Ask YC: Why the degree?
I'm now 24.
I used to be very frustrated to see companies demanding degrees before they'll even talk to you for new developer positions. I have always put that down to the HR department that don't really know what they're doing when employing developers.
However, I'm sorry to see many startups that are employing developers in the early stage, are requiring that candidates have a degree.
For all the company knows, I (and countless others) could be the best developers they'd ever meet. And yet we're automatically excluded from even applying.
Why?
If/When I am employing developers, a degree won't even separate one candidate from another, as long as I judge both to be good developers, then they're on an equal standing.
I know several people that have degree's in computer science, and none have any magical abilities that you only pickup at university.
So what gives?
210 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadJoel Spolsky talks about this in his book and he prefers a degree or, if not a degree, evidence that the person had to go through some sort of highly selective process.
Although I do have friends that have managed to get a degree in computer science and they still can't code unless they're copying from a book.
Is Joel's book based on employing people straight out of education? because presumably people that hadn't gone the degree route would have 2-3 years commercial experience by the time people the same age finish their degrees.
It deals a lot w/ hiring interns-to-become-full-timers.
If you think about it, those two things I listed are incredibly important. When you're swamped with 100 resumes and you can interview maybe 10 people, these little markers help employer make a decision. Now, that doesn't mean that a person without a degree doesn't have a chance... it just means that they will have to prove themselves in some other way (being famous coder/blogger/speaker helps there)...
To get your degree from a school indicates that you demonstrated some abilities in a selective and competitive environment. The quality of the school tends to imply the level of quality vetting -- to get into MIT is more competitve than ITT. The name on the commercial experience reflects a similar vetting process -- a development job at Apple is more difficult to obtain and maintain than one at a local utility company. Arguably, a job at a notable startup is probably another strong indicator (on the idea that a startup can't waste time on inferior talent); but I wouldn't consider job upgrades at an unknown startup to indicate much (ie, everyone here could be a CTO or lead developer for their own startup... does two years of being a lead developer for a team of one to three, selected by company seniority, tell you anything about technical leadership ability?).
It is all just borrowing collective intelligence -- using the wisdom of previous crowds to give off quality indicators.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person without a degree doesn't have a chance... it just means that they will have to prove themselves in some other way (being famous coder/blogger/speaker helps there)...
Actually the onus is on the employer. Shouldn't you want to hire the best?
The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 applicants. We did face to face interviews with the 6 applicants who passed an incredibly simple technical interview - Things that any programmer who has done any real work would almost be insulted by.
Any available filter to help sort the wheat from the chaff is helpful, and a degree is one of those filters.
That being said, I do not have a degree in anything, I got into the industry at 17 and haven't had time to go to school. But, I've been able to get far by working harder than everyone else; in the conversation of degrees making a difference, I'd like to have one, sure. But I've never needed one. I think it's come up in one interview once, and it ended up being a nonpoint.
I as an employer and employee of other organizations in the past - I can tell you that filling the hole with what is available lowers standards. While this does happen, it is not something to aspire too.
I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit.
I agree. But how is this relevant to our discussion. I have not said that the resume is a criteria.
The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 applicants. We did face to face interviews with the 6 applicants who passed an incredibly simple technical interview - Things that any programmer who has done any real work would almost be insulted by.
Apparently, your filters arent effective.
Any available filter to help sort the wheat from the chaff is helpful, and a degree is one of those filters.
A degree may be one of those ineffective filters that you are already using. Perhaps it is just a segmentation factor like gender or age. If all one seeks to do is reduce the number of resumes/candidates one has to meet, then one might as well use gender or age or anything else.
That being said, I do not have a degree in anything, I got into the industry at 17 and haven't had time to go to school. But, I've been able to get far by working harder than everyone else; in the conversation of degrees making a difference, I'd like to have one, sure. But I've never needed one. I think it's come up in one interview once, and it ended up being a nonpoint.
And see you turned out to be alright :)
Young people are more likely to have a degree, so perhaps asking for a degree is covert ageism.
You can contact me at: matthewking [dot] yc [at] gmail.com
The game is about probability, not possibility. The assumption is:
P(qualified | degree) > P(qualified | no degree)
That's probably reasonable, since schools do filter out at least some idiots. To find a candidate, one must interview roughly 1/P candidates. If interview costs are high (e.g., face time is precious), you want as many easy filters as you can get.
This is especially true if you don't trust HR to properly find the "diamonds in the rough" (I certainly wouldn't).
Doesn't sound very accurate, but I can see the reason why.
That's a load of crap. Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. Only very young people consider "going to school" a viable option. Normal people have jobs, kids, and responsibilities and don't have time to go to school every time they pick up a new interest.
