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Comment by honkycat | Hacker News Reader

People REALLY hate college degrees on this site. I think my degree was a great decision.

I've met a few decent self-taught programmers. Most are awful. Over and over again the bootcamp grads and people who have never attended school end up being the worst performers on my team.

A LOT of the people I have worked with who do not have degrees have bad attitudes and are hyper-vigilant about "no degree" microaggressions.

I use the stuff I learned in university all the time. I didn't go deeply into debt to attend a private university, instead I worked during the day and went to school at night.

There is such a massive glut of people trying to get into the entry level programmer jobs. It's an easy decision for me: Throw the people who do not have a 4 year degree or relevant work experience into the trash. I would assume that a LOT of other people are doing this.

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People with no degrees hate degrees. People who can't pass FAANG interviews hate FAANG interviews. It's a defense mechanism, along the lines of "I'm not a bad student, the teacher hates me".

I got a degree and graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 GPA. I don't think my college education has been anywhere near as valuable to me as reading software engineering books and coding a lot has been. If I could do it all over again, I would save the $60,000 and buy a sailboat.

Any book recommendations?

What do you think about getting a Masters degree in a non-specialized field (e.g. Software Engineering and not Artificial Intelligence) while having a Bachelors degree already? I am currently at the crossroads of going into work, a masters degree or both. Am also currently an intern at a FAANG atm.

I did my masters while working. My job at the time paid for it, and there was a good school in the area. I found it fun because I was exposed to things I wouldn't have gotten exposed to in my job (programming language design, automata theory, etc...), but those things also didn't change my salary or future job prospects.

If you find learning in a structured environment fun and can get someone else to pay for it, a masters may be right for you :)

> I don't think my college education has been anywhere near as valuable to me as reading software engineering books and coding a lot

But how would you know that? I thought I was a pretty decent programmer when I started college - I had been programming since I was 5! But a five-year engineering degree gave me some much-needed structure around the things I already knew, and filled massive gaps in knowledge I didn't even know I had.

I agree with that 100%. I am a voracious reader, I love software engineering and productivity and fiction and Syfy and nonfiction and... You get the idea.

I have a previous comment on this site about reading. That is actually what I look for, intellectual curiosity and a desire to continue learning and growing.

I'll just quote myself:

""" What I look for in a developer: READS BOOKS. ( Audio books count )

That's the only thing. I'm sorry, if you are not reading and studying to keep up, you are getting left behind. There are so many brilliant people writing amazing books on a huge array of subjects. If I could get every one of my developers to read ONE book on software design[0] a year, I would die happy and the entire industry would be 10 years ahead.

They don't even have to be technical books. I just want to see intellectual curiosity and a commitment to self improvement.

- 0: In the vein of Clean Architecture, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man Month, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, The Google SRE book, etc """

What does it say about FAANG interviews that many can pass them without any practical experience by studying leetCode and Cracking the Code for a year? How many SE’s do those companies have? Do you really think they are all the best and brightest?

> What does it say about FAANG interviews that many can pass them without any practical experience by studying leetCode and Cracking the Code for a year?

It says that they can be gamed and that they aren't perfect. It doesn't mean they're entirely useless, entirely wrong, or that they generally don't select for the profiles they want to select for.

> Do you really think they are all the best and brightest?

Having worked at FAANG, non-FAANG with a lot of ex-FAANG, and non-FAANG, generally speaking, yes, I do believe that.

Having done 500+ FAANG interviews I don't think I've seen anyone hired "without any practical experience". (Except new grads, obviously, but presumably that's not what you meant).

leetcode definitely helps but won't guarantee being hired. There are many things we look for that it won't help you with.

And the unfortunate fact is that merely having experience doesn't mean you are a competent programmer. We need some way to check for that, and onsite coding is the best way we have right now, even though it's imperfect. Sometimes companies ask more realistic problems ("implement this API on a laptop w/ access to docs") so it's not always so artificial, but the artificial problems make it easier to have a level playing field.

Some jobs do require people that can solve “hard problems”(tm) at scale and can’t use off the shelf frameworks. But I’ve heard (but never experienced) companies looking for a developer for a bog standard yet another software as a service CRUD app or some bespoke internal app who still think they need to do an interview process like a FAANG. That was where my dismissive attitude toward that style of interview originally came from.

