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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

In ~15 years of a career that did not begin with a CS degree (or degree of any sort), this has not proven to be the case for me at all.

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It might be a regional thing. Here in Boston, academics seem fairly important to a lot of people.

If you're working for a university spinoff, academics probably come up more often than in the rest of industry. On the other hand, I led development on the flagship product of a university spinoff before taking over product management for another product that that university spinoff, and I have one semester of college to my name. So, no, I'm not sure this is really a regional thing either.

It might be more "specialty-related" than geographically-related. I work in the same field as Thomas (security), am from Boston, and have had largely the same experience as him about degrees.

I've also built security practices for three organizations, and can attest that not only is education not a positive hiring factor, it's at best neutral.

If you are an expert in some niche and are known in industry, not having a degree is not a problem. Bill Gates does not have degree and I am sure lots of companies want to hire him (even for board of directors). On the other hand if you are regular software engineer with average skills, not having degree will definitely close some opportunities. It does not mean you won't find a job (in this market you have to be really really bad to not get any offers) but you will miss promotion here and there or not called to interview for some better companies.

In the last seven years I have interviewed more than 150 people and only 2 or 3 did not have relevant technical degree.

It sounds like you're saying, "don't be a regular software engineer with average skills". Couldn't agree more.

The problem is that almost all 18 year old think that they are that special snowflake that is not average while vast majority of them are just average or worse.

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