Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers.
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But the above quote seems logical for me as well. In an interview situation, I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success.
Like it or not, that is a signal of something that’s relevant in lots of business/office situations and so, all else equal, I’d expect managers to lean towards the degree-holder.
Am I wrong in thinking that "not completed" is often vastly closer to "having a degree" than "never started"? Obviously some people fail out of degrees completely, but many start a degree because they're capable and simply find out they dislike the content.
Not completed shows that you were accepted to an institution, so it matters how selective the institution was. There’s a lot of research that shows there’s some (wage) benefit to the first year of college, then not so much for the second or third, but a lot more for the degree. Bryan Caplan’s book on the subject covers this ‘sheepskin effect’ very well.
You get the filtering effect for MIT/Stanford/etc. Then it's a mix between "decided the academic thing wasn't right for me" and "it got tough so decided to bail" whether or not that's ever explicitly stated. (Or random family etc. issues etc.)
Starting college and not completing it is a mixed signal as compared to never starting.
If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
At the same time, someone who started and dropped out might be seen as a signal that they could not conform to and complete a structured program. Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education. In that regard, someone who never attended college but taught themself programming (at least enough to pass the tech screen on 'all else equal' footing with degreed candidates) might be a better bet than someone who dropped out after two years in a comp sci program and screened the same.
> If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
If theory behind your wagers was correct, and if you're optimizing for SAT scores.
I dropped out of engineering after my first year because of the math. My high school had an experimental math program that was designed for people who wouldn’t need higher level math, which kind of screwed me. I was generally good at math and tests, so I placed into a higher level course than high school prepared me for. Because I did so well on the test, they wouldn’t allow me to take a lower level class. I tried. On the first day the teacher handed me a letter telling me I was departmentally dropped.
This didn’t lead me to fully dropping out of school. I pivoted over to CIS, graduated, and worked my way up to a principal software engineer.
Did these people you’re talking about totally quit, or did they find a solution to the problem? Employers are going to tend to like those who find alternative solutions.
IQ isn’t useless, it’s just not the only measure that matters. Conscientiousness, for example, probably played a role in those who quit or not.
> Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education.
Or maybe at 20 years old they didn't yet know what they wanted to do with the rest of their life but had been pushed into college anyway by overzealous parents and teachers.
If an infallible oracle told you that was the case and you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard, would you hire the college graduate or the candidate who got railroaded into attending a bit of college and then dropped out?
I think the tie goes to the college graduate for over half of the hiring managers, and I don't think that's crazy at all.
> you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard
That's different from the original quote, which was simply:
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But your question is interesting. Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Suppose that you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard and also both had degrees, indeed from the same institution. Then how would you choose? By height? Age? Gender? Physical attractiveness?
If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.
> If you have two indistinguishable candidates on relevant dimensions who both passed the interview bar and are the best two candidates you have for one position, literally just flip a coin, hire the winner, and move on.
Agreed.
Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc. You ignored my first question: "Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?" My second question was actually intended to highlight the issue.
What you appear to be doing with "I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is reaching for one arbitrary personal characteristic and inventing an idiosyncratic, non-scientific psychological theory in order to justify discrimination. Others do the same thing with age and gender, for example (younger people and men are just better at programming, they say). You don't know the life story of these people, and there are any number of reasons for someone not completing a degree: monetary problems, family problems, a major illness or injury, natural disaster, etc. Moreover, if you select just based on degree completion, you give job candidates no opportunity to show evidence that they "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" in ways other than competing a degree. It's simply a bias toward degree holders. By your own admission, you're not using the degree as evidence of job-relevant skills but rather as a psychological, "life story" factor.
I am biased towards degree holders for programming and other tech roles. It’s not a requirement or some magic talisman of “hire immediately”, but all else equal, I’ll prefer it and, all else equal, I will use it to discriminate (in the “distinguish” or “tell one thing from another” sense).
> Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc.
As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees for roles where intelligence and conscientiousness are useful qualities.
> Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to [perform] equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Of course it's possible for a non-degree holder to outperform a degree holder, or for a Mech E or English major to outperform a Comp Sci grad. That doesn’t mean I think a Comp Sci degree has no relevance or value to an SWE job.
You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
If someone out-interviews another for a role and clears the bar, you hire the out-performer. When you otherwise can’t tell which candidate is stronger and get down to the area where coin flips become a sensible selection mechanism, I think it's wise to choose the degree holder over using the coin. Other people might rely on height or appearance; I can't control what they do.
> As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees.
1) You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
2) If you're looking for IQ, then why don't you administer IQ tests to job candidates rather than looking at an extremely unreliable proxy for it?
3) You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates. Do you even realize what you're saying here? That's literally prejudice. By the exact same reasoning, you could discriminate based on race, for example, e.g., Asian vs. white vs. black. The only difference between racial discimination and degree discrimination in this respect is the legality of it. Even if I granted for the sake of argument that your empirical speculation about scores and measures were true, you're just talking about averages, and many individual members of every population will be above average or below average.
> You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
It is often used as the "high-order bit". Like I already said a few comments ago, the quote from the article was different from your quote.
But I don't think it's a sensible tie-breaker. You're taking a degree as a "life story" factor, but that's an arbitrary, singular choice of many possible life story factors.
