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Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees

• Randgalt 11y ago
  B.S. I've never worked for a place that cared. I'm self taught. Req's always say degree or _equivalent_.
  • cbhl 11y ago
    At some places, x years of experience can be considered equivalent, but bootstrapping to the equivalency is non-trivial without a degree (chicken-and-egg).
    • andywood 11y ago
      This was my bootstrapping process: Got a tech-support job at a software company. During my first week, wrote a company-themed screensaver. Showed it to the CEO. Became a developer later that day.
    • karmicthreat 11y ago
      This is where fake it till you make can really come into effect. My first paying programming gig was a gambling system for a really cheap dominican/canadian outfit. Pulled it off, made some really good design decision and then bailed when it was obvious the owners were trying to rip off their investors. It still gave me experience and I used that experience and stories for the next 2 jobs. Hopefully it keeps working because I am way better than I was on that casino job. I don't think you can become a great programmer until you overcome The Fear. And you won't be able to do that until you have the stress of doing it professionally for someone else. And being able to successfully come out the other side of the project.
• HaloZero 11y ago
  For people who don't have a degree, have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? The requirement might say it but I doubt it matters practically. I imagine for junior positions this matters more. Anecdotally, I know at least one friend without a degree who gets the same amount or more recruiter emails sans any degree on his profile
  • busterarm 11y ago
    I get a lot of recruiter and founder interest but I often do not make it past an HR screener's eye into a candidate pool due to lack of degree. If I can bypass that step and talk to a dev or experienced manager I get at least one interview every time. For companies using software like Greenhouse in their recruiting pipeline, I _never_ make it through to even a phone screen without an internal shove by someone. Almost everywhere I've ever worked, I've been considered a strong hire. Mid-level dev.
    • monk_e_boy 11y ago
      We looked at a degree as an indicator that this person can stick at something for 3-4 years. For some jobs this was a good thing, for other jobs it didn't matter. I've had jobs where my manager didn't have a CS degree, one of them I had to sit him down and explain why his ad-hoc database made out of .txt files and thousands of lines of C# code wasn't a good idea. A CS degree forces you to know about a broad range of ideas and tools (e.g. databases). This is useful. Employing someone with out that means they may have holes in their knowledge that you aren't expecting to be there. But give this person some motivation and a week and they'll get up to speed.
      • busterarm 11y ago
        I had another skilled tech career with 15 years experience before switching to software and all of my employment has been in the 1-5 year range, more towards the latter. Despite my lack of degree, I tend to be one of the more CS-oriented people on the teams I join. I put this upfront in my portfolio & github with the projects I show off, namely that I've written an ORM, a Web Server, games with AI using game trees and behavior trees, contributed to some popular OSS, etc...even some random odd stuff like emulators, disassembler scripts, pentest tools, etc., I guess I do have some gaps but I'm constantly trying to fill them and I'm not satisfied to rest on that knowledge.
      • thrownaway2424 11y ago
        Shoot, I got that beat. I spent 5 years and still don't have a degree.
• victorhugo31337 11y ago
  Having worked my way through college working as a full-time Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, many people look down on others who don't have a Computer Science degree. Pragmatically, after more than a decade I've seen people with PhDs from top schools who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. I've also seen "uneducated" software craftsmen who could write the most elegant and clear code. There is no silver-bullet in the tech industry--yes, having a Computer Science degree helps, but it doesn't guarantee the person will be a good Software Engineer.
  • jkyle 11y ago
    > I've seen people with PhDs from top schools who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag A computer science PhD, in my humble opinion, does not teach how to program anymore then having PhD of Architecture teaches you how to build a residential home. If it did, there'd be much more time spent learning about tooling and practicing programming instead of reading papers and generating novel research. If I were hiring C.S. PhD's, I would not be judging them on the quality of their code or proficiency in any particular language.
    • duaneb 11y ago
      This is true, and the unfortunate effect of treating all software engineers as equal. However, if PhDs are not expected to write code, don't call them software engineers, call them "researchers".
      • noarchy 11y ago
        >This is true, and the unfortunate effect of treating all software engineers as equal. However, if PhDs are not expected to write code, don't call them software engineers, call them "researchers". Generally, they aren't called "engineers". They'd be computer scientists. But I say that as someone who lives in a place (Canada) where "engineer" is a protected term, of sorts. You can't just slap the title on anyone.
        • 11y ago
• kayoone 11y ago
  Depends on what you want to work on. Computer Science != Software Engineering
  • busterarm 11y ago
    How many Valley startups are doing Computer Science!? ..or even Software Engineering!
    • beamatronic 11y ago
      Wait, are you saying my Rational Rose UML skillz are no longer in vogue?
    • jonesb6 11y ago
      We should really just start calling it software implementing..
      • bottled_poe 11y ago
        We already have two terms for that - coder and programmer.
