Getting by in a technical industry without a degree | Hacker News Reader

Getting by in a technical industry without a degree

rys.sommefeldt.com

46 pointsSwizec42 comments

From my personal perspective, me not having a degree doesnt matter in the slightest and i think that it probably helps due to my personal preference, because i dont think id want to work for a company that decides my vast amount of experience is irrelevant because i dont have a degree.

It doesnt matter as much because of a number of factors, first, im a contractor and would never take a permie job, also i sucked at school. I left school at 15 thinking i was dumb because i got bad grades. After leaving school and finding computers and learning them myself, i finally realised i wasnt dumb and after a few years in shitty jobs while learning in the off time, i eventually started making an income from my passion.

Fast forward to today and my portfolio and technical knowledge in my field speaks for itself. To me, going to university would have just delayed my career by years and im already kicking myself for not getting my act together quicker.

It's possible that you'd miss a theoretically possible "good company with a bad HR department" although one can argue that they wouldn't remain a good company for very long...

True, but this is always why i like working for smaller companies, they generally aren't big enough to have HR departments so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting.

so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting

Which, of course, never goes wrong ;-)

(I shudder to think of some of the early hiring decisions I made as a techie... I sucked. Hiring is darn hard. Being technical doesn't magically make you good at it.)

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

Google is trying very hard to be this, for example in not hiring people without degrees.

It is my understanding that they stopped such practices years ago. There are several people around here who claim to work at Google without a degree.

I've known some folk who were approached to work for G who don't have degrees. So it doesn't seem to be a general rule.

I work for Google. My highest degree is a high school diploma.

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

It's company growth that causes it.

Once the overhead of managing the admin side of employees becomes sufficiently large centralisation is a common result.

Getting that up and running right is hard - especially since the hard bits are often outside of the skill set of the folk hiring the people to run that new department. Take too long to do get it right and a good company can go bad quite quickly.

My point is that a company with a bad HR department seems to me to be a "bad company" no matter how good the rest of it is.

Fair enough ;-)

Or a good team within a bad company.

I think your experience may be shaped by the area you've chosen to work in. I'm aware there are areas I'd be interested working in but are hard to enter without a PhD, it's not an insurmountable barrier but it can make things harder.

It is not that particular areas need you to have a degree or a doctorate, it's just they are a good shorthand for required knowledge or proof of competence and without them you'll need to prove that in other ways.

Just some advice for the international readers who might be thinking about dropping out: If you want to work in the US you will have have immigration problems if you don't have a degree. Getting a work visa without your degree is semi-imposible (especially if you're in your 20s).

Dropping out was one of the best choices I've ever made but this particular thing is something that has come back to bite me in the ass several times.

Yeah, that's biting me right now :/ You need a degree to apply for the H1-B, but I've got a great immigration attorney and am applying for an O-1 visa. Wish me luck!

On the opposite side of things, has anyone had experience trying to move outside the US without a degree?

With decades of experience, my lack of a degree isn't a large problem. But let's be clear that many companies will cull my résumé in the first pass. I'm fine with that, as I'd rather work for people who pay more attention.

When I was younger and had less experience things were not so easy. Lacking a degree, I had to persevere a bit more when job hunting. Networking was important early on.

Here's my (main) problem with what you wrote: in any job there will be many, many problems to solve that you won't love, but you have to solve them anyway.

Passion for the job is a "nice to have," not a requirement. Passion fades, and if your job performance is going to fade along with it, I don't want to hire you.

If somebody is all passion and no skill, well that's a total wild-card. They may or may not ever be productive. I do think people like this exist, but only temporarily. If they are truly passionate, they'll get good at their work. If not, then they are just all talk and not really passionate.

A person with great skill but no passion - I'm not sure that person exists. I don't think you can get to the level of greatness without some form of passion. If you have zero passion the you are probably going to top out at "adequate" and your skills will diminish as the industry passes you by.

I would bet that every on this forum has some passion. It wouldn't even make sense, why waste your free time reading tech forums? All of us here have at least a little passion for the field.

I read somewhere that attitude is what matters; for example, if you have one great guy in your team, who happens to be cynical, pessimistic and such it's going to hurt overall performance of the team compared to the same team without that guy. Or something like that. I don't know, but this seems to be something you'd like to take into account if you're hiring.

But my main point is different. First, if your job has certain elements to it that you don't like and you don't feel like you have the resolve to do those things (for whatever reason) you should just change jobs. And second, I find your statement that "passion fades" unfounded. It didn't fade for me and it was about twenty years so far and counting. It's the same for OP, it seems. And I do have (enough of a) life, have great SO (with whom I'm together for almost as long as I code!), and so on; it still didn't change a thing (ok, it may be that I'm now trying to plan more things in advance but that's it).

As for those "problems you do not love" - I genuinely don't have them anymore. Right, there always is some frustration, sometimes anger, but I think these emotions are a testament to my love for all these problems: I wouldn't feel them if I didn't care, right?

So, while it's not necessary to be true scotsman - genuinely passionate - it changes much if you are. I say "scotsman", because I would like to think that passion that fades is not a true one... Maybe I'm wrong. We need to wait another twenty years to be sure :)

Well written, and totally agreed that a degree stamp / piece of paper is not an indicator of the knowledge or passion of the individual.

However, I do know that lack of degree is always weighing heavily on the individual who doesn't have it. This further leads to compensatory behaviour

My 2 cents - I think an individual is better off taking small steps towards getting a degree than justifying it for the rest of their life.

