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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Those education requirements almost always go out the window or can be ticked by passing Cisco certifications or something else vocational. (speaking from experience)

What I'm trying to drive home here is that you do need programming experience to be a good sysadmin/devops/platform; back when devops as a job title was becoming "a thing"(tm) I was told over and over again that sysadmins couldn't code and thus we need devops.

Now it seems devops don't need to be able to code (which you seem to think as well). So we will come up with a new term to cover programmers who understand systems.

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You kidding? A German university CS M.Sc. degree is very different from a Cisco certification.

I guarantee I can get that job with no degree.

Those "degree" sections are universally optional, they're always listed by I have never seen them honoured.

I'd put $20,000 down on the wager that I could get that job with only a Cisco certification (or even nothing at all).

You probably can.

But the criticism was that the job ad was not requiring knowledge of how to write code, and I was pointing out that the degree requirement (strict or not) indicates that that's not true.

If you don't have the required degree but can demonstrate equivalent skills, then that's fine. Kudos to the company about being flexible on the formalities side.

I think you misunderstand.

There is a line that is universally ignored in job ads. This is that line.

if I showed no ability to write a for loop or a linkedlist. I could still get that job.

I see it time and time again, it's like we must add that line to job descriptions, but it's never checked, never verified and ultimately it serves no purpose. There will be no difference between someone with a BSc in CompSci, an MSc in CompSci or no degree at all.

The thing that will get you that job, likely, is discussing how http works, how tcp works and perhaps something to do with exit codes.

My experience with sw eng job interviews is very different and I've been interrogated quite intensely about data structures, design patterns, computer architecture internals, and have done the same on the other side of the table many times. It brings a good perspective on whether the candidate knows their way around the box and has a deep understand of what happens inside it. And I also appreciate if my colleagues know how an L2 cache works, what an RB tree is and what's good and bad about microservices. Whether that's been acquired through a university degree or through self-learning or experience on the job, I don't care though.

Might not be true for this particular posting.

If I'm interviewing person A and person B, all things being equal, I'll go for the one that has a degree on CompSci (or equivalent). That's it. It's not that difficult. Obviously if person A doesn't have a degree but knows much more (based on the tech interview) than person B who has one, I'll go for person A.

Be aware that this is a german job listing.

The only european country that takes titles even more serious is Austria. So without a M.Sc. in CS or a similar M.Sc. your chances may be quite low to even get an interview. Especially since university is basically free here so many people have a B.Sc. or M.Sc. in germany.

Sure, I work for a German company though.

No BSc or MSc here.

I have a computer science degree and barely mention it in my resume because it’s just one of those “checkbox” things that doesn’t actually matter. At my current job I’m not sure anyone even knows that I have one from a decent school. it’s just credentialism. you don’t need a CS degree to be a good systems engineer. It can help you solve weird problems, and IMHO it allows me to think about certain things from a very particular lens a lot better than others, but you absolutely do not need one.

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