Over the last few years I have kind of seen the light of day. When you’re hiring at scale, you do need a standardized process. On the other hand, while I haven’t spent a day studying any really complicated algorithms[1], I’ve spent just as much time knowing how to talk the talk of a “cloud native enterprise architect”, and it took me awhile to realize how much of a hypocrite I was being for saying that I would never jump through the seemingly artificial hoops of studying algorithms.

[1] that’s not entirely true. I spent a year or two maintaining a bespoke compiler/IDE/VM for Windows Mobile.

It's not that they CAN be gamed. It is that they NEED to be gamed.

They want you to want the position. They want you to explicitly study and prepare for the position.

Sure you could go from zero to ready to interview Google over the course of the year. But I feel like most experienced software developers would only have to study for a month or so to really brush up on interview questions.

This is a very poorly reasoned perspective. Case in point, I have a CS degree background (from a top school) and think it was completely useless in terms of my career. I got my first job through a random connection and from then on my experience and practical skills have gotten me work.

Also, even though I've worked for various "top" companies, I've never once had to write my own binary tree, hashmap, Dijkstras search, etc etc. Note, I also think FAANG style interviews are a waste of time too, which is why at my current company I make all applicants do a take home test which is analogous to the kind of work they will be doing if they get the job.

It is easy to see why having a degree is not popular here in this forum. It is probably acting as a hard barrier for some to get a job. Thus people don't like it.

Per my experience working in a big tech shop, most of the engineer-kind co-workers DO have a STEM degree. I don't think a CS degree is required in that sense, as long as the background is relevant. Only one of them came with no college degree, but he fits in well and decent in his work.

Hiring is difficult as always, degree is indeed a powerful indicator. When the amount of candidates is not that tight, and the hiring process is increasingly streamlined, its importance will only grow.

How much of an “indicator” do you think my degree is from a no name college that so graduated from in the mid 90s?

When it comes to interviewing, I think the biggest problem is one of biases. When working at a company in Sweden, an applicant was braggadocious about their prior experience, which was normal for their culture (as a means of demonstrating value) but not the Swedish one (where modesty is king). He was almost excluded purely on that basis. I, as an outsider, was aware of the phenomenon, but my native colleagues weren't.

At another job, a theoretically inclined colleague was grilling a junior candidate on DDD and hexagonal versus onion architectures because that interested him. I had to point out that wasn't relevant at all for a fledgling programmer's ability to write a basic web API.

Self-selection is a big problem, whether it be through cultural values, personal interests or the topic at hand: degrees. Let's please stick to what a degree is: an authority argument and a semi-reliable proxy for intelligence. The rest is incidental, as you can be lazy and disorganised with a degree, or possess a broad theoretical background and be intelligent without.

I think a bunch depends on how people used their time in university. The typical college graduate has an advantage over the typical bootcamper. At the extremes is where it doesnt really matter because the fundamental driver was different. People focused on the job will always yield to those that are driven intrinsically (and, in a way perpetually suffer those that are intrinsically motivated as they are the only ones inventing things)

A lot of the people I have worked with over my thirty years working, who do have degrees, frequently come across as blinkered know-it-alls because as they have a CS degree they therefore know everything. A fair selection of whom were canned as despite great degree grade they could do little beyond make tea in the real world. The reality is just the same - most people with degrees are awful.

I take issue with bootcamp being self taught - they are not remotely the same thing at all. I would probably be more suspicious of bootcamp grads than anything else - from experience of various commercial training over the years. Someone truly self taught - rather than winging it - is approaching it a very different way.

Being old, most of the seniors in my early career had no CS degree or even degree at all. A fair selection of whom could give anyone in today's world a run for their money.

The TL;DR of which is, of course, most applicants regardless of background will be pretty dire... Which is why hiring remains non-trivial.

Have you considered the bad attitudes you're encountering are because you think most of the self-taught programmers you've met are "awful" and that they shouldn't have been given opportunities to begin with, instead preferring to, "throw them in the trash"? Seems like you're getting out of those relationships what you put in.

I've met CS grads who can't code FizzBuzz, and I've met self-taught programmers who work 1/10th as hard as I do and are 10x as productive. There's no correlation whatsoever, and the industry reflects that; the pay scale is exactly the same.

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