        • Kurtz79 11y ago
          Really ? I always thought them as synonyms and "Software Engineer" as a more "upscale" title (which is kind of stupid, IMHO). From Wikipedia: "The term programmer has often been used as a pejorative term to refer to those without the tools, skills, education, or ethics to write good quality software. In response, many practitioners called themselves software engineers to escape the stigma attached to the word programmer. In many companies, the titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer, for many categories of programmers."
    • stale2002 11y ago
      Exactly! Me and most of my friends are doing basic front-end and app development. Nothing that required our degrees. And yet we are making the same high salaries as everyone else in the bay area.
• sokoloff 11y ago
  I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and am self-taught programmer from an early age. No one has ever balked at hiring me for a software position without a CompSci degree. (at least not that I know of; I've never been unemployed for longer than a Saturday and Sunday between jobs)
  • djwievgs 11y ago
    So fucking cool man, can I suck your cock? Idiot.
  • danans 11y ago
    The article refers to people with no degree.
    • komali2 11y ago
      I wonder how this applies in my case - self taught with a degree... in Literature. I haven't had a hard time finding a job but that's a pretty big selection bias.
  • WalterBright 11y ago
    I have an ME, and applied for a job at Microsoft around 1981 or so. They wouldn't even talk to me, and heard through the grapevine it was because I had the wrong degree. You don't understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a billionaire. I coulda been somebody, instead of a nerd, which is what I am, let's face it.
• aburan28 11y ago
  Articles like this throw fuel onto those suffering from imposter syndrome
• neom 11y ago
  I heavily heavily avoid recent MBAs and really couldn't give two shits if you have a comp sci degree provided you're a good engineer and a good human.
  • busterarm 11y ago
    I'd love to hear some of your reasoning, but my impression is that the writing has been on the wall for MBAs for 10+ years and that anyone with a recent MBA shifting into tech is someone looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue.
    • neom 11y ago
      I generally find that real world experience trumps what is being taught in MBA programs these days unless you're going into consulting or the like. It's not particularly hard to find someone who has built something instead of their MBA, and I'd much rather them around a few sage folks than some fresh faced textbook jockeys. Also: anyone with a recent MBA shifting into tech is someone looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue. ;)
• zanethomas 11y ago
  I haven't needed a degree, in my 40 years of programming.
• porter 11y ago
  Just because a job ad asks for a degree doesn't mean the person hired actually has one.
  • cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    Earlier in my career I simply would not apply if I saw that requirement. Now I just make it explicit in my submission that I do not have one. It's not clear to me how many non-responses were due to that.
  • andersen1488 11y ago
    Yep. I don't think this study really took that into account. I'm a software engineer in SV with no degree and it has literally never even been brought up by interviewers.
  • dgabriel 11y ago
    I just leave off the education part on my resume. This has literally never been a problem for me, and most requirements I see say something like "BS or equivalent experience".
  • danielhooper 11y ago
    Right. This goes for plenty of other "requirements" job ads ask for too.
• mattzito 11y ago
  So, I'm a college dropout, and for me not having a degree was an issue until I hit the 10-15 years of experience mark and was up for executive positions. Then not only was it not an issue, no one ever asked.
  • creativityhurts 11y ago
    It's weird because a couple of answers here say that it's harder getting into higher positions without a degree.
    • mattzito 11y ago
      Yeah, I think there's probably a middle management trap in a lot of organizations where they want you to have an MBA for a director of product management role, but for a vp of product or cpo job they're actively recruiting the exact people they want usually based on job experience or prior success. I think I skipped over that because I got acquired into the middle management role, no resume or job spec required.
• PhilWright 11y ago
  A degree is very useful when trying to get your first job in the industry. It provides some comfort for the hiring company that you have some level of training and understanding. It makes you stand out from those without a degree that are also trying to get a start. Once you have several years experience the degree becomes less important because you will be judged on your actual experience. An employers looks at the languages/platforms you have used and can then easily test you based on those. After 5 or more years the degree is pretty much irrelevant. Especially when there is a shortage of talent.
  • cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    Some employers do not care much at all about your experience. For example, Google interviews really don't consider this at all beyond the initial screen whether you will get your interview or not. After that it's all hours of testing your responses to problems, etc. And in reality most industry experience is of little use at Google anyways. Google does care about school and GPAs, etc. tho. More than most.
    • theGimp 11y ago
      I believe that has changed. Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees? A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b... Also, I doubt that external industry experience means little to Google -- for two reasons: 1. Good engineering practices are good engineering practices. You can pick those up by working at a good firm 2. Though they hold God-like stature, Google is like any other company. They mostly use the same technology and a lot of the same tools as everybody else.
      • 11y ago
• fiatmoney 11y ago
  You do have to get off the ground first, but at a certain point the countersignaling value of a lack of degree starts to kick in. It's sad when the most impressive thing about a candidate is that they went to School X. It's impressive when a candidate has done interesting / difficult things despite a lack of degree.
