Why You Need a Degree to Work for BigCo (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Why You Need a Degree to Work for BigCo (2013)

braythwayt.com

47 pointsbloomca30 comments

I've worked for BigCo and startups, and don't have a degree. It has never been an issue, anywhere I've worked, ever. I've asked. They don't care. The only time it would matter is if it was a legal requirement for professional engineering (anything involving safety).

Yes, BigCo wants to hire middle of the spectrum folks who live in the suburbs and do a decent job for a fair wage. But they also want to (and do) hire hackers.

It can be tricky to work at BigCo as a hacker among middle spectrum folks. They want people to slot right in.

I usually advise hackers to work in a BigCo at least once. I think it's really important from the perspective of learning how to manage your manager an how to interact with people who aren't as excited by technology as you are.

I can definitely see why you'd recommend it. I suppose mileage will vary though.

In my experience, things worked out moderately well for a little while, and then burned me out, leaving me unable to find my way back into a lucrative gig to this day. I don't regret it, but regret not leaving earlier.

+1 to this. A lot of impedance mismatch between a hacker and a middle spectrum folk. Moreover, conservative companies will promote this middle spectrum people to management positions, reinforcing the tech-adverse culture.

Lame.

What happens when you're over thirty and want to marry and have kids? Are you then not cool because you need/want to have a stable home? Are you not enough of a hacker, not 1337 enough, because you want to work for a company that might be around in 3 months?

It never ceases to amaze me how many people, who consider themselves very smart no less, by default consider anyone even five to ten years older than them complete fools for making choices that would be irrational to a 20 year old. Got news for you, you'll grow up one day, if you're lucky.

The author, who speaks of himself in the third person, was a parent and in his forties when he wrote that.

Perhaps the article is not a comment on whether making conservative life choices is or isn't cool. Perhaps the article is not a comment on whether a degree in CS does or doesn't provide personal edification or improves your programming.

Perhaps the article is nothing more than what it claims to be: A comment on why a certain type of conservative company requires a degree, and their opinion of people who embrace or eschew conservative life choices.

Large companies employ many people without degrees, it's really front line managers that handle those requirements. Further, while self taught programmers are often very good they tend to be weaker at working with other developers on large scale projects. So, many managers have examples of both and still prefer people with degrees for most projects.

Waving hands furiously, we might say that everything is more nuänced than can be ex-plained in a tweet or a blog post, and that nothing is absolutely uniform.

We can also say that in the twelve years since this blog post was first written, attitudes towards hiring have changed in many ways. Nobody (for some loose definition of "nobody") cares how we would move Mount Fuji, or how many ping pong balls would fit in a 747.

Broadly speaking, though, I stand by the fundamental assertion that the stereotypical "BigCo" values conformity, and values people who value conformity, and that many of the things they lok for are, at a deeper level, social signals.

Startups aren't so different. In 2012, we could just as easily have rewritten this blog post to be about a startup wanting applicants to have a GitHub profile because it indicated a certain need to belong to "hacker culture" that the hypothetical startup could exploit.

Do they teach how to work with other developers on large scale projects in CS degrees? Or is the problem that people without those degrees can't get hired BG big corps with large scale projects and can therefore never get the experience?

It's a set of skills that's indirectly taught in many CS programs. You can debate the relative importance of for example a shared vocabulary, but it's clearly useful.

There's way too much "conservative" in this.

What happens is that your lifestyle has changed to be more in line with what BigCo is looking for. If the scale tips more towards family life maybe you care less about excitement and variety in your work life. All of that is fine. If your life consists entirely of taking care of your family and working a stable job, then what part of you remains a hacker? On the other hand, if you're doing all that while working with your kids on building an electron microscope, then that's what makes you a hacker.

I'd add that those would apply to a young person as well who simply works a stable job and doesn't do anything to explore their curiosity in technology.

This reminds me a lot of a book I read a while ago called "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt. It focuses on the sociological aspects of hiring practices & performance evaluation measures in the knowledge economy. It's a rather obscure book but I found it fascinating.

Basically, one of the central conclusions is that many of the metrics by which knowledge workers are evaluated are really less about measuring actual technical competence or domain knowledge and much more about detecting the propensity for conformity and obedience.

Maybe that's not too surprising for some, but what's even more interesting is that this can often be the case without the evaluators/managers/people in power even being aware of it. In many cases they genuinely believe they are evaluating for domain mastery / technical skill, but are fooled by the hidden signal that correlates to what they see as "desirable" outcomes.

Do we know that people with degrees conform at greater rates than people without degrees?

Is an uneducated blue collar worker, for example less likely to conform to authority than a person with a degree or advanced degree?

I think we have to ask that question _in the context of a job where degrees are the norm_ (whether justified or not).

It could be, for example, that a person with a degree working nights as a security guard is less likely to conform, while a person without a degree who gets a job that traditionally requires a degree is less likely to conform.

Maybe it's all about being "intentionally different."

I'd be interested to know if anyone has attempted to research that. I'd imagine it might be hard to accurately measure levels of "conformity"

Author here. This originally appeared in 2005, when I blogged on a different platform.

Did you change the layout since the original publication? The quotation marks at the beginning of every other paragraph are vaguely confusing.

What was the basis, was this real life or a mix of fiction and real. Would love the true background story.

> Because quite honestly? I’d read your business plan any day. Your résumé would look better on top of a funding proposal, than under a cover letter.

Wow, what a way to sum up such an topic! Thanks.

I think the reason big companies will ask more often for a degree is that they are more risk averse. More exactly the people working there are more risk averse and hiring someone without a degree would require some explanation since it's not common practice. Also people sometimes need to hire for roles they don't know much about and having a degree provides some kind of assurance about the candidate's knowledge. It's true you can be better at doing your work without a degree but the article makes it sound like it's a bonus, which is not, at least to my eyes. BigCo doesn't care that you are going to stay there for years, most probably it would prefer higher rotation rates.

Well, I sometimes wonder about this. I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science from RIT, and I despise working at BigCos. I spent a decade doing "cog development" and I learned I hated it. It was boring, stifling, draining, and unfulfilling. Perhaps the 2 most exciting times in my career were when I was working for 2 startups, when we were building news systems, putting in our own processes, and solving interesting problems.

I will admit I could do more on the side in terms of blogging, working on open source projects, and learning new skills, but I do have a family I need to raise and house to repair and improve. It's something I am working on.

This really makes you ask 'What on earth am I doing with my life?'. The article is well said ,they want you to be too scared to leave,much like a well cared for house slave would. They even trick you into believing "benefits" are a valid form of compensation.

That being said,not all corps are like that. Some take in people like me with no college education(hah!) And give us opportunities to prove ourselves.

May I ask what field you are in and how you managed to get your foot in the door without a college educations?

Would love to answer,however not in a public forum like this. I can say that I paid my dues and had people take a chance on me.

What college proves is that you have the ability to think and execute on at least a 4-year horizon. Modern day devs where a "framework" is obsolete in 2 years when a new fashion comes along, will obviously not see the value.

Aren't most of these modern day developers 4-year Computer Science graduates though? They seem awfully short sighted to me by following every latest fad.

Some businesses are based primarily on credentials, others on performance.

With a broad spectrum in between, this can make it difficult for an outsider to know where they would stand or even if they could be allowed into the organization.

The bigger the business, the more it can get by on credentials alone, or sometimes on the parasitic action of the credentialed on the true domain performers.

Especially "institutions" which became "too big to fail" before anybody living was even born.

Very well said!

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