8 ms·
Wow you have to have a graduate degree to even be an eligible employee, never mind.
by seiferteric 9y ago
Wow you have to have a graduate degree to even be an eligible employee, never mind.
- pjmlp 9y agoAs it should be. We don't have people calling themselves engineers just because can type a few lines of code.
- SamReidHughes 9y agoLol. Having a master's is negatively correlated with developer quality in many people's experience.
- jjeaff 9y agoI know it's not always accurate. But when I am looking at a resume of someone who has a master's in CS, I think either programming was an afterthought for them or, if they had been learning to code all this time, why didn't they go out and get a job long before they had time to finish a masters?
- sametmax 9y agoThe best developper I know didn't even finished school. I train every month plenty of terrible devs for a living. They all have better formal education than I, yet I'm paid 5 times their salary to teach them how to do their job. The education system should be giving you clues on who you should hire. But it doesn't fulfill its mission at all.
- GordonS 9y agoI'm a self taught dev with 15+ years' experience. I only got a degree a few years ago (did it while working). Honestly, I learned exactly nothing useful that I didn't already know. I do a lot of hiring and, in my experience, having a degree (or indeed the class/score of said degree) has no relation to the real-world abilities of candidates.
- realusername 9y ago"engineer" in France is a regulated title you can only get through a degree (like Germany?). Actually I'm not even sure most foreign schools degrees would be accepted as engineers in France.
- byroot 9y agoThat is slightly inacurate, "Engineer" is not a regulated title in France. What is though is the "graduated engineer" (Ingénieur diplômé) title. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_des_titres_d%27ing%C3%A9nieur https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_des_titres_d%27ing%...
- JPLeRouzic 9y agoYou are discussing about the university degree (as the parent did), but there are other usages of the word "ingénieur" in France beside diplomas. In France "Ingénieur" is also a civil servant title, or a title given to someone who did that job and is now retired (I am "Ingénieur honoraire" and have a master but no "Ingénieur" diploma).
- kabdib 9y ago99% of the time I never even look at the education history of a candidate. At least once it's turned out that someone I've interviewed (and who was hired) turned out not to have a degree. Honestly, not a big deal. Oh, it's fun if they went to the school I dropped out of [I don't mention that I don't have a degree]. "Is professor Xyztmxl still teaching the OS course, and can any students understand him at all?" Good times, at the end of an interview, when things went well. But education is almost always irrelevant. I prefer seeing wide-and-deep experience in someone from a no-name school to someone from MIT/Caltech/whatever who's just been pootering around on some narrow Java project for years.
- eyko 9y agoI'm thinking of getting a degree while working too. Do you think it's worth it? Perhaps if only to make life easier... I dropped out of uni in my last year due to family/personal issues but I've been working in tech for over 12 years now. I've never needed to show a degree here in the UK but back home (Spain) it used to be an issue. Recently the opportunity to relocate to the USA came up with my employer but I sort of rejected the offer since I assumed that getting a visa might be a bit of a hassle without a degree.
- 467568985476 9y agoYes we do? "software engineer" is a very common job title.
- Caveman_Coder 9y agoSo are sales engineer/HVAC engineer/stationary engineer/chief engineer/critical facilities engineer/etc...seems like the word, and required training associated with it, is slowly getting cheapened by throwing the title "engineer" on everything.
- aianus 9y agoYou can be a professional engineer (the bridge designing kind) with a four-year undergraduate degree in all of Canada and the US as far as I know.
- seiferteric 9y agoI have a bachelor's degree in EE but do software now and am mostly self taught in that department. I have met my fair share of incompetent programmers with masters degrees though. I like the idea of moving to Europe and working there for a while, but I get the distinct impression they are far more concerned with degrees and credentials over there and I am not sure I would fit in.
- joezydeco 9y agoEmbedded project lead here. I'll take a BSEE/BSCE/BSCS with 3 years of experience over an MS+0 any day of the week.
