Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business
carlosmiceli.com
carlosmiceli.com
Once, when I was applying for a job, I ran into someone with the same perspective as Bryan Caplan's from this article. I had made it through a few interviews and tests into the process at this company, everything was going well, when at some point I mentioned my not having a college degree. I didn't even realize it until later, as by that point in a process people are usually satisfied (or not) with my skills and experience to make the lack of a degree mostly irrelevant.
I was asked to have a call with the CTO of the company. The call became a 45 minute lecture, wherein the CTO questioned the sanity of everyone who had hired me previously, urged me to consider not applying for jobs in this industry in the future, and suggested going to college as my only viable option. The call lasted 45 minutes, with me in shock and unable to believe that someone could be so rude, and not knowing how to end it politely. Still, to this day, I'm amazed. Not so much at the basic idea, not even that someone would admit to being reliant on it, but just that someone could be so rude.
Thankfully, I've avoided such dramatic rejections since, and my lack of a degree has, if anything, continued to serve as a nice filter, keeping me away from jobs where I'd be working for insane people. I've had no issues finding good positions despite my not having a degree; in most cases, my experience, portfolio, and references are what really matter. And, now that I'm focusing on working for myself/entrepreneurship, I'm not going to have to worry about it at all for the foreseeable future.
I like the explanation given, about "credentialism". It's not just confused or inept HR departments that rely on the credential of a college degree to guide their work. It's also young CTOs at technology startups trying to justify the time and money they (recently) spent earning their credential.
He wanted to make it quite known that I wasn't qualified to work in the industry (even though I worked for him in the industry just fine for several years and I was the one leaving the job on my own accord?) and that I wouldn't be able to find another job without a degree. Even though I deep down knew everything he was saying was not really based in any reality, the things he said were actually pretty hurtful at the time.
I had no trouble walking into another job that provided far more interesting work, and paid considerably more, for people who showed a much greater appreciation for us to be able to work together. I still don't know what the purpose of that email was. Sad to see me go, I guess?
My work was generous and allowed me to turn my internship into a full-time job. Yet, everyday I am told I need to finish my degree and move away from this job by coworkers.
I get to ship on average every two weeks, it is wonderful. I have time to toy and tinker on the side.
My only fear is first for blame, then, to fire. I know if I ever was to venture off, the tone would turn from "we're so grateful to have you" to "you'll never make it in this world" in a heartbeat.
I agree however that there are people who haven't chosen to do that who have shown that ability in other ways. And there are people who have neither a college degree nor any long term project in their history which often indicates they are unwilling to put up with any inconvenience.
But the message that there is no silver bullet that will make sure all of your employees are "great" is true. If you assume that credentials are that bullet you will eventually get populated with a bunch of highly credentialed and ineffective bozos who will drive out the good people and leave behind an empty husk of a work force.
So a candidate is more qualified because they ran a (potentially) meaningless gauntlet of bureaucracy, debt, and busywork?
I know that's not quite what you're saying. As I stated below - the issue is the gatekeepers. Large companies are ignoring incredibly talented individuals - simply because their HR departments are inept - or their hiring prerequisites don't allow anyone without a degree.
That said - startups can use this to their advantage. Review code samples, ask REAL questions, get to know your hires.
I love finding the savant coder, the incredibly motivated sales rep, etc - and using them to build our company - and looking at their past projects, samples, experience to make a hiring decision.
GED recipients have been less successful than originally anticipated. Social scientists were surprised because these are people who are intelligent enough to pass the curriculum but they weren't achieving greater success than other dropouts. In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, willpower, concentration, etc. The GED recipients were talented but unfocused. And the same habits that kept people on track to graduate were the habits that led to life success.
How is that relevant? It's relevant in that college signals more than conformity. It signals soft skills that matter. A willingness to slog through sometime tedious, un-exciting work. Which is what companies need sometimes.
So while I'm kind sympathetic to the argument, its a bit too black/white IMO.
Do you have more information about these studies? I have always assumed that to be true. When you look at successful people, it is the indicator that stands out most often. I'd love to look at the formal research.
http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/economics/docs/micro/f07/...
As long as we accept that it is one way of proving you can do something that takes a long time to do. I'm not sure that's what the author was saying when he talked about the signaling of a college degree though. It's more a matter of the acceptance of the dogma of the degree, not the signal that the application can commit to long term projects.
More directly, it's fine to look at an applicant who has a college degree and say, "this person was willing to put in the time and effort to get a college degree", so long as you're willing to evaluate other long term commitments with a similar measure. For example, if I see that a developer has a Github profile containing a handful of active libraries with commit activity dating back a year or more, I'm similarly impressed.
Those who didn't put in the time for either a degree or Github history will often lie on their CV about them. An interviewer will often not check up when employing someone so they'll have something against the new hire later on if they want to get rid of them quickly.
Developers who don't do college but genuinely can code projects don't apply for jobs anyway, they apply for funds then employ people.
And to the extent that I do care about, say, a college degree, I definitely am not of the mindset that "You have to have gone to an Ivy League school, or you're obviously a dolt who will never accomplish anything". In fact, I think recruiting at less prestigious schools could be a source of competitive advantage, especially for cash starved early-stage startups. Why try to compete with Google and IBM and Cisco and Microsoft, etc. for grads from Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Brown, MIT, etc., etc? Forget that, we will probably recruit at schools like North Carolina Central[1], Shaw[2], St. Augustines[3], Peace[4], Meredith[5], Wake Tech[6], Durham Tech[7], UNC-Pembroke[8], Fayetteville State University[9], NC A&T[10], Winston-Salem State[11], etc. There's talent to be had everywhere, and I doubt we'll be finding a lot of Google recruiters on those campuses.