Also, you seemed to change your story a bit in the last comment, talking specifically about a comp sci degree rather than a degree in general, but there's nothing unique about comp sci vs. other degrees to indicate "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" or to indicate "IQ".
> You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates.
I am, in effect, using the membership among the population of college degree holders as a tie-breaker.
If you choose to judge that as indistinguishable from, or equivalent to, discrimination based on race, we have a point of disagreement that isn't likely to be resolved.
I would note that there's not much a leap from "this criterion makes sense as a tie-breaker" to "this criterion makes sense as a résumé filter when you have a very large number of applicants".
Then I’d not hire them for being so short-sighted. Your college degree has nothing, at all, to do with the rest of your life unless you want it to and you work to make sure that it does.
Seems like this wouldn’t need to be said on a tech board.
That would be a situation for which I'd request a transcript - probably the only situation, because the second you're handed that degree I no longer care what your grades were.
Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
Not completing something simply because you dislike it is a big red flag. At work you often have to finish stuff you don’t like, you don’t want employee that will start something but rely on others to finish it.
Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect.
This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag.
But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.
And if you get a degree from college, it means you made something out of a lot of classes that at first glance, seemed useless. Also research skills, and the ability to pick something up on your own, maybe with a little help and practice.
But what do I know I’m a college grad who barely gets any interviews for anything.
Which is a shame, because in this case University itself often doesn't need to justify itself as more than an arbitrary time sink that rewards people who can both do the work intellectually, and afford both the fee and time to sink into it.
Are there alternatives to demonstrate those qualities to the equivelance of a degree to you? Just wondering if all else is equal what could people without a degree look to add to their resume to benefit from in these situations.
It’s tough, because a degree demonstrates perseverance and conformism. There’s no short-cut to either because a short-cut would be the choice of non-conformists & less perseverant people. There’s a great deal of work on this, known as the ‘signaling model of education’.
I agree with this broadly speaking, I wasn't necessarily asking for a shortcut or way to undermine it, more just of a way of demonstrating this ability assuming you have it.
The problem with demonstrating this equivalence is that signalling must be expensive to work; there's no 'low-cost' substitute for signalling. One example is natural diamond engagement rings; they must be expensive to signal commitment; an imitation doesn't do the job, no matter how beautiful.
I don't know a great answer (and I wish I did, because one of the high performers on my team is "undergrad equivalent of ABD" and I want people like them to succeed without unfair negative treatment).
I would say that it's hard to directly target an equivalent in an interview, because you don't want to needlessly draw attention to the fact that you don't have a degree. ("Hey interviewer, if you're worried about me not having a degree, think about the fact that I earned an Eagle Scout honor or trained for and completed a marathon or <XYZ>." Maybe the interviewer hadn't ever thought about the fact that you didn't have a degree and now you've soured them a bit.)
For the concern I raised in the GP post, I would say anything that shows persistent and consistent dedicated effort, over a long (ideally multi-year) period of time resulting in a successful outcome would qualify and would be something that I'd tried to work into one of my answers.
At the company I currently work at we are open to look at GitHub activity as a good indicator, this might work for some candidates but definitely not all.
I think non-trivial quality github activity over a sustained period of time would be an excellent indicator of the type of persistence that I'm thinking of, and something that a candidate could pretty easily work into an interview answer in a positive light.
Plus, even if they don't use it to break a tie in an "all else equal" interview, the contributions themselves will make the candidate a stronger candidate.
I'd make it a bit broader--OK, you have significant open source contributions on GitHub. So long as it's not OK you have a degree frm $X and have 5 years of experience with $Y so where's your GitHub?
I don't have a degree and it has not mattered in a long time. On an interview, I don't even get enough time to get into all my professional experience at this point.
Of course, I am not applying for something that would need a PhD in chemical engineering.
My experience has been that most companies are pretty good at identifying who the smart people are and giving them more responsibility. If anything, I would consider a business or psychology degree a huge red flag if I was doing the hiring.
I should add though that it is hard to compare for myself because without a degree I have always known I had to do that much more networking. Doesn't matter what degree you have if I make friends with the hiring manager.
That's a fair analysis. It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc.
"Bring back unpaid internships" is one obvious way to re-create the signal, assuming companies would be willing to take on ambitious 18 years olds and teach them. As a hiring manager, do you think there is any way to make this happen?
It is likey just anecdota from bad colleges/bad students. I went to a normal german university, did not complete on my own terms, but I surely learned there a lot. Even though the university intentionally did not hold my hand teaching me programming. I had to do that mostly on my own. But they gave the theoretical foundation of all the important concepts about IT. Algorithms, data structure, information theory, math, .. things I did not often see at the time any direct benefit "to get shit done". But it payed off.
In the US context, I'm strongly opposed to unpaid internships [at least in tech] (because I believe that paid internships are inherently more equitable and unpaid internships have a bunch of moral hazards for bad employers to exploit that even a local minimum wage internship does not have).
Paid internships are great and whenever we're expecting to have open entry-level positions the following year, we run a paid internship program. It's an excellent source of future talent for us and (IMO) is good training/experience for the interns.
