12 ms·

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 ad

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.)
    - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
      As a person without a CS degree who somehow works at Google, I'd have to say: 1. I work in an office where almost everyone went to the same university, which is in the same town as the office. Recruitment of grads from that university is a high priority. 2. Like you said, the interview process does bias towards things emphasized in CS programs. Recent exposure to algorithms courses would definitely help. 3. The culture within Google itself feels very much like a university culture. Perf (promo through 'demonstrating impact' and basically being in a lot of design docs and PRDs, rigorous and extensive peer review, committees evaluating people's work almost like a thesis defense), etc. To me at least. 4. I've never been on hiring committee but I do get the impression that degree will be considered. Even if not for hire, but for determining the hiring level the person is slotted into. I can't say that for sure, tho. Anyways, although I have been here 4 1/2 years I do feel like an outsider, and I feel a lot of this is being sans-degree.
      - brazzledazzle 11y ago
        Just curious, but would it be their Madison or Waterloo office?
      - whitenoice 11y ago
        Yeah in pittsburgh, google hires heavily from CMU, when I was in grad school I was surprised to see so many undergrads with internship experience at google.
- gareim 11y ago
  According to Laszlo Bock, Google checks GPA and transcripts for people a few years out of school.
- jlees 11y ago
  When I was resume screening at Google, we cared about school in terms of interpreting GPA, since 4.0 isn't equal everywhere -- and we got a LOT of resumes. Once the person got to interview stage, the school was irrelevant beyond the name-brand factor it may have had with a specific interviewer.
- jerdfelt 11y ago
  I have previously received an offer from Google and was low balled quite a bit. When pressed on this, they pointed to my lack of degree. So I got a job offer from them without a degree, but they certainly did care.
  - Negative1 11y ago
    You're generalizing; just because one recruiter used this as a lame excuse does not equate it to being policy at a company of hundreds (thousands?) of recruiters.
    - jerdfelt 11y ago
      This was from the manager I would have been working for. Like any large organization, there are exceptions and he could be the exception rather than the rule. From my perspective, "Google" cared about degrees.
  - puranjay 11y ago
    Is it a lack of a degree or a lack of a relevant degree? Like, if you had a BA in History but were a very competent programmer, would your lack of a STEM degree be held against you as much?
    - jerdfelt 11y ago
      I do not have any degree, relevant or not. Obviously they were happy with my competency since I was offered a job, they just took the path where they used my lack of degree as a negotiating tactic. Turns out there are plenty of other places that don't care about degrees and offer more money, so I accepted a job somewhere else. It was an easy decision at the time.
- moistgorilla 11y ago
  While somewhat unrelated considering that for new grads google forces them to submit a transcript. I woudln't be surprised if they cared about degrees over experience.
- 1a2a3a4a5a 11y ago
  There was definitely special treatment for MIT grads when I was interviewing at FB/Google. At FB, all of the MIT students were split off to go to the paid sushi restaurant on campus, while everyone else went to the general cafeteria. At Google, I was told that MIT grads generally skip the phone interview and go straight to onsite (and this was the case for my interview with them too). I'm not sure how big the difference is, but they weren't school-blind.
  - hga 11y ago
    MIT (and even more so for CalTech, but they don't have a world class CS program) has substantial math and science requirements that are not part of the required ABET CS curriculum. Per e.g. http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CAC-Criteria-03-10-15.pdf http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CA... One year of science and mathematics: 1. Mathematics: At least one half year that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic. [CS] 2. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some exposure to laboratory work. [CS] The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals, now it's robotics and communications). So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is guaranteed to have more scientific and mathematical maturity than the generic CS degree holder from another school. It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with lots of both). It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly. NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, the raw odds if MIT judges you can do the work are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been published if not for later realized reagent contamination. Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the department.
- daveFNbuck 11y ago
  Recruiters will say anything to keep your candidacy moving forward.
- huehehue 11y ago
  That's curious. It might depend on the recruiter/role, but I had a recruiter reach out and then ghost me after the whole "When do you graduate?" -- "Oh, I withdrew a couple of years ago" bit.
  - 67726e 11y ago
    It probably does depend. I just did a phone interview with Google. My lack of degree didn't bother the recruiter at all.
- aburan28 11y ago
