24 ms·

Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

343 points by Pete-Codes 7y ago

Pete-Codes 7y ago
Hey, author here. You might remember me from posts such as "No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers". I've made a job board for people without CS degrees. Since I am going to be applying for jobs soon and I am career-changer I figured I would make a solution for myself. It's really annoying to get to the end of a great looking job ad only to find they insist on a CS degree. All of the job positions are fine with applicants being either self-taught with a good portfolio or having done a coding bootcamp. Let me know what you think!
- machbio 7y ago
  little feedback - there is lot of whitespace between the email subscriber form and the actual listing of the jobs.. you might want to move the listing to the top over the email subscriber form.
  - Pete-Codes 7y ago
    Ok, thanks for the tip!
algodaily 7y ago
I love this, though I'd be curious to know how often developers without degrees will actually get hired (versus those with degrees). Some really quick feedback: I think multi-tag search is a must. As an example, I typed "nyc js" and got nothing, despite there very much being plenty of jobs in NYC with JS requirements.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Hey, thanks for the nice comment - glad you love it! It's a good question but really there are lots of devs doing great now that do not have degrees. I dunno if it's ok to link here but if you check my other site https://www.nocsdegree.com https://www.nocsdegree.com there are lots of successful people there. Yeah, that's a good point about the filter! Will change that :)
- Hermitian909 7y ago
  Experience of the dozens of devs I know with no degree is that if you can manage to get 3 years of experience under your belt you're golden. That's not to say there aren't doors that are closed to you, but by and large the industry just doesn't care. The better you are, the truer this becomes. I know a highschool dropout I'd consider at least a 95th percentile developer, he turns down offers for work on a regular basis.
mnm1 7y ago
This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.
- notus 7y ago
  I had the same experience, but I did see quite a few positions in the list that were catered towards juniors or entry level positions so it seems like it would still be really helpful for some people.
- ravroid 7y ago
  This has been my experience as well. I've also applied for job listings that required a degree and still interviewed (and received offers). I think the degree requirement is often interchangeable with professional experience.
- WalterGR 7y ago
  How many companies that got your resume didn’t interview you? How many companies did you interview with but not get hired? Of those companies you worked for, what was your total compensation vs. your coworkers who had degrees?
  - mnm1 7y ago
    How am I supposed to know those numbers? I'm getting paid towards the top of the median range in what I do, working remotely, often less than 40 hours a week. Hard to get something better than that. The point of my post was that not having a CS degree shouldn't discourage anyone from applying for jobs that claim to need one. I've had well over a hundred interviews in my life in person, over a dozen jobs in the past twelve years, and never has it come up. Not at faang, not at startups, not anywhere.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Well, you'd be surprised then. Cher Scarlett was turned down for a job this summer with 13 years experience due to not having a CS degree and I have been going through a ton of job ads the last few days so I can tell you lots of non-entry level roles still require a degree. https://twitter.com/codehitchhiker/status/1145776193876176902 https://twitter.com/codehitchhiker/status/114577619387617690...
codesushi42 7y ago
How many of the job listings are above entry level positions?
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  I just checked - there are 7 out of 50 marked that have Senior in the title or description. Only 6 are marked as junior (I should have added more junior positions for the launch tbh) So that leaves about 37 mid-tier positions that aren't entry level.
fiatjaf 7y ago
If you're going to hire a developer for their first job, don't think twice. Developers without degrees are better than developers with degress in 100% of the cases. If they don't have a degree that means they've learned something without being forced to, they love the subject and are genuinely interested.
- cortesoft 7y ago
  100% of the cases? That is absurd.
- rezz 7y ago
  Yes generally interested in six figure salaries with relatively low entry barrier.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Yeah, I have to be honest. If you've taught yourself to code whilst working as a waitress you are going to be motivated like hell!
- MisterBastahrd 7y ago
  Right. Because no degreed devs ever learned something without being forced to. They just put guns to our heads once we willingly decided to go to school for CS and tortured us all those hours we spend developing side projects for fun.
- SonOfKyuss 7y ago
  In my first-hand experience doing hiring, for every coding savant who doesn't need a CS degree, there are 10 others who just want a shortcut to SWE $$$ but don't have what it takes (motivation, skills, whatever) to get a degree. For better or for worse, when you're working your way through a stack of 100 resumes, having a degree is an easy filter.
  - sodafountan 7y ago
    I've probably looked at hundreds of resumes and I can't recall ever seeing someone list their education credentials at the top, it's always their work experience first unless they don't have much professional experience and I've rarely been a position to hire junior developers. Unless you're going through some Nazi-era HR department then I probably won't even make it to the last page of your resume before deciding whether you're worth interviewing or passing on. And by the way, if you're part of the 9 in 10 developers who don't have a degree and aren't cut out for development then your resume won't even make it to my desk, that's what the recruiters filter out. All of that being said I'm not sure who you worked for but sorting through 100 resumes seems like a colossal waste of time. Lifehack: Just tell the recruitment firm "Give Me Your Top 5" and that's that.
natch 7y ago
Many jobs are CS degree or equivalent experience but people misread them as CS degree only. The domain name is somewhat misleading and perpetuates a misconception. People without CS degrees sometimes have plenty of CS skills and knowledge. (Off topic: This is a case of “naming is hard but not for the reasons you think.” Naming is hard in part because being picky about names has a social cost. My being picky about the name here, perfect example. How do you (other HN readers) feel about me being picky? I suspect many of you would think I’m kind of annoying for making a big deal of it. Just saying this is a big part of why good naming is hard.)
- non-entity 7y ago
  The problem is what is considered equivalent. I've seen jobs that claim the equivalence as a decade of industry experience.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fiatjaf 7y ago