I think it would be illegal to have an unpaid internship program in many states unless the intern was doing the internship as part of a degree-granting [or at least academic credit earning] program. (That's at least a close summary of the law in MA where I am.) And in tech, I can't think of much reason to have an unpaid internship program, even if legal. If I can afford the staff time to direct and supervise the interns, I can afford the $15/hour minimum wage* and that aligns everyone's incentives better.
* We pay substantially more than this to interns, but even paying the legal minimum wage aligns incentives.
The argument is that unpaid or minimally paid internships--especially if they're pervasive for specific types of roles--are basically not viable for a lot of people.
There are counter-arguments. You're getting free on the job training even though you're barely worth it even working for free. And lots of jobs like acting and writing, can involve years of trying (often unsuccessfully) to land something that pays.
Yes, and the person I'm responsing to is advocating for people getting paid. I added on by saying I'd be happy being paid minimum wage, or just having someone pay for lunch and transit, which adds up to probably 30-40 dollars a day now with the inflation.
If someone isn't worth that much, why even bother entertaining working for you and your friends? Not like you won't throw my resume in the trash anyways.
I'm working on starting my own thing, so don't feel bad you fell for someone telling you "you're barely worth anything."
> It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy.
Lawmakers can create a law which say that educational debt above Y dollars can be discarged in bankruptcy. Of course anything like that will have second and further order effects too.
They can. But there are some debts which cannot be discharged that way. (Meaning some debts go away, but others don't.)
For example if you owe child support payments that doesn't go away just because you default. Or if you owe someone debt because you caused them an injury in a wilful and malicious manner that cannot be discharged by defaulting. These are explicitly defined exceptions in the USA law. And so is student loans.
> As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc.
If we're going to be brutally honest, at many, many companies, that's all you need to know how to do in order to have a fine career. Do what you're told, do it on time, and sustain that activity for years. Some companies say they want things like creativity, initiative, leadership, blah, blah, blah, but they're just words. Most of them are looking for cogs who take direction and finishing a 4 year degree shows you can do that.
Just as I look at that person and consider how scrappy and determined they must have been to get a start in an industry that's not terribly friendly to juniors. I know because I did it. Then earned a degree later that filled in some gaps, which I seldom use.
Of course, it's just one tiny metric and not the most important of anything I would consider, but a degree earned or not maybe a decade or two before I meet them often tells me more about their family upbringing than it does their current ability.
I would note that just as dropping out of college can be good for elite scions without being good for you, going to college can be good for elite scions (the concept was developed for them!) without being good for you.
> They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school.
Steve Jobs spent 1 semester at Reed College.
> And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
So for non-wealthy people, dropping out of college is a sign of badness, whereas for wealthy people, it's a sign of goodness? That sounds a lot like discrimination to me.
99.999999999% of degree recipients do not become billionaires either.
The point is that using a degree as decisive evidence of "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is kind of ridiculous. Especially if you're evaluating a candidate with years of actual job experience.
(And it would be quite hypocritical if a hiring manager for a company founded by a dropout disrciminated against droputs.)
For that to be mathematically correct, if we consider the underestimate case where Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the only billionaire dropouts currently alive, that would require 200 billion total college dropouts to be currently alive.
Out of the 8 billion total people on Earth.
Forbes did a study (of sorts) that estimated 44 billionaires of the 362 they had listed were dropouts. That suggests a need to have 4.4 trillion dropouts.
Order of magnitude, it's somewhere around a million times more common for a college dropout to become a billionaire than your claim.
I think there's a part of Simpsons paradox here. If there's someone without degree reaches the place where you are, they must have some extreme talent somewhere else.
The only thing having an "education" signals is conformity to mediocrity.
Yeah. An entire society is inflating its value and its capabilities. And that's a serious error to have for a planet.
So, maybe someone like Richard Feynman isn't really someone to look up to? Maybe you should be looking down on people like him? Considering his type is all about "education, science, and development."
Correctly calling the smartest person in the world an idiot is only absurd because intelligence was improperly defined in the first place. And the dominant cultural trend is all about improper definitions.
> Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers.
There's an element of self selection. Perhaps you're working at a place where only highly capable employees work and people without college education who work at your place are capable of succeeding without one in the first place? My manager seems to fit the mold you're describing. There are definitely people out there who are brilliant and don't need a college degree to show that.
I am a frequent poster at /r/itcareerquestions and a mod for /r/engineeringresumes and my anecdotal observation is that on average, college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest. I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws (whether it's from nature or nurture) those flaws would get in the way of their success even if their respective employer didn't look at college education as a measuring stick for hirability.
> college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest
Yes, it's obvious to everyone that a degree is correlated with being hireable because having a degree is also correlated with a lot of favourable attributes like intelligence and conscientiousness. If you want a warm body a degree is a good filter.
This is contradictory to strongest/highly capable employees though. For that case, having a degree is an extremely lazy filter. You filter unhireable people, but you also filter extremely hireable people.
Which sounds like a pretty reasonable heuristic for a lot of companies absent some other strong signal. Sure, there are probably circumstances where you're willing to swing for the fences on a speculative superstar but a lot of the time you want a reliable bet on someone being solid.
For some jobs, e.g. sales, that have strong quantitative metrics it's fine to not worry as much about hiring and just fire anyone who isn't making their numbers. But that works less well with things like engineering positions.