I would be very surprised to find very many "normal people" who have the drive to learn, say, probability theory or statistics to any reasonable depth by self-study. Of course such people exist, but they are neither typical nor common.
Once you've been in the real world for a while, the idea of going back to school is generally the last option, not the first. The only thing school has to offer over self directed learning is very smart people to learn from, but if you look around, you can find those people in the real world as well. Mentors tent to show up just when you're sincerely looking for them.
On the contrary, many people take classes and attend conferences, workshops and seminars at many different ages. You could learn cooking by self study, but cooking classes continue to be popular, despite being more expensive.
The only thing school has to offer over self directed learning is very smart people to learn from
Hardly the only thing: a lot of things are easier to learn when you're in a group of intelligent people all interested in approximately the same thing, and all trying to learn the same subject matter (I'm thinking mostly of graduate seminar classes here, not 300-student undergrad lectures).
You second point just echo's what I already said, smart people to learn from, that includes your teachers and peers.
My second point was not just that you can learn from your peers, but that there is a social environment at a school that is important, and not readily replicated in self-study. You don't learn much from your peers at a typical cooking class, but they still contribute to why many people choose to take classes rather than self-study.
Yes, school is a social environment for learning, that has value, but it's hardly the only way to obtain that. Outside of school, there are local clubs and hobbie groups, forums and blogs such as this on the Internet, alternate paths such as the military, etc. There are all kinds of ways to be around people who enjoy the same things you do, or are trying to learn the same things you are without going to school.
By saying thats a benefit of school you're implying that it's not obtainable elsewhere. School just isn't that important if you really want to learn, it's more valuable for those that lack motivation and need someone to make them learn.
In what country? Citation?
Here's some numbers from the UK: http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/faqs/showFaq.asp?l1=2&ID...
According to that, 43% of 17-30 year olds enter higher education in the UK.
For actual numbers of people in the UK with degrees, there's this page[4] from the National Statistics. For people of Working Age, 18 to 60-ish, in the UK, 16% have degrees, and another 8.5% have "Higher education qualifications". 15% have no qualifications. It would be handy to have data for the 25-35 age range, since not many 18 year olds have degrees.
[1] Type A: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=5440
[2] Type B: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=544
[3] World Stats: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/17/15/39245059.xls
[4] UK Degree Stats: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Product.asp?vlnk=10446
I have suggested self-teaching to many non-hacker types and they are completely opposed to it. Even those going into programming.
But the cost of searching my lower drastically.
And as another poster pointed out it is the total of (quality of candidate - search cost) that you want to maximize.
First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach.
P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))
(I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)
Back in school, we were warned about "faux amis", words which sound like they'd be right to an English speaker, but very much out of place to a native French speaker. I think in English we'd just accept any and all alternative meanings and let context sort it out, who's up for some creative reading?
What's pretentious is using big words to impress others. Most people who do this actually end up not using such words correctly, since nuances of meaning are hardly their primary concern.
Edit: what I really object to is your implied criterion that anything beyond what "most people" would say must be pretentious. Lord help us if we're supposed to go by "most people".
Using uncommon words appropriately doesn't make them any less pretentious unless you really don't know they're uncommon, and Christopher Hitchens, whom I very much like, is hardly someone associated with being unpretentious. Hitchens certainly doesn't suffer fools well.
Edit: your invocation of the name of Feynman strikes me as gratuitous (oops, I'm being pretentious there) and a textbook example of appeal-to-authority (or rather, it would be one, if you actually were quoting him or had the right to speak for him).
Edit 2: what on earth does "suffering fools well" have to do with being pretentious or not?
As for the reference to suffering fools, I was merely pointing out why I think Hitchens can be pretentious, but it wasn't really relevant, I agree.
Maybe ostentatious is a more accurate word, but it is a synonym of pretentious. In any case, I really don't care that much, so I won't bother arguing further, if you disagree with me, then let's just agree to disagree and move on to something more productive than arguing about words.
Lastly, I'd like to add something to this conversation that isn't merely being critical. The thing about less common words is that, often, they are not exactly synonymous with more common alternatives. There are often nuances that, consciously or otherwise, add to the meaning of what's being said. While thinking of this I remembered a brief post from Language Log a while back that I thought was brilliant. It takes several examples of forms that have been claimed to be interchangeable (and thus superfluous), and susses out real distinctions between them:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005487.h...
There must be a few people here who find language as interesting as I do, and would enjoy parsing out the examples they give. I'd post it as an item to HN but can't think of a title that could possibly convey the point. Oh well, maybe I'll just post it anyway...
'Autodidact' is another matter.
I have seen that attitude from the room temp IQ crowd - never thought I would see it here.
Having a larger vocabulary allows you to spend more time communicating and less time talking.
