Job posts for workers without degrees are booming, but not the hiring
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I'm reminded of the talk by the ex-Google hiring committee person, who reported that not only did their research show that the interviewers' ratings didn't predict the relative performance of people who were hired, but also that his entire committee rejected all of their own (anonymized) interview review packets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0?t=8m20s
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But the above quote seems logical for me as well. In an interview situation, I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success.
Like it or not, that is a signal of something that’s relevant in lots of business/office situations and so, all else equal, I’d expect managers to lean towards the degree-holder.
If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
At the same time, someone who started and dropped out might be seen as a signal that they could not conform to and complete a structured program. Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education. In that regard, someone who never attended college but taught themself programming (at least enough to pass the tech screen on 'all else equal' footing with degreed candidates) might be a better bet than someone who dropped out after two years in a comp sci program and screened the same.
If theory behind your wagers was correct, and if you're optimizing for SAT scores.
* "optimizing for" meaning "I'd prefer a higher score over a lower one, all else equal".
I've met people with really high IQ that were unable to do 1st year university math, and after a number of years dropped out of engineering.
And yet their IQ tests were amazing…
This didn’t lead me to fully dropping out of school. I pivoted over to CIS, graduated, and worked my way up to a principal software engineer.
Did these people you’re talking about totally quit, or did they find a solution to the problem? Employers are going to tend to like those who find alternative solutions.
IQ isn’t useless, it’s just not the only measure that matters. Conscientiousness, for example, probably played a role in those who quit or not.
Or maybe at 20 years old they didn't yet know what they wanted to do with the rest of their life but had been pushed into college anyway by overzealous parents and teachers.
If an infallible oracle told you that was the case and you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard, would you hire the college graduate or the candidate who got railroaded into attending a bit of college and then dropped out?
I think the tie goes to the college graduate for over half of the hiring managers, and I don't think that's crazy at all.
That's different from the original quote, which was simply:
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But your question is interesting. Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Suppose that you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard and also both had degrees, indeed from the same institution. Then how would you choose? By height? Age? Gender? Physical attractiveness?
Agreed.
Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc. You ignored my first question: "Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?" My second question was actually intended to highlight the issue.
What you appear to be doing with "I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is reaching for one arbitrary personal characteristic and inventing an idiosyncratic, non-scientific psychological theory in order to justify discrimination. Others do the same thing with age and gender, for example (younger people and men are just better at programming, they say). You don't know the life story of these people, and there are any number of reasons for someone not completing a degree: monetary problems, family problems, a major illness or injury, natural disaster, etc. Moreover, if you select just based on degree completion, you give job candidates no opportunity to show evidence that they "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" in ways other than competing a degree. It's simply a bias toward degree holders. By your own admission, you're not using the degree as evidence of job-relevant skills but rather as a psychological, "life story" factor.
> Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc.
As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees for roles where intelligence and conscientiousness are useful qualities.
> Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to [perform] equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Of course it's possible for a non-degree holder to outperform a degree holder, or for a Mech E or English major to outperform a Comp Sci grad. That doesn’t mean I think a Comp Sci degree has no relevance or value to an SWE job.
You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
If someone out-interviews another for a role and clears the bar, you hire the out-performer. When you otherwise can’t tell which candidate is stronger and get down to the area where coin flips become a sensible selection mechanism, I think it's wise to choose the degree holder over using the coin. Other people might rely on height or appearance; I can't control what they do.
1) You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
2) If you're looking for IQ, then why don't you administer IQ tests to job candidates rather than looking at an extremely unreliable proxy for it?
3) You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates. Do you even realize what you're saying here? That's literally prejudice. By the exact same reasoning, you could discriminate based on race, for example, e.g., Asian vs. white vs. black. The only difference between racial discimination and degree discrimination in this respect is the legality of it. Even if I granted for the sake of argument that your empirical speculation about scores and measures were true, you're just talking about averages, and many individual members of every population will be above average or below average.
> You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
It is often used as the "high-order bit". Like I already said a few comments ago, the quote from the article was different from your quote.
But I don't think it's a sensible tie-breaker. You're taking a degree as a "life story" factor, but that's an arbitrary, singular choice of many possible life story factors.