  • 13of40 11y ago
    As someone with no degree who's done OK in the software industry, I would hands-down go back and get one if I could turn back the clock. Not because it would necessarily translate to more money, but because I've been giving myself ulcers worrying about it for the last 20 years. YMMV
    • aantix 11y ago
      If you've done well, why are you worrying about it? You've bet on yourself to pull through these past 20 years and you've won. You're going to be fine without it.
      • Futurebot 11y ago
        There are lots of reasons, some of which never go away (peer acceptance, additional scrutiny / skepticism, raise availability and amount.) There's also the specialization problem: you can "be fine" but essentially be limited to what I like to term "survival tech" jobs (CRUD and some other less-than-glamorous roles.) Not going to school, especially one that gives you opportunities to work on really interesting stuff (elite/research schools), means you'll likely never break into things like robotics or Socher-level DL. There are exceptions, but most people will not. You may also never be fully accepted culturally, since one of the major advantages of going is that you're the "right" sort of person (meaning that you have the correct socio-economic background and understand/speak corporate-derived "elite meritocratic culture") / you're able to build a high-quality network of well-connected peers who themselves are part of the socio-economic elite.
        • 11y ago
• twphonebillsoon 11y ago
  Tech hiring is a such a cluster____. Why are they screening for degrees anyway? They clearly don't respect what a CS/SE/etc degree represents because at the end of the day, regardless of your experience or your credentials, you're going to be subjected to the programming interview nonsense that won't reflect your day to day anyway Its like requiring a degree in mechanical engineering to be a racecar driver, and being told to assemble an engine during your interview.
• whatgoodisaroad 11y ago
  Another way to look at this is that Colleges and Universities are now better-aligned with the industry than they were before.
• awalton 11y ago
  I experienced this one first hand, which is why I went to the cheapest school in my state and coasted through a bachelor's, knowing that I could easily pay it off once I got a job in the Valley. Wasn't quite as easily as I hoped as it turns out, but I still managed to pay it off in the same time it took to earn it, so on the overall, it worked out. Honestly can't say my degree is worth much more than the certainty my resume won't get band-rejected by recruiters, but hey.
• jpgvm 11y ago
  Bigger firms yeah, smaller firms care more about passion and knowledge. Both of which are usually attained outside of your degree (if you even have one). Degrees are good more for providing baseline mathematics and theoretical background for jobs that need more of that. That said I think a degree is probably the least relevant aspect of hiring for 99% of developers.
• jonesb6 11y ago
  It's ok I'm about to get my philosophy degree.
• BWStearns 11y ago
  I wonder how they're counting ads that say "BS or MS in Compsci or Equivalent Experience" or something to that effect. I understand that this could deter some applicants, but I think that it's pretty clearly a go-ahead for applicants who don't have the degrees but think they could do the job (though presumably applicants with the relevant degrees would in aggregate fare better etc). I wonder this explicitly because last time I looked I did not see many mentions of degrees that weren't explicitly accompanied by the OR.
  • 13of40 11y ago
    Supposedly there's actually an industry standard translation of work experience to years of college. I think it's 4:1, so 16 years of experience is worth a bachelors degree.
    • jqm 11y ago
      That seems a little high. In the real world it seems that 4 years of hands on experience is often worth more than 4 years of school. For certain things anyway. I have a degree. I'm not sure the education was really worth the money but it has opened some doors.
    • stale2002 11y ago
      I've learned way more working full time than I ever did from my CS classes.
    • BWStearns 11y ago
      Do you know anyone who would really prefer a new graduate to someone with 16 years (presumably successful or why the hell are they still here?)? I have about four years experience in full time development work and a BA in an unrelated field and (think I) haven't experienced or seen this ratio in action.
• argonaut 11y ago
  Let me summarize what I believe to be mostly uncontroversial. 1. All else equal, and looking at the industry as a whole, having a college degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. Things get more fuzzy if your degree is in math/physics/etc., but those still confer some advantage. 2. The advantage is very large for entry-level roles but diminishes greatly with experience. The advantage is even larger if you went to an elite school. The advantage is small if the school is mediocre, and negative if it's a diploma mill. 3. The advantage varies greatly with the company. Google definitely cares more than most startups. 4. The advantage virtually goes to 0 within a decade but never completely goes away, simply because of effects like your-interviewer-went-to-the-same-school, alumni networks, and the fact that more people irrationally care about CS degrees in senior devs than are irrationally biased against them. 5. Whether the advantage is worth the cost is a very complicated issue. This advantage is almost certainly not worth it if you have to go 100-250k in debt (private schools). The opportunity cost is also quite large, but this is complicated because what self-taught job you get depends on your own background. Coding bootcamps also complicate things. At a certain point depending on scholarships / parents paying / going to an in-state school, it makes sense.
  • danellis 11y ago
    > Google definitely cares more than a startup According to whom? Multiple Google recruiters have quite explicitly told me that they don't care that I don't have a degree.
    • grahamburger 11y ago
      I've heard the same, and yet I still don't work at Google.
