Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasvendetta | Hacker News Reader

I never graduated, so I probably won't ever apply to Google.

That's unfortunately true - Google seems pretty snobbish with regards to education, just one of their ways of focusing on not getting any false positives in hiring.

That certainly means they miss out on a lot of awesome programmers though - I work with absolutely stellar people who are college drop-outs, and have fired people with good degrees who did not perform.

At least Google's policy gives start-ups more room to find amazing people.

I did not have a degree when Google hired me as an engineer; the engineer who referred me was also a drop-out; my manager, now a VP, also dropped out of college; and I have a co-worker who dropped out of high school.

It's not the normal path, and you need to fill that blank in your resume with interesting personal projects and work, but Google is perfectly willing to hire designers and engineers without degrees. We do it all the time.

Anecdote time:

I graduated college with a CS degree. My college CS friend did not. I am not a professional programmer today. My friend is Hampton Catlin, the inventor of Haml and Sass.

Over-generalized moral of the story:

People who have the patience to get a degree, aren't impatient enough to invent web changing technologies like Haml and Sass.

> People who have the patience to get a degree, aren't impatient enough to invent web changing technologies like Haml and Sass.

Over-generalized, indeed: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com