6 ms·

I know its naive but I find it really hard to understand why people value the piece of paper more than the knowledge. The good news is that you can't cheat as

by hoodoof 10y ago

I know its naive but I find it really hard to understand why people value the piece of paper more than the knowledge. The good news is that you can't cheat as a software developer. Or maybe you can? Depressing thought.

kabdib 10y ago
I just interview people. I really don't care where they went to school, or if they have a degree. If they've got the chops, that's all I care about. In a small company it's pretty easy to avoid the automatic filters of large companies, the ones that screen out applicants without degrees, or from "wrong" universities, or who have low GPAs. Most of these metrics don't seem to matter in the long run (but they are easy for HR types to apply, so they do). GPAs and such probably matter in government orgs, or places that are very strict and hierarchical. You probably want to avoid places like these anyway.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Why do you think you can assess whether they've "got the chops" in an interview better than a university can assess competency in four years?
  - kodablah 10y ago
    Because having chops in one area doesn't necessarily correlate to having them in another (i.e. student vs employee). Couple that with individual valuation and personality evaluation, and it seems foolish to accept the university's assessment. Maybe if you were hiring in groups and needed impersonal metrics it would be different.
    - superuser2 10y ago
      Why do you believe whiteboarding skills are more highly correlated with success as an employee than academic performance? Or are you referring to something other than the standard coding interview?
  - bumbledraven 10y ago
    Incentives.
  - lizardking 10y ago
    Because the university and myself are assessing different sets of competencies. They are measuring academic performance, usually in mathematics or computer science, and I am looking for people who can help my company build better software. Those two competencies aren't always strongly correlated. Thus I must assess "chops" as well as I can. Additionally, the farther out from a candidate's graduation the interview takes place, the less their GPA matters compared the work they have done since they left. If you have a great resume and come highly recommended I'm not very concerned with how well you did in your calc 2 or operating systems courses.
  - kabdib 10y ago
    Candidate A stuck it out for four years. They took all the right classes. But they didn't do much of anything else. Candidate B dropped out after three years. But they've done some quite interesting side projects, they know a bunch of languages, and stuff outside the coursework, and the courses they took were the harder ones. Generally, and for openers, 'A' is gonna struggle explaining what the heck an XOR is, while 'B' is going to toss off the answer in a couple of seconds. And their skills just keep diverging from there. I'll have confidence that 'B' will keep growing and learning, and they're going to be a handful, while 'A' is going to need to be told what to do, and that will be tiresome. This ^^^ is kind of a parody, but you can tell what I'm looking for, early on. (People with more experience, I look for significant contributions to hard problems, and I'm really interested in how people decide what to work on).
sytelus 10y ago
It's usually their rich parents who value piece of paper, not students themselves as much.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- studentrob 10y ago
  And, parents are told that their kids need this paper. Test-prep businesses, like the one mentioned in the article, tell them that in order to drum up business.
godzillabrennus 10y ago
I share your sentiment. My sibling did Dartmouth for undergrad, Harvard and MIT for graduate school. I bootstrapped and sold a handful of companies after dropping out of college. People need information to judge and trust others by. Information about ones capabilities should be verifiable by your accomplishments. At the start of a career though you have no accomplishments. Companies, especially larger more established companies with higher head counts, are often risk averse in their hiring so hey use prestigious degree programs to filter out other potential candidates.
- stvswn 10y ago
  This is absolutely true, but it's not only about being risk averse in hiring -- it's about outsourcing your selection process to the universities. If you had to find 100 young people to be the next class of analysts at your fancy consulting firm, where would you start looking? It just makes sense to go to the places where high-achieving young people congregate. There's not a better system (maybe standardized testing would work, but that doesn't solve the problem).
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    > maybe standardized testing would work, but that doesn't solve the problem What problem do you mean?
kirrent 10y ago
I have to agree with you on the piece of paper. It always confused me when friends would take easier university courses to keep their GPA higher when they could take a harder one and learn more. In the real world, people don't care about your GPA, or the piece of paper really. They care about your competency. I think you're right in that software is a field where it's hard to fake it 'til you make it. Not sure how it is in the US, but where I live it's typically students in business, accounting, marketing, and management that do the majority of the cheating. Whether that's because how those subjects are assessed makes them inherently more suitable for cheating or because language problems make essays, but not software, harder to write is difficult to say.
- superuser2 10y ago
  >They care about your competency. Grad school admissions cares about your GPA. Incidentally I found it freeing to know I wasn't going to grad school. Didn't have to run the grades/stats rat race anymore, and could do the work for the right reasons. Doing undergrad knowing you are trying to get into competitive PhD programs and doing undergrad knowing it's the end of your education are very different beasts.
kyebosh 10y ago
In my experience it has been declining in importance. In the past I'd see jobs advertised asking little more than a degree (or equiv. industry experience). Today I still see degrees listed, but often as "preferred" & always amongst a litany of other skill-based requirements. Seems to be that there's at least some commercial pressure to value the "piece of paper" less. Of course it could also be that a degree is now the de facto baseline, & the wheels just keep turning.
- rhizome 10y ago
  In the US it's illegal to require a degree for almost all postitions that people around here are concerned with. Companies always try to elide this, but bizdev, marketing, programming, sysadminning, sales, and starting a company are not classified as the kinds of skilled positions for which a diploma can be required, such as engineering, finance, architecture, law, medicine, etc. I don't know if this maps perfectly to board-certified professions (IANAHR), but there does appear to be a pattern.
