5 ms·

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 im

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.
jypepin 11y ago
I don't have an engineering degree (I have a business degree) and never got rejected for this reason, even for junior position.
skuhn 11y ago
I have worked for more than one employer in Silicon Valley that expressly forbade me from considering candidates without bachelor degrees for my open reqs. This was over my objections, because I strongly believe a degree says nothing about a candidate's job skills. One place even went so far as to limit the acceptable majors. CS and CE only, not even EE was acceptable. Nevermind that EE is often in the same department and some people may have gone to schools without dedicated CS programs. Exceptions could only be made if the candidate was a direct referral and that person really went to bat for you. It's total nonsense. I have a CS degree myself and it hasn't informed my professional work at all. I don't find myself referring back to my databases coursework where we used a made-up non-SQL language or my operating systems class which was about punch cards and paper tape OSes (and this was in the early 2000's, not 1975!).
duaneb 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. You mostly just don't get phone screens, and this is mostly from larger companies where the HR drives the initial recruitment.
seanp2k2 11y ago
I haven't heard of that happening here, but I've heard that overseas, it's hard to even get interviews without a degree.
andywood 11y ago
I've been a dev for 17 years. I've worked at a mid-sized, a startup, and two BigCos, and can't remember anyone ever asking about my education. Hiring conversations are always overwhelmingly about projects I have done.
- to3m 11y ago
  Nobody ever asked me about my education either. So last time I made a CV, I left my degree out, because it was just taking up space... and I got asked at the interview whether I had a degree or not. They looked at me a bit funny when I said I did, but appeared to give me the benefit of the doubt, since they offered me the job (however I didn't end up taking it). Needless to say, my degree is now on my CV again, so people can go back to not asking me about it.
cmrdporcupine 11y ago
I've been in the industry since the mid-90s, and employed doing full-time software dev since 2000 (before that was sysadmin and scripting and the like). I have no degree; my undergrad was a BA in philosophy, but I never finished it. I dropped out to join the .com boom and do what I really wanted to do. (I never had the math grades to get into a CS program). There was never a good time for me to go back and get a degree, I was always either employed or broke, or had responsibilities (home, kids, etc.) that prevented me from dropping out of the workforce to do it. So as to your question; Yes, it happens routinely, in my Canadian job market. At both the junior and senior level. Many positions won't even reply if they don't see the degree on your resume. I make it explicit in interviews just to get it out there because I have had too many unpleasant situations where the degree was at first assumed and then revealed to not be there. Reactions vary. In the end I've had a successful career, but with some struggle. I work at Google now. But mostly only because I came through acquisition. I would not even be considered for an interview otherwise. I have faced some small internal attitude over not having a degree, tho only a little bit. There are other things that result; grads from CS programs spend a lot of time in algorithms course studying the kinds of things that get asked as skill testers in job interviews but then almost never used in the real world again. (Not to say I haven't studied these algorithms, but studying them in school I think helps respond in the way an interview expects.) That also affects employability. And more and more because this is the direction more and more interviews are taking.
- jasonjei 11y ago
  I think interviews are also a whole another can of worms for recruiting. Hiring a programmer isn't the same as hiring in many other professions; you're actually quizzed (university style) on textbook algorithms. Granted, there needs to be a filter. However, how many algorithms does one need to memorize to be a good programmer? Is knowing how red-black trees work going to make one successful? Or is knowing how hash tables work Under the surface going to make one successful? Or is just being able to use the Hash data structure provided in Ruby good enough?
  - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    So has something changed or was I just 'lucky' before, because for the first 10 years of my career I almost never ran into these whiteboard/skillz-tester type of interviews. And never into a "we take your life for the day and drill you with multiple teams for hours on end, oh and also you have to point us to a very illustrious github and stackoverflow portfolio." It was usually just a phone screen, an in person, a few questions to see if you were full of shit, and then call references. Ta da!
rconti 11y ago
Yeah, I wonder if they're counting job recs that say "or equivalent experience". That's what I see the most.
chipotle_coyote 11y ago
Yes. If you don't have a degree there's a good chance you won't get past the initial screening at some companies. In practice, if you get dozens of applicants for the same position you may be looking for excuses not to bring people in. And there are some companies that have a famously academia-focused culture, like Google. While most startups say that they don't care about degrees, the reality is that somebody with little experience who happens to have a CS degree from Stanford has a lot of doors open to them, especially in a place like Silicon Valley where so many founders -- and VCs -- are Stanford grads. This has happened to me more than once. Recruiter emails aren't a good measure for this; a dismaying number of recruiters only contact you based on keyword matches against your profile, and don't actually look at your resume. (Hence why I regularly get emails looking for contract Java developers in the northeast US, despite the fact that I'm a technical writer with a full time, non-contract job in Mountain View.) I suspect there's going to be more of a focus on degrees going forward, not less, simply because it seems like more and more people are going to "developer boot camps" and trying to get out on the market without a CS background. I don't have a CS background, so I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I suspect in a year or two we'll be creating more tech job seekers than tech jobs, and as the market tightens, screening will get more stringent. People with stellar track records are still going to get work, degrees or not, but people who are "merely good" may find that a degree tips things in their favor.
Futurebot 11y ago
I've never been rejected for a job because of it, but have experienced other things: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-software-developers-should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1#.29nbflvqj https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-software-developers-s... TLDR version: you may have to deal with lower salaries, less respect, lower quality organizations or departments, lots of free time catching up/keeping current, more questioning compared to degreed peers, and occasional culture shock. Not everyone deals with all/any of those, but chances are higher with no degree.
J_Darnley 11y ago
When you are met with nothing but silence how can you possibly know whether your lack of a degree is the thing they don't like.
Miserlou57 11y ago
About three years ago I was fast-tracked to interviews at Apple via recommendation. About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process. Eventually I was not given the position because 1. I did not have a degree, and 2. I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture. They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done by me, on-site. I still do it. Go figure. Edit: I am in hardware-side, not a developer.
danellis 11y ago
> have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.
danellis 11y ago
> have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.
arca_vorago 11y ago
I quit in the middle of uni to start an IT support company, and have been bouncing around in the industry since. I have never had much of an issue with a lack of degree, but thats mostly because I operate by word of mouth for jobs, and I have a fairly unique level of experience for a sysadmin. What I have seen being done though, not just to me, is companies using no degree as an excuse to underpay for a position. This usually only works with experienced people like myself. The company says, "ok, he seems like he can do the job, but he doesn't have a degree. That's good, because we can take 10-20k off the salary for the position and still get roughly the same level of work out of him." Also, if I am ever doing contract/job searching, it's usually word of mouth. If a company requires me to resubmit my resume in their wierd online portal and reenter every detail about myself in someother HR system to make it past the HR gods, I don't even bother with them. I'm guessing places like that would be more likley to weed out non-degree holders, while word of mouth/good ol boy network jobs are much more about your experience.

