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Comment by drakaal | Hacker News Reader

I have attended more than a dozen Colleges and Universities. I have a degree from none.

I had a ground floor corner window office at Microsoft. (those who know, know what that means)

I was told by Google if I took a job with them I would have to "finish" my studies with in 2 years of taking the job.

I was on the standards committee for h.264, VC1, HD-DVD, and Bluray. Today I build some of the most advanced Natural Language Processing systems on the planet.

What is wrong with higher education is the belief that it is necessary to do well. There are definitely fields where I want the person to have earned a Doctorate. (I would like my Brain Surgeon to have at least one if not two) But over all I find that the person with the discipline to find out what they need to know through seeking someone who can teach them, or through reading, or through taking a gig that will train them is far more impressive than attending a school. Especially for IT.

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>I was told by Google if I took a job with them I would have to "finish" my studies with in 2 years of taking the job.

Why? What would happen if you didn't? Would they fire you? It seems very odd that Google would value an unnecessary degree over the actual experience that was why they were interested in you in the first place.

Parent doesn't have any degree and the minimal qualification for almost all Google's software engineering is a bachelor. I am sure some people are exceptions.... like the most brilliant people you find probably just too famous to deal with a degree. I guess they just want to ensure most of the people at Google (except the reallly really really top famous talents one) are at least on the same page? I guess? And it might be easier to calculate salary as well. I am not saying parent is not smart - just referencing what is listed on the career page.

Yes. The particular position was related to Video Compression. There are maybe 10 people in the whole world at my level in that space. We each have slightly different skill sets, so I will say "same" level. There are probably 50 in the world that are comparable in that they have enough working knowledge to know where to look something up to do 90% of what the top 10 can do.

Most of those have a PhD but in the top 10, myself and one other have no degree, 2 have art degrees (film stuff).

In the top 50 few have masters, 2 don't even have highschool diplomas.

>There are maybe 10 people in the whole world at my level in that space.

This is highly unlikely. It's more like 10 people that you know of. Less than 1/3 of the world speaks English. Some advanced video firm in China that has no interest in participating in US standards bodies could very easily have more people with your skills.

If you are trying to build something that is compliant with the various standards, the best people are the people who wrote the standards. There are about 10 of us who have been on enough of the standards bodies that we know all the ambiguities and how they are meant to be interpreted. There is no guy standing around in China who was spying on those meetings and therefore knows more about them than we do.

And many of the people on that list are not English speakers. Math is the primary language.

Do you know what Chinese for discrete cosine transform is? Discrete cosine transform. Hebrew for Deinterlace? Deinterlace.

Yes, Basically it was a condition of my employment. They also offered me much less than any other company in the Valley would have. I didn't take it.

There are a few companies that put a lot of weight on degrees, and some that even restrict to specific degrees. Google often won't let certain positions go to people who aren't CompSci.

And there are a few places in the Valley where if you aren't a Stanford, MIT, or Ivy League grad you won't get an interview.

>And there are a few places in the Valley where if you aren't a Stanford, MIT, or Ivy League grad you won't get an interview.

That's a good sign to stay away from them anyway. It means they lack the ability to even evaluate if someone has skills.

Agreed -- the fallacy pushed out into society that higher education is the only path to success is absolutely absurd.

Even moderate domain expertise in most fields will trump the copious amount of useless information floating around in textbooks today.

Traditional academia has already begun to erode over the past few years, but I'll be happy when society finally wakes up and recognizes that empty credentials shouldn't always serve as the absolute indication of future success or achievements.

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