Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by angarg12 | Hacker News Reader

I have a background in academia and extensive experience interviewing for FAANG, particularly at the entry level. For me this article highlights the futility of current higher education institutions.

From our experience a degree is a mild indicator of performance when hiring at entry levels. We get some great candidates with no degree, and many poor candidates with degrees. Above entry level, the correlation pretty much disappear. I'm really curios what kind of difficulties OP was facing for not having a title.

I don't think we have completely removed a title from our job posting requirements, but it usually uses one of those silly conversions (CS degree or x years of experience).

That makes me wonder, what value would Universities provide if a degree wasn't a signifier anymore? what if all tech companies hired purely based on interview performance and ignored titles even for filtering? I imagine a future where all the knowledge and material is open and free on the internet, and University staff acts more as coaches and mentors, helping people who needs it in a 1-1 fashion. One can dream.

Lots of companies still have degree requirements.

Interview performance is about as low a correlation with job performance as having a degree. (i.e. none) https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

If we actually had some way of accurately evaluating performance, it would change the industry.

Well, where interview requirements reflect actually doing the job, I'd guess the correlation would be significantly higher, no? If interview requirements don't correlate with job performance, I'd conclude the interview process is flawed. After all, the whole point of an interview is to assess performance capability, if it isn't doing that then you need a new process.

I share the dream, but I season it with a splash of optimism.

The internet is a revolution in information availability and communications capability. People can, right now, learn anything they want, anything at all, for free, all they need is interest, dedication and to prioritize setting aside time for it. The business world still largely operates on the old paradigm though: signaling capability through credentials. But as companies find time and time again that the two don't always (or even usually) correlate, they're creating interesting interview processes to assess capabilities. The credential is largely a legacy requirement in environments like this.

The pace of this change is accelerating. I think over the coming decades you're going to see less importance placed on credentials in technical fields, and people will begin to just learn what they're interested in, what can get them ahead in life, on their own time, and try to work in those fields on their merit and capability. I do believe that one day people won't need credentials, they'll only need to prove themselves. This is easier for honest people but harder for grifters and phonies.

Of course, there are jobs for which mindless obedience, willingness to waste hours of your life and capacity to eat shit are defining characteristics for success. Hopefully those jobs go away, but as long as they exist, they'll have senseless requirements like credentials that people will go through the rigmarole to get. Jobs built out of red tape will have red tape.

Much like view on higher education haven't changed greatly, views on job descriptions haven't either.

People will not apply for a job because it wants 10 years of experience for an entry-level job, or some other such nonsense. I have found many employers list a dream sheet, but realistically they are open to accepting candidates with less qualifications, especially when they end up getting very few applicants (due to the hefty qualifications they asked for).

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