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I agree with you that the OP has selection bias, but I'd like to pick a nit in your example. Goldman Sachs does not generally require a degree for developers, w
by dsacco 11y ago
I agree with you that the OP has selection bias, but I'd like to pick a nit in your example. Goldman Sachs does not generally require a degree for developers, which means that it's not a suitable example for your argument. A better argument would be some Fortune 500 company that offers high salaries with a hard rule on credentials.
Goldman's careers portal certainly makes it annoying to try and apply without one (but you can!), and of course their job ads mention it as a qualification, but I can tell you from personal experience they don't require a degree. Google also lists a degree as a qualification for their engineering roles; they don't care either.
Like almost every other credential in the software industry, a degree is mostly useful for getting to the actual interview as a blind, poorly networked applicant. But if you're being invited to interview, or you contact a hiring manager directly - no, they don't care.
While we're on the topic, I'll throw this in since a lot of the HN crowd seems to be unaware - if we are comparing salaries to financial companies primarily based in New York, you can make $300k at any large tech company like Google or Facebook once you're at T5 or higher in New York. While finance companies can greatly inflate developer salaries beyond tech companies, $300k is not the floor at which you'd make that comparison.
That comparison is made in the seven figure salary range. The roles in that range are out of reach for general engineers at Google et al because they deal in specialized trading disciplines, which means they are still not comparable.
This leads me to the next note - all the large tech companies are pretty much explicitly ambivalent about degrees, even for landing an interview as a lowly, unconnected candidate.
- xiaoma 11y agoAbout what percentage of their engineers are T5 or higher?
- dsacco 11y agoI don't have numbers offhand, but T5 at Google is senior. Google has a soft "up or out" mentality in reviews, which means that all engineers are eventually expected to reach T5. If they don't within 3-5 years, it starts to reflect negatively on them in subsequent reviews. Note that you're probably only getting the aforementioned salary at T5 in one of the coastal metropolitan areas, like New York or Silicon Valley. So if your actual question was, "How many Google engineers make $300k or more?" I'd say not as many, but still probably more than at Goldman.
- morgante 11y agoThat's an awful long nit to pick. Goldman was just a random example, I wasn't trying to make a comment about their specific hiring policies. My point, which I still believe holds, is that in general the market rate for credentialed developers is higher than for non-credentialed ones. Obviously this isn't true in all cases and certainly not at the highest levels, but the fact is that having a degree can only increase the supply of jobs available to you. It's not going to be a negative for your earning potential, especially when you consider that the average developer is not working at either Google or Goldman.
- dsacco 11y agoYour point still stands, and I definitely agree with you. A degree is generally a good investment that should only be skipped with caution, sufficient drive and personal affinity for programming. I just wanted to go off on a tangent because I don't think it's common knowledge that the large finance companies will hire uncredentialed devs.
- morgante 11y ago> I just wanted to go off on a tangent because I don't think it's common knowledge that the large finance companies will hire uncredentialed devs. Fair point. I've actually never seen any evidence that they do (not that I've looked closely) and am surprised. Do you have to have prior industry experience in a particular niche to get in without a credential? (Ex. low latency expertise.)