  There is a big difference between the way Google postures it's atittude towards the developer community and the way they actually go about things. Of course Google wants developers to think that they don't care about degrees and such but at the end of the day most of the people they hire have degrees. Those prospective employees that had no degree and failed the interview process go about thinking and preaching that Google gives everyone a fair shot when in reality its just not true for those w/o a degree
- jmaley 11y ago
  Here's my experience with Google in 2014: At the beginning of my senior year in college, I sent them a resume containing my GPA (3.9/4.0) at a public school (Clemson). I heard back from Google within a couple weeks, had a few phone interviews, and then they flew me out for an on-site interview. I had friends with similar credentials, but lower GPAs (< 3.5/4.0) that never heard back from Google. Having a degree or high GPA doesn't matter to them once you're interviewing, but its tough to even get an interview without one.
  - pc86 11y ago
    Which is for the most part the entirety of a degree's usefulness beyond the first year or two of employment. It's a signal, and it allows a company to easily take a stack of 250 resumes for a single position and cut it down to 80 without a significant hit to the skill distribution. Some of the best are likely eliminated, but most of the worst are as well. My sub-3.0 GPA for a humanities degree a decade ago has no bearing on my skill as a programmer, but it almost certainly means I won't be working for Google or Facebook.
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
You're neglecting the time-value of money for number 5: four years of your life is a long time, especially with developer salaries. Even two years is roughly ~$100k worth of lost salary above and beyond your increased living expenses.
- madengr 11y ago
  Sure, but you are assuming an 18 YO has the skills of a 22 YO CS grad. Sometimes, but usually not.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    It doesn't matter. If they are half as good and get half the pay, then by 22 they have 4 years of exp, and 2 years of salary, vs. no exp, and 4 years of debt. I lucked out and happened to turn 23 the year the property boom started, my degree would have cost me over $500K in lost opportunities and cost. In my case I started out in tech support, and had to find my way into dev.
    - beambot 11y ago
      A lot of assumptions in there: comparing apples to apples (that the 18 YO has same skills as 22 YO w/ CS degree), that they went into debt for school, that they didn't work during school, that they didn't get experience from internships, etc. It's definitely not "opportunity costs win every time."
      - manyxcxi 11y ago
        Anecdotally, I went to a state school with decent computer engineering and CS programs, got all kinds of experience getting paid to write code for different groups throughout the university, met a few professors and like minded individuals in classes who wound up throwing more work my way throughout my entire career, and was 'only' $45k in debt. My first job out of school paid me $60k/yr (2006) and I was over $100k in three. I learned a lot in my CpE and CS classes, but I gained a ton of experience at market rate I never would've gotten as an 18 year old know it all. Not really related but even though I've spent most of my career using my CS teachings, the EE learning that was part of my CpE studies sure has come in handy with the IoT explosion. I knew next to nothing about electrical engineering when I entered university. Had I not gone I wouldn't have known how much I like electronics and robotics.
aantix 11y ago
Regarding #1; I'm curious as to how old you are? I'm wondering if the worth of the degree is relative to the age of the audience evaluating it? I've consulted at a lot of startups in the Bay Area as a Rails engineer, and we've mostly leaned on doing a series of hands on coding exercises (e.g. Let's develop a simple TODO list in Rails). I've probably done a couple hundred interviews, and the topic of where the candidate went to school was discussed in depth once. And that was only because he was an MIT graduate, looking for a senior role position, and missed some basic model associations in our exercises. I just can't see any of my colleagues saying out loud "yeah, this kid went to Berkeley, so he must be a winner. Let's go with him."
- argonaut 11y ago
  This is consistent with my comment. I'm sure most Rails startups don't care as much. But 1) startups, and 2) Rails, only form a small fraction of the industry. I'm sure things are different at Google, Facebook, and infra/system/research/algorithm teams. Also, the big companies have massive university recruiting programs.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    Big companies (usually!) have an HR problem. HR do the recruiting, and have to fit the recruit into a company-wide HR policy pay-and-benefits grading structure. That structure takes account of education. HR also know nothing about tech (and are usually bizarrely proud of it). So they need the tech people recruiting to lay out a range of specific qualifications or experience that the recruit needs, so they can easily reduce the huge pile of CVs down to something more manageable. The combination results in a degree being required, and CV's with no degree never even make it to a review stage. It sucks, because often the best programmers are not degree-qualified. But large organisations aren't actually a meritocracy, or concerned with hiring the best people. They want the people who will fit into the large organisation and its bureaucracy nicely. A degree usually indicates at least some respect for authority, so actually it's a good qualifier.