Quoth Dr. Bryan Caplan, who has an excellent book on the matter:
"""
In a world of costly information, employers sensibly rely on a lot of statistical generalizations. One of these, I’ll warrant, is that weirdos [non-degree holders here] are, on average, worse employees than conformists [degree holders]. Admittedly, the truth of this probably varies from industry to industry. (Check out Peter Jackson). But typically, usually, normally, normality is the best bet. The upshot is that some clever but unconventional ideas sit on the shelf, untried.
"""
The term to Google around for is, apparently, 'statistical discrimination'. There are of course plenty of other ways to be a weirdo in the eyes of an employer, but degree vs non-degree is one of the biggest ones.
Academia filters a lot less for conformity than it used to. Indeed, in some very elite places, any attempt to enforce the old-fashioned style of conformity on students would be seen as Problematic. On minority students, doubly so.
This does not need to be a bad thing - how many nose rings someone has and what color their hair is, is not a good proxy for whether they are any good at a particular skill like coding, for example.
Sure a college degree shows they can do whats expected and still get by.
A counter point to this would be You are interviewing to individuals for a job and the only thing missing from one is a degree?
Perhaps the person without a degree didn't have the money for college or had personal life happenings that prevented them from going. Yet they managed to get into an interview. Shouldn't a few more justified questions about how they get to where they are now?
This could show you that the person who didn't go to college as the favorable hire(through hard work), opposed to someone whom is or was more economically advantaged?
Instead this one has a checked box(college) and this one doesn't, the more checked boxes justify the outcome.
Being skilled is only part of being a good employee, I think it's fair to look at a degree as an indication that someone is able to commit to something long term etc but of course I have to assume there's a way for people without degrees to make up for that indication.
Measuring commitment using a university degree is rather silly. I have two degrees, including an MBA, and I’m just as non-committal as I was before the degrees.
I mean, it's a question of degree (ha!). An MBA (I have one) is pretty straightforward if you have a technical degree from a decent school; read any of the MBA first year books and it's always the math that gets people as was certainly the case when I was a tutor. But, even so, it takes some degree of commitment to plow through a formal education program.
You'd also have to show it is a commitment to the job and and not a commitment to improving themselves. Common sage advise now is to job hop at the beginning of your career.
It's also an indication--assuming a school of a certain tier--that someone else has already put the effort into vetting a person so you may not even need to.
As far as a degree is concerned, I was once given an offer without even interviewing. I asked to come in and talk to people anyway but I didn't need to.
If you hire a person to change a spark plug, yes, you need a specific skill.
If you hire a person for a job - for something which you can't really narrowly define, and don't want to, for something which may need adaptation to unexpected tomorrow, then you need those specific skills of learning on the fly - something closely associated with prolonged education program. The program could be less formal or official, but you still want to see the ability to improve, possibly improve by oneself, and even sometimes to participate in generating ideas and decisions - and education is the process where you have good opportunities to flex these kind of muscles.
At my last job I was hired to fix security issues found in some code being audited. I didn't 'write' or design the code myself. Yet the process was really just the same as regular software engineering. I wrote new code to implement algorithms that were missing, fixed validation logic, improved testing, and wrote some simple scripts to make working with some of the file formats easier.
I'd have just been a 'technician' to you but IMO: it involved all the same skills as if I'd have designed it myself. You still need to know what all the code does well enough to have written it and have the skills to improve it. So I'm not sure the distinction really matters here.
Company policy, pretty standard with large "scientific" companies.
Supposedly the requirement has been lifted but most team leaders and VP's are still reluctant. If the employee eventually fails they can still use "well, he graduated from Purdue he should have succeeded"
One of the only, if not the only, persons at my company without a degree. On the fast track to director, and currently in senior management. I'm not downplaying degrees, but not all fields need one.
From my personal experience, this rings true but mostly when applying for junior level positions. I've found that both myself and others I know in similar situations have had a lot more success applying for medior to senior level positions (assuming you have the confidence and experience to back it up).
My experience as well; haven't really been asked since getting mid+.
Once before getting hired in an interview with the CEO at a startup, but just shrugged it off. Usually this comes up(outside interview but on this instance too) like this:
"Oh, where did you go to college?"
"I didn't."
"Ohh.."
Lol. I got hired by that company anyway and it worked out really well for both parties:)
Otherwise yeah I think many can sympathize with being hired and having managers not know your history.
"Oh you have experience operating SaaS and designing cloud infra? You know how to build packages?!"
"Dude, I've been working as an AWS solutions architect and developer for like 8 years and worked as the primary systems engineer at an ISP and VPS provider. Why did you even hire m... I want a raise."
Whenever I read about the job market, there's always these massive gaps in either the reporting (or my understanding):
1. Job applications disappear into a black hole once submitted. There is no clear understanding as to what happens between clicking SUBMIT and HIRED/REJECTED.
2. There is no understanding of hiring methodologies, or even generally accepted best practices. What are the qualifications of a frontline recruiter? Their chain of command? How are reqs and JDs written, edited, processed, and managed?
