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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

> Employers are looking at your education, companies you worked at, years of experience, and maybe a vague idea of what your work area was before this.

Speak for yourself. The biggest signal I have when deciding whether to call you for an interview is your resume.

I have never considered education so far. There’s 2 states: I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.

Anyway, your resume decides how enthusiastic I’m going to be when starting your interview. Which is going to make things easier when that time comes.

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This is a reminder that a lot of this comes down to the whims of whoever is staffed at HR. I’ve often read contradictory advice about resumes in articles written by people in charge of hiring. It’s not a big surprise, a lot of these views are arbitrary (though they will insist otherwise!)

I agree. You apply to 20 identical places, only 2 call you. One called you because you worked at ACME, the other because they saw the word WIDGETS on your resume. It was the same damn resume and the perfect action word or format did not matter all that much. But I still spend hours on resume, even if it helps improve 1% of my chance it is a good exercise. I've seen people with terrible resumes, I don't want to be one of those.

Not only that, but if you re-apply again to the same 20 places, the 2 that call you will likely be different than the previous 2 because a different person looked at your resume this time.

in my field at least, i feel like the only thing that really gets HR attention is buzzwords and technology name dropping

> I know the school, and I don’t know the school. I’ve never known any school so far.

Either you're interviewing bottom-tier candidates or haven't paid any attention to schools that are out there. If you're in the US, you should be recognize the names of the top 25 CS schools. You might not know their rank, but there aren't any obscure names on that list, and they graduate a lot of students.

Glad to learn that graduating from an unknown university makes me a bottom tier candidate.

Thankfully my co-workers who graduated from MIT and Stanford didn't know that, or otherwise they would have thrown away my resume.

Willfully missing the point is typically a negative quality.

I was commenting that it's weird for someone screening resumes to not recognize many schools. Hypothetically, I could see you going to Harvey Mudd (great school) and a hiring manager not knowing about it. All the resumes aren't from those schools, though. You'd think a Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, CMU, Illinois resume would have passed by at some point.

When I was a hiring manager, most of the candidates I ran into came from international universities I had not heard about. Instead, I interviewed people based on the projects they had worked on.

In the other extreme I've even heard people here in HN argue that MIT and Stanford graduates are often mediocre, which is very different from my experience.

Hiring is hard and we all do it differently. YMMV.

The top 25? Why not the top 50? At that point I might as well memorize them all.

Unless you are in the top 3 the distinction is mostly academic.

Caltech is 11 in CS.

> At that point I might as well memorize them all.

Read through the list. You'll probably recognize a lot of the names. Out of 50, if you pay much attention to colleges in the US, I bet you'll recognize 40 of them.

I feel like it's hard not to recognize the majority of the top 100.

It becomes outright silly when US recruiters are charged with going through non-US resumes. We've had an Irish engineer being asked if this German university is "Ivy league equivalent". To which the only possible reply is "how the hell am I supposed to know?" There's 50-ish separate education systems, have fun making any sense out of it.

That’s amusing. The German university system was actively designed (or modified) after 1968 to get rid of all such prestige hierarchies. There are real universities and there are universities of the applied sciences and that’s really it. Every German university is a high quality university.

I’d say a university of applied sciences is a ‘real’ university by international standards.

> I have never considered education so far.

Surely though a B. Eng. Software with first class honors is better than a random science degree.. ?

It's complicated.

IME if I had to guess how well someone would work out and was told only the degree, I would answer:

physics/math degree > EE/ME degree > CS degree > humanities degree.

This is because in my experience, CS degrees are incredibly popular and a lot of people get them even though they may not be particularly good at programming or even enjoy it. 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.

But that's not how it works because those with only a college degree are (for the most part) not competing for the same set of jobs as those with work experience. They are competing for internships, and when it comes to internships, you are going to hire someone with a CS degree over someone with an EE degree. Therefore you are right, when it comes to internships.

When someone has only a degree and no work experience, that's a risky proposition -- those candidates should be routed to internships so both sides can get to know each other without a long term commitment. In all the companies I've ever worked with, we've never hired straight from college without it being an internship. More likely than not, an internship will result in a job offer if it goes well, and IME most do go well. That means that in practice, it's much easier for college graduates to enter the labor market. But they enter via internships that are converted to offers and generate work experience. Then the work experience is all that counts and the degree becomes a checkbox.