Just like abstracting functionality away inside functions allows you to spend more time solving problems and less time (re)writing code.
Simply saying "self-taught" wouldn't have had the right connotation: instead of "clever and driven", it would have been, "but what have they missed?" and we would have missed out on this interesting off-topic sub-thread!
The goal of writing to communicate. Unnecessarily using obscure words clouds communication. In this case, I don't think the using "autodidact" was necessary. It did not add to brevity or cadence or coherence. It was a mistake.
The only thing worse than an anti-intellectual is a bad intellectual.
"Autodidact" is obscure? WTF? Where is this coming from? Did everyone come here right after watching the American Gladiator contest? Did we get an influx of Time Magazine readers?
For me, the goal of writing here is to practice at playing with ideas. If, in playing with ideas I use words that are (maybe, a little) obscure, and I fail to communicate to people who seem to me like idiots, well, I'm fine with that. Great, actually. If only the failure to communicate ran both ways.
I'm done being autodidactic. I'm going to put down my books and go watch some soap operas and sitcoms until I figure out how the idiots here think.
What's more, relying on connotation to enhance precision is kind of silly. Connotation is highly subjective and often inconsistant across a community.
One good example of this fact is that few people here seem to see the connotative difference between the two words in question. I don't.
Maybe you can help us. Thanks.
We were poor growing up. I liked to read. I learned big words when I read, and I use them when I communicate. End of story.
If there is a different connotation in this case, I'd argue it makes the post more confusing.
Remember, all you know is P(qualified| resume says autodidactic)= P(qualified | autodidactic) * P(autodidactic | resume says autodidactic) . The second term can easily kill you. Do you trust everything people put on their resume?
On the other hand, P(degree | resume says degree) is probably close to 1, since a degree is so easy for an HR person to check.
Look, I've got nothing against hiring good people who have no degree, and I certainly don't think a degree proves much (my current students prove that conclusively). If you know you have such a good person, hire them, ignore the degree.
I'm just pointing out that the game is to find the good people. And that's a bit tricky to do.
[edit: by this way, in the interest of clarifying, what you want to optimize is not candidate quality, but (candidate quality - search costs). Don't ignore the search costs term.]
Or, "how many blog posts do you have about programming?" Again this is easy to verify.
If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.
You still haven't told us who Ayn Rand is.
The ability to write blogs is irrelevant here too as what we most likely care about is the ability to program. Hence, the programming test.
Now take the group of programmers who have written less than 30 blog posts about programming. Y% of them are good hires, and 100-Y% are bad hires.
Is X > Y, or X == Y, or X < Y?
That is the issue.
And that is the way degrees are used (when used rationally). The claim with degrees is that X is more than Y, not that most good programmers have degrees or anything else. That may be so. Then someone defended using degrees by saying there is a lack of alternative tests that are sufficiently cheap. That's not true. There are lots of cheap tests, and I have suggested 2 for which I believe X>Y is likely, and which, if studied, might turn out to have a higher X than the degree test.
My point was is that even though it filters out many of the worst programmers it would also filter out all of the really great programmers. I'd rather have my search take longer and cost more to have those great programmers on my team than end up with just good programmers.
My feeling is it has gotten much worse as people have sought degrees solely for the purpose of using them to get jobs in the field, precisely as you suggest would happen to blogs and reading cliff's notes.
However, may I point out that blogging is very different from reading the cliff's notes of a book? A hiring manager can read your blog. If they simply check that you have a blog, well, whoop-de-doo. I have a blog, so that clearly proves nothing.
However, if the hiring manager reads your blog, they can deduce a great deal about what you pretend to think and how you communicate it. So it is a small example of your work, much as posting source code is a small example of your work.
Note however that criteria (2) is important. If you use the filter "Is named Linus Torvalds", you would certainly increase the probability that any given applicant is good. Then again, your applicant pool will drop to either 0.
However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.
Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.
Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.
So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?
No, because it's not only a personal opinion, but a statement that Rand's philosophy of rational self interest is logically invalid ('rational' does not imply 'self interest'; the basis on the reflexivity of identity could fairly be called desperate) and scientifically incorrect. Rand's philosophy is incompatible with findings of reciprocal altruism in evolutionary biology and experimental game theory.
"So, out of curiosity, do these "results in evolutionary game theory" have a source?"
Here's one: "Game Theory Evolving" by Herbert Gintis; see Chapter 11. http://www.amazon.com/Game-Theory-Evolving-Herbert-Gintis/dp...
edit: no online sources? I don't normally pay $35+ because a hostile, anonymous internet commenter said something would refute someone I respect but didn't want to explain the ideas himself.
As for $35, it pains me to mention libraries...it was a source, with a link so that you could see something about the book.
