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I've interviewed somewhere around 200 people at this point and from my perspective, the degree, university or GPA have had no correlation with how well the cand

I've interviewed somewhere around 200 people at this point and from my perspective, the degree, university or GPA have had no correlation with how well the candidate does. Now, I interview for Ops roles and not software engineering, so this might not apply across the board for other roles, but I have my doubts.

smnscu 10y ago
It'd be interesting to correlate not just credentials to interview performance, but credentials, interview performance, and actual job performance. There is however the challenge that for the third aspect you can only assess the people that passed the interview and accepted the offer.
deleted 10y ago
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jdubs 10y ago
Ops is a pure experience job. A degree will never reflect how good an ops person is.
- riskable 10y ago
  This is a fair point but isn't software development (in general) trending towards this same reality? Consider a job where the plan is to write a straightforward web application that runs inside a custom-built Docker container. What sorts of skills are more important? Someone with a CS degree but little experience is going to have a hell of a time writing a Dockerfile and the scripts necessary to safely and securely deploy their application. They may be great at writing web applications but "that's not the hard part." The hard part is getting the architecture right so that the app will stay up despite being deployed, rebuilt, and re-deployed constantly. Someone who's self-taught probably picked up Linux experience along the way (because how else are you going to teach yourself web development these days?) and probably has experience with things like AWS and the realities of hosting a web application (as opposed to just writing a web application). They will have had to setup their own development environments, do their own Linux installs, and probably got used to figuring things out on their own. The way I see it computer science is science. The point of a CS degree is to give someone a career path as a scientist. These are the sorts of people that should be figuring out the next great algorithm (for whatever), finding uses for quantum computing, and finding solutions to similar fundamental problems. Software development isn't computer science. It's like the difference between the structural engineers that invented that hurricane-proof nail and the architects that decided to use it in their build.

smnscu 10y ago

It'd be interesting to correlate not just credentials to interview performance, but credentials, interview performance, and actual job performance. There is however the challenge that for the third aspect you can only assess the people that passed the interview and accepted the offer.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jdubs 10y ago

Ops is a pure experience job. A degree will never reflect how good an ops person is.

riskable 10y ago
This is a fair point but isn't software development (in general) trending towards this same reality? Consider a job where the plan is to write a straightforward web application that runs inside a custom-built Docker container. What sorts of skills are more important? Someone with a CS degree but little experience is going to have a hell of a time writing a Dockerfile and the scripts necessary to safely and securely deploy their application. They may be great at writing web applications but "that's not the hard part." The hard part is getting the architecture right so that the app will stay up despite being deployed, rebuilt, and re-deployed constantly. Someone who's self-taught probably picked up Linux experience along the way (because how else are you going to teach yourself web development these days?) and probably has experience with things like AWS and the realities of hosting a web application (as opposed to just writing a web application). They will have had to setup their own development environments, do their own Linux installs, and probably got used to figuring things out on their own. The way I see it computer science is science. The point of a CS degree is to give someone a career path as a scientist. These are the sorts of people that should be figuring out the next great algorithm (for whatever), finding uses for quantum computing, and finding solutions to similar fundamental problems. Software development isn't computer science. It's like the difference between the structural engineers that invented that hurricane-proof nail and the architects that decided to use it in their build.