Also, you seemed to change your story a bit in the last comment, talking specifically about a comp sci degree rather than a degree in general, but there's nothing unique about comp sci vs. other degrees to indicate "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" or to indicate "IQ".
I am, in effect, using the membership among the population of college degree holders as a tie-breaker.
If you choose to judge that as indistinguishable from, or equivalent to, discrimination based on race, we have a point of disagreement that isn't likely to be resolved.
Seems like this wouldn’t need to be said on a tech board.
Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
That seems overly simplistic.
Everyone doesn’t complete somethings because they don’t like it. Decisions and life is far more muddy and complicated than that.
But what do I know I’m a college grad who barely gets any interviews for anything.
The problem is, everyone who drops out due to inability presents themselves as having dropped out to work on their startup or suchlike.
So it's something of a market for lemons.
I would say that it's hard to directly target an equivalent in an interview, because you don't want to needlessly draw attention to the fact that you don't have a degree. ("Hey interviewer, if you're worried about me not having a degree, think about the fact that I earned an Eagle Scout honor or trained for and completed a marathon or <XYZ>." Maybe the interviewer hadn't ever thought about the fact that you didn't have a degree and now you've soured them a bit.)
For the concern I raised in the GP post, I would say anything that shows persistent and consistent dedicated effort, over a long (ideally multi-year) period of time resulting in a successful outcome would qualify and would be something that I'd tried to work into one of my answers.
Plus, even if they don't use it to break a tie in an "all else equal" interview, the contributions themselves will make the candidate a stronger candidate.
Of course, I am not applying for something that would need a PhD in chemical engineering.
My experience has been that most companies are pretty good at identifying who the smart people are and giving them more responsibility. If anything, I would consider a business or psychology degree a huge red flag if I was doing the hiring.
I should add though that it is hard to compare for myself because without a degree I have always known I had to do that much more networking. Doesn't matter what degree you have if I make friends with the hiring manager.
My experience has been the opposite. Regardless of degree or not degree.
"Bring back unpaid internships" is one obvious way to re-create the signal, assuming companies would be willing to take on ambitious 18 years olds and teach them. As a hiring manager, do you think there is any way to make this happen?
Is this because the student doesn't pay attention, or the student already knew all the material?
I wasn’t the best student, but I learned a ton in those four years.
Paid internships are great and whenever we're expecting to have open entry-level positions the following year, we run a paid internship program. It's an excellent source of future talent for us and (IMO) is good training/experience for the interns.
I think it would be illegal to have an unpaid internship program in many states unless the intern was doing the internship as part of a degree-granting [or at least academic credit earning] program. (That's at least a close summary of the law in MA where I am.) And in tech, I can't think of much reason to have an unpaid internship program, even if legal. If I can afford the staff time to direct and supervise the interns, I can afford the $15/hour minimum wage* and that aligns everyone's incentives better.
* We pay substantially more than this to interns, but even paying the legal minimum wage aligns incentives.
There are counter-arguments. You're getting free on the job training even though you're barely worth it even working for free. And lots of jobs like acting and writing, can involve years of trying (often unsuccessfully) to land something that pays.
If someone isn't worth that much, why even bother entertaining working for you and your friends? Not like you won't throw my resume in the trash anyways.
I'm working on starting my own thing, so don't feel bad you fell for someone telling you "you're barely worth anything."
Lawmakers can create a law which say that educational debt above Y dollars can be discarged in bankruptcy. Of course anything like that will have second and further order effects too.
They can. But there are some debts which cannot be discharged that way. (Meaning some debts go away, but others don't.)
For example if you owe child support payments that doesn't go away just because you default. Or if you owe someone debt because you caused them an injury in a wilful and malicious manner that cannot be discharged by defaulting. These are explicitly defined exceptions in the USA law. And so is student loans.
If we're going to be brutally honest, at many, many companies, that's all you need to know how to do in order to have a fine career. Do what you're told, do it on time, and sustain that activity for years. Some companies say they want things like creativity, initiative, leadership, blah, blah, blah, but they're just words. Most of them are looking for cogs who take direction and finishing a 4 year degree shows you can do that.
