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A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outsid

by tjr 16y ago

A lot of my work is on avionics software. As far as programming knowledge goes, I've learned most of what I need to do my job before college, or at least outside of college. As far as avionics goes, I've learned most of it on the job. My college education has been at best marginal with respect to the work I actually do. However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. The degree itself is valuable if you are endeavoring to work in an environment whose administrators expect you to have one. The education itself you can get on your own. Though, I personally find it helpful to be "forced" to learn some topics more deeply or broadly than I would have on my own (and this is something that I probably wouldn't have really understood until experiencing it in college).

jseliger 16y ago
However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on. PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html : But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you. Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.
- tjr 16y ago
  Sure, no doubt. Even hip big companies like Google and Apple require/recommend/suggest a college degree for technical jobs. I don't think it's a bad hiring heuristic, as completion of a college degree does suggest an amount of knowledge and perseverence to complete a goal. Really, in HN-related industries, unless you are unwaveringly committed to working for a startup or going into business for yourself, the work possibilities that would render a college degree as desireable-for-employment probably vastly outnumber work possibilities for which a degree has absolutely no use whatsoever. On the flip side, I don't think a degree should be viewed as a guaranteed ticket of entry to employment. If there's a hundred or a thousand people applying for the job, and half of them do have a college degree, you still have to stand out somehow or another. It might be as simple as having solid writing skills, or an agreeable personality at the interview. But the degree alone may not suffice.
- rsheridan6 16y ago
  If a degree is just intended to show that you're not an idiot, there could be cheaper and less time consuming ways to do that.
  - billswift 16y ago
    See Griggs Vs Duke Power. The courts essentially made less expensive means, eg testing, illegal in an attempt at "fairness".
    - rsheridan6 16y ago
      There's a legal way around that. You could set race quotas that would keep you out of court, have the test, and hire the top people from each race.
    - Daniel_Newby 16y ago
      That wasn't a court precedent, it was a legal lynching during special circumstances. Plenty of companies currently get away with using aptitude tests as part of interviewing, and this is supported by copious precedents.

by tjr 16y ago

jseliger 16y ago

However, it would have been at best very difficult for me to cut through the red tape to get the work I have without a college degree. The sorts of people who do hiring in this industry seem to really want to see that. Put yourself in the place of a hiring manager, or, better still, the person setting hiring policies for large companies. You have hundreds or thousands of people competing for jobs, sending you resumes, and the like. You only need to make one decision: hire or no hire. When you're weaning down those resumes, you're probably looking for shortcuts, and one way to get there is to filter out a college degree -- which isn't that high a bar, especially for hyper competent technical people. If you're setting hiring policies, you want to stop people from hiring their incompetent brother-in-laws or wastrel friends. And so on. PG actually wrote an essay about this kind of thing in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html : But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else. These include college admissions, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. This kind of judgement is not really about you. Anyway, this isn't an attack on the parent poster, but it is an attack of the thoughts I often see on HN and other tech sites about the lack of importance of a college degree. If you start your own company or can get others to pay you... great. But degrees are often there not only to show that you've learned and provide learning, but also as a heuristic for people who are hiring. False positives and false negatives exist, but not so much as to abrogate the usefulness of the entire system.

tjr 16y ago
Sure, no doubt. Even hip big companies like Google and Apple require/recommend/suggest a college degree for technical jobs. I don't think it's a bad hiring heuristic, as completion of a college degree does suggest an amount of knowledge and perseverence to complete a goal. Really, in HN-related industries, unless you are unwaveringly committed to working for a startup or going into business for yourself, the work possibilities that would render a college degree as desireable-for-employment probably vastly outnumber work possibilities for which a degree has absolutely no use whatsoever. On the flip side, I don't think a degree should be viewed as a guaranteed ticket of entry to employment. If there's a hundred or a thousand people applying for the job, and half of them do have a college degree, you still have to stand out somehow or another. It might be as simple as having solid writing skills, or an agreeable personality at the interview. But the degree alone may not suffice.
rsheridan6 16y ago
If a degree is just intended to show that you're not an idiot, there could be cheaper and less time consuming ways to do that.
- billswift 16y ago
  See Griggs Vs Duke Power. The courts essentially made less expensive means, eg testing, illegal in an attempt at "fairness".
  - rsheridan6 16y ago
    There's a legal way around that. You could set race quotas that would keep you out of court, have the test, and hire the top people from each race.
  - Daniel_Newby 16y ago
    That wasn't a court precedent, it was a legal lynching during special circumstances. Plenty of companies currently get away with using aptitude tests as part of interviewing, and this is supported by copious precedents.