I can't say I know of a single public intellectual or professional philosopher who takes Rand seriously. I do know of a well-regarded mathematical logician who does, but this is an aberration.
Alan Greenspan (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/business/15atlas.html).
Clarence Thomas (http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1090180289132).
your ignorance of public intellectuals and professional philosophers is not an argument against Rand. lol.
I understand if your 15 how exciting Rand can be. But to see adults take it seriously is sad.
A) You socialize(d) with people who read things that aren't sold in the grocery store.
B) You not only know how to read, but most likely voluntarily read a 700+ page book in your spare time in order to learn/see what it was about/etc...
C) If you can speak about what was in the book, and what you thought about it, you can follow the plot of a 700+ page book, you can understand the points the author was making, perhaps you can intuit the not-very-subtle philosophical and societal messages she was delivering, and you can discuss how you agree or disagree with those messages.
It's no IQ test, but frankly it's probably a much better question than "Do you have a degree?".
At least I'd rather work with people who have read a book like that, and have an opinion on it's content and the author's points (even if they hated the book/points/etc...), than the average CS degree graduate.
Sure asking about Ayn Rand isn't really an intelligence test, but it's not a bad start. Smart people can learn about data structures and algorithms. Slow people who've managed to get a CS degree from some random college may have learned enough to pass, but there's no demonstration of smarts there.
I'm hiring based on people being smart, self-motivated, willing to learn, willing to think, and people I can hold a conversation with. Teaching someone like that how data structures work is a lot easier than teaching a degree holder how to be someone I want to work with and someone I can trust to be on the ball as new technologies come out.
Nothing makes for a better interview than doing a code review and critique of the candidates own code. Something simple but telling like write a little slot machine that lets you bet money, spin the wheel, and win or lose with the game ending when you run out of money.
Anyone who refuses such a test isn't a programmer you want anyway, and you can tell an enormous amount about a potential candidate by simply looking at the quality of the code submitted. Don't bother interviewing anyone who's code you can't stand. You can see everything you need to know about their skills in that code.
You wouldn't hire a graphic designer who refused to submit samples of his designs, nor should you hire a programmer who refuses to submit samples of his code. Merely by having such a test, you'll weed out all the fakers because they won't bother with it, they'll submit their fake resumes elsewhere.
Can you imagine a test for the ability to work on larger programs?
Again, the test is just to weed out the bad candidates and allow you to only interview worthy people, everything else you'll find out in the actual interview. Interviews will be rare, few people will submit code you'll find acceptable at all. The vast majority of people applying for programming jobs, can't program, it's sad, but true.
On reflection, I think you may be right that good code is good code. Size of the system matters most when the code is bad.
You are absolutely right that it would be madness to hire a programmer without having seen him code. The companies are well aware of it and they will surely ask you to write a lot of code during the interviews. But that comes at a much later stage, as it costs them much more money than checking on your resume whether you have a degree or not.
I'm not saying that I like the way things are, but that's just life. If that's of any consolation, in most other industries the requirement of having a degree is much more strict than in case of Software Engineers.
No one but a programmer is qualified to evaluate another programmer, HR and recruiters have no place here and they'll just waste time and effort pretending to be useful, they aren't.
By doing the test you've already filtered out the wanna be's so you don't need phone interviews, the submitted samples should go strait to a qualified programmer, it'll take him only a few minutes to toss out any bad submissions and he'll quickly know who's worth actually interviewing and who's not.
Code is the only resume a good programmer needs.
But my gripe is that most employers don't even give us that chance.
In a way, that has played its part in my working life that has sent me on a path to be independent and start my own company, so I guess its not all bad :)
I've been thinking about getting a degree, but between working a full time job and doing a startup I just don't have the time, I have however bought myself two excellent books, which I'm hoping to fill the gaps with:
* The elements of computing systems (From Nand to Tetris...)
* Programming collective intelligence.
Web developers who don't have degrees aren't exposed to the fundamentals and fancy algorithms that are beaten in to you in CS courses.
That's not true. First of people without degrees can be dropouts, having learned it in school before dropping out. Second, people can self teach that stuff too.
Basically (in my experience) you have to show a genuine interest and pursue them at first, kind of like a woman/girl/chick/etc.
I think you are shortchanging the value of a formal education. You are forced to learn things you don't necessarily enjoy. For example, I was forced to take a few stats courses which I found extremely boring, but recently at work it was incredibly valuable. I know I thought I was a great developer when I was 16, but looking back I was just a good problem solver. A degree also forces you to work extremely hard on some things (projects, exams) with rigid deadlines.
Are you suggesting that people are wasting 4 years of their life? I realize it is 'just a piece of paper', but that piece of paper signifies an accomplishment.
