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Comment by raptorfactor | Hacker News Reader

I'm an Australian with no degree who got poor marks in high school, and I got a job at Microsoft (software engineer doing C++ dev and some light reverse-engineering) after about 5 years of freelance work, with zero qualifications.

IIRC my education history came up once in the interview process (I was interviewed by 6 different people that day and only one brought it up), and that part of the conversation basically consisted of:

Interviewer: "You don't have a degree?"

Me: "No, I'm self-taught."

Interviewer: "Oh okay, that's cool."

Literally nobody that I work with talks or cares about where you went to school or what your grades were. YMMV I guess.

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I feel like the problem lies in getting your feet through the front door, after that how you got your education really doesn't matter anymore. You were lucky enough to get an interview with Microsoft thanks to your past work experience, but other people (especially the ones who try academia before going into the private sector) don't have that chance and most of the time won't even be invited to an interview, that's the problem.

I am confident that if big companies actually interviewed people coming from different universities they would find that most top-uni grads are worse that people coming from different institutions who always feel like they have to perform 110% just to level the playing field.

Actually my work experience had almost nothing to do with it, as pretty much all of it was done under NDA. What really helped me was having a set of public personal projects which demonstrated competency in relevant areas (I know because I had a discussion about it with my hiring manager after I'd been working there for a couple of months - I was curious about how much the lack of a degree mattered when they were filtering candidates).

The GP was talking about going to grad school after finishing an undergrad in a different country; you're discussing getting a job without a degree.

All either of these anecdotes illustrate is it really depends on the circumstances.

I was responding directly to: "You could've gone to the best university in your country, but if it's not a top institution in the US or a handful of others [...] I feel like most big names in tech won't even look at your resume."

Definitely agree that it's very circumstantial.

Education is not the same as work. Plus the point is that in most top uni there are a lot of competion some some criterias are always "unfair" because u need to lower the pool size quickly

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