      • dgacmu 11y ago
        I suspect there may be two things going on: (a) Google doesn't care about the degree per se; but: (b) Google's interview process for general SWEs tends to test relatively quick recall of algorithmic fundamentals of the sort that get hammered into you during a BS. See, for example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246917 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11246917 and https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1z97rx/from_a_googler_the_google_interview_process https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1z97rx/f... It's also quite possible that the amount of test-taking/etc. people get in undergrad helps with some forms of interview programming. Hypothesis only - don't take too seriously. I'm a computer science professor with a Ph.D., who's spending the year hacking code in C++ & Python at Google, and I can tell you with certainty that if I didn't study, there are some forms of dynamic programming or tree data structures (I can't remember the details of a red-black tree to save my life without googling it) that I'd flub in a time-pressured interview. Many of those things are problems that some programmers might never encounter in day to day life. I do a lot of data structure stuff, and I've still never implemented a red-black tree or huffman coding after undergrad. I have std::map and gzip, for crying out loud. :) (That said, one of my Ph.D. students did once, in a very specific context where we needed it tightly integrated with something. He's also one of the best programmers I've met - far better than I - so take that with a grain of salt.)
• forrestthewoods 11y ago
  "There’s a long-lived myth that Silicon Valley and the technology industry are meritocracies where all that matters is the caliber of your code." Maybe because applicants with degrees are, statistically speaking, better than those without? I've always said that getting a job takes two things: 1) Be good 2) Prove you're good A degree achieves neither. But it helps a lot. Not having a degree doesn't preclude either. But it doesn't help at all.
  • wwweston 11y ago
    By a similar philosophy, all you really need to do is this: 1) Persuade people you're good. Or, in other words, get people to believe you add value. Being able to add value doesn't achieve this by itself. But it helps a lot. Not being able to add value doesn't preclude you from doing this. But it doesn't help. (My comment is a somewhat winking... but I suspect some readers will recognize some uncomfortable truth.)
    • forrestthewoods 11y ago
      Oh sure. Some people are so good at it they can make a career out of it. Not many though. Odds are it will catch up to you. I don't understand downvotes on my initial comment. HN is such a fickle beast.
• louprado 11y ago
  I wonder what percentage of the employees in the HR departments have a college degree. My guess it is close to 100% at 100% of top companies. Even if you do get hired, HR might undermine your career and prospects for promotion if you don't have a college degree. I don't have data but I reluctantly suspect it is true. Hopefully I'll get down votes by someone who knows this isn't the case.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• jgh 11y ago
  This seems to be about job ads. Job ads almost always list a bachelor's degree as a requirement, but I don't think it's a hard and fast rule for most places.
• colordrops 11y ago
  While likelihood of being hired and the expense of college are factors in deciding whether to attend, they should definitely not be the only ones, and maybe not even a major factor in your decision. To view things this way is to take an extremely narrow view of the benefits of attending a good university. It's not for everyone, but I personally took so much more out of the experience than just a notch on my belt for getting a job.
• danso 11y ago
  I don't see the big surprise...a degree doesn't mean that you're automatically more competent, but competence -- the kind that is valuable to a company with many moving parts -- can't be measured on a single scale. Pure mastery of C and assembly may not outweigh your ability to work within and communicate in a team. A degree implicitly confers a few social milestones: - You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college. Or, you know what it's like to be responsible for paying off a large loan. - You've been thrown into a melting pot for ~4 years and have managed not to freak out and/or commit a felony. - You've been able to commit to and meet arbitrary deadlines (i.e. finals week) and goals. No, having a college degree doesn't guarantee that you're a fine upstanding person...it's just one useful metric for an employer to have when they have little else to go on.
  • Chinjut 11y ago
    > You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college. This is really a metric we want to keep significant? "We'd just feel more comfortable giving our good jobs to people from already well-off families; if you're not from one of those, tough luck..."?
    • beatpanda 11y ago
      Officially? Of course not.
    • ProAm 11y ago
      You're intentionally ignoring the second sentence of that bullet point, which completes his thought.
      • Chinjut 11y ago
        Completes it only by reinforcing how much easier things are for those from already well-off families/the extra burden placed on those who aren't...
        • 11y ago
• mgirdley 11y ago
  If you dig in with employers to understand those job listings, there's a big difference between what they ask for and what they settle for in terms of qualifications. Another significant percentage of those job listings are designed to game the H1B system as well. So, are basically fictitious.
• Swizec 11y ago
  As anecdata from personal experience: It is possible to both get a job in Silicon Valley without a degree and an O-1 visa. I'm just one data point, but I think having gone to college for a few years is the important advantage, not the degree itself. I did the former, never ended up having time for the latter. Too busy solving people's real world business problems in return for cold hard cash. But I also started coding when I was 9 and started coding for money when I was 16 and still in high school. Your mileage may vary.
