Hacker News Reader

Comment by JamesBarney | Hacker News Reader

I've thought about this before because I've found the same thing. I think it's caused by an over reliance on education as a signal.

If you have a stack of resumes you're likely to interview everyone with a PhD, but only the ones with the most stellar github profile if they have no formal education.

During the interview if the PhD says something silly you'll probably disregard it. But the person without a formal education needs to be on point.

These and other filters means that a mediocre PhD can get through the hiring gauntlet but only the most kick ass high school graduates can make it through.

View on HN

This ^, and also most HR drones don't know how to properly vet tech candidates. They get a set of vague "wants" from hiring managers and if they see anything worded differently, they balk. I've had to personally talk with HR over the years to get them to realize that RedHat, for example, is Linux, it's not its own thing. Ditto the lazy coding candidates that list JS instead of the proper JavaScript. Let's not even get into HR deciphering stuff like Jenkins, Nomad, linting software, or other tools. They see that stuff and their eyes go all glassy.

My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree.

> My mentor long ago likened these people to Eloi and the IT grunts to Morlocks. I cannot say I disagree.

Everyone is the hero of their own story. It sounds like your mentor is arrogant, and could use more intellectual humility.

Haven't read the book, but ...

>By the year AD 802,701, humanity has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi live a banal life of ease on the surface of the earth while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing, and inventory for the Eloi.

Please explain how is this arrogant?

Because of the clear assumed superiority of coders over all other humans

I think I’d prefer an easy, but banal lifestyle to one of strenuous toil.

The mentor is comparing people without technical skills (specifically HR employees) to the fictional Eloi - the species of humans which "live a banal life of ease". Meanwhile he compares those with technical skills (presumably himself included) to that of the Morlocks, which is a species engaged in Important Work that supports the idle Eloi.

Is the condescension and self-importance more clear now? It's an Us versus Them mentality which patronizes other people and looks down on their work.

I'm a hiring manager who interviews a lot.

In my experience, high performance in difficult degrees at good schools are a very strong indicator of future success.

We find gems outside the above profile, but it holds true even across the people we've hired from code schools.

Isn't it that high performance in something difficult predict future success? That is my theory ar least, that phd requires people to do something difficult and at times demotivating in long time span which means that successfull phd are going to be not just be like that initially, but also have an experience with it.

Didn’t Google find no useful correlation between either GPA or school attended and job performance? I’m not sure if they categorized people by “easy” or “hard” degrees.

What defines a "useful" correlation?

Strong enough to bother trying to figure out if there’s a causal relationship.

Mind if I ask which one, or if it's at least one of FAANG?

I keep anonymous on here, sorry. People are unable/unwilling to not take any random thing I say as an official position of my company.

I don't work for a FAANG.

A high school or AS degree only would get thrown in the trash directly everywhere I've ever worked for even the most basic technical jobs.

50 years ago big companies would take you with just a HS degree, and if you were smart and showed initiative, put you under the wing of an engineer - or pay to send you to school. This does not happen anymore.

You're also SEVERELY limiting your career if all you complete is high school - you might be OK technically for now, but you will lack all kinds of foundations that would allow you to stay technical, and you'll certainly be disregarded completely as you age for any kind of leadership track.

I think the root of this myth (that having only a HS degree you can still get a technical job) is twofold: One, a currently hot hiring market, and two, the "be what you dream!" movement that was big in the 90's.

If you've worked through a recession (or even just a dulled market), and seen people around you lose their work, their homes, heard their struggles about how hard it is to find work - people would stop parroting this mantra about having minimal education. It's really doing damage to people who hear it.

I have a High School education then went to community college in my mid 20's and got certified in Perl and HTML - LOL

I've been getting paid to build web apps since 2000, got in right when the first dot-com bust went down; I have never been out of work since entering this field.

I also tend to work for smaller companies.

You can survive jumping out of a plane without a parachute too, but there's a reason it isn't a recommended course of action.

I only have a high school education and am currently a software engineer at a FAANG company after getting three offers. Once I leave and go to another company, I found it unlikely that they will care about my original education.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com