$99 to post a job? I want a developer, but I won't pay that price ever unless I need dozens of developers and I'm posting on a big site with big audience.
- jsty 7y ago
  That's peanuts compared to the 15-30% of salary a recruiter will charge
  - Pete-Codes 7y ago
    Exactly.
  - codingdave 7y ago
    You are only charged that if a recruiter delivers. $99 for a posting on a brand new job board, for which we have no idea if it will ever gain traction, is expensive. Not because the price is wrong, but because we have no idea if this board will be there next month, or next week. If they had metrics proving out the number of devs who look at the board, and the number hired through the board, that would be a reasonable price. But as far as I know, this board could have been set up last night, with jobs scraped from other sites. I can't spend $99 on every job board that exists. I need to choose the right boards.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  How much do you spend on recruiting? Genuine question. I was told to price it at that by someone who is a self-taught developer at a fairly small company in America and he said even that was cheap.
  - fiatjaf 7y ago
    "Recruiting"? I'm not Google, I'm a small software shop and I only want 1 random developer which I can pay directly. I think you're missing my point here.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
rezz 7y ago
Is this actually a problem still? I haven’t hopped around as much as most SWEs I suppose, but I’ve never faced an issue not having a degree in any of my previous hiring processes. I work at a large bank and we don’t screen candidates for degrees.
- BWStearns 7y ago
  Currently finishing up a job search and I've gotten some disappointed looks and noticed some cooling of tone when its revealed that I have a humanities degree. It's not super common (maybe 1/5 interviews?) but it is deeply frustrating given that it's on my CV.
  - Pete-Codes 7y ago
    I hope the website provides you with some value then. (A fellow Humanities grad)
    - BWStearns 7y ago
      Already at the negotiation stage (finally! lol. I hate the interview circuit) this time around but next time I'm looking I'll check back in.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  I don't have a degree and I've never had a problem, I've worked in Healthcare, for startups and for a publicly traded company. The biggest issue I've had was on a personal level, whenever I interview I'm anxious that others won't view me the same without a degree. I signed up for the newsletter to this site, I like the idea of companies flat out saying a degree isn't required - otherwise I feel like I'm being judged negatively for not having one.
  - Pete-Codes 7y ago
    Thanks for signing up - I hope it provides value and feel free to reply to the newsletter with your thoughts. And yes, I think it does help when people walk into an interview knowing that not having a CS degree won't make a difference.
BWStearns 7y ago
Pete, just a heads up your copy in the about says $50 for a post and the button says $99. I don't have particularly good input on which price point makes more sense but you probably want it consistent to avoid confusion. That said, slick looking site. Best of luck.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Thanks! Oh, I thought that had been changed. Thanks for catching that!
firefoxd 7y ago
This is good, myself being a no CS degree who worked as a lead in a high performance company, I appreciate if more of those can surface. But I made a comment on another job board show hn that's relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973309 > What's the relationship with the employers? I find the main issue with job website that are posted here is that there is usually zero relationship. Meaning it's mostly information copied from the career page of companies. That's why most these job boards disappear after a couple years. > I suggest if you gather enough interest here today, use it to get actual connections with employers, even if it's a handful.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  hey, yeah that's a fair comment! So I've actually gotten to know some senior devs and CTOs from interviewing them for my other blog - https://www.nocsdegree.com https://www.nocsdegree.com - so for things like pricing I have input from them. I'll definitely prioritise talking to companies and building relationships. I've also been in contact with some bootcamps.
dyeje 7y ago
Was super confused by the name (was reading it as Noc Sok) until I clicked through to the about page which formats it as "No CS OK".
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Fair enough - I might roll it into my other website No CS Degree in future.
  - electricviolet 7y ago
    I actually love it. Knock sock.
  - adventured 7y ago
    Keep the name. Definitely keep the name. Six letter dotcom, easy to rhyme and easy to remember. Easy to brand, easy to put on things to distribute & promote. At first glance the name seems a bit odd. That is quickly overwhelmed by the benefit of being easy to remember and being very short. It doesn't get much easier than noc sok (knock sock as someone else noted) when trying to remember the site later. Plus, this is a site for developers (for now anyway), they will appreciate the benefits of knock sock as a memory device, far outweighing the no-cs-ok vs noc-sok issue. And there's no bad connotation with noc sok (the classic ExpertSexchange issue).
jedberg 7y ago
I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that without a textbook). By the senior levels you can't really tell the difference between someone with or without a CS degree. Experience definitely beats textbook knowledge after a couple of years.
- helpPeople 7y ago
  I'm wondering where I'll be. I did Chem engineering in college, but have been programming since I was 17. Now I've moved to electrical design Engineering since it seems to be a hybrid of engineering and programming. So far my job is understanding everything that goes into my complex system. I'm not sure if this or embedded programming is my future. What is more valuable?
  - busterarm 7y ago
    I think there's also a large gap for people who only have a CS education and those with a traditional engineering background. Traditional engineering skills are very undervalued in this industry and I've met very few "engineers" in this field who understand engineering basics like control systems. IMO that's very valuable for building the systems we build -- I can't tell you how many half-baked implementations of some of the parts of PID I've seen kicking around. And I say that as a completely self-taught, college dropout senior developer.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      I think you have a good point. With today's complex distributed systems, control theory should really be emphasized more. I didn't learn it in school, but I definitely studied it when I started being responsible for the uptime of complex systems!
zzzeek 7y ago