Now I am sure a few people are going to say I have drunk the Kool-Aid. To that I suggest there are some places you can break the rules, and some times you have to play within the rules of the game. I think getting a degree still opens many doors, and because of that I followed through with it. Clearly there were times I considered skipping university or dropping out to pursue an opportunity, but looking back I have no regrets.
What I am saying is that people shouldn't just dismiss people without a degree, because those of us who have a true interest in what we do, and learn, read books and experiment on our own - without being forced, or having a set syllabus to follow can become very talented developers.
If you've got to a very high level alone, I think that's a damn good accomplishment too, one that is at least comparable to a degree in itself.
From my experience, programming requires both understanding and experience. What you learn in college does not necessarily correlate to success in a technical field (especially when you're coming out of a Liberal Arts university as I did).
Simply put, when it comes to a technical field:
(Past experience + understanding + execution) > a Liberal Arts degree.
But you shouldn't disregard a degree when it comes to thinking + innovation. College provides an invaluable means to look/analyze the world around you.
I wrote about this a few days ago that may be of interest:
http://datainsightsideas.com/post/35471878/
The paper signifies an accomplishment that has nothing to do with actual ability. This obsession with degrees is a fetish.
Any decently self teaching person is going to wade through the boring stuff on their own anyway. That's a straw man.
In fact, you needing the pressures of deadlines and professors to get you to work, that's more indicative of you not being a great worker or being ambivalently committed to your work then anything about self teaching people. If you need to enter a codependant relationship with an institution that often calcifies mediocrity to get your work done or to wade through the boring stuff, that doesn't mean the self teaching dropout shares your problem or hasn't done the other work.
I think being autodidactic is incredibly valuable - but I don't believe whether or not you have a degree is a good indicator of that. That skill is also incredibly hard to determine from a resume or interview. When you are hiring commonly you have once piece of paper to look at and then a 30 minute interview to evaluate the person. Whether you like it or not, the majority of people doing this will filter by degree and institution. If you can think of a better process, create a HR startup I am sure it would be amazingly successful! Many companies realize that the hiring process is flawed but there currently are few options.
I also disagree that educational institutions "calcify mediocrity".
Even if you point this out ahead of time, those people could still be right.
>I think getting a degree still opens many doors, and because of that I followed through with it.
Signals are wasteful.
>but looking back I have no regrets.
Most people think whatever choices they made were the best. That you have no regrets is not unusual.
What's written on that piece of paper is more important than the accomplishment in my experience, at least as long as finding a job is concerned.
If a company deals with hundreds of applicants they need some way of trimming them down, and not having a computer science degree will put you at a disadvantage even if you do have some other degree. I've been rejected for jobs because I have a physics degree and not "Comp. Sci"; I'm sure there are mathematicians on here who can say the same thing.
This might not be so true for startups, but I suspect that when faced with a deluge of applicants even startups will go straight for the "Comp . Sci" degrees if just to make the numbers managable.
I don't think that's the way to go. If learning something is boring, then it's either because you'll never need it or you don't realize you'll ever need it. You can't know if it's boring because of the former or the latter before you really need it.
For example, I found math pretty boring in school (beyond 6th grade, say) because I just didn't see what applications it would have in my life even if I knew I wanted to be a programmer and supposedly good math skills were a hard requirement (it only is if the problem-domain you're working on requires math).
But now I have some big ideas for my projects and I learned that some fields of mathematics and other disciplines would be a great investment to learn because it would ease or even simply make possible their implementation. So now those topics really look fun to me so it will give me the push I need to learn it all as fast as possible and in an enjoyable way.
So the effect of demanding degrees is one of mediocre organizations (which are mediocre on account of, for example, routinely doing very dumb things like using tokens of accomplishment that do not reflect actual accomplishments and abilities to make decisions instead of doing the hard work of thinking and taking intelligent risks) reinforcing their mediocrity by selecting for people who have already demonstrated their ability to be content in a mediocre system. There are lots of studies that show very little to no relationship between grades and intelligence or grades and creativity. But organizations are unwilling to put this scientific knowledge into use.
I would feel more excited about interviewing a self taught developer who was good then someone who was taught through school, since I value self teaching, meritocracy and self motivation a good self taught person would display and despise the kind of cronyism, group think, and gradual relaxation of standards to the lowest common denominator that schools all too often represent.
If finding the right employer is like finding a needle in a haystack, anything that takes away most of the hay is good.
