What if we hired for skills, not degrees?
hechingerreport.org
hechingerreport.org
I agree that strictly requiring a Bachelor even for candidates with years of experience is pointless. But would you hire a zero experience programmer without a Bachelor?
Sure, for a lot of administration/sales/marketing positions a degree may be an excessive requriment.
But isn't the real problem that a) sometimes universities don't teach enough actual skills and b) they are too expensive?
There's lots of chores that don't exactly take a lot of deep knowledge.
(Of course the answer is that companies have discarded the idea of having a training pipeline)
I think you're doing it wrong. I don't work this way.
If it's a low level job, I'll find a way to automate it. I want all my coworkers to grow to a good level.
At my company, we do train newcomers and young people, and we then hope they stay. But it's an investment that doesn't pay off every time. Other companies just hire experienced developers, by paying more than us... but they don't have a training pipeline. And we can't pay more (we're a small company) because we already spend a lot in training... sob.
One place recently passed on me for an R&D position because I had experience with Torque rather than Slurm. I have a PhD and a bunch of research experience—-it would take maybe an afternoon to figure out how to submit jobs on their system...
In my experience companies that rely on armies of junior programmers to do things manually tend to end with horrible code bases and a lot of technical debt. Few abstractions, lots of repetition, little automation and so on.
When I got out of college, I took the same low-paying entry level jobs that the 18 year old high school graduates did. I didn't get a jump start because of my degree. But I was able to use the skills I had learned (even in my Fine Arts education), to more deeply approach problems and I moved in my career more quickly. I'm still in touch with some of the folks from that very first job. They are struggling -- they spent decades in tech jobs, advancing, making more money, doing bigger things... but all eventually experienced a layoff, and can't get re-hired despite their skills and experience because younger folk, cheaper folk, with 10 years experience can do everything they can, and demand less salary. Nobody cares that you know 25 year old tech.
So the usefulness of a degree isn't about day one of your career. It is about years 3-5, when you have a few years of skills built up, and then can synthesize them into something bigger and better, and start to make bigger jumps on your career, and put yourself in a position that you are more than just your tech knowledge. And that is what employers care about once you get old.
To reframe the question you initially posed: if you have two inexperienced but otherwise technically indistinguishable people in front of you, which is more impressive? The one that spent four years sitting in classes or the one that did it entirely by self-study? For the rest of your career, almost all of your future ability and value will be the product of ongoing self-study, not what you studied in class.
What if you've got 3 inexperienced candidates in front of you?
At least for me, this has generally worked out brilliantly. A few of those hires turned into some of the most technically competent programmers I've ever worked with, and none turned out poorly. Some people are capable of educating themselves to a very high standard in a relatively short period of time. This is a primary characteristic of highly successful inexperienced programmers with degrees as well.
Did they do something at home? Some hobby project to show? Or they couldn't turn a computer on?
At my company (and in a previous one) we have hired - and still hire - people without degrees and minimal experience. But they should show us something. A github repo, taking some MOOCs, doing a "bootcamp".
How do you tell they have ability and desire if they've got absolutely nothing to show?
I have a liberal arts degree, and I entered the "professional" software engineering world by being hired at a serious company at 26, despite being a passionate PC and Linux user since I was 15. But, heck, at that age I could show some more than decent knowledge of operating systems, Python programming, networking, web protocols, and desktop GUIs. All things that I coded in my spare time or to do small jobs for friends or small family businesses. You could say I had no formal education, but not that I had zero experience.
> A few of those hires turned into some of the most technically competent programmers I've ever worked with,
And, all of them stayed at your company? I'm not saying that's not possible - it TOTALLY is. I'm saying that it's risky from an economical POV.
But if you had an in-depth conversation with them about what they had built, how they had built those things, and why they designed things the way they did, you could immediately see that they had a deeply intuitive understanding of computer science that went beyond just programming. And often they had other valuable skills, like being atypically literate writers or having a thorough understanding of how real silicon works (rare knowledge these days, sadly). And a couple stood out as being seriously deep on the theoretical CS side in their areas of interest.
I never said they stayed at my company, and I don't currently work with any of them. They all went on to have very successful careers working at the top tech companies. They just needed an opportunity. The vast majority of software engineers that have worked for me over the years have gotten a CS degree at some point in their life.
So, they had built something. That's not zero experience, for me. I think we mostly agree and share similar hiring patterns.
I'll change my question: did they work for you long enough to justify your investment in their coaching?
The idea that people are hired based on skills is obviously laudable, but _how_ does one verify those skills without extensively testing them?
Whereas deep into your carrier, your professional experience can act as a stronger affirmation of your skill, for that first job degrees seem to be the simplest means of signalling your quality. Its obviously going to exclude would-be great employees, but I guess on a cost-benefit level its understandable given that hiring can be a very intensive process for the employer.
One answer to this is to work for your own self, solve problems that you have, go talk to people who have problems and make them what they want [0].
In an essence, become an indie-developer, a freelancer, or start a business, create/contribute to an open source project. This works very well for technology industry because, more often than not, the barrier to entry to make things is not that high at all.