3. Generally speaking, how is pay determined? There's no central database of salaries and experiences – which is fine, but then how do we gauge 'who pays better' especially compared to other quantifiable factors like what comes out on a 10K
I understand some of this information may be impossible to attain, but I can't think of a topic that more heavily dominates the news cycle but that also seems to be completely built upon a black hole of innuendo, mystery, and guesswork.
I just see this as a ploy to "de-value" certain jobs. If somebody with a degree applies they will happily hire them over somebody without one. As a bonus (for the company) they will say during salary negotiation something along the lines of "This is an entry level job not requiring a degree, the most we can pay is X."
If there's anything suggested by comments on HN posts about hiring, it's that people don't know how to hire, and just make stuff up.
I'm reminded of the talk by the ex-Google hiring committee person, who reported that not only did their research show that the interviewers' ratings didn't predict the relative performance of people who were hired, but also that his entire committee rejected all of their own (anonymized) interview review packets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0?t=8m20s
What about having paid internships / apprenticeships for everyone regardless of whether or not they have started or finished a diploma or degree program?
>Job posts for workers without degrees are booming, but not the hiring
You could remove "without degrees" from the above and it would still be true. Whether the purpose is job market research or filling resume banks, the fake job posting has been elevated to an art form.
This is like traditional inheritance based OOP vs Mixin architectures. A degree is traditional inheritance, you ARE something (a doctor, a software dev, etc).
Having the skills is like Mixins. You CAN do X, Y, Z. For example, you have the skills to do Data Wrangling with Pandas, you have the skills to perform classification with scikit-learn, etc.
I think skill-based approaches are a lot more efficient (just as in OOP :))
No, a degree does not demonstrate that you ARE something - modulo defects and accidents, all humans are composed of the same parts. A degree asserts that you have demonstrated skills and knowledge of a particular subject, most often at the same institution that taught those skills and knowledge. No analogy needed.
So, if you find a doctor for example, in their 40s/50s, and you give them an experiment (with all the statistical parameters) and you ask them to test/reject the null hypothesis, you think they'll be able to do so?
Degrees say "you ARE X", they, by extension, might INFER that you KNOW the Skills X, Y, Z that are part of the study plan. But that's not granted. Having a degree doesn't mean you have the skills. You might have forgotten, you might have cheated, etc.
Thesting for the skill in particular is the only way.
Degrees are signals. A degree from a reputable university signals both a group membership in a certain social group (e.g. "Ivy League graduates") as well as a common shared experience. A degree in general also signals some level of social status (i.e. able to afford that university) as well as the rote learning ability, endurance and willingness to put up with arbitrary hurdles and rules to achieve that degree. To an extent it also demonstrates an ability and willingness to subordination and deference to authority.
You seem to believe that companies look for the most skilled person to do a given job. They don't, even if they keep saying that. They look for someone willing to put up with as much bullshit and punishment as the company can get away with while creating as much profit for the company (or whichever metric is used instead) as possible without making the company leadership look bad. For higher positions like management they usually look for someone exactly like who they already have but who won't threaten their status within the company. For leadership positions they usually look for someone who won't fraternize with the subordinates and knows how to play politics.
In addition to its use as signals, degrees used as a filter are also a base level way to demonstrate due diligence. If you take the guy without a degree, that's a risk and if he's a dud, that was a bad decision. If you take the one with a degree and he turns out to be a dud, that's just bad luck.
Uhm, same goes for job posts with degrees. There are A LOT of fake job postings right now. Im coming across postings that are open for six hours and people never repond.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But the above quote seems logical for me as well. In an interview situation, I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success.
Like it or not, that is a signal of something that’s relevant in lots of business/office situations and so, all else equal, I’d expect managers to lean towards the degree-holder.
If you allowed me 1000s of trials and I could wager on each of them, I'd wager that the SAT scores of those who started were higher than the SAT scores of those who never started. In that regard, being accepted to and starting college is a positive signal.
At the same time, someone who started and dropped out might be seen as a signal that they could not conform to and complete a structured program. Or maybe they couldn't hack the collegiate level work after coasting through primary and secondary education. In that regard, someone who never attended college but taught themself programming (at least enough to pass the tech screen on 'all else equal' footing with degreed candidates) might be a better bet than someone who dropped out after two years in a comp sci program and screened the same.
If theory behind your wagers was correct, and if you're optimizing for SAT scores.
* "optimizing for" meaning "I'd prefer a higher score over a lower one, all else equal".
I've met people with really high IQ that were unable to do 1st year university math, and after a number of years dropped out of engineering.
And yet their IQ tests were amazing…
This didn’t lead me to fully dropping out of school. I pivoted over to CIS, graduated, and worked my way up to a principal software engineer.
Did these people you’re talking about totally quit, or did they find a solution to the problem? Employers are going to tend to like those who find alternative solutions.
IQ isn’t useless, it’s just not the only measure that matters. Conscientiousness, for example, probably played a role in those who quit or not.
Or maybe at 20 years old they didn't yet know what they wanted to do with the rest of their life but had been pushed into college anyway by overzealous parents and teachers.
If an infallible oracle told you that was the case and you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard, would you hire the college graduate or the candidate who got railroaded into attending a bit of college and then dropped out?
I think the tie goes to the college graduate for over half of the hiring managers, and I don't think that's crazy at all.