I don't have a degree (though I do have a few years of college in the CS /engineering fields) and I'm pretty sure every programming job I've ever had required a "degree", if you were to look at their posted job requirements. If it's known that you can do the work (which is the kicker of course), I've never seen an employer hiring people to write code actually care about the degree. Even in academic environments I've been offered programming jobs (obviously not teaching jobs). Now, you should definitely get a CS degree or similar if you want to be a programmer. I would have done a lot better having one even though I got by without it. Also, my career path was ridiculous and is entirely non-replicable.
- wvenable 7y ago
  As a hiring manager, I fully agree. All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. It matter a lot more for juniors who lack any sort of experience. I think it make good sense for young people to get a degree but it makes less sense for seasoned professionals to go back and get one. If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the degree requirement stop you from applying.
  - asdf21 7y ago
    >If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the degree requirement stop you from applying. Then don't list it as a requirement..?
    - Pete-Codes 7y ago
      Indeed.
    - wendyshu 7y ago
      Maybe it's some company level HR policy? Certainly drives me up the wall.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. So, you lie about your actual requirements (how hard is it to add the classic “or equivalent experience” qualification?) and expect potential applicants to intuit your hidden meaning?
motohagiography 7y ago
Not sure for how much longer this will be true, but if someone can survive in the market without a degree, something about them must be exceptional. Not having a degree is a ridiculously expensive counter signal that is costly enough to be honest in many cases, so as a fast filter, it's often worth interviewing them. I get that a business that needs autodidact polymaths to run it is by definition going to have trouble scaling, will probably fail because nobody else could understand it, and that it is probably not a very good business, but this describes the vast majority of businesses, which fail in their first few years anyway. The outcome of blowing your capital on mediocre staff vs. unproven mavericks is the same. However, expecting unconventional outcomes while only risking conventional failure seems a bit self fulfilling.
kissgyorgy 7y ago
This shouldn't be a thing. It really doesn't matter nowadays. You can send your resume and nobody will care.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  It shouldn't be but while adding jobs to the site there were tons that require a CS degree. And I know people with 13 years of experience that have been turned down for jobs due to no degree.
  - kissgyorgy 7y ago
    I personally don't want to work for a company who turns down somebody because of not having a degree. If they are not smart enough with their hiring process, it's a good sign that will be other, bigger problems too.
    - ticmasta 7y ago
      This is the attitude of someone with a good job or lots of opportunities and seems pretty common on HN. Many (most?) people do not have the luxury of high-minded ideals like this. Plus, you do realize you're categorically ruling out a company by projecting one trait onto their entire culture, for the crime of using an arbitrary signaling factor?
      - kissgyorgy 7y ago
        > you do realize you're categorically ruling out a company by projecting one trait onto their entire culture I usually don't do that, but I can't tolerate this kind of rigidness with old habits.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  I've been on both sides. Sometimes you definitely care. If I have a small pile of resumes for a fairly specific job, I'll give each of them a lot of consideration and nobody will get tossed just because they have no degree. But if you hand me a stack of 300 resumes of [presumably] largely qualified individuals, I'm going to pick some reasons to make the stack more manageable. Some people definitely use degree status for that purpose.
eternalny1 7y ago
Who needs a CS degree? I don't have one and I've been a software engineer for decades. Nobody has ever asked or cared.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  If you are going through the front door, it will matter. Your resume has to make it through some filters before the hiring manager sees it, and they might have their own filters. If you only get jobs by referral, it doesn't matter.
fillskills 7y ago
In my 18 years of career, the best of the best engineers I have worked with did not have a degree. They learnt engineering as a passion. It just boggles my mind that there is still a requirement for a degree despite that.
WhitneyLand 7y ago
I have a degree in computer science and still think degree screening is bullshit. Ironically, it probably hurts companies more than candidates. If you really look into it there are some good ideas out there on how to do better. One big problem seems to be that alternate approaches break down when scaling up. For example they can't be easily automated, or cant be easily handed to human recruiters with little tech understanding than are culling tons of candidates each day. Screening based on college reminds me of screening based on an "IQ test", it may have some correlation to good candidates so people think it's good. However the correlation is weak and highly inefficient. Hard to imagine the productivity and opportunities lost compared to a high-correlation more fair process.
selfipaprazzi 7y ago
Another interesting job board would be for people who are trying to switch fields. For example, how do you transition into web-dev with 5 years of experience in embedded (or vice-versa)? I find it funny that in the era of standard tests for interviews (i.e. Leetcode style), employers still ask for relevant experience in their tech stack, too. Somehow the industry helped them have their cake and eat it too.
lostgame 7y ago
My lack of degree has never been relevant in my 12-year-long coding career, I have never had issues getting jobs I want and often seen them choose me over someone with a degree. Side projects, my obvious passion for coding, and eventually, of course, my experience got me where I’m at, making a triple-digit salary as a senior iOS developer at a major bank here in Canada. I’m so very glad I avoided the horrors of student loans that half the people my age I know are going through. I was able to see ‘higher education’ as the debt trap it was like I can see the sky is blue on a clear day. At the age of 18, it was: 1) make $50k a year doing something I’ve been doing for ten years every day, know how to do well and love, or 2) go $50k in debt every year for four years paying to struggle through the school system - I hardly passed high school, the way school works just does not click with me or many others. If you are a coder without a degree, even if it says a degree is required - just apply. This is how I got to work as an iPhone developer at LEGO, Winners, Universal Music, et cetera, until the list of these names became so notable they’d essentially be dumb to not at least look my resume over. The other most solid piece of advice I can give - just keep doing side projects. If you’re going for your first job, an impressive side project is actually a way better way to get their attention than the dozens of people who will apply with degrees. It’s different, it will always be different, because you made it your way. A degree isn’t anything unique, and is not actually any serious indication of actual programming talent. A degree in CS basically gives your potential employer the promise that you at least understand the fundamentals of computer science enough to slog it through school. Whoop-de-do. You meet the basic requirements and can even be considered. Coded a custom instant messenger client while you were in your teens? Played around with ROM hacking, assembly language? Created a Mario fan game? Show them this. You, your passion and your side projects are. I know this from the utmost experience - because those examples I just gave, I did all of, from the ages of 9-16, which got me doing web sites for real estate agents at 16, which got me working in software at Chase banks at 18. I’ve never looked back and watched my salary and experience grow year by year. :)
