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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

During the dot.com bubble I interviewed a number of people who had dropped out of college to jump into work. In general they did not have any trouble finding work. However when the bubble burst and the job market crashed dramatically, those same people were unreasonably discriminated against as there were plenty of 'degreed' people to fill positions so the folks without at least a bachelors degree were having a hard time. I know of at least two people who went back to school to finish their degrees (one essentially having redo their entire bachelor's program because their previous credits would not transfer). My takeaway from that experience was that during boom times it doesn't matter, but during lean times it does.

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This was me. I left my 4 year degree my senior year in 1999 for to write code for a living. After the crash I started to be declined even an interview because I didn't have a degree, even though I had been working for great, well known companies doing some great work. HR people literally shooed me away on phone interviews, and even startups were only looking at people with degrees. Four years ago it happened again, and I had enough. I went back to school (working full time with side projects, as well as 2 year old and newborn in my life), losing two years of credits to study business. I graduated last month with over $40k in student loans at 37 years old just so the next time I don't get the brush off for having completed 3.5 years of university.

The odd thing is that even without a degree I so see if the candidates I interview have one or not. I'll never not hire someone without a degree, but I do tend to ask about the lack of a degree or even about leaving school. I guess I do for personal reasons since I knew that it made me tense in some interview processes, but also to reassure the candidate that it's not going to hinder them in the consideration.

>losing two years of credits to study business.

This is interesting to me because I'm a little younger than you, but considering a similar path. I feel like finishing a degree would be useful, but I'm at a point career wise that I don't know going back to do CS or similar would be worth the time and cost.

I've been toying with the idea of a business degree for a while now. The kind of shops that want a degree just to get past HR usually aren't overly particular about what the degree is and I'd be adding new skillsets instead of supplementing the ones I've already developed over the course of working professionally for a decade plus.

I think its a fair thing to check for. People leave school for a variety of reasons, not all of them are because they were exceptionally talented.

It really depended on demonstrable experience more than anything.

The problem was that for awhile after the bust you could only get jobs if you were senior, and even then you might be taking junior/intermediate jobs (and pay) even though you had senior experience. If you were intermediate + a degree, you might make it over the line, but intermediate and no degree, or junior and no degree, not so much. But honestly, the biggest selector there was still your resume.

So yeah, there was definitely a shakeout, but it mostly involved that boom of people who'd joined between, say, 1999 and 2001 and didn't have any significant credentials, learned OTJ or otherwise. If you had at least four or five years under your belt and a "Sr. *" on your resume you were much more likely to survive the bust.

There were also a burst of companies around then (Google primarily, and a bunch of follow-ons) that heavily selected on college graduates, and those from the Stanford+Ivy set. That loosened up relatively quickly, though, and if you knew someone internal and could get past the recruiters and had a good resume, you could still overcome that.

I do think the next time a bust comes around, Github portfolios will probably mitigate some of the education issue. The point is to make it clear you're the best bet of the bunch, no matter what the context is.

(edit: typos)

I think it's less true now than it used to be. I fit your profile, Chuck; I dropped out of college in my sophomore year (2001) when the startup I was working for got bought out by Sun Microsystems and Sun made it clear that they would only hire full-time employees. I figured "one of 6 people working on the back end of Sun.com" would look better on a resume than a college degree in 3+ more years, so I took the risk.

Of course, back then, Sun would have never hired me had I not tagged along with an acquisition, and when it turned out I hated working for a large bureaucracy, I couldn't find another company that would even call me back despite years of programming experience plus the "worked on the back end of Sun.com" that I thought would be so beneficial. This was in the middle of the dot-com bust.

Back then, Google refused to even look at people without college degrees. Now, the article says: "Many tech companies welcome young talent, and don’t require employees to have a college degree. Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and others offer internships to teenagers; Facebook last year hired an 18-year-old intern for a full-time position."

Times have changed. For me, starting my own business was realistically the only choice I had in the early 2000's as a techie--other than moving back in with my parents, which I didn't want to do! Now, it seems like the same companies that used to view dropping out as negative are far more likely to give dropouts interviews and even hire them. As a dropout, I'm glad to see this change.

hm. that wasn't my experience (I have no degree, and started my career in the late 90s) - as far as I can tell, the period after the crash was about contacts, mostly, and secondarily about attitude.

In my experience, a "regular" or below school doesn't help at all. Hell, my side project employed some people with 'regular school' degrees. Of course, a rich person's school helps a lot, but now we're back to contacts.

The big difference I noticed about the crash was that my attitude... the combination of being cynical, honest, and the fact that yes, I will tell you if you are making me do something stupid, but I'll still do it, usually... my attitude works really well during the down times, and not nearly as well during the good times.

During the good times, as far as I can tell, there is a premium placed on yes men and others who are willing to drink the kool-aid, and those people? those people are absolutely destroyed by the crash.

But yeah, I still kind of prefer working during the crash. It's not any harder for me to get jobs; and I know it's shitty of me to say it, I certainly wouldn't wish a crash upon those people, but it's way easier for me to hire good people for my side projects when the economy is down.

It's always good to have, no matter what, and it would be extremely easy to just say you don't have it if it was a negative or worthless.

The problem is - opportunity cost.

>The problem is - opportunity cost.

Yeah. It was the late 90s before I got anything but a desktop support job. If I had gone to college rather than getting a real job in '97-98? I would have been looking for my first real job in 2001-2002. I would have been so screwed.

As it was, I had a few years to prove my competence, and with some help from some contacts (okay, okay, my dad's contacts) I stayed fairly well-employed through the bust.

Part of me kind of wishes that I took some time out later, after I had established myself, to go back to college. Mostly for social and "personal enrichment" reasons. but I totally don't regret getting a job right out of high school. I think that made the difference between me and my brothers.

The biggest issue wasn't that they didn't have a degree. The issue was that during the boom anyone could slap "web developer" on their resume and get a job. _Those_ people had wonderful resumes, could not do FizzBuzz to save their lives and generally lacked a college degree. So, in order to lazily screen bad applicants, companies decided in large part not to hire non-degreed candidates.

I think something people don't take into account is that most of the jobs weren't (and still aren't) filled in with randoms off the street. They're filled because you know someone who recommends you into the position.

The late 90s were full of "I've used a computer so I'm a tech" type people you're talking about--they got their jobs because they had a buddy who got a job, and it was easy to get your friends placed in the next desk.

But you generally knew who you partied with at work and who actually got stuff done, and those people were not the ones who got recommended into a job when times were tight. The jobs were still there to some extent, but proven people were pulled into them before they even hit a recruiter.

I had that experience at large companies but I notice startups nowadays don't seem to care all that much. Maybe it's because I have a lot of experience now though. I don't even list my education on my resume and I haven't been asked the last 3 companies I have worked at.

I also know people who had no career at all before the bubble. But managed to make one as Project Manager/Product Manager/Other tech support roles. Just because they managed to get jobs before the crash and make a career by moving around to other companies in the country.

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