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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

The 2 minimum requirements that stand out because Carmack does not have a ML/AI mathematics background and he's a college dropout:

>- 8+ years of experience in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, recommendation systems, pattern recognition, NLP, data mining, or artificial intelligence

>- Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mathematics or related technical field

What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus? Was it building artificial worlds for the headset such as video games or Augmented Reality of processing video input with ML/AI and enhancing it with tags etc?

It's possible that Carmack's expert knowledge of graphics shaders/rendering is a different skillset than mathematics of Augmented Reality.

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Lots of notable people in computing, and in particular game dev, do not have a college degree, yet it continues to be insisted upon by employers. My suspicion is that it is because it is an effective class filter. If you're high class enough it won't matter because you'll just network your way in.

I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk averse.

There's an old saying: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

It basically means that, if you use IBM for something and it doesn't work out, you can tell your manager "who could've guessed — it's IBM!", and you'll be mostly off the hook. If you were to use some promising new startup, even if it's more likely to do a great job, the fault is squarely on you if it goes wrong.

Similarly, when hiring an engineer, the recruiter and hiring manager can explain away a bad hire to upper management by saying "what a fluke, they have a degree from Harvard!", while they would be in a tougher situation if they made a bad hire and that person had no degree.

>I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk averse.

To be fair the "minimum requirements" are also a risk averse filter.... you can reject everyone without any issue by saying no one meets the minimum

> I think degrees are remaining a requirement because a hiring manager and recruiter at a large company are risk averse.

My take is more judgmental:

Our current hazing rituals persist because people can't imagine how it could be otherwise.

I agree completely. We just can't imagine doing things differently.

Fun anecdote: when I was 16 (with a couple years of experience as a developer) I was working for a company on some PHP codebase and they hired someone with a master's degree in computer science to work on it with me.

10 minutes after the first meeting he set his Skype status to "HELP: can anyone teach me PHP programming"

It's not a class issue, at least in some Countries. People I've met in the industry who don't have a comp/eng degree are typically more entrepreneurial ( and really smart), the education system was slow and boring and VERY outdated, they felt more effective not wasting time. I've worked with some really bad programmers who had masters degrees, after 2 decades I found that a degree really had no bearing on how effective someone was, it really came down to the actual person.

The problem as someone noted is HR doing the vetting, HR is in most cases filled with administrators, not problem solvers. I don't have anything good to say about HR.

People are nagging about HR but did those nagging people done any recruitment on their own?

It is not that you hire 1 person and you have all the time in the world to get to know him/her.

There is limited time, limited information and hundreds of people to be hired with hundreds of applicants.

Hiring is not scaling well, because it is time bound, someone has to read that CV, someone has to make calls. You have to have like 30mins - 1hr chat with applicant. Only way to optimize time is to throw away CVs which is not optimal because you might throw away good candidates.

This is precisely because education is used as a filter so strongly. In order to make it into the industry without meeting the education requirement you must be truly impressive in other ways.

On average, people with degrees are way better than people without degrees. The most competent people I have met are usually out of the best schools.

Of course there are exceptions, and many people like to point them out and John Carmack is one of them. But really, someone who passed tests, spent a few years with a bunch of smart people, and took lessons, all that relevant to the work to be done has a high chance of being better at it than someone who did not do that.

There are some really smart people who are not fit for school, it it not uncommon. But what is a very common is really dumb people that are not fit for school.

Another common trope with successful college drop out is that they are usually entrepreneurs, certainly because as drop outs, they are better off doing that since it is harder for them to get hired. And then, you get into survivor bias. You only hear about the successful ones.

So, companies hire people with degrees, because on average, people with degrees are better. Easier for them than having to go through thousands of inadequate candidates in order to find the exception. They may miss out, but for most positions, it is not that big a deal for companies.

Degrees are a pretty good proxy for skill, not perfect, but I can't think of a better one right now for normal people. Of course, it doesn't apply for John Carmack. But when companies post mid-level job offerings, no John Carmack will answer the call.

"On average, people with degrees are way better than people without degrees." says person with degree.

I'm not convinced. By far, the thing I find correlates most with degree possession is familial wealth.

Yes, I have the equivalent of a masters degree, and my family is middle-class, but supportive and financially sound, which I think is fairly typical on HN.

I also correlate skill with familial wealth, but more weakly than with degrees. It is clearly easier to learn some skill if you live comfortably. Not that long ago, many families couldn't afford a computer, try learning programming without a computer. If you are very motivated, you can do a lot, I have a lot of respect for those who do, but again, they are the exception, not the rule. I mean, the rich have personal tutors, the poor have local drug dealers, you do you think is more likely to end up the most qualified for a job in a reputable company? The worst part is that the rich may also end up better at finding drugs...

It's the signal-to-noise ratio.

By definition, notable people are a minority. When you're recruiting John Carmack, you don't care about degrees because he's John Carmack. But most people are not, and for those, college degrees are considered some kind of safety net.