The advantages are obvious:
1. If your execution gains traction, you make money or get acqui-hired.
2. Most companies will value your ability to build, even if you fail.
3. Being involved in the right communities might even help you find co-founders, or join other founders on their journey, or be found by prospective employers.
Separately, it also seemed not-unusual to hire software people for general ability and experience, on the assumption that they could quickly pick up whatever language/tools were needed. This seems to be less common now, outside of new-grad recruiting.
In my experience, in a small company, the CEO is still involved in the hiring process. If he's highly technical, he can conduct an interview, identify talent, and if it doesn't work out, it's his problem.
As a company grows, the CEO has delegate to people below him. Whether he's technical or not, hiring managers get involved. If a hiring manager hires someone good, degree or not, everything is fine. They don't get bonuses for hiring people without degrees who work out.
However, if an employee has to be fired, there will be a meeting to discuss what red flags there might have been that could have signaled that this person was a mistake to hire. If the hiring manager believes that they'll get in trouble for ignoring the lack of a degree, they're not going hire people without a degree. They might overlook talent, but at least they won't get blamed for messing up and hiring someone unqualified.
Because it has become utterly polluted by non default government backed loans.
If the government removed it’s college loan guarantee, what would happen?
Schools would have to transition instantly from offering unnecessary student experience and switch to essential student value.
In the automotive industry there are financial disclosure and lemon laws.
Car dealers have to disclose their finance profit as well as right if return if vehicle is unsuitable.
Shouldn’t the same or similar exist in education?
At the very least, universities should have to provide externally audited reporting on graduate employment %/$.
I’ve met too many young people with too much student debt. Some will never get out from under it, effectively indentured servitude.
So many university degree programs have negative ROI, partly due to the unnecessary experiences to attract student borrowers.
Trade school have such a stigma amongst those who aspire to have their children move up the human food chain, but really shouldn’t when you run the math.
This is the space that Lambda School and others are disrupting.
It’s a BIG space.
I suspect when it’s all over there will be hundreds of thousands of “white collar jobs” lost that exist only due to the government backed student loan competition over unnecessary and non value added experience.
Basically a repeat of the “manufacturing jobs” lost in the post dot com housing bubble.
Leaner and meaner will eventually have to come to the university system, removing a lot of expensive experience and hopefully some of the highly corrosive politics.
A 14-week training program is the "do you want fries with that" equivalent of coding, and will also get pushed down in wage. So once coding like that is at minimum wage, that's... Success, I guess? But good luck having that stay an easy path to the middle class.
"Anyone with no formal training and 14 weeks of time can make it to the middle class!" - boy is somebody over extrapolating how fast the labor market is going to correct for this. "Well paid" and "quickly trained" don't exist together for a reason (unless there is another component, like "very dangerous" added to the mix).
I know many people who got very solid SWE jobs through the popular recruitment platforms. Those platforms essentially allow people to get an on-site with big tech and startups without ever sharing one's resume: they rely solely on the results of technical interviews to screen for promising candidates. The employer spends ~$5000 to bring the candidate on-site (fees to the recruitment platform, plus the flight/hotels, plus the full day of engineers' time spent on the interviews). So I highly doubt the employer auto-rejects candidates without a degree regardless of their on-site performance. If they wanted to do that, they would have simply asked the recruitment platform to screen people for degree in advance, to avoid wasting $5k on a hopeless candidate.
Of course, I'm describing only a specific slice (Silicon Valley, maybe NYC) of the specific industry (software engineering). I guess such disregard of degrees hasn't spread to other parts of the job market because most companies, in most industries, believe that the degree provides useful information above and beyond what can be learned in an interview. Are they wrong in that belief? Or do degrees, despite being such a horrible proxy for skill, still provide a valuable incremental statistical signal about the candidate's likely fit?
Pasting the entirety of patio11’s old comment below.
> _Are companies really legally disallowed from using IQ tests in the USA?_
Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 1971. US Supreme Court found that a particular use of IQ tests in hiring practices caused a disproportionate impact on African American employees. "Disproportionate impact" can make a facially neutral policy illegal under various US civil rights laws.
This is not a blanket ban on IQ testing in employment, but corporations being risk-averse, most of them don't really do it much any more.
(This is a very happy outcome for universities, since it gives them a virtual monopoly on discriminating on the basis of intelligence. Since that is really useful to do, all a university has to do is maintain its reputation as being a mostly reliable discriminator, and the actual contents of what it teaches are virtually irrelevant.)
If the candidate has real-world experience, go with that. If they're recent grads assume they know very little and will need on the job exposure to learn. So the most useful criteria is an ability to learn. If there's a better indicator for that than a degree then by all means use it. Skills is only a useful measure if you plan to utilize rather than cultivate them.
Edit: to make myself clear, I absolutely think universities should focus more on thinking than doing. That is not a valid excuse for focusing on campus experience and the like.
It's pretty stupid that a 4 year degree is turning into a checkmark credential. It's a lot of time and effort to invest into something you aren't particularly interested in but need to get some job where the time and effort put towards the degree don't mean a lot.
