmer without a degree? What if I study remotely, does it make sense? Is there any chance to get hired for skills, not for education? Is there any advice you can give?

Thanks.

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I hire experienced people, which means that I don't care about your degree. I care about your professional career: have you been successful at other companies? What are your key accomplishments?

I can't wave your CS degree in front of my customers to get them to pay me more, so who cares about it? I prefer someone that can show me how his work will make my product or company better.

Yes. Disclaimer: I'm one of those.

I started a degree, but dropped out. It was just a waste of time and money, "learning" and doing what they put before me, which often was outdated, badly presented, silly or plain wrong (this might be different in a good college, I tried three different Spanish ones). I could just go and learn by myself the right things, from the right sources (seriously, the Internet is full of _amazing_ stuff), both theoretical and practical.

If something, I wish I could take back all that time and money rather than go back and finish. I never had a problem so far on getting hired or learning what I want or need.

Yes, I'd hire someone without a degree. Some of the people who have impressed me the most thus far in my career have had no formal education. In the security industry especially (primarily where I work), it is not uncommon to see incredible work done by those who dropped out of, or simply never attended university. This is true even in cryptography (though it's rarer).

This doesn't mean it's necessarily a winning bet to drop out of college. It depends on what you want to do. If you have solid skills and want to drop out to start a company, great, go ahead. History has shown many people beyond just Gates or Zuckerberg who succeeded that way.

In general, the more hands on the work, the less a degree matters if you have other ways to prove your skills. Research is harder to just break into.

I've worked with many programmers without degrees, including at least two who didn't graduate high school.

In my experience, people care more about your github repo, and how well you can code in person on a whiteboard, or on a small takehome projects.

If a potentional employer cared more about my previous education history than they do my skills or previous work, than I personally wouldnt really value them either. Not sure if that's the 'correct' way of going about it.

I also moved to the US recently, got rejected so many times due to the lack of US-based degree. I already got a degree in CS from my home country, but it doesn't help. I'm not saying 100% companies/startups in Silicon Valley required a degree, but you better to get one.

The bad news: If you don't have a degree, your resume has a much higher chance of being weeded out before even getting to a phone screen.

The good news: This prescreening step is the only one where your degree matters - by the time you're actually talking to a person, your degree almost doesn't matter at all.

Getting your first job will be tougher than you might like, but there are plenty of companies that don't filter candidates based on education. After you get that first job, your goal should be to expand your network - an internal referral can oftentimes guarantee a technical screen, at which point you're right where you want to be.

Yeah, without a doubt. Some of the best devs I've worked with don't have degrees.

I have a CS degree, and in my own personal view, I think that a degree is extremely helpful. With that being said, your average degree doesn't teach you how to be a great developer, nor should it. Programming is a vocational task, and while there is a ton of theory that can help you out, there is no substitute for experience.

With that being said, a lot of people on here say that a GitHub profile will help you get hired. I'm not so sure, especially when you're dealing with your typical non-tech company looking to hire a developer. The underlying idea that experience trumps education is valid in the workplace. I've worked with Oxbridge graduates that can't write code for shit, and UWE graduates single-handedly build great tools being used by millions every day.

Where I disagree is with the idea that a few small projects on GitHub can show that you work well on large projects, or as part of a team. The only thing that can reliably do that is experience, and naturally you won't get to flaunt the code you've written for a previous employer. If you want to move to the US, get some paid work in Russia. It doesn't need to be ground-breaking, or even a huge project; something you can write on your CV/Resume that says "I've written code professionally".

My advice is everything in moderation. Get enough education. Write enough open-source code to show that you can write something non-trivial. Get enough experience to show that you are capable of working as a professional developer.

Yes, you can get hired without a degree. Even at places like Google and Facebook. Most people don't care about your degree if you can deliver (i.e. have results to show for it). The older you get and the more you have accomplished, the less important it gets.

Since it seems like you're living in Russia at the moment, one thing that could be problematic is the visa issue. You might not be able to get a US residence visa without a degree (depending on your personal situation).

It seems like most people on thread say one thing, but the statistics seem to say something else.

http://phys.org/news/2014-03-hire-google-companies-bad-idea....

86% of people at google have college degrees. I guess 14% is a pretty high number, but it also says a vast majority have a college degree.

There's no contradiction here. I'd argue that the correlation noted is because knowledge workers as a whole tend to have college degrees, and Google employs a lot of knowledge workers. The number does not imply that Google actively selects against people without college degrees at a 6:1 ratio.

Hacker News doesn't represent the world of programming as a whole. In many companies, developers are hired in the same way that many other office workers are. The required degree is needed, the necessary experience on top. For larger companies that don't deal primarily in tech, this is their HR policy, and it exists for all roles.

Well, as long as you get the job done I wouldn't bother about whether or not you have a degree. And quite a few of my friends are pretty good programmers though they don't have a degree. In fact degree is just a piece of paper so you shouldn't let it stop you from getting job offers. And if does, it means the employers aren't seeking for an expert. And such employers aren't worth spending time on. BTW have you thought of taking online courses in some university abroad. I heard from http://dissertationwriter.org/contact-us/ that if you are good you can join one of these courses http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/.

By the way, I have thought about online courses. I think I'm gonna try MIT course.

Yes i would. Today degrees are overrated in our field. Is a young web engineer without experience more interesting than a developer without degree but 5 years experience ? In fact the more valuable is your personal knowledge and personal projects. And I don't speak about school knowledge/projects, but those you developed by yourself.

