Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyclif | Hacker News Reader

That is the new way to build companies, College degrees don’t matter much IMHO anymore, for developers anyway. It’s more how you interact with the open source community and what you release yourself. Your github account has become your new resume and what you say on Twitter and in various IRC channels are more likely to get you the best jobs then any recruiters ever will.

I'm interested in education, hiring, and matters of accreditation. Those last few paragraphs really got my attention. I'm glad I read all the way to the end.

View on HN

That's a terribly short sighted thing to say (by the poster). I know HN users don't seem to value education, but a college degree has a lot of value outside of the education component. Living with others, compromising, group work, social life, classes outside your area of focus, etc. I'd rather hire someone who has been through this than a hacker who has only spent time in the echo chamber of forums and fellow geeks.

As of July 2010, unemployment rate for college grad was 5.0% while for HS grad was 9.9%.

Of what relevance are those numbers to a deft software developer? What's is the unemployment rate for skilled software developers?

How do you define what a skilled software developer is?

I personally define people by their track record.

By being a skilled developer yourself.

We called these hackers "polymath" and it is far easier and much cheaper to get rid of TV and get hobbies.

Beside, 4 hours of tv watching a day is practically a part time job. Might as well spend that free time on something more relaxing and brain stimulating.

Yes, beware selection bias and all that, but note that he specified developers.

Not all of us can go to college.

In my ten year career, I haven't found there to be a correlation between having a degree and being a good developer. I've worked with a number of awesome people, most with degrees, some without, and plenty of bad people, most with degrees, some without. To me, a degree isn't a positive nor a negative signal for anything. You can talk about value of the intangibles outside the education component, but in my experience, a degree doesn't necessarily confer this either.

EDIT: Actually, thinking about it further, I haven't come across many bad developers without a degree. This is surely selection bias: bad devs with a degree can hide in the bowels of BigCo with HR departments who don't actually know how to hire good people, but absolutely require a degree. The bad devs without a degree can't get these cushy, hard to be fired from positions, and therefore don't last very long and probably find another line of work.

It depends on the software development project. I've worked with web devs who didn't know what a finite state machine was and did fine. Right now I work at a research institution crunching genomes. Not knowing the basics that a CS degree can give you will not work in this environment.

That's not to say that you can't get these skills outside of school but I think you get a better rounding of skills in school than out in the field. I've met more devs who didn't go to school that can't work on really difficult problems than the ones who did.

Of course, selection bias and all that.

In my experience there is no direct correlation between a developer being good or bad based on whether they had a degree or not. However, what I did find was that someone who had completed their undergrad is generally capable of thinking at a higher level and can work through harder problems. IMHO, a University shouldn't be about training students to go into the workforce but to teach them how to effectively think and solve problems, regardless of discipline.

I would argue the presumption that college is critical to developing higher critical thinking is a damning indictment of pre-college schooling.

I generally agree with that statement but I wasn't making any presumptions only stating my observations. College is not critical to developing higher critical thinking but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Why? It's a pretty simple system - elementary, middle school, and high school are about laying the knowledge foundation for critical thinking. University (grad school really) is about actually practicing that.

You need a body of generally accepted knowledge to actually be a critical thinker. Most people I meet don't lack the critical thinking, they lack the body of knowledge.

I was a bad dev without a degree in the bowels of a medium-sized company (1000 people or so?). It was pretty cushy. I was really terrible. For three years. I think I'm much less bad now.

>HN users don't seem to value education

HN users value education a great deal, many just refuse to let school interfere with it, especially when school == java school.

I'm not saying not to get a degree and I do sometimes wish that I had gone for a CS degree. But that being said I have learned all I needed to know in order to grow a 100 people strong cutting edge company and all I have is my GED.

And even though I only have my GED I am still very familiar with how computers work, memory management, building virtual machines, etc. I have a small scheme here that compiles to rubinius bytecode and then gets JIT'd by LLVM into machine code that I will release one of these days and I have read tons of papers and feel like I know as much or more then your average CS degree grad.

Everything you need to know is on the internet nowadays. All you have to do is spend the time to reach out and grab it and you can learn anything you want to learn and eventually get any job you want to get if you only apply yourself hard enough.

I did not mean to disparage college degrees, merely to make a comment that you can learn as much or more then you would learn at your average CS degree school by just applying yourself and reading online, then practice, practice, practice.

The real question of course is what's the unemployment rate for HN users?

I'd guess we're beating college grads.

I found education benefits most in expanding your mind and abilities (of learning, critical thinking, and sharper mind), not so much about the knowledge. Of course knowledge helps but you can pick them up on your own. Education force you to learn some topics that you might never use later but would benefit you in other way anyway. Some people can gain those without a formal education, more power to them. What it means is that the hiring manager can't be lazy to use degree as a filter. Have to really understand the individual's capacity.

Beware selection bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com