- scottLobster 9y agoAnd Europe wonders why it doesn't have any serious Facebook/Google competitors. An engineer is anyone who uses technology to solve a problem. Now there's a massive spectrum of quality there, but a piece of paper or two and some classwork doesn't make you an engineer. Or even a particularly good engineer. Just the other day I explained how Hash Tables work to someone with a Masters.
- Danihan 9y agoWas it a masters in CS?
- arethuza 9y agoI've known quite a few people with "conversion course" UK MSc degrees who probably wouldn't know what a hashtable is let along how they work.
- scottLobster 9y agoYep.
- pjmlp 9y agoLots of American tech in Facebook and Google has been created by Europeans with degrees that decided to work in US. Should I make a list?
- scottLobster 9y agoSure, but by this program's criteria a lot of those people probably wouldn't be considered "Engineers" in their home countries, all because they don't have a piece of paper from some meaningless authority. From my admittedly limited exposure to the continent and knowing my sister's experience with Swiss Bureaucracy, I can only imagine European government workers get high off the ink from all the rubber stamps required.
- kabdib 9y agoI don't have a degree (just 35 years of experience shipping products at companies you have definitely heard of). Some of the best engineers I've worked with haven't had degrees. One guy I know (who will never have to work again) didn't even bother to graduate from high school. A few of them have written papers published in academic journals. There is definitely more than "a few lines of code" involved in their careers. I guess if you're a bureaucrat designing a visa, requiring a degree makes sense. But saying that people lacking degrees aren't good engineers is crazy.
- geomark 9y agoI always feel like the guy in this meme when someone suggests I should interview for some hot new opportunity http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/i-know-more-than-you.jpg http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/i-know-mor...
- usrusr 9y agoIt's a different language. Similar words have different meanings in different parts of the world, simple as that. The American "software engineer" translates to "software developer" in much of continental Europe, even if the locals are sometimes using English words fot that. In Germany, for example, even getting all the fancy certifications will not make you an "Ingenieur“, the term just isn't used for computer science at all. ("Ingenieur“ is shared between disciplines as different as architecture and electrical engineering, but computer science will make you an "Informatiker“) Btw, when English is borrowing words from other languages they also tend to undergo a significant semantic shift. It's a two way street.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoI'd like to see you tell John Carmack that he's not an "engineer" or any other accomplished engineer that didn't graduate with a degree.
- Glyptodon 9y agoI've never been comfortable with the widespread use of the term "engineer" in software design and development contexts, but that doesn't change the fact that it's kind of a joke to try requiring a master's degree for what's ostensibly a startup/tech oriented visa program. I certainly have the impression that many founders and developers have only bachelor's degrees, or are self taught.
- Ankaios 9y agoI know a CPU designer that avoids the term "software engineering" and instead calls the profession "software arts & crafts." :)
- MrTonyD 9y agoWhen I got my job at NeXT computer I remember Steve Jobs saying to me that there were only two people there without degrees, and he was one of them (and I was the other.)
- SilasX 9y agoYes, I think the term has been abused and overused, but it's equally wrong in the other direction to dismiss all tech talent simply for lacking a graduate degree.
- 2255 9y ago"Tech" is more than programming and software engineering. Other engineering fields have less opportunities for self-taught people and innovation in those fields are driven by people with higher degrees.
- corford 9y agoAs far as trades/professions are concerned, you need a degree or a certificate of some kind for virtually everything in France (from being a hairdresser all the way up to doctors/lawyers).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dustinmoris 9y agoThat's so fucking backwards. France was, is and will remain a shit place for any serious entrepreneur. Literally no single unicorn founder from the US would have satisfied these old fashioned conservative anti-progression requirements.
- corford 9y agoIt's more nuanced than it seems on the surface. I started with a similar opinion but I have to say there is something to be said for everyone from hairdressers on up actually having some form of relevant qualification. At least for the trades etc. - you end up with much more knowledgeable practitioners. There are problems though: it leads to very early specialisation (when someone fresh out of school may still not be exactly sure what they want to do) and makes it difficult to hop between different trades/jobs (since you need to re-train in a lot of cases).