I think that's the confirmation bias at work. If such an organization learns that a PhD-holder is real good the reaction will be: "Well what do you expect, it's a PhD!" but facing a successful self-taught person they'd say: "How did he manage to do that without a degree? Must be luck..."
http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html
The other posters who have spoke of a degree as a filter which lowers the cost of interviewing are correct. I can think of two occasions over the 1.5 yrs that I worked there where they hired people who didn't have a clue what they were doing. This was obvious immediately and they had to be ruthless about firing them. I don't know if requiring a degree would have made this nastiness less likely, but these mistakes have a significant cost for both the employer and the employee.
1. How would you program a compiler for a new DSL? 2. What is stdcall? How does it relate to the stack? 3. How many registers does a 486 have? What is a register? 4. How does ethernet work? 5. What is the most efficient way to break a project down into tasks and milestones when dealing with a large team? 6. If you break a computer which you bought, but has not yet been delivered, who is liable? 7. How would you mathematically model a computer controlled temperature controller system?
I know the answers to those questions because I learnt them along the way as I got my degree. I have a wide spectrum of knowledge which is not directly useful to programming, but is useful to me as general knowledge.
When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them.
No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and specialist things. Just because you don't have enough fire in your belly to do more then the minimum learning when you're on your own doesn't mean anything about anyone else.
(EDIT: Sorry. Not to be too harsh on you. Your quiz is relevant. Of course, if the OP can't answer questions like yours in his field, he isn't the kind of autodidact I'm defending. But if he can, (and given that many self teaching people can do things like that easy) your point about learning just enough to get stuff done is more a personal thing then anything about autodidactic people)
I don't know how self taught you are, but 100% of my income comes from things I learned myself and applied myself. I spent $0 to learn those things, and now I make, well, a fair bit more than $0.
In spite of all I learned by myself, when I went back to school, I discovered things I did not even know where useful to me.
I'm not saying that a person is flawed because he is not aware of some specific area. He just is not aware of it because it's not something he directly requires. What Web programmer needs to know about register transfers? Well, if he went to do a CS degree, this knowledge would be forced on him, making him a better programmer in general!
Civilisation only exists because of the institution of school. Don't bash it, it's a very good thing.
Here is my education history. I studied music and philosophy not computers. Anyway I was self taught enough that in my senior year contemporary philosophy of mind class (which I studied independently because it was my interest before the class was offered), the professor asked me to proofread and critique the final rather then take it. I never took notes but I could correct other peoples notes from memory. I also taught myself composition and music theory up to the 400 level before dropping out of school. In high school, I got perfect scores on AP tests for classes I skipped almost every day (I got 15 college english credits for a class I failed). I did knowledge bows and was the knowledge bowl coaches TA, where he gave me old questions and encyclopedias on various topics and we got 2nd at state. (we were a poor public school). I had more AP credits then the saludictorian and valedictorian but I sat in the back with the pregnant girls and delinquents at graduation. I don't think I learned things from class, and think all that was self taught. I always got in trouble for reading ahead or hiding a book.
School is, in general, good. But for certain bright people, putting them like that in classes with people of normal intelligence is exactly like putting normal kids in classes with severely mentally disabled kids, and limiting the normal kids potential to the mentally disabled kids potential. On balance school is good, but there is a class of people for whom school is devastatingly confining and intellectually restricting. Depending on early experiences, these people are going to hate school early, become self taught college dropouts or never go to college (who can blame them?) and teach themselves skills like this guy is saying. Because these people's dropout status is related to their high intelligence, excluding them with barriers based on degrees is a great way to protecting yourself from some of the most creative, intelligent, original thinkers our planet has to offer.
Thank you LPTS, that's pretty much exactly what I wanted to say. A lot of people have gone off on tangents discussing the merits of a degree, where I actually agree with them for the most part.
The point I was actually trying to make, you've conveyed very well. Don't judge our intelligence or ability on such a unrelated subject as having a degree or not.
Hopefully a few people will have read this thread who will be employing in the future, and the information contained may influence their decision when they're deciding to write the "Degree required" line on their job advert.
University is a free place. Come and go as you please, just write the exams. Those geniuses should have no problem doing that, no?
A company needs a good mix of the following:
1. Slow and steady worker 2. Charming and friendly people 3. People with clever ideas who know how to explain their ideas properly
Some helter skelter genius with strong opinions and a low ability to complete projects is exactly the wrong type of person for a company.
And the right kind of person to start an own business.
If he dropped out to execute something (like start a business), then it is a major plus point. If he dropped out to go work in a dead end job, or to become an 'artist' then this is a sign of a person who cannot complete projects.
I mean, why would you drop out of college to go earn $3000 a month when you could just finish college and earn more than that?
I would NEVER discriminate against a person because financially they had trouble going to college. But I would see it as very negative if a person complained about college not being the right thing for them. Learning is learning, there is no right or wrong way. Everyone does it his way.
