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.
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
My take is more judgmental:
Our current hazing rituals persist because people can't imagine how it could be otherwise.
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"
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.
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.
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.
I'm not convinced. By far, the thing I find correlates most with degree possession is familial wealth.
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...
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.
I did meet many with math/physics etc degrees, so not everone has a computer science degree.
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.
How could you know that without going to college?
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
Really just trying to capture a low-level baseline.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting conspiracy theory.
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...
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.
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.
but he does have almost 30y of experience. i would take the experience of the license.
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.