That's different from the original quote, which was simply:
> If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said.
But your question is interesting. Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Suppose that you had two candidates who interviewed otherwise equally in every regard and also both had degrees, indeed from the same institution. Then how would you choose? By height? Age? Gender? Physical attractiveness?
Agreed.
Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc. You ignored my first question: "Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to performally equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?" My second question was actually intended to highlight the issue.
What you appear to be doing with "I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is reaching for one arbitrary personal characteristic and inventing an idiosyncratic, non-scientific psychological theory in order to justify discrimination. Others do the same thing with age and gender, for example (younger people and men are just better at programming, they say). You don't know the life story of these people, and there are any number of reasons for someone not completing a degree: monetary problems, family problems, a major illness or injury, natural disaster, etc. Moreover, if you select just based on degree completion, you give job candidates no opportunity to show evidence that they "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" in ways other than competing a degree. It's simply a bias toward degree holders. By your own admission, you're not using the degree as evidence of job-relevant skills but rather as a psychological, "life story" factor.
> Now explain how having completed a degree is a "relevant dimension", unlike height, age, etc.
As a population, I believe that college graduates almost certainly score higher on measures of intelligence and conscientiousness than non-grads. I believe that's both true and valid for use in selecting employees for roles where intelligence and conscientiousness are useful qualities.
> Have you considered that if it's possible for a dropout to [perform] equally to a degree holder in every perceivable respect, it raises doubts about the value of a degree?
Of course it's possible for a non-degree holder to outperform a degree holder, or for a Mech E or English major to outperform a Comp Sci grad. That doesn’t mean I think a Comp Sci degree has no relevance or value to an SWE job.
You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
If someone out-interviews another for a role and clears the bar, you hire the out-performer. When you otherwise can’t tell which candidate is stronger and get down to the area where coin flips become a sensible selection mechanism, I think it's wise to choose the degree holder over using the coin. Other people might rely on height or appearance; I can't control what they do.
1) You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.
2) If you're looking for IQ, then why don't you administer IQ tests to job candidates rather than looking at an extremely unreliable proxy for it?
3) You're admitting to using population statistics to evaluate individual job candidates. Do you even realize what you're saying here? That's literally prejudice. By the exact same reasoning, you could discriminate based on race, for example, e.g., Asian vs. white vs. black. The only difference between racial discimination and degree discrimination in this respect is the legality of it. Even if I granted for the sake of argument that your empirical speculation about scores and measures were true, you're just talking about averages, and many individual members of every population will be above average or below average.
> You seem to be imagining some boogeyman where “has degree” is treated as the high-order bit rather than what I’ve been consistently saying (and what I think is relevant to the article under discussion): that it’s closer to a tie-breaker (or low-order bit) and a sensible one in many regards.
It is often used as the "high-order bit". Like I already said a few comments ago, the quote from the article was different from your quote.
But I don't think it's a sensible tie-breaker. You're taking a degree as a "life story" factor, but that's an arbitrary, singular choice of many possible life story factors.
Also, you seemed to change your story a bit in the last comment, talking specifically about a comp sci degree rather than a degree in general, but there's nothing unique about comp sci vs. other degrees to indicate "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" or to indicate "IQ".
I am, in effect, using the membership among the population of college degree holders as a tie-breaker.
If you choose to judge that as indistinguishable from, or equivalent to, discrimination based on race, we have a point of disagreement that isn't likely to be resolved.
Seems like this wouldn’t need to be said on a tech board.
Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
That seems overly simplistic.
Everyone doesn’t complete somethings because they don’t like it. Decisions and life is far more muddy and complicated than that.
But what do I know I’m a college grad who barely gets any interviews for anything.
The problem is, everyone who drops out due to inability presents themselves as having dropped out to work on their startup or suchlike.
So it's something of a market for lemons.
I would say that it's hard to directly target an equivalent in an interview, because you don't want to needlessly draw attention to the fact that you don't have a degree. ("Hey interviewer, if you're worried about me not having a degree, think about the fact that I earned an Eagle Scout honor or trained for and completed a marathon or <XYZ>." Maybe the interviewer hadn't ever thought about the fact that you didn't have a degree and now you've soured them a bit.)
For the concern I raised in the GP post, I would say anything that shows persistent and consistent dedicated effort, over a long (ideally multi-year) period of time resulting in a successful outcome would qualify and would be something that I'd tried to work into one of my answers.
Plus, even if they don't use it to break a tie in an "all else equal" interview, the contributions themselves will make the candidate a stronger candidate.
Of course, I am not applying for something that would need a PhD in chemical engineering.
My experience has been that most companies are pretty good at identifying who the smart people are and giving them more responsibility. If anything, I would consider a business or psychology degree a huge red flag if I was doing the hiring.
I should add though that it is hard to compare for myself because without a degree I have always known I had to do that much more networking. Doesn't matter what degree you have if I make friends with the hiring manager.
My experience has been the opposite. Regardless of degree or not degree.
"Bring back unpaid internships" is one obvious way to re-create the signal, assuming companies would be willing to take on ambitious 18 years olds and teach them. As a hiring manager, do you think there is any way to make this happen?
Is this because the student doesn't pay attention, or the student already knew all the material?