    - mahyarm 11y ago
taneq 11y ago
Re #4, the direct advantage may go to 0 but the indirect advantage remains that those first few jobs were much easier to get due to your degree. Your first couple of jobs are the most difficult to score. After that, you can rely more on contacts and your reputation.
moxie 11y ago
> All else equal...having a college degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. I don't think this is uncontroversial. I've done hundreds of interviews at companies large and small, and nobody else has ever brought up the education section of someone's resume in discussion. I look at it occasionally, but my hiring preference is inversely correlated to the amount of education a candidate has. PhDs go directly to the bottom of the pile, then masters, then undergrad, and no school is on top.
- cerrelio 11y ago
  Since my little sister can now put together an MVC app in 30 minutes with no knowledge of threads, big-O or sorting algorithms, I'd say education matters little for junior devs working on run-of-the-mill flavor-of-the-week apps. However, for more specialized types of systems, I'd require formal education, even going far enough to require topic-specific coursework to ensure depth of knowledge. A team at my company is being led by a guy with a BS in CS, but he doesn't have the background in the type of system he's building. The project has been a source of pain for management for the past few quarters; it's stagnating because he's come upon difficult issues that would be avoided had he had a more comprehensive education. Education is crucial for designing and developing interesting software (i.e. anything that doesn't query a database and pretty print results). Dismissing it altogether can limit the types of systems your team can develop, and limits the career potential of your employees/coworkers.
  - marcus_holmes 11y ago
    > he's come upon difficult issues that would be avoided had he had more experience. FTFY
    - cerrelio 11y ago
      He's in his early 40s and has two decades of development experience. Experience is not the issue. The issue is his lack of machine learning knowledge. His dodgy, non-working, memory-hoggy misimplementation of A* search on a problem space of size > 10^20 demonstrates that very pointedly. Also, his general experience should teach him that if he knows nothing about a topic then he should do his homework. He doesn't. Education is key. He sure can build a great ecommerce system in Rails though.
ChuckMcM 11y ago
I think that mostly calls it, although the advantage for "elite private" vs "state school" is not as large as you might think. And you could add; 6. When the market is saturated with programmers looking to be hired, those with degrees (at all levels) are hired before those without degrees. If the current slow down in funding results in a lot of layoffs, it could create a 'bump' where a lot of programmers are competing for a relatively small number of jobs. And in that situation a degree would be helpful.
Dr_tldr 11y ago
A further problem of assessing value is that the analysis is taking the job postings as an accurate reflection of who actually ends up getting the role. Pretty much every developer who doesn't get their first job through an internship ends up taking a job that had 2-3 years of experience listed as the minimum requirement, but we would know an article titled "junior developers need not apply" is questionable.
kabdib 11y ago
[I read a LOT of resumes. Been programming professionally since the early 80s] If I see someone who's done interesting things, then realize they don't have a degree, that is a plus, and I'm interested in them. But generally, if they've got 10+ years experience, I never even look at the education history. It doesn't matter.
donatj 11y ago
#2 makes me sad. I went to a for profit school widely regarded as a diploma mill, and received an excellent education that I feel truly prepared me more for the real world than many of the CS graduates I've worked with in the ten years since graduation. Remarkably small class sizes meant a ton of one on one time with teachers whom had worked in the industry for years before going into teaching. All the students were there to LEARN, many of them non-traditional students. They never could escape the negative stigma and went out of business last year. I imagine I'm doomed to the same stigma.
- frankc 11y ago
  No can take away the value of the education. It's only the credential that lacks value. There is no requirement that you list it on your resume.
- JayBlanton 11y ago
  Could you share the name of your school?
OpenDrapery 11y ago
I know there has always been a stigma attached to diploma mills. People that have gone to "real universities" will always enjoy looking down on those that went to "fake universities". With the new wave of coding bootcamps, I would expect the same disdain. In fact, I would expect bootcamp to rate below diploma mill, but I'm not sure that's the case.
ots 11y ago
There is a fix for #5; get a foreign degree. The college education at most European universities is free or almost free. Hey, at some of them they pay you to study. :) They are not as highly regarded as the private US universities, but there are two dozen European universities in the world top 100. I hear more and more people saying they want to send their kids to study in Europe instead of paying hundreds of thousands for private school here. The curriculum for CS and many other STEM is more or less the same everywhere.

