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Comment by anexprogrammer | Hacker News Reader

The main thing people miss out on not having a degree is not getting past silly HR "must have degree" filtration.

Never once found a CS degree a worthwhile indicator of ability.

It may be a superb book, but not even giving a sample chapter out to judge writing style, quality of explanations, depth and so on?

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I think there is more to a degree than that, but you make a good point. Now a days, instead of trying to figure out a problem, coders try to figure out which framework has already figured out the problem. It allows for less experienced people to get things done, but limits you to being able to mortar together bricks rather than make bricks.

The problem arises when you need to make bricks. You don't necessarily need a CS degree to make bricks, but you need to learn most things taught with a CS degree.

Spot on. There is an old Joel on Software post that goes into detail on this issue: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

The last paragraph is the money quote:

Ten years ago, we might have imagined that new programming paradigms would have made programming easier by now. Indeed, the abstractions we've created over the years do allow us to deal with new orders of complexity in software development that we didn't have to deal with ten or fifteen years ago, like GUI programming and network programming. And while these great tools, like modern OO forms-based languages, let us get a lot of work done incredibly quickly, suddenly one day we need to figure out a problem where the abstraction leaked, and it takes 2 weeks. And when you need to hire a programmer to do mostly VB programming, it's not good enough to hire a VB programmer, because they will get completely stuck in tar every time the VB abstraction leaks.

Even funnier, coming across companies that don't accept anyone who doesn't have a degree from xyz university.

That's the case for some elite finance institutions, but does it happen with programming?

I once got a rejection from an internship application late one night a few hours after I applied. I wouldn't be really surprised if I had been automatically rejected. And my rejection might have been because the state university I went to was not specifically mentioned in the drop down list of schools, it was in the "other" category. I think I might have not gotten a rejection so quickly if I had been going to a target school like MIT or Stanford.

Sure, that's fair. Do you think you would've gotten at least a phone interview had you had a lot of experience and a good resume (aside from the non-target school)? I have friends who have such experience in finance and firms won't even look at them because of the university name in their resume.

I don't know what their criteria was. I guess they could have skimmed it for a few seconds. I actually just had a classmate tell me that they just had an interview for an internship at that company.

But I can say I do have a good resume. I have a little bit of full time experience (before I decided to go to school full time for cs) and an internship at a company they recruit from.

So it's technically not an immediate disqualifier. But I did get a rejection quickly enough that I think it might have been automatic, and my school is still listed as "other - please specify" on their internship application.

More likely their internship program was full already.

It's definitely possible. It was a startup, I think they only had a few thousand employees. But I think applied in the fall. So their intern program probably filled up really fast if it was full.

I can't remember specifically, but my area is really huge on government contracting so I doubt it was a finance institution.

Oh yes. While this might not be a hard, publicly facing requirement, I have seen resume review processes that took into account things like school or whether you have worked for a hip, big name tech employer.

If your sensible resume with 10 years of experience doing work on an in demand field doesn't even get a recruiter call back, it might be because you did it for an enterprise company the recruiting team doesn't really know anything about. Chances are that no engineering manager ever got to read it.

I for one have worked with people coming from all kinds of backgrounds, and I don't think that the filtering makes any sense. My favorite software engineer hire had a Physics degree from Missouri-Rolla, and whose career highlight was work at a company that makes billing software for telcos. She would not have been given the time of the day in a lot of big tech companies.

If I was leading a company's recruiting strategy today, I'd aim at those kinds of candidates: If I aim at pedigree, I am competing, both economically and prestige-wise, with all the big names in tech. If instead I aim for the kinds of people that the market undervalues, I'll close more candidates and keep them longer.

Sounds like a good movie in the making (Coderball?)

It's a way to easily filter when you get 1000 applicants for 1 job posting. Not the fairest but it's quick.

And an even easier way to filter out the company.

There is bias in the risk of their decision: hiring someone given that (s)he is good is not important - the important thing is that (s)he is good given (s)he is hired. That's why they are conservative in their selection process.

Comments like these can only really have two causes:

- You've bought into the anti-intellectualism wave that's going on in the US.

- The universities near you are really poor.

Is it really the case that you learn so little on these universities that you literally have no advantage over those who didn't attend?

There are genuine questions surrounding how valuable CS degrees are (or should try to be) for professional software development careers. It has nothing to do with anti-intellectualism.

I think it's more many people vastly underestimate just how much they and others got out of their education.

Sure,everything is a bell curve, but spending the majority of your time thinking of little else beyond software concepts for 4ish years will fundamentally change how you think and reason.

I learned a lot in my time at university, but to be fair it was just a starting point and I have learned a lot more by myself afterwards.