I wasn’t the best student, but I learned a ton in those four years.
Paid internships are great and whenever we're expecting to have open entry-level positions the following year, we run a paid internship program. It's an excellent source of future talent for us and (IMO) is good training/experience for the interns.
I think it would be illegal to have an unpaid internship program in many states unless the intern was doing the internship as part of a degree-granting [or at least academic credit earning] program. (That's at least a close summary of the law in MA where I am.) And in tech, I can't think of much reason to have an unpaid internship program, even if legal. If I can afford the staff time to direct and supervise the interns, I can afford the $15/hour minimum wage* and that aligns everyone's incentives better.
* We pay substantially more than this to interns, but even paying the legal minimum wage aligns incentives.
There are counter-arguments. You're getting free on the job training even though you're barely worth it even working for free. And lots of jobs like acting and writing, can involve years of trying (often unsuccessfully) to land something that pays.
If someone isn't worth that much, why even bother entertaining working for you and your friends? Not like you won't throw my resume in the trash anyways.
I'm working on starting my own thing, so don't feel bad you fell for someone telling you "you're barely worth anything."
Lawmakers can create a law which say that educational debt above Y dollars can be discarged in bankruptcy. Of course anything like that will have second and further order effects too.
They can. But there are some debts which cannot be discharged that way. (Meaning some debts go away, but others don't.)
For example if you owe child support payments that doesn't go away just because you default. Or if you owe someone debt because you caused them an injury in a wilful and malicious manner that cannot be discharged by defaulting. These are explicitly defined exceptions in the USA law. And so is student loans.
If we're going to be brutally honest, at many, many companies, that's all you need to know how to do in order to have a fine career. Do what you're told, do it on time, and sustain that activity for years. Some companies say they want things like creativity, initiative, leadership, blah, blah, blah, but they're just words. Most of them are looking for cogs who take direction and finishing a 4 year degree shows you can do that.
Of course, it's just one tiny metric and not the most important of anything I would consider, but a degree earned or not maybe a decade or two before I meet them often tells me more about their family upbringing than it does their current ability.
And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
Steve Jobs spent 1 semester at Reed College.
> And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
So for non-wealthy people, dropping out of college is a sign of badness, whereas for wealthy people, it's a sign of goodness? That sounds a lot like discrimination to me.
The point is that using a degree as decisive evidence of "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is kind of ridiculous. Especially if you're evaluating a candidate with years of actual job experience.
(And it would be quite hypocritical if a hiring manager for a company founded by a dropout disrciminated against droputs.)
Out of the 8 billion total people on Earth.
Forbes did a study (of sorts) that estimated 44 billionaires of the 362 they had listed were dropouts. That suggests a need to have 4.4 trillion dropouts.
Order of magnitude, it's somewhere around a million times more common for a college dropout to become a billionaire than your claim.
Yeah. An entire society is inflating its value and its capabilities. And that's a serious error to have for a planet.
So, maybe someone like Richard Feynman isn't really someone to look up to? Maybe you should be looking down on people like him? Considering his type is all about "education, science, and development."
So that means a "safe" hire, doesn't it?
> Richard Feynman
Had a PhD from Princeton!
There's an element of self selection. Perhaps you're working at a place where only highly capable employees work and people without college education who work at your place are capable of succeeding without one in the first place? My manager seems to fit the mold you're describing. There are definitely people out there who are brilliant and don't need a college degree to show that.
I am a frequent poster at /r/itcareerquestions and a mod for /r/engineeringresumes and my anecdotal observation is that on average, college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest. I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws (whether it's from nature or nurture) those flaws would get in the way of their success even if their respective employer didn't look at college education as a measuring stick for hirability.
Yes, it's obvious to everyone that a degree is correlated with being hireable because having a degree is also correlated with a lot of favourable attributes like intelligence and conscientiousness. If you want a warm body a degree is a good filter.
This is contradictory to strongest/highly capable employees though. For that case, having a degree is an extremely lazy filter. You filter unhireable people, but you also filter extremely hireable people.
For some jobs, e.g. sales, that have strong quantitative metrics it's fine to not worry as much about hiring and just fire anyone who isn't making their numbers. But that works less well with things like engineering positions.
What in the world are you talking about? Citation definitely needed.
Note that only 38% of Americans have a college degree.
""" In a world of costly information, employers sensibly rely on a lot of statistical generalizations. One of these, I’ll warrant, is that weirdos [non-degree holders here] are, on average, worse employees than conformists [degree holders]. Admittedly, the truth of this probably varies from industry to industry. (Check out Peter Jackson). But typically, usually, normally, normality is the best bet. The upshot is that some clever but unconventional ideas sit on the shelf, untried. """
The term to Google around for is, apparently, 'statistical discrimination'. There are of course plenty of other ways to be a weirdo in the eyes of an employer, but degree vs non-degree is one of the biggest ones.
This does not need to be a bad thing - how many nose rings someone has and what color their hair is, is not a good proxy for whether they are any good at a particular skill like coding, for example.
A counter point to this would be You are interviewing to individuals for a job and the only thing missing from one is a degree?
Perhaps the person without a degree didn't have the money for college or had personal life happenings that prevented them from going. Yet they managed to get into an interview. Shouldn't a few more justified questions about how they get to where they are now?