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  > iOS developer at a major bank here in Canada. Is it the one that forced me to upgrade their app to a version that didn’t support scheduled payments anymore?
jahlove 7y ago
great url
adamredwoods 7y ago
It's interesting to see job boards becoming so diversified. Are there ones for women in dev, PoC in dev, and LGBQT in dev? What about disabled people? What about over-middle aged people? (...there probably are, I didn't search)
honkycat 7y ago
How do you know someone doesn't have a CS degree? They'll tell you. You're right: Nobody cares you don't have a degree. It's not impressive, it is just normal. What I have a problem with is the huge chip on people's shoulders about "not having a degree" and insisting on dissing anyone who chose to go a different route. I have a CS degree, I went to school on a scholarship, did not have these massive loans and "wasted years" everyone keeps harping on about. I volunteered my time, I was on the programming team, I did internships, I got amazing insights and advice from my professors. I went to school at night and worked during the day. I consider my CS degree the best decision I ever made. I found the training and education I received extremely valuable. However, not all degrees are created equal. I went to a really great school. Probably would have had a different experience if I went to whatever crappy state school was nearby. I also don't think it is necessary to have a degree to be a great programmer. What I DO think is necessary is study and honing your craft. Experience for software development is worth much less than people give it credit for. Hacking sucks. Just hacking at stuff for years on end leads to you being an expert beginner. Do you have 10 years of experience? Or have you done the same thing for 10 years. This applies to everything: You can get twice as far in half the time if you don't have to figure everything out for yourself, and listen to and learn from experts. What I look for in a developer: READS BOOKS. ( Audio books count ) That's the only thing. I'm sorry, if you are not reading and studying to keep up, you are getting left behind. There are so many brilliant people writing amazing books on a huge array of subjects. If I could get every one of my developers to read ONE book in on software design[0] a year, I would die happy and the entire industry would be 10 years ahead. They don't even have to be technical books. I just want to see intellectual curiosity and a commitment to self improvement. - 0: In the vein of Clean Architecture, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man Month, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, The Google SRE book, etc.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  > Probably would have had a different experience if I went to whatever crappy state school was nearby. I went to a bottom-ranked state school and loved it.
  - honkycat 7y ago
cromulent 7y ago
When you have 100+ applicants for a job, you have to apply a filter. Requiring a degree is an easy one to apply that your boss will support. Whether you get the best candidate or limit your hiring pool is immaterial. A guy I met years ago at a very large company had another filter - he used to split the pile of resumes in two, and throw half in the bin. He then said "I want the guy I hire to be lucky".
- courtewing 7y ago
  For every one position we hire for we’ll see 100s of applicants, and we might have 5-10 good choices to hire. Filters are a critical part of managing a candidate pipeline, and for better or worse a degree is widely used as a filter for those companies that don’t lack a pool of qualified candidates, which also tend to be pretty attractive companies to work for.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > Requiring a degree is an easy one to apply It’s also a safe one in terms of low rate of false positives and low rate of false negatives. There are a few, of course (if there weren’t any, there’d be no need to meet the candidates), but ability to complete a four-year-degree correlates highly with ability to complete software projects.
  - RussianCow 7y ago
    > ability to complete a four-year-degree correlates highly with ability to complete software projects [citation needed]
ericmcer 7y ago
I have done some interviews for front-end positions and it is interesting watching non-degree candidates crumble on certain really easy questions. Even something simple, like a while loop can trip up some of the newer devs who try to figure out which of the canned JS array library functions I am asking for. Not that you often need a while loop, it's just interesting that modern web development has shifted to be so functional that you could be a professional programmer who does not fully grasp a while loop.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I am not sure how this is correlated with not having a degree. In my degree they didn't teach me while loops specifically. I taught myself them before the degree because I programmed as a hobby. I'm sure bootcamps would teach `while`. I also don't see what this has to do with FP. I bet there are few people who understand map/reduce functions and don't get for/while loops, unless they are literally just memorizing tutorials without understanding them.
  - ericmcer 7y ago
    map/reduce deals specifically with an array whereas a while doesn’t? Most people get traversing an array with a for/while loop vs traversing with map, but using a while loop in a more algorithmic question trips people up. Let’s say my terminating case is that a number no longer has a remainder when divided by X, that confuses people, different from terminating at the end of the array.
eganist 7y ago
I hope you pronounce it "knock-sock" because that would be brilliant. Leave the "No CS OK" reference for people to think about.
amdavidson 7y ago
I understand the desire for a site like this from a job seeker's perspective (no CS degree here either), but what is the incentive for the employer? Are these no-CS job hunters not on every other site? As a job poster just put "No degree required" and your inbox should be flooded. I don't see "no degree" as a skill that needs to be sought by paying $99 to post a job.
- fucking_tragedy 7y ago
  It's the same value-add as any other niche job board.