However, I do know that lack of degree is always weighing heavily on the individual who doesn't have it. This further leads to compensatory behaviour

Care to elaborate? I was unable to obtain my degree, and maybe it is that weighing on me, but it feels like people with degrees spend a inordinate amount of time justifying their accreditation to deal with their own insecurities.

Since I did not have the opportunity to go to college, unlike my friends, I received a lot of ribbing early on about how their are getting their education to get a good job. Once I finally revealed how much I was making, I never heard another word of it.

I never felt the need to make fun of them for going to college though. In fact, I fully supported it. Education is amazing and it truly saddens me that people have to justify it with prospects of future employment opportunities to even justify going.

As an engineering manager - I'm all for pursuit of knowledge and excellence. I could care less whether a person has a degree as long as he has the subject matter expertise. Multiple well respected engineers in my group don't have a degree.

I think its really a personal choice. You can get a degree and not have to keep justifying your choice, and how good you are even without it. Or, you can be a strong man and choose to ignore the mainstream perception. Either ways, the knowledge and subject matter-expertise is non-negotiable to succeed.

A degree is like a past proof of minimal performance - ie that you did barely enough to satisfy the requirements at one point in the past. The requirements may or may not be relevant for the job at hand.

A degree doesn't says how good you are either.

Yet many people use that as a proxy, maybe to save themselves the trouble of properly evaluating candidates.

Why not - but they shouldn't complain about mediocrity then. They fuel it (along with the education bubble)

A degree also proves that you were able to stay dedicated to something for ~4 years without giving up. There is a lot to be said for showing that kind of commitment to a goal.

I'm not sure that is it. I have dedicated far more time than that to other endeavours, but I can likely count on one hand the number of employers who would actually care.

I think the reality is just pack mentality. At some point, one successful business only hired those with degrees, and everyone else adopted the same policies in attempt to duplicate their success.

I think it's more an excuse for the employer, if he's an employee too. Imagine this situation:

superior.- This guy is a disaster, why did you even hire him?

employer.- Well, he had a X degree in Y.

I do have a degree, but besides my first job, which I got through the uni's internship program, I have never been asked about it since. Of course, now that I'm cofounding a startup, its unlikely that I ever will be asked about it (though as a technical cofounder, it may help to add to my credibility, though if I can execute, I won't need a degree to prove that I can execute..)

While there are many "naturals" that do great without a degree it is still a statistically significant differentiator for the average applicant. When I scan resumes I do look what applicants studied but usually only to get an idea of additional questions to ask that might be a bit outside of the recent experience. I would not hesitate to hire someone without a degree, though.

i'm a undergraduate, working as an engineer. i have worked with one of the major brands like Dell. i see no difference between a graduate and an undergraduate these days. All have the right to study and work hard and internet has been a of great help.

A degree doesn't matter. Writing solid code does...

Depends on what you want to do I guess. I'm a software developer. Less than 25% of my job actually involves writing code.

Do you find that frustrating? For me, days with less than 30% time spent doing coding feel like a waste. I think I value coding and the surrounding activities far more than any other type of work activity. For me that other 75% (I'm guessing spent in meetings) would feel like a time vacuum.

Deciding what code to write is not a waste, writing code that is not needed is far more wasteful. Defining that as "in meetings" is not very productive.

In any given day, I may have a number of meetings; I have to write any variety of documentation; get into discussions about whether or not a particular requirement is correct and stated properly; answer technical questions of the "what if..." type; investigate strange behavior to see if it's a bug or just normal, but misunderstood behavior; review other people's designs, code, or test cases, etc...

When all that's done, there's not a lot of time coding.

No, it's not frustrating: it's just part of the job. I mentioned in another topic a few days ago that my dept. won't hire people who are "just coders." We expect developers we hire to be able to take on all aspects of the job from gathering requirements though final test, if necessary.

Fair enough, I always considered looking into production and customer issues, digging through log files, and doing code review as part of 'coding', even though that's not the literal meaning.

Perhaps I'm using that term a bit too loosely then :)

I think you have to be able to demonstrate that you can write good code as well. I think the only way I've been able to get the jobs I have has been because of open source work. Without that I'd have a much harder time finding work, as demonstrating my experience would be more difficult. Especially considering my education is in design & painting.

The B.Sc...means precious little...What’s way more important to me...is the reason why you did it in the first place. If it’s not because you love it then I’m going to be much less interested in retaining your services, even if your technical ability is first rate.

Yet another jackass who pushes his own prejudices over ability to do the job. This is why no HR mechanisms work better than random at hiring the right guy.

Personally it sounds like a damn effective heuristic to me.

I've found the folk who have a passion for their work are the best employees. Technical ability isn't the only factor in being productive - or hiring. Caring about your work is vitally important too.

Ideally what I want is ability and passion of course - but the world isn't an ideal place.

A technically excellent employee with no passion... well.... in my experience they tend to coast. They do what they're told, and do it well, but they're not the ones who bang on your door first thing in the morning and go 'Have you seen this?!'. The folk banging on the door are the ones that make money.

Give me a passionate employee with a clue and I can coach them into technical excellence.

I've yet to figure out how to coach passion into somebody who doesn't really care.

Says someone who's never had to do data cleansing for a living. Try telling me you're "passionate" about that.

I dropped out of HS, then dropped out of college. Ask me how my career has suffered!

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