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Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your d

Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your degrees. I regularly hire people into a commercial software company in Europe, and I don't inherently care about your degree, but I do care about you understanding a broad range of the fundamentals, and in the absence of a CS degree (which does happen) I have to spend extra time assessing an applicant's understanding of the fundamentals. Recently hired a fresh grad without a CS degree for a C++ programming position, and his interview was a bit longer than usual while we ran over those basics. The degree IS a form of signalling; it signals "I probably have a grasp of the basics".

guitarbill 7y ago
We can argue about "fundamentals", but I'm happy hiring non-CS grads. Because for us, "fundamentals" are things like "can you work in a team?", "can you write/communicate well?", "can you grasp real-world workflows/issues/bottlenecks real people have using products?", and "will you try the simplest thing first?". Other degrees offer the same or more opportunities to hone these skills. It's easy for senior engineers on the team to address gaps in CS knowledge, but much harder to address a lack of soft skills, writing, or over-designing/too much abstraction (because you were taught the patterns, but not when to use them). I could go on, but IMO, this is why interviews are still so broken, and why the field of software development still faces the same issues it always has. Granted, I'm not building a DB, but compared to maintenance and over-engineering, performance is rarely an issue, and easily solved via profiling.
- EliRivers 7y ago
  My fundamentals include a basic knowledge of algorithms, data structures and essentially just how to think about problems in a way that solutions can be programmatically represented. Basically, can you write simple software? Everything you mentioned is also needed, but I really, first and foremost, need them to be able to write some simple software. If they can't do that, I really can't afford to teach them. A CS degree often makes this check simpler than for the candidates with other educations, such as the history degree holder we have. If you don't need that then sure, it's a different hiring game for you.

guitarbill 7y ago

We can argue about "fundamentals", but I'm happy hiring non-CS grads. Because for us, "fundamentals" are things like "can you work in a team?", "can you write/communicate well?", "can you grasp real-world workflows/issues/bottlenecks real people have using products?", and "will you try the simplest thing first?". Other degrees offer the same or more opportunities to hone these skills. It's easy for senior engineers on the team to address gaps in CS knowledge, but much harder to address a lack of soft skills, writing, or over-designing/too much abstraction (because you were taught the patterns, but not when to use them). I could go on, but IMO, this is why interviews are still so broken, and why the field of software development still faces the same issues it always has. Granted, I'm not building a DB, but compared to maintenance and over-engineering, performance is rarely an issue, and easily solved via profiling.

EliRivers 7y ago
My fundamentals include a basic knowledge of algorithms, data structures and essentially just how to think about problems in a way that solutions can be programmatically represented. Basically, can you write simple software? Everything you mentioned is also needed, but I really, first and foremost, need them to be able to write some simple software. If they can't do that, I really can't afford to teach them. A CS degree often makes this check simpler than for the candidates with other educations, such as the history degree holder we have. If you don't need that then sure, it's a different hiring game for you.