- Jaygles 7y ago
  I can imagine a company reasoning that someone who doesn't have a traditional CS education may approach problems from a unique perspective as they wouldn't have the standard logical flowchart in their heads you might expect from a CS graduate. I remember taking a geology class as a substitute for an ecology class I couldn't get in to before I moved states for my environmental studies degree where the professor would often comment that my descriptions of certain geological principals were interesting to read through because I couldn't just regurgitate the info my classmates had from taking pre-requisite classes I didn't have to take.
- sportanova 7y ago
  It's another distribution channel for your job, with a highly concentrated audience. It's like you want to advertise to parents, so you put your ad on the park bench at the playground
Phillips126 7y ago
I may have to try this job board out sometime. I hold a 4 year degree in Graphic Design and sort of fell into programming. I was working at a small print company as the only graphic designer and was being "groomed" to take over the management position. I was asked often to provide quotes, make orders, take calls from customers, etc. We didn't have a good system in place for quoting or keeping track of our workflow so I started building a dashboard with PHP. In the end I really loved the work I was doing, it felt good knowing I was providing a ton of value. When they asked me to take the management position I told them that I was going to work for another company as a web developer (they loved the dashboard there as well). I worked in that position for 2 years making similar dashboards/internal applications when the company decided it was time to start a Software Department and hired another developer to work beside me. I've now been with the company for 5 years but things are starting to get a bit rocky with the lack of meaningful work to do. I'm dreading the interviewing process as I feel inadequate not having a formal CS degree - despite several years of experience in software development. We've made cool things (surgical training simulators, dashboards for manufacturing, custom BLE Mesh network, mobile applications to name a few) but I feel they may just be overlooked by the recruiters.
- souprock 7y ago
  I didn't know that degree existed until I found a coworker with it. He switched careers because being a color-blind graphics designer was difficult. He had to constantly use a color picker to read out the RGB values. We got him doing assembly code. He was lots better at that.
archeantus 7y ago
I dropped out of college about seven years ago, about 24 credit hours shy of getting my IS degree. The classes left were a mix of business classes I don't care for (Accounting) and generals I don't care for (Biology 100? PASS). I haven't had any problems finding great jobs as a software engineer throughout my career, including working at Apple in Cupertino straight out of college. Recently, a guy in my neighborhood who works at the school I went to tried to talk me into going back and finishing up. He talked to the dean and said they could waive four of the eight classes I had left to do! So now I only have four classes left, all doable online, most of them easy generals like arts and letters... That sounds pretty tempting and everything, but part of me has also enjoyed achieving success outside of the path that our society more or less mandates as a requirement. I almost want to skip the degree to continue showing that it isn't the paper that matters, but the line of work that you pursue and the effort you put into it. Am I crazy? Should I just go get the silly degree?
- tempestn 7y ago
  Can't tell you what you should do, but if it were me I would. Who knows if it could help get you a higher salary at some point in the future, for instance, if nothing else. Given the small amount of work remaining, I'd say go for it.
- mosselman 7y ago
  Who cares about showing people you can do something without a degree? It might get you more money or different opportunities at some point in life at the cost of doing some classes. Which in turn will teach you something you didn’t know already know, which is also a positive and possibly fun thing. It isn’t as if people are sitting around saying “wow look at archeantus doing all that stuff without a degree, he is sure telling them.” Do whatever feels right for you, not others.
- bduerst 7y ago
  At the risk of committing a sunk cost fallacy, I would definitely say that's worth it since you are already so close and a sizable segment of society places a minimal expectation on having such a thing. Degrees are more a certificate that signal something to employers rather than actual vehicles of continued learning. Even if it's not needed now, it would certainly open more doors. But that's just my opinion. Do whatever feels right for you.
mcqueenjordan 7y ago
I dropped out of college. I self-studied CS and I've now worked at both AWS and Google. A degree is just a piece of paper. The only thing that actually matters is what you know and what you're able to do. Getting through the door the first time is the hardest part. Keep trying. Once you have any experience, you can keep building on it.
aehtyb 7y ago
the scrolling is messed up. has some kind of pseudo smooth scrolling javascript thing. really unnecessary.
jmlon 7y ago
Nice. Just wondering how are employers going to filter candidates qualified for their postings... Isn't this just transferring all the responsibility to verify qualifications on the employer?
marshallant 7y ago
I always laugh at this. You learn more by going to college then just computer science. I would say a degree is required, not necessary a CS degree, but something.
dboreham 7y ago
Hmm. Wouldn't this be just a regular job board where an applicant ignores any requirements in the postings that applicants have a degree? For me, hiring, the criterion is more like "could get a degree". Whether or not you actually have the degree doesn't matter to me. Someone who isn't smart enough/motivated enough to get a degree, if they wanted to and had the time/money, well I'd probably not hire that person. Perhaps this is what folks are really getting at when they say you need a degree?
Pete-Codes 7y ago
Just had first two sales now :)
Etheryte 7y ago
Not entirely on-topic, but the cover image on your homepage is scary — it looks like the exact type of workplace I wouldn't want anyone to end up, degree or not. Noisy open office where people are like cattle, essentially the same as cubicle era, except no cubicles.
- swayvil 7y ago
  It looks like a sweatshop.
  - boopk 7y ago
    looks like a college exam room
  - 19ylram49 7y ago
    Bingo. Environments like that seem to be the new “wave” now. I can’t stand them! Maybe it’s just me but I don’t understand how anyone can get any work done in those settings.
- sylk 7y ago
  Oh gosh. Change that to something else PLEASE!
- redleggedfrog 7y ago
  No man, check it out - get your own laptop. Yeah, that looks pretty terrible.
- w1nter 7y ago
  This is not an office, I took it during programming competition/hackathon. Originally posted it here https://unsplash.com/photos/QBpZGqEMsKg https://unsplash.com/photos/QBpZGqEMsKg
swayvil 7y ago
