Hacker News Reader

Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers.

> 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.

View on HN

Am I wrong in thinking that "not completed" is often vastly closer to "having a degree" than "never started"? Obviously some people fail out of degrees completely, but many start a degree because they're capable and simply find out they dislike the content.

Not completed shows that you were accepted to an institution, so it matters how selective the institution was. There’s a lot of research that shows there’s some (wage) benefit to the first year of college, then not so much for the second or third, but a lot more for the degree. Bryan Caplan’s book on the subject covers this ‘sheepskin effect’ very well.

You get the filtering effect for MIT/Stanford/etc. Then it's a mix between "decided the academic thing wasn't right for me" and "it got tough so decided to bail" whether or not that's ever explicitly stated. (Or random family etc. issues etc.)

Starting college and not completing it is a mixed signal as compared to never starting.

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 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.

If theory behind your wagers was correct, and if you're optimizing for SAT scores.

Underlying this proposition is that I'm optimizing for* something closer to what IQ (and SAT) measures.

* "optimizing for" meaning "I'd prefer a higher score over a lower one, all else equal".

But IQ is completely useless as a measure.

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…

I dropped out of engineering after my first year because of the math. My high school had an experimental math program that was designed for people who wouldn’t need higher level math, which kind of screwed me. I was generally good at math and tests, so I placed into a higher level course than high school prepared me for. Because I did so well on the test, they wouldn’t allow me to take a lower level class. I tried. On the first day the teacher handed me a letter telling me I was departmentally dropped.

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 they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education.

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.

That's certainly possible.

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.

> you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard

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?

If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.

> If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.

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.

I am biased towards degree holders for programming and other tech roles. It’s not a requirement or some magic talisman of “hire immediately”, but all else equal, I’ll prefer it and, all else equal, I will use it to discriminate (in the “distinguish” or “tell one thing from another” sense).

> 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.

> 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.

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".

> You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates.

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.

I would note that there's not much a leap from "this criterion makes sense as a tie-breaker" to "this criterion makes sense as a résumé filter when you have a very large number of applicants".

Then I’d not hire them for being so short-sighted. Your college degree has nothing, at all, to do with the rest of your life unless you want it to and you work to make sure that it does.

Seems like this wouldn’t need to be said on a tech board.

That would be a situation for which I'd request a transcript - probably the only situation, because the second you're handed that degree I no longer care what your grades were.

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.

Not completing something simply because you dislike it is a big red flag. At work you often have to finish stuff you don’t like, you don’t want employee that will start something but rely on others to finish it.

What if it aint "dont like", but "not worth"? Like, if there is no value in wasting time on completion

Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect.

This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.

There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag. But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.

> is a big red flag

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.

And if you get a degree from college, it means you made something out of a lot of classes that at first glance, seemed useless. Also research skills, and the ability to pick something up on your own, maybe with a little help and practice.

But what do I know I’m a college grad who barely gets any interviews for anything.

There are many reasons you might not complete a degree, and some don't reflect badly on the student at all.

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.

Which is a shame, because in this case University itself often doesn't need to justify itself as more than an arbitrary time sink that rewards people who can both do the work intellectually, and afford both the fee and time to sink into it.

Sure a college degree shows they can do whats expected and still get by.

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.

That's a fair analysis. It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc.

"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?

> many people learn very little in their college classes

Is this because the student doesn't pay attention, or the student already knew all the material?

You are missing option C: College classes simply don't teach very much.

Because they didn’t pay attention. Or were too busy partying.

I wasn’t the best student, but I learned a ton in those four years.

It is likey just anecdota from bad colleges/bad students. I went to a normal german university, did not complete on my own terms, but I surely learned there a lot. Even though the university intentionally did not hold my hand teaching me programming. I had to do that mostly on my own. But they gave the theoretical foundation of all the important concepts about IT. Algorithms, data structure, information theory, math, .. things I did not often see at the time any direct benefit "to get shit done". But it payed off.

In the US context, I'm strongly opposed to unpaid internships [at least in tech] (because I believe that paid internships are inherently more equitable and unpaid internships have a bunch of moral hazards for bad employers to exploit that even a local minimum wage internship does not have).

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.

I’d gladly take an internship that paid minimum wage or at least had a meal and transportation stipend.

The argument is that unpaid or minimally paid internships--especially if they're pervasive for specific types of roles--are basically not viable for a lot of people.