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.)
  - cmrdporcupine 11y ago
    As a person without a CS degree who somehow works at Google, I'd have to say: 1. I work in an office where almost everyone went to the same university, which is in the same town as the office. Recruitment of grads from that university is a high priority. 2. Like you said, the interview process does bias towards things emphasized in CS programs. Recent exposure to algorithms courses would definitely help. 3. The culture within Google itself feels very much like a university culture. Perf (promo through 'demonstrating impact' and basically being in a lot of design docs and PRDs, rigorous and extensive peer review, committees evaluating people's work almost like a thesis defense), etc. To me at least. 4. I've never been on hiring committee but I do get the impression that degree will be considered. Even if not for hire, but for determining the hiring level the person is slotted into. I can't say that for sure, tho. Anyways, although I have been here 4 1/2 years I do feel like an outsider, and I feel a lot of this is being sans-degree.
    - brazzledazzle 11y ago
      Just curious, but would it be their Madison or Waterloo office?
    - whitenoice 11y ago
      Yeah in pittsburgh, google hires heavily from CMU, when I was in grad school I was surprised to see so many undergrads with internship experience at google.
gareim 11y ago
According to Laszlo Bock, Google checks GPA and transcripts for people a few years out of school.
jlees 11y ago
When I was resume screening at Google, we cared about school in terms of interpreting GPA, since 4.0 isn't equal everywhere -- and we got a LOT of resumes. Once the person got to interview stage, the school was irrelevant beyond the name-brand factor it may have had with a specific interviewer.
jerdfelt 11y ago
I have previously received an offer from Google and was low balled quite a bit. When pressed on this, they pointed to my lack of degree. So I got a job offer from them without a degree, but they certainly did care.
- Negative1 11y ago
  You're generalizing; just because one recruiter used this as a lame excuse does not equate it to being policy at a company of hundreds (thousands?) of recruiters.
  - jerdfelt 11y ago
    This was from the manager I would have been working for. Like any large organization, there are exceptions and he could be the exception rather than the rule. From my perspective, "Google" cared about degrees.
- puranjay 11y ago
  Is it a lack of a degree or a lack of a relevant degree? Like, if you had a BA in History but were a very competent programmer, would your lack of a STEM degree be held against you as much?
  - jerdfelt 11y ago
    I do not have any degree, relevant or not. Obviously they were happy with my competency since I was offered a job, they just took the path where they used my lack of degree as a negotiating tactic. Turns out there are plenty of other places that don't care about degrees and offer more money, so I accepted a job somewhere else. It was an easy decision at the time.
moistgorilla 11y ago
While somewhat unrelated considering that for new grads google forces them to submit a transcript. I woudln't be surprised if they cared about degrees over experience.
1a2a3a4a5a 11y ago
There was definitely special treatment for MIT grads when I was interviewing at FB/Google. At FB, all of the MIT students were split off to go to the paid sushi restaurant on campus, while everyone else went to the general cafeteria. At Google, I was told that MIT grads generally skip the phone interview and go straight to onsite (and this was the case for my interview with them too). I'm not sure how big the difference is, but they weren't school-blind.
- hga 11y ago
  MIT (and even more so for CalTech, but they don't have a world class CS program) has substantial math and science requirements that are not part of the required ABET CS curriculum. Per e.g. http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CAC-Criteria-03-10-15.pdf http://www.abet.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CA... One year of science and mathematics: 1. Mathematics: At least one half year that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic. [CS] 2. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some exposure to laboratory work. [CS] The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals, now it's robotics and communications). So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is guaranteed to have more scientific and mathematical maturity than the generic CS degree holder from another school. It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with lots of both). It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly. NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, the raw odds if MIT judges you can do the work are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been published if not for later realized reagent contamination. Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the department.
daveFNbuck 11y ago
Recruiters will say anything to keep your candidacy moving forward.
huehehue 11y ago
That's curious. It might depend on the recruiter/role, but I had a recruiter reach out and then ghost me after the whole "When do you graduate?" -- "Oh, I withdrew a couple of years ago" bit.
- 67726e 11y ago
  It probably does depend. I just did a phone interview with Google. My lack of degree didn't bother the recruiter at all.
aburan28 11y ago
There is a big difference between the way Google postures it's atittude towards the developer community and the way they actually go about things. Of course Google wants developers to think that they don't care about degrees and such but at the end of the day most of the people they hire have degrees. Those prospective employees that had no degree and failed the interview process go about thinking and preaching that Google gives everyone a fair shot when in reality its just not true for those w/o a degree
jmaley 11y ago
Here's my experience with Google in 2014: At the beginning of my senior year in college, I sent them a resume containing my GPA (3.9/4.0) at a public school (Clemson). I heard back from Google within a couple weeks, had a few phone interviews, and then they flew me out for an on-site interview. I had friends with similar credentials, but lower GPAs (< 3.5/4.0) that never heard back from Google. Having a degree or high GPA doesn't matter to them once you're interviewing, but its tough to even get an interview without one.
- pc86 11y ago
  Which is for the most part the entirety of a degree's usefulness beyond the first year or two of employment. It's a signal, and it allows a company to easily take a stack of 250 resumes for a single position and cut it down to 80 without a significant hit to the skill distribution. Some of the best are likely eliminated, but most of the worst are as well. My sub-3.0 GPA for a humanities degree a decade ago has no bearing on my skill as a programmer, but it almost certainly means I won't be working for Google or Facebook.