- literallycancer 9y agoYou also end up with situations where people drive all day from the UK and back to do some interior decoration/carpentry/whatever over the weekend, because the locals are so expensive that you can pay extremely well for non-French EU professionals and still be better off.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zdkl 9y agoYeah there's a joke about how much "bac+N years" is expected in there somewhere, along the lines of englands "it's regulation".
- jgh 9y agoI believe a "Masters" in France is roughly equivalent to a Bachelors in USA/Canada. At least that's my understanding from friends in France who basically refer to a high school diploma as Baccalaureate.
- davidivadavid 9y agoNope. At the university, a "master" is something you get after studying for 5 years, roughly. After 3 years, you get a "licence", which is equivalent to a BA/BS. Engineering schools use a slightly different system, but it's roughly equivalent.
- GuiA 9y agoYeah that's the big debate, isn't it? Is a 4 years anglophone BSc equivalent to a 3 years european Licence, or 5 years Master? When I was applying to grad schools in the US, my French undergrad was not recognized as a proper undergrad - it had to be a 5 year Master (I snuck around that restriction by spending a year in the UK and getting a british BSc). But of course, French institutions consider 4 years american degrees to be equivalent to 3 year French degrees (rightfully so in their mind - after all, French people don't waste anytime declaring their major or taking general ed classes, which they have taken in high school; their class load also tends to be higher) Tl;dr each country thinks their degree is better than the other's
- ToFundorNot 9y agoIf their system is anything like in Quebec (probably is), the three year is the same as a 4 year (or 4 is the same as 5 for engineers). In Quebec there's a stage between secondary school, and post secondary which lasts 2-3 years. In terms of years, it looks like this: Primary:1-6 Secondary:6-11 Pre-Post Secondary: 12-13 Post Secondary 14-17(14-18 for engineering/etc.) In the end they are equivalent, however differently structured.
- GuiA 9y agoI've studied, taught, interviewed, hired, and worked with many computer science majors from both sides of the system. There's no rule to quickly compare the two in terms of how useful they are in the industry/a research lab. For example, I've found the average MIT or Stanford BSc to be in a similar league as the average French student from a top 5-year school (eg INSA Lyon, Polytechnique, ETH Zürich, etc). On the other hand, the average engineer out of a state university BSc is not quite as good as the average engineer out of a French public university licence program.
- kingmanaz 9y ago>Wow you have to have a graduate degree to even be an eligible employee, never mind. And yet, if you're a Near-Eastern economic migrant with no French and a 2000 word vocabulary in your native tongue ...welcome aboard.
- dang 9y agoGiven that we've warned you more than once before, this easily exceeds the threshold for banning you. Please don't post like this again. National/racial/religious/ethnic flamebait is emphatically not welcome here.
- kingmanaz 9y agoBan away. What was said in my post is both true and pertinent. On the other hand, what is not germane to the discussion is the moderation-enforced ethos being peddled by YC's etiquette police. I, and many others, are here to discuss tech, including those things which affect tech lifestyle, and this does include Europe's present demographic crisis. Good luck squelching the world's dissenting worldviews.
- smuss77 9y agoGuess they haven't figured out you can't masters yourself to competency, or they know and don't care.
- andrewstuart 9y ago>> or they know and don't care Thereby proving that the emperor has no clothes.
- andrewstuart 9y agoThat would have excluded Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs.
- MikeTheGreat 9y agoThey would have clicked on the 'Startup Founder' link instead. Or later, they could click on the 'Investor' link
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- eeZah7Ux 9y ago...and the would have never be taken seriously. Social/family connections were crucial to them.
- sangnoir 9y ago...as well as millions of other non-graduates you never heard of, with good reason. For any random field, it is easy to pick outliers. The question is, what matters more to you - rejecting a few false negatives or a lot more false positives.
- xiaoma 9y agoIn startups, nearly all the value is in the outliers. Black swan farming beats conservative strategies with even one success in a decade.
- sangnoir 9y agoThat strategy is favored by, and makes sense for Silicon Valley VCs. I could be wrong, but I think France is mostly concerned about creating jobs and advancing its tech industry as a whole rather than chasing unicorns.
- realusername 9y agoNo, because they are not workers but founders.