• aswanson 11y ago
  I remember thinking when I graduated high school the college doesn't matter because knowledge is knowledge, so unless it's MIT who cares? How idealistically wrong. Your college affects initial conditions, and life being the chaotic system that it is, has tremendous integral effects over the trajectory. Networking, who you know, peer group...all that stuff I heard from my dad and thought was bullshit and peripheral turns out to be of ultimate consequence. Get into and associate with the most elite groups as early as your ability allows.
• ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  There's a huge elephant in the room for this: IQ testing. Companies get sued if they test for IQ and consider it in their hiring process. On the flip side, IQ is a very good predictor for job performance, especially for programming. This is a good chunk of why companies do whiteboarding - it's not going to get them sued, and it selects for cleverer people. You know what else selects for cleverer people? SAT scores. Now, companies aren't allowed to ask for SAT scores, but they are allowed to look at what college you went to. So if you know that someone attended MIT or Stanford, you get a pretty gigantic hint about what their IQ is.
  • gragas 11y ago
    Your comment about SAT scores is funny to me because I was just thinking about how untrue it is today. I was one or two questions off of a perfect score, and I'm at an extremely selective school right now. One of my friends didn't score quite as well as me, but really close (read 97th or 98th percentile) and I would not trust him with my life to write any program. We both are CS majors, granted he goes to a different school. In all honesty, I think SAT scores have less correlation with IQ and general intuition than most people believe. Sure, it's a decent way to weed people out, but it is by no means a way to find geniuses.
    • jkchu 11y ago
      To be fair, someone's inability to write a program does not mean that they cannot be a genius. Perhaps your friend has other areas of interest/talent. I would say that performance on standardized tests is a test of two things: 1) hard work and preparation and/or 2) Intelligence in the concepts or subjects being tested.
  • el_benhameen 11y ago
    I think an assertion that large (that IQ test scores correlate strongly with better job performance) needs some sources to back it up. I'm not saying they're not there, but I'd like to see them. There's a lot more to overall job performance than ability to reason about complex programming problems. As a counterpoint, a Google HR SVP says in an article referenced elsewhere in the comments [0] that they don't ask for G.P.A's and test scores anymore because they're "worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation". [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
• lkb2k 11y ago
  At one time I was a hiring manager at a largish global tech company. Not having a degree myself, and noticing that a large number of the top devs in the company also either had no degree or had degrees that were not in any way related to CS I pushed back on HR to pull the 'relevant degree' requirement from our job postings. I was told that I was welcome to recruit, interview and hire people without a college degree, but if we posted the job publicly without the requirement, we would not be able to hire any non-American programmers. The government would see the lack of a degree requirement, even for a sr dev or specialized tech position, to mean it was an entry-level position that any American could do and would deny our visa request if the person we liked best happened to be a foreigner. I don't know how real the risk is, but it is a perception in HR at big companies.
  • refurb 11y ago
    Interesting! I hadn't considered this, but it makes sense. Many of the US work visas, such as TN, H1-B and even the employment-based green card either require a college degree or give preference to a position that requires a college degree.
• sjg007 11y ago
  This is Silicon Valley. Don't have a degree, can't get a unicorn job? Start something!
• d0m 11y ago
  Someone once told me that school is such bullshit that if you can though it out for 4 whole years that means a lot about determination.. Of course real life is more nuanced but I thought it had a little bit of truth to it.
• tn13 11y ago
  You can get a CS degree for $10k in Silicon valley. No big deal.
• WalterBright 11y ago
  I've regularly seen just about every method used to pick candidates bashed here and denigrated as unfair, useless, etc.: degrees, GPAs, SATs, IQs, phone interviews, in person interviews, whiteboarding, tests, puzzles, experience, etc. Reminds me of the hoary cliché that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.
• home_boi 11y ago
  I don't think degrees matter that much. After the first internship/job, the prestige of the companies on your resume basically "becomes" your degree. I go to a mediocre school and the responses were night and day before and after getting an internship at a trendy company.
  • acosmism 11y ago
    amen.
• dj_doh 11y ago
  My undergrad advisor gave one of the best advices about why diploma is important. A college education is a social institution where you work with dozens of students, teachers and staffs across disciplines. Ideally, culminating with a diploma. That diploma doesn't tell others how good you are or you can be. It tells others that you can be part of a social institution and get some things done. Greatness is independent of school or diploma. Some of the best minds of the world never set foot in a school campus.
  • dhimes 11y ago
    This is excellent. I'm stealing it.
• dj_doh 11y ago
  Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Here the keyword Harvard dwarfs dropped out.
• memememememe 11y ago
  I've earned no less than $180k/yr in the past 6 years, as a remote developer without a degree. The only thing that matters in life is what you decide to believe is true.
  • georgefrick 11y ago
    Are you a stand alone contractor, or do you work for someone? How much experience? You'll have to excuse me for bugging you; but I have 10 years experience and I make half that.