ThrustVectoring 11y ago

You're neglecting the time-value of money for number 5: four years of your life is a long time, especially with developer salaries. Even two years is roughly ~$100k worth of lost salary above and beyond your increased living expenses.

madengr 11y ago
Sure, but you are assuming an 18 YO has the skills of a 22 YO CS grad. Sometimes, but usually not.
- fleitz 11y ago
  It doesn't matter. If they are half as good and get half the pay, then by 22 they have 4 years of exp, and 2 years of salary, vs. no exp, and 4 years of debt. I lucked out and happened to turn 23 the year the property boom started, my degree would have cost me over $500K in lost opportunities and cost. In my case I started out in tech support, and had to find my way into dev.
  - beambot 11y ago
    A lot of assumptions in there: comparing apples to apples (that the 18 YO has same skills as 22 YO w/ CS degree), that they went into debt for school, that they didn't work during school, that they didn't get experience from internships, etc. It's definitely not "opportunity costs win every time."
    - manyxcxi 11y ago
      Anecdotally, I went to a state school with decent computer engineering and CS programs, got all kinds of experience getting paid to write code for different groups throughout the university, met a few professors and like minded individuals in classes who wound up throwing more work my way throughout my entire career, and was 'only' $45k in debt. My first job out of school paid me $60k/yr (2006) and I was over $100k in three. I learned a lot in my CpE and CS classes, but I gained a ton of experience at market rate I never would've gotten as an 18 year old know it all. Not really related but even though I've spent most of my career using my CS teachings, the EE learning that was part of my CpE studies sure has come in handy with the IoT explosion. I knew next to nothing about electrical engineering when I entered university. Had I not gone I wouldn't have known how much I like electronics and robotics.

aantix 11y ago

Regarding #1; I'm curious as to how old you are? I'm wondering if the worth of the degree is relative to the age of the audience evaluating it? I've consulted at a lot of startups in the Bay Area as a Rails engineer, and we've mostly leaned on doing a series of hands on coding exercises (e.g. Let's develop a simple TODO list in Rails). I've probably done a couple hundred interviews, and the topic of where the candidate went to school was discussed in depth once. And that was only because he was an MIT graduate, looking for a senior role position, and missed some basic model associations in our exercises. I just can't see any of my colleagues saying out loud "yeah, this kid went to Berkeley, so he must be a winner. Let's go with him."

argonaut 11y ago
This is consistent with my comment. I'm sure most Rails startups don't care as much. But 1) startups, and 2) Rails, only form a small fraction of the industry. I'm sure things are different at Google, Facebook, and infra/system/research/algorithm teams. Also, the big companies have massive university recruiting programs.
- marcus_holmes 11y ago
  Big companies (usually!) have an HR problem. HR do the recruiting, and have to fit the recruit into a company-wide HR policy pay-and-benefits grading structure. That structure takes account of education. HR also know nothing about tech (and are usually bizarrely proud of it). So they need the tech people recruiting to lay out a range of specific qualifications or experience that the recruit needs, so they can easily reduce the huge pile of CVs down to something more manageable. The combination results in a degree being required, and CV's with no degree never even make it to a review stage. It sucks, because often the best programmers are not degree-qualified. But large organisations aren't actually a meritocracy, or concerned with hiring the best people. They want the people who will fit into the large organisation and its bureaucracy nicely. A degree usually indicates at least some respect for authority, so actually it's a good qualifier.
  - mahyarm 11y ago

taneq 11y ago

Re #4, the direct advantage may go to 0 but the indirect advantage remains that those first few jobs were much easier to get due to your degree. Your first couple of jobs are the most difficult to score. After that, you can rely more on contacts and your reputation.

