Is this why these companies have such intensive leet coding interview processes? In other professions a degree + exams alone is enough.
I can't imagine an interview where a doctor has to perform surgery "as a take home interview" without pay or be able to solve obscure problems from chemistry, biology, etc.
I've interviewed a lot of people at this point and I just can't rely on a CS degree as a guarantee of competence. I've interviewed (and worked with) people with degrees from excellent CS programs who were bad engineers. Some of them must have cheated in their CS courses because they were outright incompetent -- but they were able to get degrees.
It's a serious problem that we don't have a good way to tell if someone is good at software engineering. Unfortunately degrees don't guarantee anything. So we use whiteboarding, which isn't great either.
I'm not really sure we should want degrees to be a guarantee of competence anyway. If the industry relied on them it could lead to a culture of credentialism that would make it more difficult for good engineers without CS degrees to get jobs. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have degrees in other subjects.
Agreed. Considering how important this problem is, you'd think there would be a generally accepted solution that was both effective at finding the right candidate and efficient with resources (both the candidate's and the company's). As far as I know, there isn't one.
> Some of them must have cheated in their CS courses because they were outright incompetent
I suspect they just didn't want to be software peeps. I suck at anything I don't wanna do, and I find a way to get better at anything I'm really interested in.
One can say this about any other profession, can't one?
The notary I met while buying my last apartment was a sham, he probably cheated while studying. Guess what? My acquaintance rubber-stamps papers like no one else, one of the best paper rubber-stamping guys I know.
To be fair, there's a board certification process for doctors that they are typically expected to pass before being considered for employment. You could argue this is their version of a 'take-home' interview.
Article title's kind of disingenuous, isn't it? Name-drops Google and Apple, and then the rest of the positions are, like... "You can be a barista at Starbucks, a cashier at Whole Foods, or even a housekeeper at a Hilton!"
The whole concept of 'requiring' a degree to get a job, aside from legal requirements, is silly to begin with. No company in existence has ever required a degree. Companies may reject someone they never planned on hiring in the first place on the basis of not having a degree to evade a discrimination lawsuit, but that's quite a different thing.
In a professional setting - outside of software engineering - the degree requirement is absolutely common.
No young person has ever been hired as a structural engineer, mechanical engineer, water resources, etc, etc without at least a bachelors. The extreme minority that might be employed as such without a degree might have been originally hired at a lower position (as a draftsperson, for example) then trained and promoted from within.
> No young person has ever been hired as a structural engineer, mechanical engineer, water resources, etc, etc without at least a bachelors.
But that's not a degree requirement (aside from legal requirements), that's excess in the labour pool. Once an employer has so many people to choose from, then they have to figure out some methodology to reject people. No degree is one of the only legally acceptable forms of doing so, so it is the most common.
It's a subtle difference, but an important one if you are the one joining the labour pool. Even with a degree, you're going to be competing against a whole lot of other people for the same work. Not an ideal situation.
In constrast, you see a lot of tech companies on this list because tech companies don't have much choice in hiring right now. They're lucky to get one person to apply. They don't need an arbitrary filter, nor can they expect to have one.
This is great! A college degree can really help in a lot of careers (and I say this as someone with both a college and a grad degree), but rarely is it actually essential. It's not often even a good proxy for knowing that someone can do something. Direct measures of ability, such as reviewing past work, or even tests of certain types, are going to be much better at actually assessing whether or not someone can do the job, and also make jobs accessible to people from backgrounds that might make getting a college degree hard, but have no effect on whether or not a given individual can do a given job.
I personally couldn’t care less if the people I’m hiring went to college. When I interview someone, I’m interested to see if they know enough about the thing I’m hiring them to do to solve a specific problem, if they seem like a hard worker and if they are able to learn new skills. I’m sure college degrees are good for some companies hiring practices, but I don’t even ask to see a resume. All I want is work samples and or a good interview.
The most successful engineers I know don't have a degree. One is an engineering lead at Netflix, two of them started their own companies after spending about five years working for other big names.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 65.3 ms ] threadI can't imagine an interview where a doctor has to perform surgery "as a take home interview" without pay or be able to solve obscure problems from chemistry, biology, etc.
It's a serious problem that we don't have a good way to tell if someone is good at software engineering. Unfortunately degrees don't guarantee anything. So we use whiteboarding, which isn't great either.
I'm not really sure we should want degrees to be a guarantee of competence anyway. If the industry relied on them it could lead to a culture of credentialism that would make it more difficult for good engineers without CS degrees to get jobs. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have degrees in other subjects.
I suspect they just didn't want to be software peeps. I suck at anything I don't wanna do, and I find a way to get better at anything I'm really interested in.
The notary I met while buying my last apartment was a sham, he probably cheated while studying. Guess what? My acquaintance rubber-stamps papers like no one else, one of the best paper rubber-stamping guys I know.
No young person has ever been hired as a structural engineer, mechanical engineer, water resources, etc, etc without at least a bachelors. The extreme minority that might be employed as such without a degree might have been originally hired at a lower position (as a draftsperson, for example) then trained and promoted from within.
But that's not a degree requirement (aside from legal requirements), that's excess in the labour pool. Once an employer has so many people to choose from, then they have to figure out some methodology to reject people. No degree is one of the only legally acceptable forms of doing so, so it is the most common.
It's a subtle difference, but an important one if you are the one joining the labour pool. Even with a degree, you're going to be competing against a whole lot of other people for the same work. Not an ideal situation.
In constrast, you see a lot of tech companies on this list because tech companies don't have much choice in hiring right now. They're lucky to get one person to apply. They don't need an arbitrary filter, nor can they expect to have one.