6 ms·

> 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 hav

> 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.

> 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.