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>I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new employees?

* In general, I think there has been a strong trend away from investing in people, to treat them as interchangable cogs or simply farm out as much as possible. I've seen larger organizations which almost seem scared of having exceptional people, or more specifically allowing them to do exceptional work. It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique institutional knowledge with them.

* Assessing "talent" costs time. The time of reasonably talented people you are or will be paying, in some form another.

* Unless you find a way to turn it into an automated, repeatable process, the decisions made are subjective and subject to all manner of criticism and allegations. This might not rate in a startup, but once you're large enough to have anyone titled "hiring manager", I expect these things are going to be relevant.

* Scale is a problem. If I put out an entry-level job I'm gonna get 500+ applicants. Reduce it to something almost criminally narrow (You already know who you're going to hire, but you have to go through the motions and make the selection defensible) and I'm still looking at 100+.

* Not sure what exactly you mean by training. It's hard enough to find people who can drop into a new environment and apply their existing skills immediately. Finding people who are so smart and capable that they can drop and learn skills while applying them would be that much harder.

> It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique institutional knowledge with them.

this begs the question - _just who exactly_ is the entity that is seeing this as a liability instead of an asset? I suspect its not the owner of the business, but a middle manager who needs to make themselves valuable, and their only value is in managing other employees. A self directed, motivated employee who has large leverage could pose risk to the said middle manager.

Of course, all this is just speculation.

"I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials."

You have to realize how there is a huge, huge amount of people incredibly full of shit. Everybody thinks, or at least says, that they are an expert hacker. The problem is that invariably someone who overstated and overestimated their skills makes it inside a company. Then the bullshit really starts flying. They want to hire their no skills friend, or sibling, or spouse because $$$. They talk them up and try to bully anybody who is against hiring the person. Suddenly it appears on the surface that the company IS trying to hire based on 'talent' or at least one persons biased perception of it. Talent is not going to work in the typical political business environment. Next, you go with degrees. Does your self serving friend hire at least have a degree? No? well too bad for you and your friend.

When you talk about "talent" it's almost funny because of how awful reality actually is in hiring. When anyone tries to talk up themselves or their friends, all anybody can think is 'full of shit.' When somebody says they dropped out and taught themselves, its 'full of shit.' When somebody says that the best employees don't need to go to college, its 'full of shit.' Do you think people who have heard and seen every lie out there are just going to take a person's word for it?

Curiously, you didn't say, "when somebody says they went to college, its 'full of shit'". If people are as untrustworthy as you claim, it is a real concern. I assume you take steps to verify that everyone who claims to hold one actually does?

Of course, in programming specifically, it is so easy to verify expertise, relatively speaking, that observing any claim made by the applicant seems pointless.

Companies can verify academic credentials through third party services or the school directly. That's the whole point of credentials.

In programming it is very difficult to verify expertise. Programmers, especially self taught programmers, are usually very myopic. Someone will learn one technology, and then they determine a candidates overall expertise based on knowledge of that one technology. The problem is they've built up their entire ego based on learning just one thing and even got a job as a rails hacker or a javascript hacker or whatever. That person thinks that they know how to determine expertise: just ask a bunch of very specific rails questions. In reality there's a huge range of necessary expertise such as problem solving, debugging, interacting with people, using other languages and frameworks, databases, testing, operations. But the ego takes over and says, "I'm an expert in html, therefore html is all that's really important."

Now you might say that if the interviewer finds someone who can do the specific skill, what's the problem? The problem is that in a larger company, that one skill is a dime a dozen. How is the candidate going to stack up when there are 400 rails hackers that can also do lots of other things. As soon as its apparent the person can only do rails and is kind of dumb about other things, that's inviting huge criticism and job peril for the interviewers. Small companies can enjoy their ignorant bliss.

The other class of interviewers are hiring managers who's egos are by their very nature amazing experts in all fields and technologies, but who's brains know absolutely nothing about software.

I understand that you can, but I asked if you do? If you don't, the claim of having a degree holds no more water than claiming the title of "best programmer ever".

There was a high level executive from, I believe, Yahoo in somewhat recent times caught without having a degree, despite claiming to have one. It is clear that some people are definitely slipping through the cracks, even in large organizations who have the resources to do the requisite background checks. We also hear, over and over again, about the supposed college graduates who cannot even solve fizzbuzz which indicates that a lot of people are lying.

How many people, who actually have the skills and aren't foiled by fizzbuzz, are making their way into industry by lying about their education? I guess that is something we'll probably never know for sure, but what if it happens more often than we might suspect?

To answer your question I don't immediately think someone who claims to have a degree is full of shit about their degree. It takes a special kind of person to blatantly lie about an easily verifiable fact. I assume that any capable HR department is going to call the college registrar when conducting the background check. In the Yahoo CEO case, I don't think he started listing computer science until after getting the job.

Fizzbuzz failures happen because people don't code every day and can lose their edge in just a few weeks or someone did a degree that has very little practical material. Obviously, having a degree doesn't mean someone is a great programmer. Its just another tool to form a basis of trust.

Obviously a lot of people do lie their way in and do nothing or do negative work. That's why a lot of companies are so awful to work at if one is serious about their profession and actually trying to move things forward.

I also see this as a huge problem. Without the "credential crutch", identifying talent and true ability is nearly impossible for a hiring manager who isn't deeply involved in the business on a day-to-day level. The problem is, the managers who ARE deeply involved are usually too busy to spend time searching for and hiring new employees (GREAT managers though, will always find time for this).

Hiring is especially a problem in tech, because there's an even bigger disconnect between the hiring managers' understanding of the actual position.