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.

jypepin 11y ago

I don't have an engineering degree (I have a business degree) and never got rejected for this reason, even for junior position.

skuhn 11y ago

I have worked for more than one employer in Silicon Valley that expressly forbade me from considering candidates without bachelor degrees for my open reqs. This was over my objections, because I strongly believe a degree says nothing about a candidate's job skills. One place even went so far as to limit the acceptable majors. CS and CE only, not even EE was acceptable. Nevermind that EE is often in the same department and some people may have gone to schools without dedicated CS programs. Exceptions could only be made if the candidate was a direct referral and that person really went to bat for you. It's total nonsense. I have a CS degree myself and it hasn't informed my professional work at all. I don't find myself referring back to my databases coursework where we used a made-up non-SQL language or my operating systems class which was about punch cards and paper tape OSes (and this was in the early 2000's, not 1975!).

duaneb 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. You mostly just don't get phone screens, and this is mostly from larger companies where the HR drives the initial recruitment.

seanp2k2 11y ago

I haven't heard of that happening here, but I've heard that overseas, it's hard to even get interviews without a degree.

andywood 11y ago

I've been a dev for 17 years. I've worked at a mid-sized, a startup, and two BigCos, and can't remember anyone ever asking about my education. Hiring conversations are always overwhelmingly about projects I have done.

to3m 11y ago
Nobody ever asked me about my education either. So last time I made a CV, I left my degree out, because it was just taking up space... and I got asked at the interview whether I had a degree or not. They looked at me a bit funny when I said I did, but appeared to give me the benefit of the doubt, since they offered me the job (however I didn't end up taking it). Needless to say, my degree is now on my CV again, so people can go back to not asking me about it.

cmrdporcupine 11y ago

I've been in the industry since the mid-90s, and employed doing full-time software dev since 2000 (before that was sysadmin and scripting and the like). I have no degree; my undergrad was a BA in philosophy, but I never finished it. I dropped out to join the .com boom and do what I really wanted to do. (I never had the math grades to get into a CS program). There was never a good time for me to go back and get a degree, I was always either employed or broke, or had responsibilities (home, kids, etc.) that prevented me from dropping out of the workforce to do it. So as to your question; Yes, it happens routinely, in my Canadian job market. At both the junior and senior level. Many positions won't even reply if they don't see the degree on your resume. I make it explicit in interviews just to get it out there because I have had too many unpleasant situations where the degree was at first assumed and then revealed to not be there. Reactions vary. In the end I've had a successful career, but with some struggle. I work at Google now. But mostly only because I came through acquisition. I would not even be considered for an interview otherwise. I have faced some small internal attitude over not having a degree, tho only a little bit. There are other things that result; grads from CS programs spend a lot of time in algorithms course studying the kinds of things that get asked as skill testers in job interviews but then almost never used in the real world again. (Not to say I haven't studied these algorithms, but studying them in school I think helps respond in the way an interview expects.) That also affects employability. And more and more because this is the direction more and more interviews are taking.