  - ams6110 10y ago
    Illegal? Most employment in the US is at-will. You can hire or fire for any reason or none at all, as long as you're not selecting based on race, sex, religion, etc. Where is it illegal to require a degree in Marketing for a job in Marketing?
    - IkmoIkmo 10y ago
      There's some truth to it, I believe. There's legal notions that state you can't create arbitrary requirements. i.e. take a job where employees are on the phone with customers all day, it turns out that entrepreneurs would rather want your name to be John than Juan, Kwame or Mohammed. And given racial differences in socioeconomic standing, which create differences in educational attainment, it's easy to say a college degree is a requirement for the job, when you're really just using it as a proxy to hire a certain ethnic profile. This is just an example, I'm not claiming here it's widespread (although it wouldn't surprise me in some industries, and many blind tests have shown preferences, but that's besides the point.) Now this isn't new, so there have been court cases in the past. And they shaped a precedent which loosely states that you can't just say you need a degree for the job. You need to back that up with real data. This isn't common practice, but it's the law. So for a job where you need to do rudimentary work, there's technically quite a high burden of proof on the employer to require a degree for that. The famous case is Griggs vs Duke Power Co[0][1] There've been more cases since, it's not that hard to find. In any case, no it's not broadly illegal to ask for a degree at all. But there is precedent that unnecessary tests, e.g. a degree requirement for a telemarketing job, are indeed illegal. I wouldn't know for certain how a judge would rule on the examples given by the person you replied to, like system admin or marketing, but I suspect the notion a degree would be required would be found entirely reasonable by a judge, like syst admin or marketing. But I get his point. I've got friends who work e.g. as a credit analyst, which is a job they say they and their peers could've done at age 16 without even finishing HS, yet it's a typical job that requires a degree and that a judge would probably be convinced of that it requires a degree. [0] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/424.html http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/424.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
coredog64 10y ago
Sure you can cheat as a developer. I have had contract firm setup interviews with candidate A and then send candidate B on-site. I have interviewed candidates on the strength of a resume only to find out that someone in the building at a previous position was working with a technology. Once on the job, I have seen people pass off code from Java tutorial sites and StackOverflow as their own. Eventually, they find someone who will protect them and then they can collect pay while generating excuses and blame storming.
- 67726e 10y ago
  I have friends working for government contractors. They basically just need a warm body in a seat. Get that piece of paper and you're golden.
- 67726e 10y ago
  I have friends working for government contractors. They basically just need a warm body in a seat. Get that piece of paper and you're golden.
whamlastxmas 10y ago
I valued my degree's paper more than the content. The content was largely bullshit. Who needs to learn astronomy for a business degree? Employers don't give a shit if I know about astronomy, why should I care? It's required, however, so I took it. I did the minimum to get a 4.0 and nothing more. I think space is interesting and I read about it in my free time, but memorizing facts and figures about random things isn't really interesting. Even the relevant classes are largely bullshit. I took a marketing class where the textbook was seemingly written by a group of people who sit in a room all day making up labels for common sense concepts. As a student, I have to memorize those labels. I have to memorize the meaningless systems and charts and diagrams those people came up with. I have to memorize the names of people who did things in the field of marketing. You get my point. It was a waste of time. There was definitely useful stuff in my degree, stuff that was helpful in my actual jobs, but it was maybe 1-2% of my total undergraduate career, and I could have learned that information on my own with a few books and about a month of studying.
- IkmoIkmo 10y ago
  Wait what, you had to take astronomy in uni to get a business degree? Could you elaborate, maybe point me to the program? I've never heard of anything like this. (although I do know other ridiculous examples, don't laugh but I know people who had PE in a uni business degree. team building competencies and all that crap haha)
  - Tyr42 10y ago
    There is a requirement of 10 non-math faculty classes (out of 40 classes) to get a degree in Math here. It's not that uncommon I think.
  - whamlastxmas 10y ago
    I had to take 8 hours (two classes) of a science class with a lab. I could have done physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Astronomy was the easiest option so it's what I chose. I think most, or at least many, business schools have a requirement for this in the US.
yen223 10y ago
I don't care about a degree. But the Department of Immigration does.
redcap 10y ago
There's the story about a developer who outsourced his work to China so that he could browse reddit: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-developer-outsourced-his-work-to-china-so-he-could-surf-reddit-and-watch-cat-videos/#gref http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-de...
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  Doesn't the IRS view that if you cannot substitute labour, then you are not a contractor? http://art.mt.gov/artists/IRS_20pt_Checklist_%20Independent_Contractor.pdf http://art.mt.gov/artists/IRS_20pt_Checklist_%20Independent_... "Services rendered personally." (Couldn't find the same simple checklist on irs.gov). So it seems quite within his rights to outsource, no? Unless there's some clearance restriction or I'm just misunderstanding these guidelines?
  - studentrob 10y ago
    He FedEx'ed his rotating RSA key fob to China. The Chinese worker used it to access the company network daily for 6 months. I imagine the company could press some heavy charges if it wanted to.
studentrob 10y ago
> I know its naive but I find it really hard to understand why people value the piece of paper more than the knowledge. It's used as a filter. On paper, you look good, so you get an interview. When many applicants are "fake" degrees, industries get the impression that there simply isn't good talent out there. Employers don't have a reliable means of knowing the likelihood someone is a good engineer. Employers could try to filter based on Asian-sounding last names, but that would be illegal and cheating themselves out of candidates who actually did work hard in school.