In other words, jobs for devs who are willing to work cheap. None of my dev jobs ever required a degree. None of them advertised the fact.
harel 7y ago
Is a degree absolute requirement an actual "thing"? I don't have a degree, never went to uni. I didn't even finish high school properly. But I've been in very good work coding for over 20 years now. Almost every position or contract I took had some sort of a degree "clause" in it, but not once was it ever asked, raised or inquired about anywhere. Ever.
bernierocks 7y ago
A degree only matters if you have zero experience, which could be supplemented by personal projects or open source contributions.
redleggedfrog 7y ago
This is a tough one for me. I wish I had a CS degree, because, well, I just want one. But I don't have one - I studied for a different BA degree, found computers, neglected classes, and then proceeded on to 27 years of programming. I'm nearly 100% self taught. And here's the weird part. At the handful of companies I've worked at there has most certainly been mild disdain for those with degrees. Nothing overt, but it was understood that if you didn't have the passion to teach yourself, and went to school to learn your programming, you were somehow inferior. We did have lots of people with degrees who turned out great, but they were always considered the exceptions, not the rule. I found this fascinating. Nearly all the senior developers, even lead developers, had no degree.
- GoodGOYIM 7y ago
  > Nearly all the senior developers, even lead developers, had no degree. Not true in France. How can one learn TDD and Agile Methodology without having at least an MS in CS?
xenospn 7y ago
I never graduated high school and have been in the software industry for about 20 years. No one has ever asked about my education or where I went to school.
SenHeng 7y ago
A lot of countries will not give you a work visa unless you have a degree.
crimsonalucard 7y ago
I hate these affirmative action initiatives. I get you want to help a minority, but you do so by implementing discriminatory practices.
29athrowaway 7y ago
Consider these sets of skills: a) skills acquired through a CS program b) skills acquired on the job c) skills acquired in a programming bootcamp d) skills acquired studying on your own (MOOC, books, videos, documentation, etc.) To build the first iterations of a product, you may need only c) and d). Once that product gets traction, things get exponentially more difficult and problems can get very abstract. That's when a) and b) makes a difference. Most software engineers can create a simple Twitter clone, but only a small tiny fraction can make it work at Twitter scale.
winrid 7y ago
I was so lucky that my high school was able to send me to a three year vocational CS class. Don't have a real degree. But once I was shown what a function was my passion for this stuff just took off.
jlevers 7y ago
I agree with the many people who've said (in essence) that for 90%+ of programming jobs -- i.e., writing CRUD apps or the like -- a CS degree is unnecessary. But how about that last 10% of jobs? Does the degree open doors to cutting-edge, exciting opportunities that aren't available without it? I'm in the process of deciding whether or not to drop out right now. I know that I have what it takes to self-study and get to a similar level of knowledge as a CS grad, but I'm wondering if not having a degree will preclude me from the less common, more exciting jobs that I'm most interested in.
codeisawesome 7y ago
Immigration is the biggest reason for citizens of non-wealthy/previously-colonised countries to get a degree.
19ylram49 7y ago
Many a time, I’ve hired software engineers without degrees over software engineers with Ivy League or top-10 school CS degrees, and I haven’t regretted it even once. Nowadays, I don’t even put education “requirements” in job descriptions, and even if you mention your school during an interview, I don’t really care for it, to be quite honest. At the end of the day, our real technical/programming interview (no whiteboard nonsense) will tell me the things that I need to know about your technical abilities. I remember interviewing one candidate with a CS degree from RIT, and I honestly spent a good portion of the interview genuinely feeling like this poor individual just flushed the tuition $ down the toilet, because he was just failing the interview miserably! Funny thing is, he knew a lot of theory, but when it came time to produce, it didn’t work out too well for him. (He could use whatever set-up that he preferred, Google usage was obviously allowed, he was given space to work without disruption at various points, and most importantly, the problem was a legitimate problem that we had to solve at the company.) All of this to say: Just apply! If you have the skills and a company doesn’t give you a chance because of a stupid degree requirement, they aren’t a good fit for you and don’t deserve you! Cross them off of your list, move on, and apply to another company.
tylerl 7y ago
Very few "real" tech companies require degrees now, certainly none of the sensible ones do. Looking at the front page of job listings on this board, you see Dropbox, Google, Uber, Oracle, Amazon, Visa, Atlassian, and Bank of America all with serious tech jobs (some of them quite senior) with no education requirement. But what you will need is the knowledge that you would have otherwise gotten with a CS degree. If you don't know a priority queue from a linked list, or you can't name an example of an O(nlog(n)) algorithm, then you're going to struggle in way more than just the interview; this crap comes up in real life more often than might be obvious. Luckily there are more than enough free places to learn this stuff. It's far less structured than a college, and requires an absurd amount of discipline to do on your own time, but nothing is missing. Beyond the ad-hoc content, several top-tier universities put their CS courseware online for free, and you can totally get the same CS education that others pay $200K for. You don't get the paper that says you did it, but you don't really need it. Getting through the resume barrier is a bit more tricky, but here's a tech recruiting open secret: Stack Overflow. It's gold for recruiters, and extremely heavily used. They find people who consistently post strong answers on topics relevant to the company they're recruiting for and directly recruit them to interview. Skip the job listings. If you have a strong S.O. profile and provide enough information for recruiters to track down who you are, you'll get no end of attention. That and GitHub. Write some code that demonstrates good design and put it up. When I was doing talent vetting for small firms, a person's Github page was a far more valuable signal than their "qualifications".
0xdead 7y ago
Makes sense; You don't really need a degree to be a web-dev anyway. On the other hand, people with CS degree rarely become a web-dev.
- non-entity 7y ago
  > people with CS degree rarely become a web-dev Source? I think there definitely needs to be a better categorization between simple CRUD development, and jobs that require more in-depth knowledge of CS, but plugging "software developer" or "software engineer" on any job board seems to yield vastly more "web development" jobs than anything else.

