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Comment by koboll | Hacker News Reader

I've never been asked about any education in developer interviews, only experience.

Obviously YMMV, but after a couple years of experience, employers simply stop caring about education level.

I'm 100% sure I am passed-over and filtered out because I don't have a CS degree. Nevermind my experience, I don't hit the checkbox. HR and IT managers have it in their mind they NEED it. However, I relate well to managers without a CS degree.

it be interesting to know how these phone interviews went. if you’re not even getting that far then you don’t want to work for a company that requires a degree. all a degree gets you is a base level of knowledge, you’re not gaining any useful experience. all that usually counts is if you can prove the knowledge without a degree. if you’re making it to the phone interviews then someone else must be more a more viable candidate than you

Anecdotally the most dysfunctional place I've worked at was the most obsessed about educational credentials. I had highly relevant experience (including some that was open sourced on GitHub) and a degree in a related field but it wasn't the exact degree they were looking for. This struck me as really strange at the time, I found out later that the managing director was pressuring the people doing to hiring to only take people that were eligible for some particular government funding that had rather narrow conditions about credentials. The only reason I got hired was because the position had been open for a long time and they were starting to get a bit desperate. I shudder to think how many other skilled applicants didn't get that job in the months before I did.

There's a big element of selection bias: many companies that care deeply about hiring Stanford grads will pass on those who don't mention the school in their resumes. The companies that were willing to give you an interview obviously didn't immediately filter you out. In case there's any doubt, if you don't mention your educational background in your resume people will assume you don't have any college-level degree.

And there are also many of us put in situations of reviewing resumes and interviewing that don't have college experience who don't care what school you went to, or if you even did.

Going to college definitely makes things easier, and I don't advise people to take the path I did but there are paths other than college that still work well for this industry.

You're talking past the point. The original comment was:

> I've never been asked about any education in developer interviews, only experience.

> ... employers simply stop caring about education level.

The reason he was not asked about education is not necessarily because 'employers by and large don't care', but rather that 'employers that do care about education would've already filtered him out after seeing the resume'. The interviews from employers that do care about education would never materialize in the first place.

This is not a judgment about the role of education and pedigree, but rather pointing out that any effect would have likely played out in the resume stage.

Thanks for clarifying your point, I think that makes a lot of sense.

Thankfully for me I consider it a positive selection bias as I wouldn't want to work for a company/manager with such insular hiring criteria. Unfortunately it does make it harder for people just getting started in their career.

Since you mention it, people who have degrees and people who don't have degrees usually work in different companies. Any programmer is unlikely to experience both sides of the coin.

I find people with college experience are much more likely to be biased against people without than vice versa. But that is just my anecdotal experience. Google and Dropbox definitely had more people with degrees but a decent amount of people without. The hiring pipelines were more biased towards recruiting new grads out of good schools but we never turned down solid people with good experience.

I generally like to work with people, and at places, that value your contributions and experience rather than your credentials. I've been lucky enough to find that in every place I've worked. I can't say my experience has been one of only working with people without degrees. I've worked with amazing engineers with and without degrees and don't put much stock in the degree itself.

Well, it takes a degree or 5 years of relevant experience to enter the front door. Better have both.

I wouldn't call it a bias, companies have different expectations and needs. At big name, there are a hundred people applying every day, the bar is higher than no degree and/or little experience.

There is also the fact that the lack of education puts one at a disadvantage. For instance, I know of co workers who ask questions about complexity, compilers and graphs. It's common for candidates with no formal education to be completely oblivious to these.

I think it's a bias to assume the candidate won't understand those things or be suitable for the job based on lack of college alone. If you require people to understand complexity, compilers, and graphs to do the job effectively then test for those. I've encountered plenty of people with degrees who similarly didn't understand those concepts.

I definitely agree that lack of education is a disadvantage, it just means you have to start a different way. that could mean your first few years is coming in through a side door before you start getting relevant experience.

I think we both agree. The lack of degree will mean years of bad jobs and learning the hard way though practice, before it can be compensated. It's years of struggling on the job, instead of in the college.

.. making money rather than going into debt.

Plus there's the uncomfortable fact for academics that the state of the art is often pushed forward in industry, and written about in academy. So, sometimes, the job is really, really good. You're doing stuff now that kids will be learning about in 5 years...

We have plenty of data that shows that more degrees = more salary though.

https://www1.salary.com/Salaries-for-Web-Software-Developer-...

The one time I was flown in to interview at a Silicon Valley shop was the only time that I was asked about education directly. I never attended high school.

Added: It was something like "education means a lot in this town, as much as people don't say it.".

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