    • memememememe 11y ago
      I'm a contractor. I started learning front end coding in late 2007, and backend software development in late 2008. I didn't get a full time backend software dev contract until 2010 and I read a LOT and started working on my own pet project to learn during that year before, etc. I negotiated hard, and even played hard to get (but also was very humble and nice - hard to get doesn't necessarily mean "you can't afford me!", etc., more like "I'm sorry. I love the team I I think I'm a great fit, but I just can't afford to accept an offer below X"), and that first contract ended up being full-time at $90/hr. That set the precedent in my mind. Once you decide something very solidly, you will find a way to make it happen. Ask for what you want, and remember, even if it's a pain in the neck and takes a long time, if you can earn double, every year is like 2 years.
• Gratsby 11y ago
  The reason isn't because everybody wants a college degree, it's because having it in the job ad opens it up to H1 visa holders, which make up a significant part of the silicon valley workforce (not just from one country, there is a crazy international contingent in the SF Bay Area). Many companies have entire departments that are made up of an H1 workforce and will favor them in hiring - which is a little odd considering that you are supposed to pay over market rate for an H1, but we all know there are ways around that (either changing the job title to a lesser paying job, using a job title that has a below market rate for the same set of duties as another title, paying the "contracting company" the higher rate, but the actual worker gets paid less, etc.). I've seen a handful of companies actually require a degree, but almost all will waive the requirement based on experience - especially for someone who is the right fit. I've seen some (or some departments) that will only hire high profile school graduates, but that kind of a thing is usually specific to a particular market.
  • theparanoid 11y ago
    It's not odd to favor H1B's. I was talking to a fellow from India yesterday. He's in Minnesota. Why? Because Symantec recently split into two, and one part went to Minnesota. He'd leave tomorrow for another job back in California but won't because he's on an H1B.
• gozur88 11y ago
  Employers use degrees as a proxy for intelligence now that it's legally perilous to give IQ tests. They don't want you because they think MIT taught you something people can't learn on their own. They want you because you were smart enough to get accepted at MIT.
• Zyst 11y ago
  How many of those enforce their requirement? I have previously applied and gotten job postings that mention they want a CS degree, in fact no one has ever made a fuss about the lack of it in my experience.
• hashkb 11y ago
  The WSJ is often out of touch with reality and this article is no exception. They collected the data from job postings and stopped investigating. If they'd done any real investigation (like, polled working developers and correlated their work history with their education) they'd realize their reporting doesn't support their (sensationalizing) headline. (I used to work at Hired; I have a decent sense of what gets noticed on an engineer's resume. And I've personally interviewed hundreds of developers.)
• pklausler 11y ago
  The best programmers with whom I've ever had the privilege to work have had their degrees in mathematics, not CS, and I think that math majors have tended to be better hires, in my experience. Physics and astronomy students can also be great.
• vvanders 11y ago
  Article is looking at job ads, not actual employment. Every job I've applied to had a degree requirement. Ive had offers from every place I've interviewed with no degree. Just because they ask for it doesn't make it a hard requirement.
• matheweis 11y ago
  I work for a university (not in SV), and the min quals for software engineers usually go something like: (Bachelors of Science degree AND three years of development experience) OR (Five years systems development experience) OR (Any equivalent combination of experience, training and/or education) In personal experience, once I hit about 10 years of experience, whether I had a degree seemed be only of passing interest to interviewers.
• nocarrier 11y ago
  The best hackers I've worked with didn't have degrees. The best software engineers did. You need both. On the hacker front, I noticed a lot of patterns--they had a lot of drive, were self-taught (obviously), and had other things about them that were remarkable. One can play any song on the piano that he's heard just once before. Another is a multiple-time CTF champion. Another is the best performance engineer I've ever met, and who can diagnose and fix site outages 10x faster than anyone else. There's a difference between hackers and engineers though. I found that the engineers were good at breaking projects into milestones and driving their teams toward them, e.g. steady state development when conditions are good. And I found that the hackers excelled at exceptional or emergency situations like debugging complicated multithreaded code on the fly or figuring out which switch in a datacenter was corrupting packets for production traffic. There were exceptions in both directions (hackers who were great technical leads and engineers who were great detectives), but this was a pretty general rule I saw over the years. I also worked with a number of people without degrees that weren't very good, so it's not like the lack of a degree makes you a hacker or makes you good at your job. You have to be very driven when you're self-taught and sometimes have to work harder than your peers who have a more evenly balanced education. I ended up being a bit of a wildcard myself--I'm a self-taught hacker and did lots of cool debugging and detective work for 14 years, and then I was a manager for 5 years. I think hackers can make interesting managers since they are willing to upend traditions and try new things with their teams. I did a lot of that.
• a0ede18d1e 11y ago
  I recently got thrust back into the job market here in Austin, and I've not gotten the response I was hoping for. I've only gotten two on site interviews, both of which ended with a No from the company in question. Even if I do get through the recruiter phase and get brought in, I'll get thrown algorithmic questions I haven't had to deal with since I left school. Even though I'm a capable dev with some team lead experience I can't help but think I am being passed over (in part) because I never finished college. I've even considered going back, but due to the length of time I've been out it seems my credits have expired (even though I'm still paying the student loans). On top of that, I left school for a reason and it hasn't changed - I hated every waking second of my life while I was there. But now I have no income and a wife and house to support. Maybe I'm just looking for a scapegoat. Everyone I talk to (outside the industry, I have only a few contacts within it) just say "Don't worry, everyone wants to hire smart nerds like you!".