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.

Yes, and the person I'm responsing to is advocating for people getting paid. I added on by saying I'd be happy being paid minimum wage, or just having someone pay for lunch and transit, which adds up to probably 30-40 dollars a day now with the inflation.

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."

No, no, no. Bring back paid apprenticeships. There clear incentives to abuse the unpaid internship system and exacerbate disadvantage.

Unpaid internships are terrible. They fall mostly to wealthy students who can afford to take a year of unpaid work.

> It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.

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.

Hold on… can a private person not default in the USA? In Europe you can default and it takes 3 years and you are cleared from credits.

> can a private person not default in the USA

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.

> As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc.

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.

I think there's a part of Simpsons paradox here. If there's someone without degree reaches the place where you are, they must have some extreme talent somewhere else.

> Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers.

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.

> college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest

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.

Which sounds like a pretty reasonable heuristic for a lot of companies absent some other strong signal. Sure, there are probably circumstances where you're willing to swing for the fences on a speculative superstar but a lot of the time you want a reliable bet on someone being solid.

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.

> I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws

What in the world are you talking about? Citation definitely needed.

Note that only 38% of Americans have a college degree.

No citation available because it's an anecdote/sample data from 2 subreddit communities...

Quoth Dr. Bryan Caplan, who has an excellent book on the matter:

""" 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.

Academia filters a lot less for conformity than it used to. Indeed, in some very elite places, any attempt to enforce the old-fashioned style of conformity on students would be seen as Problematic. On minority students, doubly so.

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.

Just as I look at that person and consider how scrappy and determined they must have been to get a start in an industry that's not terribly friendly to juniors. I know because I did it. Then earned a degree later that filled in some gaps, which I seldom use.

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.

The only thing having an "education" signals is conformity to mediocrity.

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."

> conformity to mediocrity

So that means a "safe" hire, doesn't it?

> Richard Feynman

Had a PhD from Princeton!

Correctly calling the smartest person in the world an idiot is only absurd because intelligence was improperly defined in the first place. And the dominant cultural trend is all about improper definitions.

Are there alternatives to demonstrate those qualities to the equivelance of a degree to you? Just wondering if all else is equal what could people without a degree look to add to their resume to benefit from in these situations.

It’s tough, because a degree demonstrates perseverance and conformism. There’s no short-cut to either because a short-cut would be the choice of non-conformists & less perseverant people. There’s a great deal of work on this, known as the ‘signaling model of education’.

I agree with this broadly speaking, I wasn't necessarily asking for a shortcut or way to undermine it, more just of a way of demonstrating this ability assuming you have it.

The problem with demonstrating this equivalence is that signalling must be expensive to work; there's no 'low-cost' substitute for signalling. One example is natural diamond engagement rings; they must be expensive to signal commitment; an imitation doesn't do the job, no matter how beautiful.

I don't know a great answer (and I wish I did, because one of the high performers on my team is "undergrad equivalent of ABD" and I want people like them to succeed without unfair negative treatment).

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.

At the company I currently work at we are open to look at GitHub activity as a good indicator, this might work for some candidates but definitely not all.

I think non-trivial quality github activity over a sustained period of time would be an excellent indicator of the type of persistence that I'm thinking of, and something that a candidate could pretty easily work into an interview answer in a positive light.

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.

I'd make it a bit broader--OK, you have significant open source contributions on GitHub. So long as it's not OK you have a degree frm $X and have 5 years of experience with $Y so where's your GitHub?

I don't have a degree and it has not mattered in a long time. On an interview, I don't even get enough time to get into all my professional experience at this point.

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 that most companies are pretty good at identifying who the smart people are and giving them more responsibility.

My experience has been the opposite. Regardless of degree or not degree.

The, uh, signal-to-noise ratio seems to be quite variable though.

Many of the big tech companies were founded by college dropouts, who became billionaires.

They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school.

And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.

I would note that just as dropping out of college can be good for elite scions without being good for you, going to college can be good for elite scions (the concept was developed for them!) without being good for you.

> They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school.

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.

99.999999999% of college dropouts do not become billionaires.

99.999999999% of degree recipients do not become billionaires either.

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.)

You have one 9 too much. We are only 8 billion not 80 billion. ;). But the number seems right.

For that to be mathematically correct, if we consider the underestimate case where Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the only billionaire dropouts currently alive, that would require 200 billion total college dropouts to be currently alive.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com