Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?

I have worked with some impressive people who have little to no formal education.

That said, getting inside the door might be a lot harder.

If you have little or no work experience, then your prospective employer will focus on your education. Once you have more experience, then that is what matters the most.

Some advice: internships and engineering coops are really great ways to get experience in your field, while getting that magical degree.

It's not a one-or-the-other, IMO--you'll want both, eventually.

The most successful candidates I've seen often complete their degree while working actively on passion projects and going on internships/coops.

While experience is generally valued more highly than education, it's worth remembering that many companies (in particular, the big, popular ones like Google, etc.) often have an education requirement irrespective of experience.

I have very little formal education in CS, I've had no problems getting a career going. Especially at smaller companies that have less experience hiring, it's not difficult to get in the door with some networking and proof of your skills. Larger companies with a larger volume of applicants are more likely to use metrics like degrees as a filter, with small companies the right experience can matter much more than a degree.

I was able to find a student startup that I was enthusiastic about and overwork myself until I had enough experience to become interesting to larger companies, ultimately tripling my income in a 3 year period. There are many paths, but they're not always obvious.

I didn't finish my degree until I was 30. I am 39 now, so I spent roughly half my career without a degree and the other half with a degree.

For me, the difference is fairly simple. My education is a credential and it helps me get my foot in the door. My experience helps me actually get shit done.

I think it really matters when looking for your first professional job.

Some formal education shows that you have at least the commitment and self-discipline to achieve a goal.

If not, you should be able to show off some professional work that you did (and you are able to demonstrate that YOU did it), which could be a problem if your expertise is something like, say, embedded software, and not frontend web developer.

After a couple of years of demonstrable experience, it should really not matter, although some of the more established/formal companies might still be looking for people with degrees (for reasons unknown to me).

As someone who enjoys engineering in the trenches and getting my hands dirty, I always try to learn how much experience a person has when I interview them. HR and other areas of the business will use degrees and certifications as proxies, but I've found them to be unreliable. I work in an industry where the skills aren't really taught in school, so we have to try to filter for people who are really dynamic learners. Degrees aren't a good proxy for that, so we have to dig deeper.

Lots of people will have "bat boy" syndrome...a baseball team can make it to the World Series, and the bat boy gets to go with them, but doesn't provide any value on the field. These are engineers that were associated with projects, but didn't actually do any of the work. They just happened to be in the room when it was done, but put it on their resume anyway.

That said, if you're relying on experience to open doors, I'd make sure that you can actually show people what you've accomplished. I have 5+ years experience at a very reputable and challenging company, but all the work I've done is proprietary. So people have to take me at my word,and it's difficult to convey how much you're capable of in an hour long interview.

I think education will actually open more doors more easily. Another way to look at it: You're always getting experience(there aren't many gate keepers), but getting a degree can provide you access to lots of opportunities once you have it.

As an employer, while recruiting educational qualification helps. Especially fresher level recruiting. In India, we get too many resumes for fresher openings. It's not possible to interview every candidate. Even it is not possible to call every candidate for an aptitude test. What the Indian companies do? They set an arbitrary cutoff. Only people who have secured 60% in their engineering exam can apply.

I am telling this as an entrepreneur who didn't get a graduate degree. I eventually started my own company with some of my other friends. But now when I need to hire I definitely look at educational qualification. It's an easy criterion to make sure that there are "less" chances of getting bad hires. I would love to give everybody a chance to qualify for a job at my company, but hiring has costs associated with it.

But if you are really passionate about programming (or any other technology) and can build something impressive which other people in your age group can not do easily, then you shouldn't find it difficult to find a job without a degree. Generally, this happens via references. I got my first job like that. But I used to earn 1/4th compared to my other friends, who had good academics, in their first jobs.

However, after a few years of experience, qualification doesn't matter much. Your ability to communicate and prove your skills matters much more.

In the end, all your actions have consequences. If you want to leave education for your passion, be prepared to live with that decision for your life. As there will be long-lasting consequences (not necessarily all bad) with the decision.

I had far better results hiring people with experience and no formal education than with people with formal education and same experience in terms of time. This is specially true to some people with a degree that feel some kind of entitlement, while on the actual results of the job they lacked significantly.

People can cheat in their formal education and still get the degree. It is a little harder to cheat their way through a job.

Google reported that Grade Point Averages are only useful when evaluating candidates who have graduated within one to two years. For other candidates work experience is more important.

I'm 40 and don't have a degree. There are some kinds of more theory-oriented gigs that probably aren't for me (at the last place I worked, I sat next to a guy perfecting image stitching algorithms), but there's still tons of work out there, and there are quite a few people without degrees or with "irrelevant" degrees who are happily employed. It's also worth noting that the more you see out there, the more you realize you can't know it all. Beyond math heavy gigs, I'm not much of a UX guy, I've never even looked at mainframes, and on and on. So it's just one of many things.

I'd try to finish your degree if you're in a position to do so, but if not, I would not sweat it too much either.

Higher education is what you make of it. I spent every moment I wasn't working on class work working on side-projects. So I killed two birds with one stone.

If you do college right (go above and beyond class work, absorb everything) you can come out with the equivalent of ten years experience in four but if you do it wrong (coast by) you can come out with negative return.