moxie 11y ago

> All else equal...having a college degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. I don't think this is uncontroversial. I've done hundreds of interviews at companies large and small, and nobody else has ever brought up the education section of someone's resume in discussion. I look at it occasionally, but my hiring preference is inversely correlated to the amount of education a candidate has. PhDs go directly to the bottom of the pile, then masters, then undergrad, and no school is on top.

cerrelio 11y ago
Since my little sister can now put together an MVC app in 30 minutes with no knowledge of threads, big-O or sorting algorithms, I'd say education matters little for junior devs working on run-of-the-mill flavor-of-the-week apps. However, for more specialized types of systems, I'd require formal education, even going far enough to require topic-specific coursework to ensure depth of knowledge. A team at my company is being led by a guy with a BS in CS, but he doesn't have the background in the type of system he's building. The project has been a source of pain for management for the past few quarters; it's stagnating because he's come upon difficult issues that would be avoided had he had a more comprehensive education. Education is crucial for designing and developing interesting software (i.e. anything that doesn't query a database and pretty print results). Dismissing it altogether can limit the types of systems your team can develop, and limits the career potential of your employees/coworkers.
- marcus_holmes 11y ago
  > he's come upon difficult issues that would be avoided had he had more experience. FTFY
  - cerrelio 11y ago
    He's in his early 40s and has two decades of development experience. Experience is not the issue. The issue is his lack of machine learning knowledge. His dodgy, non-working, memory-hoggy misimplementation of A* search on a problem space of size > 10^20 demonstrates that very pointedly. Also, his general experience should teach him that if he knows nothing about a topic then he should do his homework. He doesn't. Education is key. He sure can build a great ecommerce system in Rails though.

ChuckMcM 11y ago

I think that mostly calls it, although the advantage for "elite private" vs "state school" is not as large as you might think. And you could add; 6. When the market is saturated with programmers looking to be hired, those with degrees (at all levels) are hired before those without degrees. If the current slow down in funding results in a lot of layoffs, it could create a 'bump' where a lot of programmers are competing for a relatively small number of jobs. And in that situation a degree would be helpful.

Dr_tldr 11y ago

A further problem of assessing value is that the analysis is taking the job postings as an accurate reflection of who actually ends up getting the role. Pretty much every developer who doesn't get their first job through an internship ends up taking a job that had 2-3 years of experience listed as the minimum requirement, but we would know an article titled "junior developers need not apply" is questionable.

kabdib 11y ago

[I read a LOT of resumes. Been programming professionally since the early 80s] If I see someone who's done interesting things, then realize they don't have a degree, that is a plus, and I'm interested in them. But generally, if they've got 10+ years experience, I never even look at the education history. It doesn't matter.

donatj 11y ago

#2 makes me sad. I went to a for profit school widely regarded as a diploma mill, and received an excellent education that I feel truly prepared me more for the real world than many of the CS graduates I've worked with in the ten years since graduation. Remarkably small class sizes meant a ton of one on one time with teachers whom had worked in the industry for years before going into teaching. All the students were there to LEARN, many of them non-traditional students. They never could escape the negative stigma and went out of business last year. I imagine I'm doomed to the same stigma.

frankc 11y ago
No can take away the value of the education. It's only the credential that lacks value. There is no requirement that you list it on your resume.
JayBlanton 11y ago
Could you share the name of your school?

OpenDrapery 11y ago

I know there has always been a stigma attached to diploma mills. People that have gone to "real universities" will always enjoy looking down on those that went to "fake universities". With the new wave of coding bootcamps, I would expect the same disdain. In fact, I would expect bootcamp to rate below diploma mill, but I'm not sure that's the case.

ots 11y ago

There is a fix for #5; get a foreign degree. The college education at most European universities is free or almost free. Hey, at some of them they pay you to study. :) They are not as highly regarded as the private US universities, but there are two dozen European universities in the world top 100. I hear more and more people saying they want to send their kids to study in Europe instead of paying hundreds of thousands for private school here. The curriculum for CS and many other STEM is more or less the same everywhere.