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This guy should not be down voted. For better or worse, College is the new high-school. Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy fil

This guy should not be down voted. For better or worse, College is the new high-school. Of course a degree in of itself won't get you far but it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. There are also other opportunities inside college (internships, friends, learning difficult concepts) that you realistically aren't going to find outside. The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with? Retail/Sales, Warehouse work, Construction, Odd-jobs, Uber That's the reality.

gagege 9y ago
> it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.
- icelancer 9y ago
  >It won't get that bad in our lifetimes I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well). There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.
icelancer 9y ago
>The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with? Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall? People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there). More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.
- rockinghigh 9y ago
  I also hire engineers and don't care about education. However, what you call networking is often bootstrapped by education and previous work experience. Very few people have "an impressive Github" out of high school that will actually impress good tech companies. However, if you have a bachelor from an average university, you will at least get some phone interviews.

gagege 9y ago

> it's an easy filter that many companies use to quickly weed out candidates. That's going to have diminishing returns though, and become a useless metric. It won't get that bad in our lifetimes, but in 70 years, for our great-grandchildren, maybe.

icelancer 9y ago
>It won't get that bad in our lifetimes I think it will. It already has started. As I told the OP, I blind resumes for education. I started the practice when I built a Data Science team for a tech company and noticed that education signaling was negatively correlated with performance, and it was worse the more "applicable" the degree was in (CompSci grads were among some of our worst employees, while Mathematics and Physics grads did exceptionally well). There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one major one is that the company I worked for was a C or B- player at best in the market. Any good CS graduate worked for a real company, startup, or did their own thing, leaving us with a lot of people who just held a piece of paper and thought it was worth something.

icelancer 9y ago

>The value of a College degree depend heavily on how the individual leverages it but it's an important thing to have. Without what are you left with? Being a software developer with an impressive Github and set of independent work, the likes of which will impress the vast majority of good tech companies that need productivity and not papers to hang on a wall? People that think that undergraduate degrees pass a "filter" are ones that are applying through open portals and hoping their resume is selected. Most of the good jobs in software development are obtained through networking in one form or another, in-person and online (Show HN is a good example, amongst millions of other ways to get your work out there). More and more hiring managers are becoming like me. I blind your resume for education. I actively don't want it. I have found it to be a useless signal at best and a counterproductive signal at worst.

rockinghigh 9y ago
I also hire engineers and don't care about education. However, what you call networking is often bootstrapped by education and previous work experience. Very few people have "an impressive Github" out of high school that will actually impress good tech companies. However, if you have a bachelor from an average university, you will at least get some phone interviews.