College also exposed me to a lot I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise like operating system design, AI, physics, statistics, calculus, and compiler design.

I also got a high-profile internship through my school and THAT looked extremely good on my resume.

However, as a hiring manager I almost never consider the degree when hiring. The candidates get the same questions no matter what.

In fact, a doctorate is almost always a negative signal. I have never hired someone straight out of a doctorate. In my case they have always spectacularly fail the coding part of the interview.

In short: you get what you put in. If you can afford to spend four years with little to no pay it is an awesome experience (in my opinion). But it doesn't make or break you.

Beware the educated idiot.

I was working with an old carpenter friend of my father's last weekend, and he was telling me a story about a guy he apprenticed with. The man didn't complete 8th grade, and could barely do arithmetic, but was a master mason and carpenter. He was once tasked with taking apart a good-sized sawmill and reassembling it on another site; he spent a day walking through the existing plant, looking things over, without taking any notes, and then when the equipment was packed up and moved, set the whole mill back up at the new site from memory, with a healthy dash of experience to supplement.

EDIT, forgot the conclusion: Clearly, education isn't everything. It's at best a proxy for talent.

As an employer I focus almost exclusively on industry experience for hiring more junior people. Once I start dealing with more senior people I focus on experience and understanding of the literature of our profession. How they get that understanding is largely unimportant to me but an academic background is one way.

I will say as a job searcher, the degree is pretty important, especially in bad job markets. In good markets, hirers are willing to overlook education more readily than in bad markets when they can be more selective.

Finally, I understand everyones experience is different, but I absolutely loved some of the projects I was able to work on while getting my degree. They would be frequently inappropriate outside of academia so you are unlikely to get those opportunities in industry. For me, working on academic projects while I was there was nothing but fun and it largely prepared me as well for moving into industry as anything my peers were doing.

We care, first and foremost, about what you can _do_ with whatever experience and education you have.

Education matters to the extent that it makes you a better developer than the other candidates. For example, did you take a DSP course and learned it well? That enables you to pursue jobs that require DSP knowledge.

Experience matters to whatever extent that you can demonstrate that you accomplished something significant during your job and that you learned and grew from it.

On a somewhat-related tangent, I have a friend who swears by someone who is a self-taught doctor / nurse-practioner. This "doctor" cannot prescribe medicine obviously but is able to do checkups, etc. with self-purchased equipment and interprets OTC blood tests on his own. He apparently knows his limits and has sent people to the hospital when a situation exceeded his knowledge. He is completely self-taught from material online and books from the library

When I've been involved in hiring, neither of these mattered as much as if the person could show their knowledge of the relevant subjects we were hiring for in the application/resume/letter & then in the interview.

Do you want breadth, or depth?

Experience is good for depth of technical skills and office collaboration skills. Education provides introduction and breadth of topics.

Employers generally want to minimize the amount of on the job learning a new hire has to do. That means depth in the skill sets they want. And that doesn't even include employers who run an website/app assembly line and don't want to hire cogs, not engineers.

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Allow me to make the case for breadth, because your personal goals should be broader than focusing on what employers want and being a really really really good fit for small percentage of jobs.

Sacrificing your education to "focus on gaining experience" is a con. You want to be hire-able long term. To the extent that experience proves you can build something, have a project to show for yourself. Not a senior project, something you care about, with utility to yourself, something that by the time you get to an undergrad project, you just want to work on your thing for credit.

I can't even count the number of times I've benefited professionally from a few kernels of knowledge something outside my main work focus but knew because of a "topics" course I once took. Having an idea what already exists out there in the world, even if the skills aren't strong is a huge boon to solving problems as the come up, or approaching a new design. Otherwise you're often re-inventing the wheel, or feeling around in the dark until you stumble upon a professional domain you didn't know existed and can start reading their literature. The upsides of depth are just much more visible than the downsides of lacking breadth.

Focus on your education. You'll always have time to gain more experience, but, for most of us, the opportunity to get an education will expire. You find a job, get married, have kids, buy a house, etc, then all the sudden, there's very little time left for school.

Most employers prefer work experience over education. But, right now, there's such large oversupply of labor and talent in Software engineering, they typically require both. Hiring at kabam, Even in the bay area, we had a large supply of candidates who had bachelors and masters degrees in computer science. Unfortunately, that's the minimum bar now. A master's in CS will help you get a job as a software engineer, just don't expect to learn anything useful from it (except maybe intro to OOP, and your Software engineering classes, and maybe the DB class). 97%-99% of the knowledge you need to be an effective software engineer comes from experience and side projects and learning on your own.

the professional tech landscape is competitive: even with a degree and experience, a job offer will not just fall in your lap. and at the moment, it sounds like you don't have either.

stay in school unless you have (a) a very good rationale for quitting, and (b) a detailed (in writing!) plan for how to get good enough at your craft to the point that you'll land some interviews and score a job offer. be honest with yourself about the discipline this will require, particularly if you're already 'struggling' in the structured learning environment you're in now.

beyond that, remember that the value of a college degree for you as a human being goes far beyond just your career.

edit: you might also do some research on what a typical technical interview involves these days. e.g., it's not unheard of to spend six months prepping for a google interview.