This could show you that the person who didn't go to college as the favorable hire(through hard work), opposed to someone whom is or was more economically advantaged?
Instead this one has a checked box(college) and this one doesn't, the more checked boxes justify the outcome.
As far as a degree is concerned, I was once given an offer without even interviewing. I asked to come in and talk to people anyway but I didn't need to.
If you hire a person for a job - for something which you can't really narrowly define, and don't want to, for something which may need adaptation to unexpected tomorrow, then you need those specific skills of learning on the fly - something closely associated with prolonged education program. The program could be less formal or official, but you still want to see the ability to improve, possibly improve by oneself, and even sometimes to participate in generating ideas and decisions - and education is the process where you have good opportunities to flex these kind of muscles.
Certainly at the beginning of the college career the top 1% would be a better indicator but at what point would the college education surpass that?
The joke is the PhD fellows and principals don't want some Linux hacker that never went to college fixing all their code that doesn't work.
Edit: shit/code
I'd have just been a 'technician' to you but IMO: it involved all the same skills as if I'd have designed it myself. You still need to know what all the code does well enough to have written it and have the skills to improve it. So I'm not sure the distinction really matters here.
Why do you think engineers don't or shouldn't fix things?
Isn't the very idea of designing a system: solving a problem, and isn't problem solving synonymous with "fixing a problem".
One can choose to implement various formal and rigorous methods throughout a process, but at the end of the day it's all the same activity.
Is the reason imposed by a party external to the employer, maybe a regulator?
Or is it arrogance/ignorance of a strongly university-connected organization?
Or is it intended as an pretext to get the work of some people with preferable terms?
Supposedly the requirement has been lifted but most team leaders and VP's are still reluctant. If the employee eventually fails they can still use "well, he graduated from Purdue he should have succeeded"
Once before getting hired in an interview with the CEO at a startup, but just shrugged it off. Usually this comes up(outside interview but on this instance too) like this:
"Oh, where did you go to college?"
"I didn't."
"Ohh.."
Lol. I got hired by that company anyway and it worked out really well for both parties:)
"If you didn't read my resume, why are you interviewing me?"
Otherwise yeah I think many can sympathize with being hired and having managers not know your history.
"Oh you have experience operating SaaS and designing cloud infra? You know how to build packages?!"
"Dude, I've been working as an AWS solutions architect and developer for like 8 years and worked as the primary systems engineer at an ISP and VPS provider. Why did you even hire m... I want a raise."
1. Job applications disappear into a black hole once submitted. There is no clear understanding as to what happens between clicking SUBMIT and HIRED/REJECTED.
2. There is no understanding of hiring methodologies, or even generally accepted best practices. What are the qualifications of a frontline recruiter? Their chain of command? How are reqs and JDs written, edited, processed, and managed?
3. Generally speaking, how is pay determined? There's no central database of salaries and experiences – which is fine, but then how do we gauge 'who pays better' especially compared to other quantifiable factors like what comes out on a 10K
I understand some of this information may be impossible to attain, but I can't think of a topic that more heavily dominates the news cycle but that also seems to be completely built upon a black hole of innuendo, mystery, and guesswork.
Then, it still wasn't going well.
But I eventually found a company that interviewed me, and it came down to me an 1 other person, and on paper, they looked a lot better than me.
They gave me a test (brainbench, IIRC) and I absolutely smoked the other guy on every part of it.
So in the end, I didn't need a degree. My next job didn't care at all about my degree, just my 5 years of experience and what I knew how to do.
I'm reminded of the talk by the ex-Google hiring committee person, who reported that not only did their research show that the interviewers' ratings didn't predict the relative performance of people who were hired, but also that his entire committee rejected all of their own (anonymized) interview review packets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8RxkpUvxK0?t=8m20s
You could remove "without degrees" from the above and it would still be true. Whether the purpose is job market research or filling resume banks, the fake job posting has been elevated to an art form.
Having the skills is like Mixins. You CAN do X, Y, Z. For example, you have the skills to do Data Wrangling with Pandas, you have the skills to perform classification with scikit-learn, etc.
I think skill-based approaches are a lot more efficient (just as in OOP :))
Degrees say "you ARE X", they, by extension, might INFER that you KNOW the Skills X, Y, Z that are part of the study plan. But that's not granted. Having a degree doesn't mean you have the skills. You might have forgotten, you might have cheated, etc.
Thesting for the skill in particular is the only way.
You seem to believe that companies look for the most skilled person to do a given job. They don't, even if they keep saying that. They look for someone willing to put up with as much bullshit and punishment as the company can get away with while creating as much profit for the company (or whichever metric is used instead) as possible without making the company leadership look bad. For higher positions like management they usually look for someone exactly like who they already have but who won't threaten their status within the company. For leadership positions they usually look for someone who won't fraternize with the subordinates and knows how to play politics.
In addition to its use as signals, degrees used as a filter are also a base level way to demonstrate due diligence. If you take the guy without a degree, that's a risk and if he's a dud, that was a bad decision. If you take the one with a degree and he turns out to be a dud, that's just bad luck.
now they're more like billboards that never get taken down
just to fill a space