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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn’t surprise me if this is a question of credentials.

I don’t know any experienced people with solid skills who also have degrees who have been having difficulty.

I know one good one, but without a relevant degree who is struggling. I also know lots of boot camp/recent grads in iffy masters programs who aren’t getting anywhere.

I am aware of a few hiring processes that are just inundated with people who don’t have a relevant degree that keep restarting as a result.

So it may simply be that standards rose more than actual availability in the market did.

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I don't think skills, degree, whether it has a cover letter, or astrological sign makes any difference at the moment.

A lot of recruiters are just throwing out anything they receive after I dunno, after 400 applicants. It's too much trouble to go through.

I definitely know talented people with plenty of experience and the expected degrees who were struggling to find jobs after being laid off. At this point I think all of them are placed now, but I don't know that means the market is better. Just that my specific limited sample has had sufficient time to find something.

Anecdotal but this is my experience as well. The majority of my friends with compsci bachelors/masters degrees have been gainfully employed for years. Those with 8 week code camps are unfortunately always going to be at a competitive disadvantage, particularly if it's their first job.

Are people struggling even with years of experience because of lacking a degree? Or are they entry level?

This one person has 10 years of experience, but he is mostly enterprise Java, so target companies are more traditional.

The vast majority of candidates we reject have a degree.

Degrees are as useless a metric as bootcamps in my experience.

I've done so many interviews in which a 4.0 CS grad can't sort a list that a degree from even 'elite' institutions doesn't mean much.

Does the job you're hiring for actually require sorting a list? If Kroger wants to hire a new CEO, they're unlikely to require candidates to walk up to the cash register and ring up customers even if it's a very basic skill for the industry.

Out of all the places I've worked, I think my favourite approach was Dropbox's: They ask these algo questions for new grads, because every new grad from a computer science program has been through these classes and it's an easy thing to index on.

But for experienced hires, nobody gets algorithms questions. Instead, you get practical questions -- depending on the role, things like writing an ID allocator, finding duplicate files across a filesystem, demonstrating understanding of concurrency, etc. No "implement this well-understood algorithm that you'll never implement again" questions.

I’ve never written a linked list after college and I’m a principal software engineer. Why would I waste my time when there are libraries written by dedicated, excellent engineers that have been used by millions of developers?

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