343 points by Pete-Codes 7y ago

Hey, author here. You might remember me from posts such as "No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers". I've made a job board for people without CS degrees. Since I am going to be applying for jobs soon and I am career-changer I figured I would make a solution for myself. It's really annoying to get to the end of a great looking job ad only to find they insist on a CS degree. All of the job positions are fine with applicants being either self-taught with a good portfolio or having done a coding bootcamp. Let me know what you think!

machbio 7y ago
little feedback - there is lot of whitespace between the email subscriber form and the actual listing of the jobs.. you might want to move the listing to the top over the email subscriber form.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Ok, thanks for the tip!

algodaily 7y ago

I love this, though I'd be curious to know how often developers without degrees will actually get hired (versus those with degrees). Some really quick feedback: I think multi-tag search is a must. As an example, I typed "nyc js" and got nothing, despite there very much being plenty of jobs in NYC with JS requirements.

Pete-Codes 7y ago
Hey, thanks for the nice comment - glad you love it! It's a good question but really there are lots of devs doing great now that do not have degrees. I dunno if it's ok to link here but if you check my other site https://www.nocsdegree.com https://www.nocsdegree.com there are lots of successful people there. Yeah, that's a good point about the filter! Will change that :)
Hermitian909 7y ago
Experience of the dozens of devs I know with no degree is that if you can manage to get 3 years of experience under your belt you're golden. That's not to say there aren't doors that are closed to you, but by and large the industry just doesn't care. The better you are, the truer this becomes. I know a highschool dropout I'd consider at least a 95th percentile developer, he turns down offers for work on a regular basis.

mnm1 7y ago

This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.

notus 7y ago
I had the same experience, but I did see quite a few positions in the list that were catered towards juniors or entry level positions so it seems like it would still be really helpful for some people.
ravroid 7y ago
This has been my experience as well. I've also applied for job listings that required a degree and still interviewed (and received offers). I think the degree requirement is often interchangeable with professional experience.
WalterGR 7y ago
How many companies that got your resume didn’t interview you? How many companies did you interview with but not get hired? Of those companies you worked for, what was your total compensation vs. your coworkers who had degrees?
- mnm1 7y ago
  How am I supposed to know those numbers? I'm getting paid towards the top of the median range in what I do, working remotely, often less than 40 hours a week. Hard to get something better than that. The point of my post was that not having a CS degree shouldn't discourage anyone from applying for jobs that claim to need one. I've had well over a hundred interviews in my life in person, over a dozen jobs in the past twelve years, and never has it come up. Not at faang, not at startups, not anywhere.
Pete-Codes 7y ago
Well, you'd be surprised then. Cher Scarlett was turned down for a job this summer with 13 years experience due to not having a CS degree and I have been going through a ton of job ads the last few days so I can tell you lots of non-entry level roles still require a degree. https://twitter.com/codehitchhiker/status/1145776193876176902 https://twitter.com/codehitchhiker/status/114577619387617690...

codesushi42 7y ago

How many of the job listings are above entry level positions?

Pete-Codes 7y ago
I just checked - there are 7 out of 50 marked that have Senior in the title or description. Only 6 are marked as junior (I should have added more junior positions for the launch tbh) So that leaves about 37 mid-tier positions that aren't entry level.

fiatjaf 7y ago

If you're going to hire a developer for their first job, don't think twice. Developers without degrees are better than developers with degress in 100% of the cases. If they don't have a degree that means they've learned something without being forced to, they love the subject and are genuinely interested.

cortesoft 7y ago
100% of the cases? That is absurd.
rezz 7y ago
Yes generally interested in six figure salaries with relatively low entry barrier.
Pete-Codes 7y ago
Yeah, I have to be honest. If you've taught yourself to code whilst working as a waitress you are going to be motivated like hell!
MisterBastahrd 7y ago
Right. Because no degreed devs ever learned something without being forced to. They just put guns to our heads once we willingly decided to go to school for CS and tortured us all those hours we spend developing side projects for fun.
SonOfKyuss 7y ago
In my first-hand experience doing hiring, for every coding savant who doesn't need a CS degree, there are 10 others who just want a shortcut to SWE $$$ but don't have what it takes (motivation, skills, whatever) to get a degree. For better or for worse, when you're working your way through a stack of 100 resumes, having a degree is an easy filter.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  I've probably looked at hundreds of resumes and I can't recall ever seeing someone list their education credentials at the top, it's always their work experience first unless they don't have much professional experience and I've rarely been a position to hire junior developers. Unless you're going through some Nazi-era HR department then I probably won't even make it to the last page of your resume before deciding whether you're worth interviewing or passing on. And by the way, if you're part of the 9 in 10 developers who don't have a degree and aren't cut out for development then your resume won't even make it to my desk, that's what the recruiters filter out. All of that being said I'm not sure who you worked for but sorting through 100 resumes seems like a colossal waste of time. Lifehack: Just tell the recruitment firm "Give Me Your Top 5" and that's that.

natch 7y ago

Many jobs are CS degree or equivalent experience but people misread them as CS degree only. The domain name is somewhat misleading and perpetuates a misconception. People without CS degrees sometimes have plenty of CS skills and knowledge. (Off topic: This is a case of “naming is hard but not for the reasons you think.” Naming is hard in part because being picky about names has a social cost. My being picky about the name here, perfect example. How do you (other HN readers) feel about me being picky? I suspect many of you would think I’m kind of annoying for making a big deal of it. Just saying this is a big part of why good naming is hard.)

non-entity 7y ago
The problem is what is considered equivalent. I've seen jobs that claim the equivalence as a decade of industry experience.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

fiatjaf 7y ago

$99 to post a job? I want a developer, but I won't pay that price ever unless I need dozens of developers and I'm posting on a big site with big audience.

jsty 7y ago
That's peanuts compared to the 15-30% of salary a recruiter will charge
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Exactly.
- codingdave 7y ago
  You are only charged that if a recruiter delivers. $99 for a posting on a brand new job board, for which we have no idea if it will ever gain traction, is expensive. Not because the price is wrong, but because we have no idea if this board will be there next month, or next week. If they had metrics proving out the number of devs who look at the board, and the number hired through the board, that would be a reasonable price. But as far as I know, this board could have been set up last night, with jobs scraped from other sites. I can't spend $99 on every job board that exists. I need to choose the right boards.
Pete-Codes 7y ago
How much do you spend on recruiting? Genuine question. I was told to price it at that by someone who is a self-taught developer at a fairly small company in America and he said even that was cheap.
- fiatjaf 7y ago
  "Recruiting"? I'm not Google, I'm a small software shop and I only want 1 random developer which I can pay directly. I think you're missing my point here.
fucking_tragedy 7y ago

rezz 7y ago

Is this actually a problem still? I haven’t hopped around as much as most SWEs I suppose, but I’ve never faced an issue not having a degree in any of my previous hiring processes. I work at a large bank and we don’t screen candidates for degrees.

