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Comment by lmm | 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?

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.

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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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