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Comment by hythloday | Hacker News Reader

Completing a BSc with a third involves more deadline pressure than shipping, say, two or three video games? Are you sure about that?

Being more general and less snarky - I think that, probably, you (personally, as a single hiring manager) can get away with "only hire CS grads from great universities with firsts", if you work for somewhere easy to hire into (Facebook/Google/Twitter/whatever), because they don't find it hard to find people, just to find ones who're good enough. If (as I suspect by your estimation of the costs of mid-hiring) you're working for a no-name start-up, you're not only cutting out the brilliant people without degrees (and I've worked with many over my career), but you're also cutting out the excellent graduates who won't want to work for you because you're hiring a monoculture.

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Facebook, Google, and Twitter certainly hire/make offers to hire individuals without degree. I know folks that are greatly respected at all three that fit that bill: Wayne Rosing is a famous example. These companies also can't afford to make hiring mistakes and have an extremely high bar.

That said, a Computer Science education certainly improves your chance of getting past the hiring bar. To most it means an exposure to topics they learn about had they spent the four years doing web development: what Bryan called "how computers work" (operating systems, CPU architecture, concurrency), algorithms and data structures beyond arrays and hash tables, and advanced topics (distributed systems, machine learning).

On the other hand, if you've spent those four years contributing to FreeBSD, doing game development (and here I mean doing AI and graphics yourself), or working on another technically challenging project such as a web browser or a compiler, it would be a different story.

I have an MS in CSE but from not from a nationally recognized top-tier school. I think I've done reasonably okay as far as professional success goes, but if I had to do it all over again, I'd have transfered to UC Berkeley (or another top CS school) when I had the chance, even if it meant delaying entering the work force by 1-2 years.

>Completing a BSc with a third involves more deadline pressure than shipping, say, two or three video games? Are you sure about that?

Personally - quite possibly. If you did the BSc I know you were at least able to hand in something that met the basic requirements, on time or close to it. If all I know is you worked at Company X and weren't fired, that could mean any number of things, and I'd have to be a pretty good interviewer to figure out which.

If you did the BSc I know you were at least able to hand in something that met the basic requirements, on time or close to it. If all I know is you worked at Company X and weren't fired, that could mean any number of things, and I'd have to be a pretty good interviewer to figure out which.

I don't follow this reasoning. Unless just having the BSc is actually good enough to get hired instantly, you're going to have to figure out if the candidate is good enough anyway. The additional information from the BSc is slim, at the cost of rejecting a chunk of the candidate pool. Just doesn't seem like a very worthwhile tradeoff.

The pool's big enough that other factors (e.g. interview scheduling) are more restrictive. Tossing out half the pool at random really wouldn't hurt. If there's a trivial-to-measure factor that's even 5% correlated with suitability for the position, it's worth looking at only those applications that have it.

Tossing out half the pool at random really wouldn't hurt.

There was a story posted here before about a hiring manager that flipped coins to sort the candidate pile. "We only hire lucky people here." I wish I still had the link...

Was it this one by Raganwald?

http://raganwald.posterous.com/i-dont-hire-unlucky-people

As a guy still in school, I would say that more than half of the people in my CS classes are complete dunces. I would think that even by selecting for the degree, you're still faced with the problem of needing people to prove their skills, no? Is a guy who graduated with an almost failing C really better qualified -- at least from a foot-in-the-door perspective-- than a self-taught guy that has the confidence in his skill to ignore the degree requirement and apply anyway?

No. But there's no easy way to tell the difference between "a self-taught guy that has the confidence in his skill to ignore the degree requirement and apply anyway", and an idiot who didn't read the ad properly, and the latter are sadly far more numerous.

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