Of course, it's just one tiny metric and not the most important of anything I would consider, but a degree earned or not maybe a decade or two before I meet them often tells me more about their family upbringing than it does their current ability.
And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
Steve Jobs spent 1 semester at Reed College.
> And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
So for non-wealthy people, dropping out of college is a sign of badness, whereas for wealthy people, it's a sign of goodness? That sounds a lot like discrimination to me.
The point is that using a degree as decisive evidence of "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is kind of ridiculous. Especially if you're evaluating a candidate with years of actual job experience.
(And it would be quite hypocritical if a hiring manager for a company founded by a dropout disrciminated against droputs.)
Out of the 8 billion total people on Earth.
Forbes did a study (of sorts) that estimated 44 billionaires of the 362 they had listed were dropouts. That suggests a need to have 4.4 trillion dropouts.
Order of magnitude, it's somewhere around a million times more common for a college dropout to become a billionaire than your claim.
Yeah. An entire society is inflating its value and its capabilities. And that's a serious error to have for a planet.
So, maybe someone like Richard Feynman isn't really someone to look up to? Maybe you should be looking down on people like him? Considering his type is all about "education, science, and development."
So that means a "safe" hire, doesn't it?
> Richard Feynman
Had a PhD from Princeton!
There's an element of self selection. Perhaps you're working at a place where only highly capable employees work and people without college education who work at your place are capable of succeeding without one in the first place? My manager seems to fit the mold you're describing. There are definitely people out there who are brilliant and don't need a college degree to show that.
I am a frequent poster at /r/itcareerquestions and a mod for /r/engineeringresumes and my anecdotal observation is that on average, college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest. I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws (whether it's from nature or nurture) those flaws would get in the way of their success even if their respective employer didn't look at college education as a measuring stick for hirability.
Yes, it's obvious to everyone that a degree is correlated with being hireable because having a degree is also correlated with a lot of favourable attributes like intelligence and conscientiousness. If you want a warm body a degree is a good filter.
This is contradictory to strongest/highly capable employees though. For that case, having a degree is an extremely lazy filter. You filter unhireable people, but you also filter extremely hireable people.
For some jobs, e.g. sales, that have strong quantitative metrics it's fine to not worry as much about hiring and just fire anyone who isn't making their numbers. But that works less well with things like engineering positions.
What in the world are you talking about? Citation definitely needed.
Note that only 38% of Americans have a college degree.
""" In a world of costly information, employers sensibly rely on a lot of statistical generalizations. One of these, I’ll warrant, is that weirdos [non-degree holders here] are, on average, worse employees than conformists [degree holders]. Admittedly, the truth of this probably varies from industry to industry. (Check out Peter Jackson). But typically, usually, normally, normality is the best bet. The upshot is that some clever but unconventional ideas sit on the shelf, untried. """
The term to Google around for is, apparently, 'statistical discrimination'. There are of course plenty of other ways to be a weirdo in the eyes of an employer, but degree vs non-degree is one of the biggest ones.
This does not need to be a bad thing - how many nose rings someone has and what color their hair is, is not a good proxy for whether they are any good at a particular skill like coding, for example.
A counter point to this would be You are interviewing to individuals for a job and the only thing missing from one is a degree?
Perhaps the person without a degree didn't have the money for college or had personal life happenings that prevented them from going. Yet they managed to get into an interview. Shouldn't a few more justified questions about how they get to where they are now?
This could show you that the person who didn't go to college as the favorable hire(through hard work), opposed to someone whom is or was more economically advantaged?
Instead this one has a checked box(college) and this one doesn't, the more checked boxes justify the outcome.
You could remove "without degrees" from the above and it would still be true. Whether the purpose is job market research or filling resume banks, the fake job posting has been elevated to an art form.
1. Job applications disappear into a black hole once submitted. There is no clear understanding as to what happens between clicking SUBMIT and HIRED/REJECTED.
2. There is no understanding of hiring methodologies, or even generally accepted best practices. What are the qualifications of a frontline recruiter? Their chain of command? How are reqs and JDs written, edited, processed, and managed?