Many jocks finish college while barely being able to read, many students cheat their way through, or barely make it through with low grades. Going to college is much more an indicator of your social values rather than your skills.
Most people tend to go to college because they're expected to, it has a lot to do with the values your parent instill. Many people skip college because it never occurred to them they should go, their families simply didn't instill those values in them.
College is nothing more than a place where one can learn, it does not mean one does learn. People who enjoy learning don't ever stop learning and self learning eventually becomes a requirement for all who want to continue to grow. College is nothing more than a kick start for a minority of society, there are many other paths that are just as successful.
Many of the most successful companies in the world were started by college dropouts who realized school was getting in their way. Classrooms are good for teaching the masses, people who learn faster than average will absolutely feel like they're being held back and turn to self directed learning as the superior method it is.
Therefore I don't see it that I failed to complete a project, or have a lacking ability to execute. Not going the normal path, where you're not guided through, the route isn't clear, you have to make decisions, and take actions on your own accord.
Does that not demonstrate an ability to execute?
I have always encountered jobs on the standard job market that require degrees, and I just thought that was how it was. I found other jobs, and made my way despite that.
The reason for starting this thread was because I thought people starting their own companies, especially many of them being from a technical background themselves, would have a different line of thinking..
That looks like dangerous thinking to me. I guess it's conforting to think that what you never heard of in your "formal teaching environment" doesn't exist or doesn't matter. School can only expose so many topics to you. It can go deeper than necessary in some topics that won't be relevant to you and completely ignore others that would be.
That's the difference between self learning and structured learning - most of the time people learn things specific to the topic they are interested in. If you are trying to claim otherwise, then your worldview is deeply flawed.
But if you're going to be teaching yourself on the side anyway, part of the value of being in school in the first place is reduced. Depending on your financial situation, it might make sense to just teach yourself full-time, or to do your reading on the side while working.
I hated school. After a while I decided that I was better off without it. Ten years later, I still feel that way.
"most of the time people learn things specific to the topic they are interested in."
Your structure is wrong. It's not most of the time all people. It's most of the people all the time. An autodidactic person (admittedly rare and an outlier) will have already studied design patterns or whatever, because they read obsessively and learn best that way.
I'm not trying to claim most people don't work that way. I'm saying there is a group of outliers that has both an ability to learn way better and faster than school can teach, and who dropout. These outliers are both highly desirable employees and cast off by the system. I think that normal people are projecting their own inability to self teach well at a college level onto the freaks who have this ability.
If you think there isn't a group of outliers who is better off self teaching, as able as any PHD's, and who drop out or don't attend school because it is stifling to their natural urge to learn, your worldview is excluding a lot of the most talented and creative people on the planet.
And one more thing - the plural of degree is degrees not degree's. I learned that in school.
Team work, communication, planning and organisation skills can be picked up in real life environments too, if anything in a better fashion.
When you enter employment at a young age, your employer and your colleagues are more willing to show you the ropes and give you time to learn on the job, considering you usually start at a low position. Then you proceed to learn real world experience for a number of years, depending on how quickly you dropped out of education, and how quickly you landed a job.
I had been working as a developer for 5 years by the time my friends of the same age finished their degrees. Put that into perspective and compare to people fresh out of university.
I'm not saying people with a degree have wasted their time, or that it wasn't the right thing to do. Just give those of us who chose a different path some credit too.
As far as my options go, I'm now self employed and loving it.
I knew a fellow who didn't go to university and was managing a team of 12 developers within his first five years of work. He was richer than the average graduate too.
I did not see any correlation between skill level and degree. Programming is a craft, like carpentry. You learn it by doing it, by doing it with other people, by thinking about it and talking about it, a little bit by reading books about it, and almost not at all by watching lectures about it.
That said, people who don't have the kind of experience with programming to tell a good programmer from a bad one have to resort to proxy measures like credentials. I usually worked for small companies, where this is less of a problem.
I see programming today as in a similar state as auto mechanics was in the 1970s & early 80s in the US. If you had good sense and aptitude, you could be one, and the barrier to entry was very low.
Now it's different. You (for the most part) need some sort of certification to be a "grease monkey;" and even then, you are fixing, tuning and rebuilding engines, not designing them.
To me a degree would not so much signal skill in any programming language, as a general skill in learning new stuff, which to me seems to be the most important skill of a programmer. A university degree seems to indicate that ability of learning stuff to some extent. Sure, if you taught yourself programming, you have learned something by yourself, too. But I think it is a lot easier to learn one particular programming language than to have a general understanding of computer science, be able to write down stuff, learn things you are not as interested in, and so on.
I scripted a bunch of stuff for controlling mp3's, and a few socket bots to protect from channel takeovers.
Then I wanted a mp3 player more like itunes is today, and so I set about making one in VB.