I would say that while they may not be John Carmack, pretty much all of the best people I've met in this industry did not have a college degree, and many of the worst did. Anecdotal yes, but suffice it to say I put very little stock into paper.

I myself attended university for a single year before deeming it completely not worth the time and money (which I couldn't really afford) and instead acquired several associates degrees (which I paid for with a menial job). Because of this, I admit to some bias on the matter.

Up to half my graduating class drifted by with “help” from friends / could barely code. They eventually figured out that leetcode exists and now they all have high paying jobs

>I myself attended university for a single year before deeming it completely not worth the time and money

almost the same with me. i was already living by myself went i started to go to college. where i live, college is not a "full time job" -- i had to work all day long then attend classes at night. it was basically exhausting.

i decided to quit college and instead focus on my career -- which was absolutely the right idea. i learned more by doing than by going to college.

> i learned more by doing than by going to college.

How could you know that without going to college?

A good person with a degree likely works at Google or equivalent. If you don't work at such a place then likely the places you went to are just very non-degree friendly and therefore gathered a lot of good people without degrees that had a hard time getting jobs elsewhere.

Is this true? I remember reading a few years back that Google had plenty of engineers without a degree, that they allegedly hired based on their side projects, free software contributions, etc.

When I worked at Google I never met anyone without a degree. They don't have it as a hard requirement but they are still very rare, since those without degrees rarely pass Googles interview process.

I did meet many with math/physics etc degrees, so not everone has a computer science degree.

I see. We should not believe everything we read on Google, even more so if it's about Google :-)

That is an exaggeration. Most successful people in the software industry definitely have an engineering degree.

Within gamedev, I can't tell.

> most successfull people in software industry

- The outliers of the billionaires and big names are kinda making people reconsider though. e.g Zuckerberg, Gates (maybe dropout to do something is better signal)

I remember reading somewhere that something important to keep in mind is that Zuckerberg and Gates didn't really "drop out" as they could go back to college at any time if they wanted to. However once they succeeded there was no need. This was not a choice between "a degree and a shot at something" but "a degree, or either something that works, or a degree later".

dropout doesn't mean expelled. If people took a leave of absence, they can return. At most schools, it is allowed.

Yup, they "dropped out" not because they were failures but rather were too successful.

Sure if you compare the extreme end of one bell curve with the middle of another then, hey look the p95 people in one outperform the p50 of the other! But if you compare the median developer in each then what? My experience is that if you’re > 40yrs old it’s irrelevant as the industry was immature but younger than that and the median degreed engineer I’d expect to come out significantly on top.

You also have the problem of survivorship bias - you’re looking only at the non-degreed engineers who survived in the job and not all of those who dropped out. When hiring the question is whether the non-degreed pool of applicants can on average be expected to match the performance of the degreed applicants?

Anecdotally < 40y/o great engineers I’ve encountered without degrees almost always have a degree in *something* or they spent their youth tinkering with personal computers - historically an even more inaccessible privilege than a college degree. They are p95 folks.

I certainly don’t think degrees have to be required but at the same time I don’t want to wade through rivers of unqualified candidates searching for that p95 individual. Bootcamps are kinda the exception here but that’s another topic.

College degrees are a loaded concept in our minds; they are tied up with intelligence, knowledge, class, politics, etc. It's tough to untangle them.

But education does help tremendously; smart people go to college, and work hard to learn for four years. I'm not an idiot; I didn't waste my time; I learned a lot; it changed my thinking skills dramatically for the better. Especially for people in the liberal arts(!), what I see most is critical thinking: Being skeptical (about themselves too) and thinking powerfully and effectively and penetratingly. Look at all the nonsense that people believe on the Internet (and in business and elsewhere); we don't lack algorithms, we lack critical thinking. Also, college is very demanding on raw 'cognitive productivity' - inputting, analyzing, producing - more than business.

(Tangentially, I see both critical thought and 'cognitive productivity' slide as people get further from college and in more powerful positions. The BS we hear from some middle-aged SV leaders is laughably megalomaniacal nonsense. Only their egos can save us, all we need is what they want to provide, if you listen to them.)

But yes, people also use college as a class signal, unfortunately, and these days in the US college education correlates strongly with family wealth, IIRC the research. If we solve the latter, which we did easily in our history, we solve the former.

Makes it easier to apply for visas, if necessary. I might not use my Electronics Engineering degree in any way for work, but I would not be able to apply for a work permit without it. Maybe it's easier to write "degree" rather than "degree if you're a foreign-born person". The latter makes it seem like you're discriminating against foreign born applicants by having higher standards for them to clear. Which is true, you are discriminating, but only because the government says you must.

Companies tend to put an emphasis on avoiding false positives, and usually don't care much about the risk of false negatives. They know it's possible for someone to be great without a degree, or any other random arbitrary requirement. But they know that there's a higher likelihood that someone without the requirement does not fit what they're looking for, so they're willing to lose desirable candidates as long as it removes a certain ratio of undesirable candidates.

