4 ms·

I 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 ap

by chomp 7y ago

I 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 ago
How much of a signal would my degree that I got over 20 years ago really be?
- chomp 7y ago
  How 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 ago
    Age 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 ago
      I 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.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        It does take a lot of energy. By the time I got competitive with the Microsoft stack and server side rendering, the world was moving on to client side frameworks and Node (at least the smaller companies I prefer). Instead of trying to keep up with the front end technologies I spent the last year and half moving toward cloud architecture on AWS, learned Python for scripting and spent some time as a dev lead in preparation for being an overpriced “cloud consultant”/“digital transformation consultant”. Now I am ramping up on Node, React, and the Docker ecosystem to keep competitive as a developer. It does get tiring. But I spent some time in semi management two years ago as the dev lead and realized that wasn’t for me and from seeing how much we were paying the “AWS consultants” who were just a bunch of old school netops guys who passed a certification, I realized where the money was.

by chomp 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

How much of a signal would my degree that I got over 20 years ago really be?

chomp 7y ago
How 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 ago
  Age 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 ago
    I 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.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      It does take a lot of energy. By the time I got competitive with the Microsoft stack and server side rendering, the world was moving on to client side frameworks and Node (at least the smaller companies I prefer). Instead of trying to keep up with the front end technologies I spent the last year and half moving toward cloud architecture on AWS, learned Python for scripting and spent some time as a dev lead in preparation for being an overpriced “cloud consultant”/“digital transformation consultant”. Now I am ramping up on Node, React, and the Docker ecosystem to keep competitive as a developer. It does get tiring. But I spent some time in semi management two years ago as the dev lead and realized that wasn’t for me and from seeing how much we were paying the “AWS consultants” who were just a bunch of old school netops guys who passed a certification, I realized where the money was.