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Comment by dsl | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that Facebook wont hire a kid with a degree from a community college here in the US, but will fight tooth and nail to hire someone with a degree from an Indian college that Mark probably couldn't pronounce the name of.

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You have anything to back that up? Don't they have an interview process that purports to determine actual candidate viability? are you saying merely being from the US AND having not a big name uni degree precludes you from even getting that far? Seems oddly weird and short sighted of their HR

That's simply not true. Facebook will hire anyone who they think is awesome and shows promise. There are many people that work at Facebook who don't even have a degree (the CEO for one...). The culture comes from the top, and Mark recognizes that you don't necessarily need to have a degree to be awesome at what you do because of his own experiences.

In fact, a friend of mine quit college after his Freshman year to go work at FB. He has no degree.

If a kid who only went to community college (or no tertiary education at all) has the skills to be a great programmer and can pass the interview, sure Facebook would hire them. It is harder to get noticed without a degree, so they might have to do more to show it by contributing to open source projects, winning programming contests or being referred by an employee, but once they're in the loop, it's fair game.

Why should "Can I pronounce the name of the college?" be a factor in who is the right candidate for a job?

Data? Source?

"Leading experts on the STEM workforce, including Richard Freeman of Harvard, Michael Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Paula Stephan of Georgia State University, Hal Salzman of Rutgers, Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown, and Norman Matloff of the University of California-Davis, have said for years that the US produces ample numbers of excellent science students. In fact, according to the National Science Board’s authoritative publication Science and Engineering Indicators 2008, the country turns out three times as many STEM degrees as the economy can absorb into jobs related to their majors."

http://www.cjr.org/reports/what_scientist_shortage.php?page=...

Figure 3-12 on http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/figures.htm#ch3

says that only 10% are involuntarily not employed in their field.

Why would 1% be involuntarily unemployed in their field if their field needs workers? Before we seek to import talent shouldn't we use up the local supply?

How is it interesting? Credentials matter. They're one of multiple metrics any knowledge-driven company uses to find the best to fill roles. Some community-college educated kid is unlikely to have the right skills to fill roles FB or any other tech company is looking for.

Even if the community college kid did get the interview (and their resume isn't immediately filtered out) good luck on that without advanced education. It wouldn't be impossible but definitely hard. Way hard.

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