This is specially true of companies that get thousands of resume submissions, like Google, Facebook, etc. For them, removing the noise is a huge challenge.

The way I phrase it for my min requirements is something like -- degree in comp sci, math, informatiks, or other engineering discipline, or similar engineering based work experience.

Really just trying to capture a low-level baseline.

But those notable people are the exception not the norm.

Norm is that people go through college to learn about complex things in computing.

That is why it is also norm to put it as a requirement in recruitment.

> My suspicion is that it is because it is an effective class filter.

Not just that. College degrees are the perfect way for employers to outsource training (simply because an IT degree will transfer a lot of the knowledge needed on the job) and vetting (aka is this person able to meet deadlines with high quality output) cost and risk.

I honestly don't think any part of that statement is correct. What I learned at university was a lot less practical and applicable than what I learned getting my associates, and I've met PhDs while teaching train-the-trainer courses who didn't know how to use a mouse. Between that and what I've heard from people who did get a degree in computing it is filled to the brim with math and theory and very little practical application. That's valuable, but it isn't the same as training.

As far as vetting goes, my experience is that all it really vets is a person's familial wealth. Consistently I've seen that wealthy people have little trouble getting degrees and people from less wealthy backgrounds who get degrees had to work a lot harder for it. Things might be different somewhere like MIT, but most colleges are not MIT.

Yes, it's a class filter. You can't legally filter on race or sex, but most people with a master's degree are male and white so making that a requirement is a filter of sorts.

Most master's degrees, and degrees in general, are going to females, so if they're trying to filter for males then they aren't doing a good job.

> are going to females

Please, don't use "females" as a noun, that's gramatically incorrect and dehumanizing language (see e.g https://medium.com/fearless-she-wrote/woman-vs-female-67fd4c...).

Additionally you're factually wrong, in STEM fields (which is what we are talking about) about twice as many degrees go to men: https://www.statista.com/statistics/828906/number-of-stem-de...

It is not surprising people react poorly to other people trying to police their natural language based on assumptions projected onto them about it.

Male/female to describe individual or cohorts of humans based on sex is pretty common language. It certainly isn't "fundamentally" wrong. It's just a higher abstraction. You have to infer the form of being from the context - usually very easy.

The rest of this article is just an author's assertions about how these words are used.

The Person you replied to used “males” as a noun as well. I find it interesting you didn’t have any words with respect to that.

I guess it depends where you live. In Canada, more women have University degrees than men. It's been that way for a while.

And outside the US, university can cost, but isn't a back breaker. Or it's free.

I wonder how much this is a US problem. Most Canadian computing jobs, which I get sent, seem to specify "or experience" as an alternative to a degree.

You think companies and universities specifying a masters or PhD for certain job positions are secretly a white supremacist patriarchy of bourgeoisie, hell bent on filtering out the proletariat?

Interesting conspiracy theory.

Ahahaha. Ok buddy.

Would you hire an unlicensed electrician to wire your house?

I have hired someone to work on my home's electrical who did not have a license. A lot of people let unlicensed tradesmen, family members, or themselves do work on their home. Frankly, like programming, most of it isn't really that hard.

A degree is not a license and brings with it no safety regulations...

Depends on the country, https://www.ordemengenheiros.pt/en/about-us/

No I would not. Home electrical wiring is becoming increasingly complex today, with the rise of whole-house surge suppressors, backup generators, solar panels, and sensitive expensive electronics everywhere.

Assuming that half of the US houses were built before 1980 (when electrics were still primitive and wiring was sometimes aluminum), fitting modern services into a home with knob and tube wiring and floating grounds (like mine) is NOT something I want to trust to a jackleg, no matter how many years of experience he has.

the dude that does all the electrical stuff at my apartment does not have a license at all.

but he does have almost 30y of experience. i would take the experience of the license.

There used to be a time when “college dropout” was no big deal in the tech world so long as you could build things (see e.g., Facebook founder & Oculus co-founder) so to see a Masters degree listed as a “minimum requirement” really bums me out.

I have never remembered a time where "college dropout" was not a big deal in tech. It was such a significant thing that it was often one of the first few facts you would find out about a person behind some technology.

And jobs with degrees as a requirement were often the norm. For a senior position in a research oriented group that might be expected to collaborate with and/or hire from academic groups, totally normal to want a higher degree.

It has always been and is still the case that not having a degree is not a huge impediment if you have the chops -- You will find a place, or a place will find you. But it has never been the case that someone without a degree could ever expect to have equal opportunity to be hired into any job out there.

> What was Carmack's development focus during Oculus?

I'm not sure exactly but there's a bunch of keynotes from Carmack around Oculus Connect on YouTube. Here's one from 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn8m5d74fk8, and another one from a year later where he's live coding in a VR environment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydyztGZnbNs. You'll find a bunch more if you search too.

I remember skimming through them years ago not because I'm into VR development but I've been a life long fan of Carmack's work and like listening to him talk about things.

Maybe doing that 3 semester Master's ain't that mehh idea after all

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