I'm quite firmly against anti-intellectualism. Otherwise I think I'd then have to be anti myself!

In interviews, and across my 25 year career, I've met some excellent degree holders who brought some great skills to proceedings and a roughly similar number of excellent developers who didn't have the paper.

I've also come across occasional degree holders who I'd barely trust to make coffee let alone put near code.

In short, people are people.

Similar to other commenters I've found no correlation between degree on CV and later ability in employment, or it to be a useful indicator for prospective employees. In consequence I do find requiring a degree for applications silly.

Having a degree doesn't guarantee that you're automatically better than anyone without one, there will be good and bad people on both sides. People that don't take the traditional education route will generally be self studying through private courses or just reading lots and lots of books. It takes a lot of drive, determination and study skills to do it on your own too. Additionally many of them may have been able to break into the job market early, so they'll have years of real world experience and learning from peers by the time they would have usually finished their degree.

In some cases it's garbage in, garbage out. They may have been terrible going into university and came out a little bit better. They scrape by barely passing and come out with a degree that is just as valuable as the person standing next to them with natural ability, drive, and passion who excelled through school. After all half the graduates are below average.

Having a CS degree gets you through a Google-style interview -- where they will hammer you for hours on your ability to recall the skills you needed to pass your algorithms classes in university, and grade you almost solely on that.

And then you will start working there and almost never use those skills again, because you'll be using a vast library of datastructures and algorithms in the language of your choice, and the skill you will need the most is the ability to analyze why you might need one vs the other.

Unless you're on the team which is writing said libraries, which is rare.

Implementation is only a portion of what's important in an interview. The thing you will not get anywhere without is a knowledge of what algorithms exist and when to use them.

You will not get through a Google style interview knowing what algorithms exist. You will be expected to implement them. On a whiteboard. Almost perfectly. Without access to a computer.

"Only a portion". And almost-perfectly is a big deal. You're not expected to write compiler-ready code, just to show that you understand what's happening under the hood. Which meshes up with practical expectations -- if you can't understand what potential bugs/space/time complexity you're introducing when leveraging a library, then you're a fundamentally worse coder than someone who can.

Except this is in fact bullshit since if you're ever working on some speed/memory critical code, that's the time to bother filling your brain with the different options available and picking the appropriate one. Carrying around arbitrary knowledge to show off is pointless.

Most code most programmers write won't ever run at sufficient scale or be sufficiently critical that CPU or memory bounds will matter, and using e.g. one sorting algorithm vs another will be largely irrelevant. It's recognising when you need to bother optimising that is the sign of a competent developer.

And asking someone to write actual (not pseudo) code on paper/whiteboards - as I've seen in interviews - is like assessing someone's driving ability by asking them to mime driving a car.

I agree.

But it's worth pointing out that a Google style interview also includes some portion which is "system design" oriented which would touch more on that kind of thing.

But they're more interested in avoiding false positives, than false negatives. So the process is designed to weed out most people.

I've interviewed somewhere around 200 people at this point and from my perspective, the degree, university or GPA have had no correlation with how well the candidate does. Now, I interview for Ops roles and not software engineering, so this might not apply across the board for other roles, but I have my doubts.

It'd be interesting to correlate not just credentials to interview performance, but credentials, interview performance, and actual job performance. There is however the challenge that for the third aspect you can only assess the people that passed the interview and accepted the offer.

Ops is a pure experience job. A degree will never reflect how good an ops person is.

This is a fair point but isn't software development (in general) trending towards this same reality? Consider a job where the plan is to write a straightforward web application that runs inside a custom-built Docker container. What sorts of skills are more important?

Someone with a CS degree but little experience is going to have a hell of a time writing a Dockerfile and the scripts necessary to safely and securely deploy their application. They may be great at writing web applications but "that's not the hard part." The hard part is getting the architecture right so that the app will stay up despite being deployed, rebuilt, and re-deployed constantly.

Someone who's self-taught probably picked up Linux experience along the way (because how else are you going to teach yourself web development these days?) and probably has experience with things like AWS and the realities of hosting a web application (as opposed to just writing a web application). They will have had to setup their own development environments, do their own Linux installs, and probably got used to figuring things out on their own.

The way I see it computer science is science. The point of a CS degree is to give someone a career path as a scientist. These are the sorts of people that should be figuring out the next great algorithm (for whatever), finding uses for quantum computing, and finding solutions to similar fundamental problems.

Software development isn't computer science. It's like the difference between the structural engineers that invented that hurricane-proof nail and the architects that decided to use it in their build.

It may even be useful to lack a degree, since the job market is otherwise good and you automatically filter out the lamest companies that way ;-)

(No, not a perfect heuristic, but I think it may not hurt)

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