by hoodoof 10y ago

kabdib 10y ago

I just interview people. I really don't care where they went to school, or if they have a degree. If they've got the chops, that's all I care about. In a small company it's pretty easy to avoid the automatic filters of large companies, the ones that screen out applicants without degrees, or from "wrong" universities, or who have low GPAs. Most of these metrics don't seem to matter in the long run (but they are easy for HR types to apply, so they do). GPAs and such probably matter in government orgs, or places that are very strict and hierarchical. You probably want to avoid places like these anyway.

superuser2 10y ago
Why do you think you can assess whether they've "got the chops" in an interview better than a university can assess competency in four years?
- kodablah 10y ago
  Because having chops in one area doesn't necessarily correlate to having them in another (i.e. student vs employee). Couple that with individual valuation and personality evaluation, and it seems foolish to accept the university's assessment. Maybe if you were hiring in groups and needed impersonal metrics it would be different.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    Why do you believe whiteboarding skills are more highly correlated with success as an employee than academic performance? Or are you referring to something other than the standard coding interview?
- bumbledraven 10y ago
  Incentives.
- lizardking 10y ago
  Because the university and myself are assessing different sets of competencies. They are measuring academic performance, usually in mathematics or computer science, and I am looking for people who can help my company build better software. Those two competencies aren't always strongly correlated. Thus I must assess "chops" as well as I can. Additionally, the farther out from a candidate's graduation the interview takes place, the less their GPA matters compared the work they have done since they left. If you have a great resume and come highly recommended I'm not very concerned with how well you did in your calc 2 or operating systems courses.
- kabdib 10y ago
  Candidate A stuck it out for four years. They took all the right classes. But they didn't do much of anything else. Candidate B dropped out after three years. But they've done some quite interesting side projects, they know a bunch of languages, and stuff outside the coursework, and the courses they took were the harder ones. Generally, and for openers, 'A' is gonna struggle explaining what the heck an XOR is, while 'B' is going to toss off the answer in a couple of seconds. And their skills just keep diverging from there. I'll have confidence that 'B' will keep growing and learning, and they're going to be a handful, while 'A' is going to need to be told what to do, and that will be tiresome. This ^^^ is kind of a parody, but you can tell what I'm looking for, early on. (People with more experience, I look for significant contributions to hard problems, and I'm really interested in how people decide what to work on).

