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Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

This is the interesting bit

"on each paper, at least four of the five questions relates directly to material I have needed to know during my time working on Tarsnap, "

Most software jobs are far more distant from CS that Colin's. And more power to him for working fulltime on something that leverages his knowledge. (spoken as someone who spent a decade doing glue-random-apis-together-and-bill -by-the-hour enterprise software scut work)

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Yet, at least in the European countries I've lived in, you won't get through HR without a CS degree, unless you're doing your own business.

I'm in the UK, I know people who are excellent developers who don't have degrees on any kind and who have no problems whatsoever getting employed.

Mind you they have 10+ years experience and can point to major succesful projects - so whether or not they have a degree or not is rather irrelevant.

I am too, a CS student at university. I've got a Github account with around 10 projects, just side-projects when I had some time.

Even with that, and fairly high grades, it was still a slight challenge to get a placement. Said placement is just to give me an edge over fresh graduates, I'll have a year in industrial experience over them.

In Portugal, Switzerland and Germany I never knew about the HR department accepting any candidate without CS degree or related field (e.g Electronics), in the companies I worked for.

I'm employed in Portugal without a (completed) CS degree, and I had more than one company to choose from. From what I could tell, the interviews were much more important than any lines on my CV.

I'm actually Portuguese, the only people I know that managed to do that, were guys and girls from my degree doing something on the side during the .com days for some startups, back in the 90's.

Never saw that in the big companies, but it's been several years that I don't work there.

Well, the only "big" company I interviewed for was Sybase, but they were interested (although, I think they mentioned that my salary would be affected by that).

I chose a smaller software company, though. I much rather earn less but have a less enterprise-y work environment.

Personally I'd regard any company where the HR department gets to filter candidates on silly criteria like that as somewhere I'd never want to work.

That's patent nonsense in Belgium as well, true some companies do care. But I've often seen the opposite, they don't care at all what degree you have. They care if you can pass _their_ test. Because obviously they're better at testing people than colleges are.

I think you've accurately identified why you could have those gaps. Not that you do have them, but hourly billing enterprise software "scut work" doesn't require a whole lot of CS. I wonder if the stuff on the other side of those APIs did?

'spent' == past tense. (and yes some of us have been doing this for a while ;) )

Working on large scale machine learning projects now. Couldn't be happier. And yes, I knew the answers to the questions without having to look them up. (though I suspect I'll get the Networking questions wrong.)

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