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Note he said "coding" and "writing apps for the app store", not "getting a coding job". Apple's website still asks for 4 year degrees for their engineers (at le
by chomp 7y ago
Note he said "coding" and "writing apps for the app store", not "getting a coding job". Apple's website still asks for 4 year degrees for their engineers (at least the ones I just now looked at).
The reality is that "has 4 year degree" is a rapidly deteriorating signal that many businesses still use to separate the wheat from the chaff. All of the smartest people I know don't have 4 year degrees. And they weren't able to beat the "HR boss" when trying to get new opportunities.
I think it's plainly clear that you don't need a 4 year degree to learn how to code. But you do need it if you don't want an uphill battle in landing a good job, especially at large corporate jobs.
- rgrieselhuber 7y agoIt’s an interesting topic. When I hire, I could care less if someone has a degree and having more than a bachelor’s degree is many times an anti-signal unless they compensate for it in other ways. It’s hard to tell from my vantage point, however, if my case is merely anecdotal.
- chomp 7y agoI do hiring also at my job. I can see why filtering on 4 year degree is attractive to some - it's a bit daunting when on day one of opening a req, you get 25 applications. When you get up to 40, you start looking for signal within the noise, and your brain picks up patterns like "has degree." We resist the temptation to pick up on patterns within the resumes which admittedly was difficult at first. The number one signal we've found to make reliable hires is "has this person directly worked in our industry before" which may be evidence of a bad onboarding/training program on our part, because I don't see our industry as being that difficult. I really don't know, hiring is very, very hard.
- scarface74 7y agoHow much of a signal would my degree that I got over 20 years ago really be?
- chomp 7y agoHow much should it be? Zero. How much does it end up being? Well, assuming you've already caught on to the age bias in the industry, you probably have long since stopped putting your graduation year on your resume. That makes you right side up on the age bias piece, because otherwise I'm pretty sure you will have a difficult time landing a job at most places. (This is the trick I learned for my resume, as a grad from a similar amount of time ago) On teams I've sat in on, it's not like they just go "oh non-grad, this goes to the garbage can". But if you wind up with 10 equally exceptional resumes knowing you only want to bring out the top 5, and a couple of them don't have a degree, some team members will want the degree holders to be brought out. They look for more signal, even though it isn't necessarily there. And I mean, if you have 10 exactly equal candidates (which is a bad hypothetical honestly because it'll never happen), maybe you do want the more accomplished people to be given a shot. But how it works in reality is that the degree may give like a slight bump to under accomplished individuals. Which is why we had to ban education from consideration at my current employer.
- scarface74 7y agoAge bias is over rated. I’ve had no problem finding jobs. It’s never taken me over three weeks to find a job and I only started job hopping at 35. I found a job in 4 days just by meeting a recruiter for lunch and this was at a subsidiary of a what was then a Fortune 10 company. Most “ageism” comes from people who haven’t kept their skills current with market demands and haven’t kept their network strong - of both former coworkers and local trusted recruiters. I don’t put my graduation year on my resume, but seeing that my managers have always been older than me it wouldn’t make a difference. I also don’t put that I did C and FORTRAN on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes because it isn’t irrelevant when I am applying for a jobs as eithera full stack developer/architect or some type of buzzwordy “consultant”.
- rgrieselhuber 7y agoI would prefer to hire people with 10-20 years of experience. The only challenge on this is when the candidates want to do management work only and not get their hands dirty anymore. On a personal level, I totally understand. As someone doing the hiring, I think a lot of candidates are missing out on opportunities to use their depth of experience as a result. It does take a lot of energy to stay hands on though.
- trafnar 7y agoI don't have a degree and it hasn't caused me any problems getting coding jobs in silicon valley. It never even came up. My jobs have mostly been at startups, so maybe it is an uphill battle at big corporations like you mentioned, but I'd be surprised if lack of degree was a sticking point for a talented coder trying for a job at Apple/Google/Facebook.
- everdev 7y agoI've hired dozens of programmers and never once looked at what college they went to or if they went to college (or where they live, just what time zone they're in). In web/app coding, all that matters is what you've done in the last 1-4 years. Anything beyond that is too dated to be relevant. It's been a highly successful recruiting practice. There are so many brilliant self taught developers that would get overlooked if I only looked at college graduates.
- scarface74 7y agoBut how can you possibly be a good developer if you don’t know how to invert a binary tree?
- everdev 7y agoOr know how to quick sort in C?
- scarface74 7y agoWell that’s different since qsort() is part of the standard library.... Yes, for the pedantic I know whether qsort() actually implements the quicksort algorithm is implementation defined.
- everdev 7y agoLol, didn't know that. We had to write it ourselves in high school.
- notus 7y agoTheir 4 year degree requirement is soft. I know plenty of engineers there without degrees.
- chomp 7y agoI'm not trying to be combative, but why would they include it on the requirements then? Do they wave the requirement only for exceptional software developers? Or maybe it creates enough friction for non-higher-educated people to not consider applying, thereby creating the same effect of only hiring degree holders? If one uses a soft education req as a substitute for exceptional ability, then that would run counter to what Tim Cook is saying, unless "has education" is a signal for a quality a person may have that is external to coding ability? And even if the education part is injected by HR (because I understand, some HR departments love to inject requirements) and is truly not necessary, what kind of implicit bias does that add to interviewers when they wind up interviewing mostly degree holders?
- ninjanomnom 7y agoI started working as a software engineer without a degree. I don't know about apple in particular but my current job had a degree listed as a requirement but didn't actually care when I applied. I'd wager that having a degree listed as a requirement reduces the amount of lowest quality applicants and that's the only real reason why some significant portion of companies don't actually care if you have the degree.
- mcphage 7y ago> I'm not trying to be combative, but why would they include it on the requirements then? Frequently the people writing the job requirements, and the people who you’ll be interviewing with, are not the same people.
- tomrod 7y agoEconomic signaling theory plays out dynamically. Whatever makes a strong signal today will eventually become diluted unless explicitly kept from having that happen. Degrees, amazon ratings, Unicorn status, you name it.
- borkt 7y agoI don't see how coding is any different than being an auto mechanic in the long run. The only skills that will truly bring value long term it feels are project management and the ability to motivate a wide variety of individuals to work together efficiently.