[1]: http://www.nccu.edu/
[7]: http://www.durhamtech.edu
[8]: http://www.uncp.edu/
[10]: http://www.ncat.edu/
[11]: http://www.wssu.edu/
Their education is so much more practical and real-world-ready than my Ivy League engineering education (which was largely theoretical in nature).
Maybe time will prove me wrong, but we'll see...
P.S. As the article points out, falling victim to the credentialism trap as an employee is also a sign of conformity. Some companies want that, but hiring extremely talented non-conformists is an easy and excellent way to kick the competition's ass in many cases. The future of technology is almost never created by conformists.
You do not have the time to do a full-fledged investigation of every one of them, or bring them all in for a lengthy interview. You just don't. You need some filter to reduce the number to something more manageable, and degree/school is a straightforward way to do it.
Also recognize that 99% of jobs, even technical jobs, do not require (1) a one-in-a-million technical skill which is (2) easy to identify and measure.
Is filtering by degree flawed? Absolutely. But that's an academic argument. The question managers face is: what's a better way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?
Last but not least: in my experience, most jobs require navigating some amount of bureaucracy and difficult people. Someone completely unwilling or unable to make these "compromises" probably would be better working for himself, and not within an organization.
Yes, it's impossible to interview every applicant, but a company focused on minimizing time spent and resources used instead of maximizing recruitment of employees who can create the most value is doing it wrong.
Selecting at random from the applicant pool.
Any reasonably selective filter function that becomes sufficiently part of HR conventional wisdom will render the fraction of applicants who both pass it, and are capable of getting and keeping a job, unavailable in the market. The residue is people who either fail the function or pass the function and are sub-par employees. Because the feedback loop on the effectiveness of hiring practices is sufficiently attenuated, the utility of the filter going negative will not be noticed.
Treat easy, popular ways of identifying top talent like stock tips: even if they were true in the past, by the time you hear about it, it's not a good idea anymore.
Not everyone turns 18 and suddenly has everything they need but simply decides not go to because, like, non-conformity, man!
It is just as likely that <insert life> happened. Is someone who decided to raise an unexpected child a non-conformist? The oldest child staying home to work because the breadwinner in the family died... clearly that person is a non-conformist.
Are you serious?
[1]: Afford in time, energy, money or other resource, not strictly money.
Equally laughable is the idea that "going to college signals conformity to organizations that want you to be a conformist in order to work there".
Right, that's exactly what going to, say, Deep Springs, or St. John's, say, signals. I signalled conformity by going to a school with a rep for weirdos and grinds, and concentrating in something widely agreed not to have much direct relationship to the business world (and which has an observable correlation with disputatiousness and disrespect for ipsedixitry)---of course!
It's true that going to college is the default option for people in the middle class or above (or who wish to join the middle class or above), but it's simply fallacious to conclude that if you don't go to college you don't go out of nonconformity. Your action doesn't conform, but that doesn't in any deep sense make you a nonconformist. (The person who decides to raise an unexpected child might well be very much a conformist.)
Caplan strikes me as one of those people who can't distinguish between the novel or unusual and the praiseworthy.
While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.
[Startup X] does not need a CMU PhD to build the latest Node app. The domain is blocked at my office so I can't read the article, but I'd argue that spending the extra money on "10x" talent does nothing but shorten your runway.
(Brilliant people for sure, but that hasn't saved them from a suspect business model)
If the premise of the original article was correct though, you would expect that the uncredentialed people who made it past the hiring bar would be far stronger than the people who got an unjustified boost based on their credentials and the prejudices.
If it's true that easy-to-measure academic credentials are basically uncorrelated with job performance, then that's probably a good indication that their hiring process actually is well-calibrated: if people with poor credentials were doing better than people with good credentials, then their hiring process isn't giving sufficient weight to non-academic factors. If people with good credentials were doing better than people with poor credentials, that would indicate that they were putting too much weight on credentials and could improve hiring by weighing other factors.
X: Hired by google, good grades, good school.
In fact, it doesn't test the difference between institutionalized tertiary education vs a lack of it, only differing academic performance among those who are already relatively successful in it.
I say this with no credentials whatsoever, so I'm not just trying to be part of the 'credentialist conspiracy'.
In practice our existing system just isn't fulfilling that purpose enough to justify the enormous amount of money being spent. Accurate signalling on knowledge/skill level has been lost in the noise of wealth/conformity signalling.
Companies which were not dependent on cheap/competitive talents were able to get away with many inefficient work practices. Companies which are not dependent can and will still do that. Introspection is stressful and costly, change even more so.
"This is why great designers, salesmen or computer programmers are still highly valued": A very narrow selection of professions where productivity is very sensitive to variations in ability.
Even if you have a savvy, dynamic, progressive team in a large company - looking for coding/sales/marketing savants - HR will typically not even pass candidates resumes if they don't have a BA/BS etc.
New kid in suit: "No no no, you don't understand - I have an MBA"
Woman: "Oh? Oh. Then I'll have to SHOW you how it works."
In short; not sure I agree with your generalized statement. I'm sure there are cases where it is true.
I'm sure your HR department, and therefor - you - are ignoring some outstanding candidates.
It's cool though, we'll hire them.