  • bitshepherd 11y ago
    You're competing with UT grads and everyone else who moved to the area for tech. Not having a degree in Austin puts you at a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting recruited. I had the same problem when I lived there and I, too, do not have a degree.
    • a0ede18d1e 11y ago
      I hadn't thought of that, what with UT being right here. I was able to get hired with relocation 5 years ago. Since then I figured it'd be a good town to put down roots so I bought a house. And now here I am seemingly unable to find work. Damn. Maybe I'll have to look to other cities. I put my resume into the big corps and either got nothing or had some asinine HackerRank test that lost my progress 1:45 in and then heard nothing more.
      • bitshepherd 11y ago
        Well, you can relocate to the Bay Area, as expensive as it is. I did so, as well as a huge mob of Texans. Californians did the opposite: moved to Texas for cheaper housing/lower taxes. The upside is they pay you more to offset the cost of living. The downside is that roughly 50% of my income before rent goes to taxes, and half of that goes to rent.
• gizi 11y ago
  Well, since software engineering is a field where the government is not able to settle the matter just by slapping the obligation to have a particular degree or certification just to be admitted to the job, employers are allowed to choose. If you have an aptitude for programming, you will be better off just programming for 4 years. Going to college and reading books about programming will turn out to be only marginally useful, and actually quite costly. Instead of learning, and making quite good money, you will be digging yourself into a debt hole, while you will still need to pick up the real skills afterwards, at the expense of an ever more skeptical employer.
• doh 11y ago
  This is why many companies in Silicon Valley require a degree http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm For every year of school a person has to have a 3 years of experience to be considered for H1-B. FB hired 3k people in 2015 (http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-employees/ http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook...) of which 900 were foreigners hired thanks to H1-B.
• bootload 11y ago
  "Self-taught developers dominate technology: 69% of the developers who responded to the survey are at least partly self-taught, and fewer than half hold a formal degree in computer science." It's fascinating to read this article on SV wanting devs with degrees, then compare it to this article [0] on the annual StackOverflow developer survey. SV requires a very narrow skill set compared to the rest of the world. [0] "Two out of three developers are self-taught, and other trends from a survey of 56,033 coders" ~ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207
• throwaway3141 11y ago
  I don't understand why considering degree and reputation of the university when hiring so frowned upon ? It seems perfectly logical to me. Afterall, when you have 1000s of resume a day to sift through (not unusual for big companies like Google, etc), what criteria should you use to filter the candidates ? It's easy to fill a resume with lot of crap which is often fake or exaggerated. A degree and university reputation is a very objective measure that can used to quickly identify a potential good set of candidates, and then use actual interview to find bad apples from them. This approach optimizes toward having as few False positives as possible when hiring (False negatives on the other hand are plenty, and that's fine) - which is a stated goal of hiring for all big companies (Google, FB, etc), who are at luxury of having more candidates than they need, hence don't care much about False negatives. Is it fair to people without degrees, esp, for cases where the only reason was that they couldn't afford it (considering how damn expensive higher education is in US) ? No, of course it is not, but then who said life has to be fair ? And of all things, why should we expect for-profit (and I use that word with respect, not derision) companies to hurt themselves to "just" try and make it fair to everyone ? IMHO, education (both degree, and even more importantly the selectiveness of the university) serve as a very good proxy measure for how likely a candidate will be good. This is similar to say work-experience at a very reputable company, which is known for its selectivity. In both (university or top company) the scenarios you know that candidate had been filtered among a very large pool of candidates in past, so very likely to be bright. As an example say, you want to select a dream team to attack the "Riemann Hypothesis" problem. Will you consider a candidate's credential (like education, university they are working at) as one of the big factors, or will you be just trying to interview anyone who applies, even if they don't have any exposure to higher math ? Say you get 100k applications, and can only interview at most 100 of them, does your answer change ? I know, that I will look at credentials, past work (which all correlate insanely with education & university affiliation) as the first measure to filter things out. Of course their will be outliers, and there will be exceptional people who are very good at Math without any degree (like Ramanujan), but there is no scalable way to find them in this scenario. Similar example: What is the probability of some random dude on internet claiming he has a proof of P != NP being right vs say it coming from a reputed researcher (for the sake of argument say "Richard Karp") ? Whose proof are you going to read more carefully ? I guess the answer is obvious is this case. Now let's say it is between a random no-credential dude vs a PhD student of Richard Karp's (at Berkley) - who are you going to take more seriously ? Is it fair, probably not ? But statistically you will be much better with having these conscious & unconscious biases (backed up by data of course), then sampling uniformly from the world.
