Google's New Career Certificates Could Disrupt the College Degree | Hacker News Reader

Google's New Career Certificates Could Disrupt the College Degree

inc.com

21 pointspaulpauper25 comments

How is this different from any other certification?

In IT, many people starts their career with certifications and without a degree. Get a MCSE/RHCSA/CCNA/AWS cert and you can get entry level jobs without a degree. This is not new. But certifications haven't killed college degrees. There are plenty of job offers who specifically request having a degree to avoid people with just certs (and automated systems that filter out their resumes). And while there are very talented people with no degrees, at the end of the day recruiters will usually choose a candidate with a degree before one without it. How are Google certs going to change this?

IMO this is just a sales pitch for Google certs. As for the "partners" who promise to hire a specific number of people with these certs, they just want to hire cheaper IT workers and nothing else.

I think they're banking on Google's brand offering a halo effect to certifications in general. I'm suspicious that would be effective though.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is going to work. I've spent some time looking into college educations, and I think the lede is buried on what the value actually is. For most roles that require a college degree, the actual education is of some value, but not the primary value. Frankly, for most roles, I think 4 years of on the job training would result in a far more competent worker than 4 years of college. There's a lot of stuff that you'll likely never use, and a ton of stuff that you might use, but probably not. I can't recall a single time I used calculus at work. Even if I did need calculus, an approximation to the nearest millionth is more precise than I would even be likely to be able to implement in the physical world.

No, I think a significant portion of the value of a college education is predictability of the workforce. Most people who go to college are on a roughly similar path in life, and are looking for roughly the same thing from a job. They get along as coworkers because of that. It provides a base for people to get along with. Unconventional people (who I love) are harder to integrate. They might not give a shit if you give them a raise or a promotion, and likewise, they may not give a shit if you threaten to withhold them. They might not get along with coworkers as well, because they lack similar life goals and experiences.

I think that is the real value (again, for most jobs. Academics and researchers are obviously quite different).

I would guess that these will temporarily be considered valuable, and then will become equivalent to a degree from DeVry. It guarantees the education, but that isn't what people were hiring for to begin with.

I work in the academic space, and I think this is a great initiative. New ways to get more people more skills are always welcomed, and Google can bring with it a lot of attention and prestige.

What I will be interested to see in the coming months/years is (a) whether Google will put their money where their mouth is and be willing to hire their own graduates (even over those applicants from prestigious institutions), and (b) whether or not this actually sticks around - at this stage I personally would be very hesitant to sign up for any new Google-run program. Since they're being hosted on Coursera I will hope that they will persist even if/when Google loses interest.

I think they'll hire people as they would have far more information about the students than anyone else would. They can cherry-pick the top students.

Is it just me or are half these programs that will supposedly “disrupt the college degree" in spaces where a college degree was never a requirement in the first place?

Would Google themselves hire people with these certificates?

Or, do they just want others to hire these people?

I think that would be the metrics to measure the quality and success of these certificates.

I would wager they're trying to increase their top of the funnel for recruiting. They want people to get these certs, then somebody else to hire them and give them on the job training, and then Google will hire them once they've been in a role for a few years.

I actually wouldn't be surprised if this was intended to increase their number of minority candidates. A lot of people have pointed to top of the funnel issues with recruiting diverse candidates (not saying it's true, I'm not in recruiting and don't know). This would offer an avenue for traditionally disadvantaged groups to get something that lets them accrue on the job training, at which point Google can hire them. It helps anybody who is disadvantaged, but Google has been trying to fix their demographics for a while now and failing pretty hard.

Weren't the first software developers Big Co secretaries just keeping up with the times and tools that made them better at their jobs?

Entry level/ junior software developer roles might not need anything more than basic understanding of how code works in general, or companies to just be willing to do on the job training.

Maybe if companies actually invested in their employees like that again, they would be incentivized to actually pay them their fair market value and people would stop having to jump jobs every two years just to make what they deserve

> Most enrollees will finish in six months or less

I am not convinced that you can learn the skills and knowledge necessary to be an effective software engineer in six months. However I think it will be an awesome avenue to improve your skills if you already have some background.

I tend to agree, but code bootcamp grads spend even less time and get hired sometimes so...

I am not convinced that you can learn the skills and knowledge necessary to be an effective software engineer in six months.

Of course not, that takes years of practical hands on experience to learn. Many people can work as programmers for a decade without mastering those skills.

6 months could however be enough to learn enough to a start being productive as a junior member of a larger development team.

Maybe six years? Sixteen?

I fully expect new engineers to come in very green. There is so much breadth to software engineering that I understand that they will learn half of what they need to know on the job.

Never mind that, six years from now, much will have all changed anyway. (I've been at this a few decades now and, with Swift, I've now learned language #6 for my job.)

this industry is full of people who have been working as professional software engineers for years and are still ineffective

Only the Android dev associate program is related to software engineering. I don't think anybody going into this program has expectations of acing a technical interview at Google with their Coursera certificate of completion.

But it might be attractive to people that are interested in exploring the area without the overhead of a full CS curriculum.

There's quite a "do what I say, not what I do" about this, creating certificates good enough for other people but unlikely (an understatement) to carry any weight at Google itself.

Just another step towards the atomization of people into worker units. Who needs a well-rounded education anyways?!?! /s

Everyone does. The cost of formal education (both time cost and financial outlay) in many countries doesn't make it workable for many.

> many countries

Most developed countries have made this workable. The failure of US higher ed to make itself affordable or accessible does not preclude the value of higher education. The fact that private companies see this as an opportunity for market disruption is bleak at best and dystopian at worst.

Even in taxpayer-funded education systems, the majority of people will not earn a degree. Part of that is because many people enter the workforce straight out of high school. If you work 8-hour shifts at a McDonalds or at a factory, when are you supposed to go to class?

That's why this type of program is needed. Google is not claiming that this is supposed to replace university. It is only business-news-lite websites like Inc and Fast Company that need to sensationalize every headline.

As a professor at a top institution I can say with certainty the entire US higher education system is fatally broken and the student loan bubble will burst to disastrous results. The situation as it stands is so bad that I welcome any other ideas, though returning to the state funding model is most preferable. The Cal state system is still amazing despite decades of attempts to do it damage, we need a real renaissance of public funding to save what we have.

The problem with Europe is with few exceptions the research output is a faint shadow of what US, and increasingly Chinese, institutions produce. Likewise, you see a lot of tech companies growing in US and China and while Europe lags further and further behind.

> The problem with Europe is with few exceptions the research output is a faint shadow of what US, and increasingly Chinese, institutions produce. Likewise, you see a lot of tech companies growing in US and China and while Europe lags further and further behind.

I wonder what the picture looks like if you include Europeans researchers and founders here in the US.

I have many, many colleagues from EU: French, German, Italian, Belgian, Croatian, all among the best in the field. None of them remotely interested in going back. I’m actually an American who lived in EU for several years and loved it.

Reads like an advert

How can you not mention Google using education to build a moat around their monopoly?

It's not much of a moat. The Data Analytics certificate has R and Tableau on the syllabus. Google Data Studio is their in-house solution and it's not being used.

Same goes for the UX Design course, which uses Figma and Adobe XD. Google doesn't have their own offering in this area however.

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