I don't think you would have a problem getting people to want to hire you without a degree. What you should really look into (and I had to do this as well, though not moving from Russia) is what countries you can easily get a visa to without a degree (even if an employer is willing to hire you). In my case I had to first get my Australian citizenship (originally Ukrainian, but Australian resident at the time) to qualify for a Working Holiday visa to Europe to make my preferred move (then looked for employment once there).

Another option might be to try to get a job at a Russian branch of an international company - sometimes working at a local office for a year or so can legally make transferring overseas within the same company easier.

> What you should really look into (and I had to do this as well, though not moving from Russia) is what countries you can easily get a visa to without a degree

I did not think of that option, thank you.

I certainly would. I don't have a degree either. I've been working in the industry for over 20 years now; nobody cares what I was doing or not doing in the '90s. It is probably harder to get in the door now than it was when I started, but my experience has been that if you know how to code, you want to keep coding, you know how to learn, and you want to keep learning as you go, lack of formal certification will not be an obstacle to your career development. A degree gets you the first job, and experience gets you all the jobs after that. If you can get in and show that you know what you're doing, you can build from there and it doesn't matter how you started. It sounds like you may already have jumped that hurdle.

It depends on the employer. Some large companies may have policies about degrees. Smaller co's may not care. The key is having the necessary skills and experience, which may take years to accumulate. Lacking a degree doesn't mean lacking education. You mention freelance work, so maybe you do have the skills.

Your biggest issue might be getting a proper work visa, which, by the way, even immigrating post-grads struggle with, so good luck to you if this is a factor...

As others have said, the problem is getting the interview, not getting hired.

You'll have to get a recommendation from someone to get an interview, either by doing Open Source or Stack Overflow or attending conferences or something. Once you're in an interview, most companies in the Bay aren't going to care about a degree if you can pass the interview.

The problem is making it through the HR/resume hurdle. (And passing the interview).

I don't know the degree status of any of my team. That said, getting a work visa in the US without a degree seems like it maybe very difficult.

No, because if it turns out you don't have the skills you say you do, I will get fired because I hired someone just based on my own (wrong) preferences. If you had a degree but couldn't do the job, it is a more 'honest' mistake and I could blame your school.

Doesn't this just make you a bad interviewer? The fact that blaming someones college is even on the table just makes it seem like you aren't doing your job as an interviewer. I've met tons of CS degrees from UC Irvine and other great schools who can't program worth a damn.

I'm under impression that parent expressed frustration with having to work in environment with so little respect for human intelligence that this kind of bureaucratic CYA is needed to stay employed there.

Now, there is the question whether one should want to stay in such a place, but it seems to be a common folk wisdom that many places are like that and there is no escape.

Like it or not, once a company has more than one manager they are competing for headcount and budget. They can't just leave to another job. cya is the nature of the job.

No, an employee might be very skilled but is difficult to work with. Imagine someone who has a habit of threatening coworkers, stalking an ex, bringing weapons to work, etc. That's not something that comes out in an interview. If the person is fired there is the expectation that these kind of behavior problems would have been found out and fixed in four years of college. It's the same with skills. Someone should have found out in four years.

Tough, but honest answer. The point that this person is trying to make that a lot of users will probably say something along the lines of "Yes I will if your side projects are good enough." But for every HN user there are 10 interviewers that look at all the resumes and just throws those out that do not come from a top tier CS school. I wish OP the best of luck.

Sounds like you work for a horrible company. I am from UK and work in Australia and I have never heard of or experienced anything like this. Sounds like the worst of the worst.

Whether or not the company is horrible or if someone would be fired for a bad hire, managers will assume the worst and do the most weasely thing. So, expected behavior is they play it safe and trash resumes without degrees. Some people don't have the same perceived social pressure because the company is small or they are the founder.

If that is true, its is an effective a cartel for the universities. Join our courses or kiss goodbye to your middle income lifestyle dreams.

This is a hilarious response because any place that would fire an interviewer for a bad hire would be one of the worst possible places to work at. Hiring engineers is hard enough without the threat of your job being attached to their success. If you need to cover your ass so much that you can't hire anyone without a good degree that indicates there's more politics in play than actual engineering.

Yes. I would value 1 year of actual professional experience over having a 4 year degree. A CS degree teaches you CS. Most software engineering jobs are <5% CS. It's all about being able to deliver. Don't sell yourself short.

We'd hire three of them, tomorrow, if they had the right skills we were looking for.

What you're actually asking is: Would I hire a "programmer" without a degree and with zero work professional programming experience on their resume.

Yes. But only if that programmer had a good portfolio and showed a lot of promise. They'd have to interview well and be able to explain what their code does and why. Oh, and I'd only ever hire them as a junior developer, which of course means that the company has to be willing to handle that situation.

Once they've had a few jobs, the experience portion completely replaces the need for a degree and the question is obviously 'yes'. The rest of the interview is much easier for someone with actual experience, degree or not.

That's not what I'm asking. I'm currently working at a Russian company as a Java EE developer. So, "professional programming experience" is the thing I'm getting right now.

Update: I was hired with no experience. But here's another country, different people, different companies. I came up with this question to find out if other countries are better or worse with such thing as hiring an ungraduated employee.

I don't know about Russia specifically, but getting a work visa in the US might be very hard without a degree in some science/engineering/management field.

I'm in the UK and we definitely hire without a degree. We do, however, require a few years exp. to make up for it.

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