From there I progressed to games, in VB and Java, such as space invaders etc, dabbled a bit with 3d programming.
Moved to the web, HTML, JS, followed by PHP, then some JSP/Servlets and ASP through a work requirement, learned SQL Server and databases in general from a MCDBA who was also a MCT.
Messed with C and linux, borrowed some books from the library and read every page, lost my way a bit and learned about creating exploits.
Then got back on track, some c++, some ASP.NET/C#.
And the list goes on. My language and framework of choice is now Ruby on Rails.
For example, personally I am bored by now by web programming, and university really wasn't so much about practical programming. I liked the theory, complexity of algorithms and so on. in your self-taught curriculum, did you ever come across those kinds of things? Do you/did you care? If you are truly interested in that stuff, but don't want to spend the money, why not do it in a remote learning course or something? I mean, you want to learn the stuff anyway, why not get credit for it?
Obviously it is better to create a new distributed hashing algorithm by creating something like bittorrent, rather than doing theoretical work about it at university. But university is not so bad, and some results from academia do spill over into the real world.
Just today a friend told me about a program he got to analyze that did user authentication on the client. It is amazing to me that people can be able to program such Java clients, yet be unable to understand the security issue. They can program, yet they can not program. Maybe it is because it is so easy to learn programming, and bad code actually runs, too, that employers like to see some additional verification like a CS degree (and of course the CS degree is not guarantee stuff like that won't happen).
During that 5 years, I've lived in 3 completely different locations within England, and lived in another country for a few years too. I've worked for big companies, small companies, startup companies and now myself.
It was a personal decision, that I took, and I don't regret it one bit. I'm not even in the market to get a job, I just had an old annoyance come back when I noticed a few startups requiring degree's for their jobs on here, I thought startups would be different to the usual useless HR departments in that they should be able to tell good developers to bad, without filtering on whether they have a degree or not..
Even without degree, I think that you still have a chance to get a job if your resume and your projects you have are good enough (or if you run a business in the past). It probably get's more difficult in the consulting business, as the company sells you (and your resume) to their customers, so it get's difficult to sell you for a premium rate if you got no degrees or certification.
That being said, If you haven't done so far, I would read a few algorithm classes, because that's something you normally never learn while programming (also a good tip for the Twitter guys... ;))
doesnt add up, what exactly do you mean?
However, I observed in recent years (at least here in Switzerland and also other people told me about it) that it seems to get easier and easier to pass university, as there is more and more pressure from the state (which finances university) to let more and more people pass, due to the lack of engineers.
I never figured out how to look at a resume and meaningfully select for extremely good hackers who were within our ability to attract (although it was easy to identify them in interviews). The ones for whom that was obvious from their resume had better opportunities.
One thing that I find interesting about this conversation is how much more often it comes up in software than elsewhere. Why are there so many autodidact hackers out there? I think it might be that computers are such excellent, affordable learning environments. The quick feedback loop you can get actually working with a computer is unlike anything available for most fields.
On the other side, academic CS programs are relatively new, and possibly don't do such a great job yet. Or maybe it's just that they've been attracting large numbers of the wrong people in recent years.
Almost all ground-breaking mathematics was done at a very young age.
And you think you have a depressing career outlook?
Theory gets useful if you want to tackle harder problems. If you aren't aware of the theory, you often don't know what you are missing. As an ex-dropout, I was in that position for a long time.
Going out on a limb now, big company with little respect for theory -> Microsoft, big company with healthy respect for theory -> Google.
You can do fine without theory, but its getting harder (and will continue to).
But in reality neither that, nor job experience really matters. Why? Because a person can write anything they want on their resume and you'll never know that they are BSing
Unless you pick up the phone and make a few calls. There are many things that are trivial to check, such as whether someone actually attended a given school or worked at a given company.
Certainly people can and do BS on their resume and get away with it, but its not because resumes are inherently unverifiable.
Anyway, this is not to make any sort of judgment on you personally, you have probably done more awesome things than most 24 year olds and may be nothing like what I described, but you asked: when an employer sees a resume without a degree that's a snap decision thought process they might go through.
The situation actually isn't that bad... most of the best jobs aren't "resume" jobs, they're "hey I know a guy" jobs. Networking is much more important than resume to getting a good job - especially at startups!
You're only 24. If it's bothering you, go get a degree. Otherwise, make sure you produce work that demonstrates your abilities. Check out this article - 'How I got hired by Amazon' http://www.brunozzi.com/en/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-ama... - a great example of not needing to care whether the person has a degree or not.
I don't have a degree and I ended up working at Microsoft. But it would never have happened if I had tried applying through their recruitment channel, due to the degree filter. I was headhunted based on performance.