3. Generally speaking, how is pay determined? There's no central database of salaries and experiences – which is fine, but then how do we gauge 'who pays better' especially compared to other quantifiable factors like what comes out on a 10K
I understand some of this information may be impossible to attain, but I can't think of a topic that more heavily dominates the news cycle but that also seems to be completely built upon a black hole of innuendo, mystery, and guesswork.
Once before getting hired in an interview with the CEO at a startup, but just shrugged it off. Usually this comes up(outside interview but on this instance too) like this:
"Oh, where did you go to college?"
"I didn't."
"Ohh.."
Lol. I got hired by that company anyway and it worked out really well for both parties:)
"If you didn't read my resume, why are you interviewing me?"
Otherwise yeah I think many can sympathize with being hired and having managers not know your history.
"Oh you have experience operating SaaS and designing cloud infra? You know how to build packages?!"
"Dude, I've been working as an AWS solutions architect and developer for like 8 years and worked as the primary systems engineer at an ISP and VPS provider. Why did you even hire m... I want a raise."
The joke is the PhD fellows and principals don't want some Linux hacker that never went to college fixing all their code that doesn't work.
Edit: shit/code
I'd have just been a 'technician' to you but IMO: it involved all the same skills as if I'd have designed it myself. You still need to know what all the code does well enough to have written it and have the skills to improve it. So I'm not sure the distinction really matters here.
Why do you think engineers don't or shouldn't fix things?
Isn't the very idea of designing a system: solving a problem, and isn't problem solving synonymous with "fixing a problem".
One can choose to implement various formal and rigorous methods throughout a process, but at the end of the day it's all the same activity.
Is the reason imposed by a party external to the employer, maybe a regulator?
Or is it arrogance/ignorance of a strongly university-connected organization?
Or is it intended as an pretext to get the work of some people with preferable terms?
Supposedly the requirement has been lifted but most team leaders and VP's are still reluctant. If the employee eventually fails they can still use "well, he graduated from Purdue he should have succeeded"
Having the skills is like Mixins. You CAN do X, Y, Z. For example, you have the skills to do Data Wrangling with Pandas, you have the skills to perform classification with scikit-learn, etc.
I think skill-based approaches are a lot more efficient (just as in OOP :))
Degrees say "you ARE X", they, by extension, might INFER that you KNOW the Skills X, Y, Z that are part of the study plan. But that's not granted. Having a degree doesn't mean you have the skills. You might have forgotten, you might have cheated, etc.
Thesting for the skill in particular is the only way.
You seem to believe that companies look for the most skilled person to do a given job. They don't, even if they keep saying that. They look for someone willing to put up with as much bullshit and punishment as the company can get away with while creating as much profit for the company (or whichever metric is used instead) as possible without making the company leadership look bad. For higher positions like management they usually look for someone exactly like who they already have but who won't threaten their status within the company. For leadership positions they usually look for someone who won't fraternize with the subordinates and knows how to play politics.
In addition to its use as signals, degrees used as a filter are also a base level way to demonstrate due diligence. If you take the guy without a degree, that's a risk and if he's a dud, that was a bad decision. If you take the one with a degree and he turns out to be a dud, that's just bad luck.
Then, it still wasn't going well.
But I eventually found a company that interviewed me, and it came down to me an 1 other person, and on paper, they looked a lot better than me.
They gave me a test (brainbench, IIRC) and I absolutely smoked the other guy on every part of it.
So in the end, I didn't need a degree. My next job didn't care at all about my degree, just my 5 years of experience and what I knew how to do.
now they're more like billboards that never get taken down
just to fill a space
As far as a degree is concerned, I was once given an offer without even interviewing. I asked to come in and talk to people anyway but I didn't need to.
If you hire a person for a job - for something which you can't really narrowly define, and don't want to, for something which may need adaptation to unexpected tomorrow, then you need those specific skills of learning on the fly - something closely associated with prolonged education program. The program could be less formal or official, but you still want to see the ability to improve, possibly improve by oneself, and even sometimes to participate in generating ideas and decisions - and education is the process where you have good opportunities to flex these kind of muscles.
Certainly at the beginning of the college career the top 1% would be a better indicator but at what point would the college education surpass that?