sytelus 10y ago

It's usually their rich parents who value piece of paper, not students themselves as much.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
studentrob 10y ago
And, parents are told that their kids need this paper. Test-prep businesses, like the one mentioned in the article, tell them that in order to drum up business.

godzillabrennus 10y ago

I share your sentiment. My sibling did Dartmouth for undergrad, Harvard and MIT for graduate school. I bootstrapped and sold a handful of companies after dropping out of college. People need information to judge and trust others by. Information about ones capabilities should be verifiable by your accomplishments. At the start of a career though you have no accomplishments. Companies, especially larger more established companies with higher head counts, are often risk averse in their hiring so hey use prestigious degree programs to filter out other potential candidates.

stvswn 10y ago
This is absolutely true, but it's not only about being risk averse in hiring -- it's about outsourcing your selection process to the universities. If you had to find 100 young people to be the next class of analysts at your fancy consulting firm, where would you start looking? It just makes sense to go to the places where high-achieving young people congregate. There's not a better system (maybe standardized testing would work, but that doesn't solve the problem).
- thaumasiotes 10y ago
  > maybe standardized testing would work, but that doesn't solve the problem What problem do you mean?

kirrent 10y ago

I have to agree with you on the piece of paper. It always confused me when friends would take easier university courses to keep their GPA higher when they could take a harder one and learn more. In the real world, people don't care about your GPA, or the piece of paper really. They care about your competency. I think you're right in that software is a field where it's hard to fake it 'til you make it. Not sure how it is in the US, but where I live it's typically students in business, accounting, marketing, and management that do the majority of the cheating. Whether that's because how those subjects are assessed makes them inherently more suitable for cheating or because language problems make essays, but not software, harder to write is difficult to say.

superuser2 10y ago
>They care about your competency. Grad school admissions cares about your GPA. Incidentally I found it freeing to know I wasn't going to grad school. Didn't have to run the grades/stats rat race anymore, and could do the work for the right reasons. Doing undergrad knowing you are trying to get into competitive PhD programs and doing undergrad knowing it's the end of your education are very different beasts.

kyebosh 10y ago

In my experience it has been declining in importance. In the past I'd see jobs advertised asking little more than a degree (or equiv. industry experience). Today I still see degrees listed, but often as "preferred" & always amongst a litany of other skill-based requirements. Seems to be that there's at least some commercial pressure to value the "piece of paper" less. Of course it could also be that a degree is now the de facto baseline, & the wheels just keep turning.

rhizome 10y ago
In the US it's illegal to require a degree for almost all postitions that people around here are concerned with. Companies always try to elide this, but bizdev, marketing, programming, sysadminning, sales, and starting a company are not classified as the kinds of skilled positions for which a diploma can be required, such as engineering, finance, architecture, law, medicine, etc. I don't know if this maps perfectly to board-certified professions (IANAHR), but there does appear to be a pattern.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Illegal? Most employment in the US is at-will. You can hire or fire for any reason or none at all, as long as you're not selecting based on race, sex, religion, etc. Where is it illegal to require a degree in Marketing for a job in Marketing?
  - IkmoIkmo 10y ago
    There's some truth to it, I believe. There's legal notions that state you can't create arbitrary requirements. i.e. take a job where employees are on the phone with customers all day, it turns out that entrepreneurs would rather want your name to be John than Juan, Kwame or Mohammed. And given racial differences in socioeconomic standing, which create differences in educational attainment, it's easy to say a college degree is a requirement for the job, when you're really just using it as a proxy to hire a certain ethnic profile. This is just an example, I'm not claiming here it's widespread (although it wouldn't surprise me in some industries, and many blind tests have shown preferences, but that's besides the point.) Now this isn't new, so there have been court cases in the past. And they shaped a precedent which loosely states that you can't just say you need a degree for the job. You need to back that up with real data. This isn't common practice, but it's the law. So for a job where you need to do rudimentary work, there's technically quite a high burden of proof on the employer to require a degree for that. The famous case is Griggs vs Duke Power Co[0][1] There've been more cases since, it's not that hard to find. In any case, no it's not broadly illegal to ask for a degree at all. But there is precedent that unnecessary tests, e.g. a degree requirement for a telemarketing job, are indeed illegal. I wouldn't know for certain how a judge would rule on the examples given by the person you replied to, like system admin or marketing, but I suspect the notion a degree would be required would be found entirely reasonable by a judge, like syst admin or marketing. But I get his point. I've got friends who work e.g. as a credit analyst, which is a job they say they and their peers could've done at age 16 without even finishing HS, yet it's a typical job that requires a degree and that a judge would probably be convinced of that it requires a degree. [0] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/424.html http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/424.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