jasonjei 11y ago
I think interviews are also a whole another can of worms for recruiting. Hiring a programmer isn't the same as hiring in many other professions; you're actually quizzed (university style) on textbook algorithms. Granted, there needs to be a filter. However, how many algorithms does one need to memorize to be a good programmer? Is knowing how red-black trees work going to make one successful? Or is knowing how hash tables work Under the surface going to make one successful? Or is just being able to use the Hash data structure provided in Ruby good enough?
- cmrdporcupine 11y ago
  So has something changed or was I just 'lucky' before, because for the first 10 years of my career I almost never ran into these whiteboard/skillz-tester type of interviews. And never into a "we take your life for the day and drill you with multiple teams for hours on end, oh and also you have to point us to a very illustrious github and stackoverflow portfolio." It was usually just a phone screen, an in person, a few questions to see if you were full of shit, and then call references. Ta da!

rconti 11y ago

Yeah, I wonder if they're counting job recs that say "or equivalent experience". That's what I see the most.

chipotle_coyote 11y ago

Yes. If you don't have a degree there's a good chance you won't get past the initial screening at some companies. In practice, if you get dozens of applicants for the same position you may be looking for excuses not to bring people in. And there are some companies that have a famously academia-focused culture, like Google. While most startups say that they don't care about degrees, the reality is that somebody with little experience who happens to have a CS degree from Stanford has a lot of doors open to them, especially in a place like Silicon Valley where so many founders -- and VCs -- are Stanford grads. This has happened to me more than once. Recruiter emails aren't a good measure for this; a dismaying number of recruiters only contact you based on keyword matches against your profile, and don't actually look at your resume. (Hence why I regularly get emails looking for contract Java developers in the northeast US, despite the fact that I'm a technical writer with a full time, non-contract job in Mountain View.) I suspect there's going to be more of a focus on degrees going forward, not less, simply because it seems like more and more people are going to "developer boot camps" and trying to get out on the market without a CS background. I don't have a CS background, so I don't want to say that's necessarily a bad thing, but I suspect in a year or two we'll be creating more tech job seekers than tech jobs, and as the market tightens, screening will get more stringent. People with stellar track records are still going to get work, degrees or not, but people who are "merely good" may find that a degree tips things in their favor.

Futurebot 11y ago

I've never been rejected for a job because of it, but have experienced other things: https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-software-developers-should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-paying-45091d22acc1#.29nbflvqj https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-software-developers-s... TLDR version: you may have to deal with lower salaries, less respect, lower quality organizations or departments, lots of free time catching up/keeping current, more questioning compared to degreed peers, and occasional culture shock. Not everyone deals with all/any of those, but chances are higher with no degree.

J_Darnley 11y ago

When you are met with nothing but silence how can you possibly know whether your lack of a degree is the thing they don't like.

Miserlou57 11y ago

About three years ago I was fast-tracked to interviews at Apple via recommendation. About 9 interviews later over 4 spread-out days, I was told I had done quite well during the interview process. Eventually I was not given the position because 1. I did not have a degree, and 2. I was holding a beer in my LinkedIn picture. They ended up paying my current employer (their vendor at the time) astronomical amounts of money to do the very same service, done by me, on-site. I still do it. Go figure. Edit: I am in hardware-side, not a developer.

danellis 11y ago

> have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.

danellis 11y ago

> have you ever been rejected from not having a degree? No, never. Not even for jobs that listed a degree as a requirement.

arca_vorago 11y ago

I quit in the middle of uni to start an IT support company, and have been bouncing around in the industry since. I have never had much of an issue with a lack of degree, but thats mostly because I operate by word of mouth for jobs, and I have a fairly unique level of experience for a sysadmin. What I have seen being done though, not just to me, is companies using no degree as an excuse to underpay for a position. This usually only works with experienced people like myself. The company says, "ok, he seems like he can do the job, but he doesn't have a degree. That's good, because we can take 10-20k off the salary for the position and still get roughly the same level of work out of him." Also, if I am ever doing contract/job searching, it's usually word of mouth. If a company requires me to resubmit my resume in their wierd online portal and reenter every detail about myself in someother HR system to make it past the HR gods, I don't even bother with them. I'm guessing places like that would be more likley to weed out non-degree holders, while word of mouth/good ol boy network jobs are much more about your experience.