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Degrees used to be useful for weeding out resumes. I have 10 jobs, 100applicants, just pick the dozen CVs with degrees. That fails when everyone has a degree, s
by oiuyhgftrhyjuk 16y ago
Degrees used to be useful for weeding out resumes.
I have 10 jobs, 100applicants, just pick the dozen CVs with degrees. That fails when everyone has a degree, so then you start to pick only ivy league, or only 1st/2:1 class.
SO you can try and pick degrees based on scarcity, ie I only hire oxbridge maths grads, or MIT physics as programmers.
Opensource has changed a lot of that - when I went to college only universities had compilers. A machine capable of running a compiler took a room, now I talk to high school kids who have written kernel modules.
I now hire either people with no degrees based on projects they've done as well as smart graduates (ie maths/physics) - ironically both groups with no formal programming qualifications.
- raganwald 16y agoTo quote a certain pretentious blogger: "At either end of the educational spectrum, there lies a hacker class."
- rbxbx 16y agowas this pretentious blogger yourself? Yegge? Do share, please.
- kenjackson 16y agoI think you view the degree incorrectly. A degree should be a minbar of what one knows. It shouldn't be a scarcity measure. If someone has a CS degree I should be able to talk about garbage collection, threads, the pumping lemma, Amdahl's Law, control flow, NP-Completeness, etc... Scarcity really should have nothing to do with it. Either you've acquired the knowledge, in which case the degree signals that or you haven't. Your job as someone who hires people is to determine which vectors you put the most weight on. CS knowledge certainly isn't the only thing you care about, but a degree in CS may signal sufficient CS knowledge. In some cases maybe it requires a PhD in a specific field. Or maybe you want someone who has worked in the Linux kernel. In any case these vector weights should be job specific. About the actual article, I must admit I don't know what the writer is talking about. As a consultant I've see a wide range of enterprise development. Some is as sophisticated as what you're likely to see at Google. Others are basic just people doing HTML markup. The degree requirement is a very pragmatic signal that the applicant has the basic skills required to do the job. I'm sure there are other ways to demonstrate this, but there's probably considerable investment in determining what they provide. The thing that is somewhat interesting is that while there are probably just as many programmers who don't have degrees in CS/Math as those that do, most of the major breakthroughs, academia or industry, are from people either with these degrees or in the process of getting them.
- jswinghammer 16y agoBased on my 10 years of interviewing people no one with or without a CS degree can discuss any of those things. I'm usually happy if they know what a hash table is and roughly how it works.
- redthrowaway 16y agoI find this surprising. Maybe because we covered some of those topics in first year, and, as a second-year student, they're still fresh in my mind, but I simply can't see how someone who completes a CS degree would be ignorant on all of them. For the same reason, I can't see how fizzbuzz is a useful test. It was the very first thing we learned to program in our intro CS class. I'm not from a top-ranked school, and while we tend to do fairly well in competitions, we certainly aren't renowned for our CSc program. I don't know whether to feel encouraged or discouraged when reading articles and comments like this. Are there truly that many incompetent CS grads and/or insufficient programs out there?
- baddox 16y agoI don't quite understand all the anti-college rhetoric, especially toward what I consider to be a pretty hard science (CS). Personally, I pursued (and am close to finishing) my CS degree because I wanted to know what CS was and get good at it. Right out of high school I was not qualified for an entry level programming job (I mean truly qualified, as in able to do the job, not just get the job). I'm now confident in my knowledge and qualifications. It's been worth the time and money (read: debt) to me.
- raganwald 16y agoWhat I attempted to do with the article was to educate people to the wide disparities between curriculums in CS programs and to subtly encourage picking a school based on its rigour. To the extent that you read the essay as being anti-college, I failed as a writer. I apologize.
- oiuyhgftrhyjuk 16y agoTrouble is then why would you do a CS degree? I'm looking for smart and go for scarcity then I ask myself - if you are so smart why did you do CS instead of maths/physics etc?
- baddox 16y agoI did CS because I wanted to learn CS more than math or physics. Of course, there's a decent amount of all three in my CS curriculum. This wasn't necessarily a money-based choice (and I have trouble believing that math or physics graduates make more than CS graduates anyway), it was a choice based on what I enjoyed and wanted to learn more about.