coredog64 10y ago

Sure you can cheat as a developer. I have had contract firm setup interviews with candidate A and then send candidate B on-site. I have interviewed candidates on the strength of a resume only to find out that someone in the building at a previous position was working with a technology. Once on the job, I have seen people pass off code from Java tutorial sites and StackOverflow as their own. Eventually, they find someone who will protect them and then they can collect pay while generating excuses and blame storming.

67726e 10y ago
I have friends working for government contractors. They basically just need a warm body in a seat. Get that piece of paper and you're golden.
67726e 10y ago
I have friends working for government contractors. They basically just need a warm body in a seat. Get that piece of paper and you're golden.

whamlastxmas 10y ago

I valued my degree's paper more than the content. The content was largely bullshit. Who needs to learn astronomy for a business degree? Employers don't give a shit if I know about astronomy, why should I care? It's required, however, so I took it. I did the minimum to get a 4.0 and nothing more. I think space is interesting and I read about it in my free time, but memorizing facts and figures about random things isn't really interesting. Even the relevant classes are largely bullshit. I took a marketing class where the textbook was seemingly written by a group of people who sit in a room all day making up labels for common sense concepts. As a student, I have to memorize those labels. I have to memorize the meaningless systems and charts and diagrams those people came up with. I have to memorize the names of people who did things in the field of marketing. You get my point. It was a waste of time. There was definitely useful stuff in my degree, stuff that was helpful in my actual jobs, but it was maybe 1-2% of my total undergraduate career, and I could have learned that information on my own with a few books and about a month of studying.

IkmoIkmo 10y ago
Wait what, you had to take astronomy in uni to get a business degree? Could you elaborate, maybe point me to the program? I've never heard of anything like this. (although I do know other ridiculous examples, don't laugh but I know people who had PE in a uni business degree. team building competencies and all that crap haha)
- Tyr42 10y ago
  There is a requirement of 10 non-math faculty classes (out of 40 classes) to get a degree in Math here. It's not that uncommon I think.
- whamlastxmas 10y ago
  I had to take 8 hours (two classes) of a science class with a lab. I could have done physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Astronomy was the easiest option so it's what I chose. I think most, or at least many, business schools have a requirement for this in the US.

yen223 10y ago

I don't care about a degree. But the Department of Immigration does.

redcap 10y ago

There's the story about a developer who outsourced his work to China so that he could browse reddit: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-developer-outsourced-his-work-to-china-so-he-could-surf-reddit-and-watch-cat-videos/#gref http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-de...

MichaelGG 10y ago
Doesn't the IRS view that if you cannot substitute labour, then you are not a contractor? http://art.mt.gov/artists/IRS_20pt_Checklist_%20Independent_Contractor.pdf http://art.mt.gov/artists/IRS_20pt_Checklist_%20Independent_... "Services rendered personally." (Couldn't find the same simple checklist on irs.gov). So it seems quite within his rights to outsource, no? Unless there's some clearance restriction or I'm just misunderstanding these guidelines?
- studentrob 10y ago
  He FedEx'ed his rotating RSA key fob to China. The Chinese worker used it to access the company network daily for 6 months. I imagine the company could press some heavy charges if it wanted to.

studentrob 10y ago

> I know its naive but I find it really hard to understand why people value the piece of paper more than the knowledge. It's used as a filter. On paper, you look good, so you get an interview. When many applicants are "fake" degrees, industries get the impression that there simply isn't good talent out there. Employers don't have a reliable means of knowing the likelihood someone is a good engineer. Employers could try to filter based on Asian-sounding last names, but that would be illegal and cheating themselves out of candidates who actually did work hard in school.