In other words, your college degree is important, but it's important to open the door to your first real job by getting you an internship. After that, it very rapidly decays in importance. This is because the work experience is so much more informative and relevant than the education. I've never looked at anyone's grades or honors, and it's not uncommon to have a lot of employees without a college degree if they have proven their skills in other ways. This disregard for grades or degree and focus on actual skills is what makes things like dev bootcamps work (for good or ill).

I might be biased since I don’t have a CS degree, but I consider having a degree in the humanities a potentially more positive signal than a typical CS degree. It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.

In contrast when you screen resumes you invariably come across people who apparently managed to get a CS degree without learning anything. They won’t be dissuaded from applying to technical positions but if one doesn’t have a CS or related technical degree they probably have some confidence in their own ability.

There’s also a factor where some employers simply pass on resumes if the candidate does not meet strict degree requirements. This also increases the average quality of the non-CS degree holder a bit.

> It could indicate that the candidate is able to learn programming and software development on their own, and are interested in the field enough to “switch” careers despite being in an apparent disadvantage.

Call me cynical, but if I were to see an art history major switch to programming, I wouldn't think "this is a person that decided he loves CS more than art history", I'd think "this is a person that loves art history and ran out of money."

Of course that's all from the resume. Once you actually meet someone and work with them, you can find out pretty quickly how passionate they are and where their interests are. But we are talking about making judgements off of resumes, which again is why work history trumps all. If someone succeeded at a place with similar requirements to yours, that is a much more important signal of qualification than education, so once you land that first job, whether you were an art history major or cs major isn't so important. Might as well study what you love and then figure out how you fit into the labor market later.

Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree. It doesn't make sense. Many are deeply passionate about CS and will learn on their own. This is compounded by the theory in uni and learning opportunities.

> Why are you assuming all the CS candidates are not passionate about the degree. I don't think I said or suggested that?

What I implied is that people tend to look for jobs related to their degree if they don't have a good idea what they want. There are those passionate CS degree holders and dispassionate CS degree holders applying for a (say) software dev job. There are probably very few dispassionate humanities degree holders applying to the same job. It's some signal, and I don't think one has to dismiss the importance of a CS degree to see that.

> 20 years ago, I'd put the CS degree higher up, but today Universities have lowered standards significantly and are minting lots of CS graduates with dollar signs in their eyes.

In addition I’ve heard of an seen a number of things in CS programs to make me question their quality. I can’t speak to the other degrees.

Maybe? As far as I’ve found there is zero correlation between education and competency, at least in the candidates I’ve interviewed.

This is mostly in the Asia/Pacific region though, it might be different elsewhere.

I'm in a senior position with no degree and the absolute best engineers I have ever worked with almost all have music degrees.

Edit: it's also worth noting as an ex-hedgie that in technical roles most of the firms specifically filter for people with musical ability for this reason.

How can I make sure the next hedge fund I interview at know I'm a mediocre guitar player? Or is mediocre not worth mentioning?

I found electrical engineers to be similar.

Computer science degree holders were mostly lacking ability in my experience.

But I wouldn't count anyone out by their degree.

The best people in any field are the ones that passed the harshest filter, and pole vaulting from music to programming is about as demanding as it gets.

Not as much as you'd think. Most of them had a specialty in computer music which leans heavily on building your own tools/instruments.

But I agree with you.

Some of the best developers I’ve worked (and work) with are from a music background with an interest in computer music also. I guess maybe part of it is that at a certain point in writing music software you really need to be using C++, and audio software in particular is quite unforgiving due to its real-time nature, so you have to learn some fundamentals to write performante code? But I’m sure there’s more to it than just that.

I’ve also worked with some really smart people from a physics background.

Yeah I think that's mostly accurate. I also think that learning signals processing/sampling teaches you an enormous amount of practical, transferrable skill.

Similar kinds of problems come up in physics, so for me this tracks.

Mm, I'm a hiring manager, and I would not really prefer the software degree. Certainly it would quite low in the signals I'd be considering.

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