High tuition colleges only exist prey on low-talent people trying to buy fake credentials. Anybody talented enough to learn from a college what they can't learn at a lower priced college, can get a scholarship to that college.
What many are proposing here is expending that into trade schools/edu, which I suppose makes sense for what most coding consists of. But what's most revealing is this insistence on the public shouldering that burden instead of employers who reap the benefits investing into the training.
The argument of the article is very clearly that prospective employees should be judged based on skills, not degrees. It doesn't matter if higher education improves. This still holds.
The primary benefit of college is a degree. Networking is a secondary benefit, where the more elite the college the better opportunity is.
There is absolutely no difference in the quality of self-education in, say, computer science or mathematics vs. going to a top-tier college for it, given a motivated, moderately intelligent student.
"I already had a bachelor's degree in Biology, it turns out I could learn to code!" - Huge shocker...
Just take computer science, an easy one because of the abundant resources available through the Internet. There is absolutely zero gain, once again, for the moderately intelligent, motivated student, in terms of learning from going to a college vs. a motivated, well-thought self-study. Study plans are available online. Course syllabuses are available online. Textbooks are available online. Problem solutions are available online.
"that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse, than by a day's meditation"
It is often paraphrased today as, "I learn more in an hour's discourse than in a day's meditation."
You're reinforcing my point: If all this information is out there, and the only people actually completing it are those who have already gone through a degree program... maybe this shit's relatively hard to learn on your own? Maybe there should be some kind of institution, where completing a course of study awards some kind of certificate... crazy talk??
It was said of of {Gauss, Newton, Euler - I forgot who} that he made his way by Euclid's Elements by simply reading until he did not understand, then thinking until he understood, then returning, until he had gone through the whole thing by himself. I am not Newton. Neither are you. Neither is almost anyone.
It turns out that learning is something of a team sport, and is best accomplished (for the vast majority of humanity) in some kind of structured environment, and that we respond better to people than to screens of videos. Who knew...!
MOOCs are a complete waste of time. Boot camps are just a worse and cheaper version of college, in terms of learning. They both cater to those who refuse to read. People serious about learning on their own are not going to use MOOCs.
Discussion is available online about many topics. Your notion that someone has to be Newton to read through a book and understand it is ridiculous.
So we're back to having people fully involved, might as well just cut the crap and go to school.
One autodidact thinks: "No need to go to college and pay all that money; I can learn it all on my own". Some actually put in the effort to do so and do quite well in their lives.
Another autodidact thinks: "Holy ____, there are facilities, equipment, and educated experts here that I could never hope to get access to on my own! If I use my autodidact ability to take advantage of this huge concentration of knowledge resources, I can not only learn the basic stuff in the classes but a whole bunch of advanced topics besides." These people go on to work on what people refer to as "interesting problems" at FAANG-level technology companies and have fun doing it, not to mention being paid amazingly well.
Choose wisely, autodidacts.
Also, parroting political talking points about snowflake kids and such doesn't provide any value, even if draws support from a certain type of crowd.
Right up until you get to your postdoc is seems like you’re mostly playing ‘guess the right answer’ with your professors.
It’s great for another dose of slightly more specialized basic knowledge, but it’s not going to prepare you for anything after that unless you stay in academia.
A gross simplification doesn’t mean the thesis is wrong.
I see a disconnect in the way you describe those people and the motivation I'd generally ascribe to persons with these traits. Smart and hard working folk often seek the path of higher ed because it has more to offer than a random job with X months of training that's unlikely to be challenging, why would they be interested in that?
Aside: does the US still not have IT apprenticeships?
American IT apprenticeships are unofficial, and usually start as junior sysadmin/networking/infra/SWE roles, although I do know people who started as customer service or business analysts who transitioned to the tech side due to aptitude.
Side note: There are large enterprises who are publicly announcing they’re dropping a degree requirement for their roles. Definitely points to where the market is headed.
I don't really see your side note happening here in Germany, for higher level positions dropping degree requirements is (in my experience) usually only done post factum if a fitting applicant happens to appear, usually with relevant experience instead. In my view that reflects a lack of formal education in the applicant pool more than it does changing requirements in the market.
However, I agree that employers should do much more on-the-job training. In my company there is almost no formal training for newcomers and it shows. A lot of guys get stuck at beginner level and never advance from there.
One thing I like to see in people now is that they have a wider look at the industry besides their direct work. I have a seen a ton of .NET devs who don't know what Haskell, Kotlin or Node is. I like people who read stuff like tech blogs to keep up to date.
I agree less capable people will need more hand holding, and that processes must be improved for “sorting hat” the student pipeline.
Why should an employer risk with the education of a worker that may then leave for another company?
Such approach worked in the past, when you entered a company when you were 19 and left when you retired (unless the company blew up, of course). Then, you could expect to get 100% training on the job, by your company.
Now, you need most skills before entering. And you should expect minimal training.
There is also a CYA component here. If a hiring manager takes a risk on an applicant with no degree and it doesn't work out, the hiring manager will take the blame for choosing an "underqualified" applicant.
The result is the employer retains that employee.