• dclowd9901 11y ago
  As someone with a journalism degree I've never had a hard time getting interviews anywhere, large, small, whatever. I think it more matters that you have a degree at all and a decent sum of experience than strictly a CS degree. For instance, I can now lean on my professional experience more where before I had to have a portfolio of projects.
• LAMike 11y ago
  Can someone tell me where I can get a B.S in Javascript?
• Myrmornis 11y ago
  Slow news day at the WSJ.
• alexc05 11y ago
  I've been developing professionally for nearly 20 years now. Though, since some of that time was as a high school teacher, it isn't all, super high end stuff, but even there was value in learning how non-programmers think about computers... (One darling example was "what do you mean by file->menu? Menus are for food" With that 20 years experience (and two non-cs bachelor's degrees) I've now managed to fail interviews at both Facebook and Amazon. While the Facebook one was (in my opinion) pretty deeply flawed, the Amazon one, the 4 hour version, gave me virtually every opportunity "get it right" and I felt like interviewers were all "on my side" In the end though, I really felt like if I'd had the full CS experience in university, I'd have had the edge I needed. Specifically there were portions of technical nomenclature that I fell short on in the object oriented design portion. "What is the word for that thing you're doing there?" and the dozens of hours spent discussing various efficiencies of search and sort algorithms would have made the extra steps in the optimization portion feel more like second nature. With all that said, I have recently been doing my research into how and where I might be able to go back to school for the stuff I've missed out on. U of T or a Waterloo masters? Perhaps Harvard extension schools? (the online version of the school which apparently real Harvard grads sneer at but still has Harvard in the name)... Or maybe there is enough in iTunes U to get what I need. Whatever I go with, after 20 years programming, I've decided that I may as well take this programming thing seriously. I suspect there is a future in it.
• madengr 11y ago
  Surprised no one has mentioned the degrees also need to be from accredited programs.
• tombert 11y ago
  I don't live in Silicon Valley, but I've found that the "requirement" for a degree is more of a suggestion than law. I don't have a degree, and I still usually apply to jobs that have that requirement. I don't always get an interview, of course, but I get them often enough to where I kind of feel like they're on the description as a formality more than anything.
• MonadQueen 11y ago
  We need people who are comfortable with the Cslculus. This is nearly non-existent in non-degrees people.
• m_-_-_d 11y ago
  Title should be "Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees. Mostly."
• spacemanmatt 11y ago
  Degrees are a form of legit experience. They aren't the only form, but I can't fault a company for short-cutting their own process by requiring a degree. I think it should be their choice, even though I disagree with it from a effective-business perspective. Personally, I might filter for someone with particular training or tool experience, and I see outsourcing your decision process to a college/university in a similar light. We can't investigate every competency, so we use proxies.
• womplord 11y ago
  TOP KEK M8
• stillsut 11y ago
  There is a larger issue here than just what recruiters at the GOOG are looking for. Historically, the difference maker between SV and Boston was the willingness of the former to take dropouts, divorced people, dreamers with gaps between jobs, and for the latter to actively filter out those people. Remember, "disruptive innovation" occurs first in the low-cost product segment before working its way up into the the more recognized and lucrative markets. Given the rapid progress going into both: - Alternative Learning Models: bootcamps, MOOC's, K-12 coding education, etc - Dev Tools: StackOverflow replacing book learning, github/npm creating code of a thousand dependencies, etc I would worry that forcing your entire company to be made of candidates of the most traditional and elite background sets you up to miss the next trend in how to profit from People->Software.
• dmansen 11y ago
  I do lots of recruiting / hiring at my job. I use a sliding scale. If you have no CS degree: have you written applications from scratch? Is your experience diverse or have you spent 5 years repeatedly writing the same Rails app? On the other side, if you do have a CS degree, have you written application code before? If not, I want to see that you can apply your CS fundamentals to practical business problems. Of course there are people without a degree who are phenomenal programmers, and people with one who can't write FizzBuzz! Is anyone arguing against this? When we're screening people we need some way of gauging your skill level. A degree is one indicator, practical experience is another.
• Bjorkbat 11y ago
  It's worth pointing out that they came to this conclusion by looking at job postings. If a company is large enough to have some HR person creating job postings, then they're going to come from this mindset that education acts as a convenient filter for separating "the wheat from the chaff". It can sound dumb as all hell, but it's the best broken solution they can come up with because it's easy to glance at a resume, see the letters "MIT" and put it in a different pile from the people who came from New Mexico State (or some other generic university in a predominantly rural area). I don't agree a degree, and I've done pretty well for myself, but it's worth pointing out that I've never applied for a formal job ad. I've relied on friends and I've relied on networking events where I showed off some cool thing I made and found out after the fact that the person I showed it off to was an influencer when it came to hiring at their company. So to sum things up, I think it's safe to say that companies hire by degrees because that process scales pretty well, whereas hiring by portfolio really doesn't. Nonetheless, if a dropout can prove themselves even modestly well, then they've got a job.