BWStearns 7y ago
Currently finishing up a job search and I've gotten some disappointed looks and noticed some cooling of tone when its revealed that I have a humanities degree. It's not super common (maybe 1/5 interviews?) but it is deeply frustrating given that it's on my CV.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  I hope the website provides you with some value then. (A fellow Humanities grad)
  - BWStearns 7y ago
    Already at the negotiation stage (finally! lol. I hate the interview circuit) this time around but next time I'm looking I'll check back in.
sodafountan 7y ago
I don't have a degree and I've never had a problem, I've worked in Healthcare, for startups and for a publicly traded company. The biggest issue I've had was on a personal level, whenever I interview I'm anxious that others won't view me the same without a degree. I signed up for the newsletter to this site, I like the idea of companies flat out saying a degree isn't required - otherwise I feel like I'm being judged negatively for not having one.
- Pete-Codes 7y ago
  Thanks for signing up - I hope it provides value and feel free to reply to the newsletter with your thoughts. And yes, I think it does help when people walk into an interview knowing that not having a CS degree won't make a difference.

BWStearns 7y ago

Pete, just a heads up your copy in the about says $50 for a post and the button says $99. I don't have particularly good input on which price point makes more sense but you probably want it consistent to avoid confusion. That said, slick looking site. Best of luck.

Pete-Codes 7y ago
Thanks! Oh, I thought that had been changed. Thanks for catching that!

firefoxd 7y ago

This is good, myself being a no CS degree who worked as a lead in a high performance company, I appreciate if more of those can surface. But I made a comment on another job board show hn that's relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973309 > What's the relationship with the employers? I find the main issue with job website that are posted here is that there is usually zero relationship. Meaning it's mostly information copied from the career page of companies. That's why most these job boards disappear after a couple years. > I suggest if you gather enough interest here today, use it to get actual connections with employers, even if it's a handful.

Pete-Codes 7y ago
hey, yeah that's a fair comment! So I've actually gotten to know some senior devs and CTOs from interviewing them for my other blog - https://www.nocsdegree.com https://www.nocsdegree.com - so for things like pricing I have input from them. I'll definitely prioritise talking to companies and building relationships. I've also been in contact with some bootcamps.

dyeje 7y ago

Was super confused by the name (was reading it as Noc Sok) until I clicked through to the about page which formats it as "No CS OK".

Pete-Codes 7y ago
Fair enough - I might roll it into my other website No CS Degree in future.
- electricviolet 7y ago
  I actually love it. Knock sock.
- adventured 7y ago
  Keep the name. Definitely keep the name. Six letter dotcom, easy to rhyme and easy to remember. Easy to brand, easy to put on things to distribute & promote. At first glance the name seems a bit odd. That is quickly overwhelmed by the benefit of being easy to remember and being very short. It doesn't get much easier than noc sok (knock sock as someone else noted) when trying to remember the site later. Plus, this is a site for developers (for now anyway), they will appreciate the benefits of knock sock as a memory device, far outweighing the no-cs-ok vs noc-sok issue. And there's no bad connotation with noc sok (the classic ExpertSexchange issue).

jedberg 7y ago

I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that without a textbook). By the senior levels you can't really tell the difference between someone with or without a CS degree. Experience definitely beats textbook knowledge after a couple of years.

helpPeople 7y ago
I'm wondering where I'll be. I did Chem engineering in college, but have been programming since I was 17. Now I've moved to electrical design Engineering since it seems to be a hybrid of engineering and programming. So far my job is understanding everything that goes into my complex system. I'm not sure if this or embedded programming is my future. What is more valuable?
- busterarm 7y ago
  I think there's also a large gap for people who only have a CS education and those with a traditional engineering background. Traditional engineering skills are very undervalued in this industry and I've met very few "engineers" in this field who understand engineering basics like control systems. IMO that's very valuable for building the systems we build -- I can't tell you how many half-baked implementations of some of the parts of PID I've seen kicking around. And I say that as a completely self-taught, college dropout senior developer.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    I think you have a good point. With today's complex distributed systems, control theory should really be emphasized more. I didn't learn it in school, but I definitely studied it when I started being responsible for the uptime of complex systems!

zzzeek 7y ago

I don't have a degree (though I do have a few years of college in the CS /engineering fields) and I'm pretty sure every programming job I've ever had required a "degree", if you were to look at their posted job requirements. If it's known that you can do the work (which is the kicker of course), I've never seen an employer hiring people to write code actually care about the degree. Even in academic environments I've been offered programming jobs (obviously not teaching jobs). Now, you should definitely get a CS degree or similar if you want to be a programmer. I would have done a lot better having one even though I got by without it. Also, my career path was ridiculous and is entirely non-replicable.

wvenable 7y ago
As a hiring manager, I fully agree. All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. It matter a lot more for juniors who lack any sort of experience. I think it make good sense for young people to get a degree but it makes less sense for seasoned professionals to go back and get one. If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the degree requirement stop you from applying.
- asdf21 7y ago
  >If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the degree requirement stop you from applying. Then don't list it as a requirement..?
  - Pete-Codes 7y ago
    Indeed.
  - wendyshu 7y ago
    Maybe it's some company level HR policy? Certainly drives me up the wall.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. So, you lie about your actual requirements (how hard is it to add the classic “or equivalent experience” qualification?) and expect potential applicants to intuit your hidden meaning?

motohagiography 7y ago

Not sure for how much longer this will be true, but if someone can survive in the market without a degree, something about them must be exceptional. Not having a degree is a ridiculously expensive counter signal that is costly enough to be honest in many cases, so as a fast filter, it's often worth interviewing them. I get that a business that needs autodidact polymaths to run it is by definition going to have trouble scaling, will probably fail because nobody else could understand it, and that it is probably not a very good business, but this describes the vast majority of businesses, which fail in their first few years anyway. The outcome of blowing your capital on mediocre staff vs. unproven mavericks is the same. However, expecting unconventional outcomes while only risking conventional failure seems a bit self fulfilling.

kissgyorgy 7y ago

This shouldn't be a thing. It really doesn't matter nowadays. You can send your resume and nobody will care.

Pete-Codes 7y ago
It shouldn't be but while adding jobs to the site there were tons that require a CS degree. And I know people with 13 years of experience that have been turned down for jobs due to no degree.
- kissgyorgy 7y ago
  I personally don't want to work for a company who turns down somebody because of not having a degree. If they are not smart enough with their hiring process, it's a good sign that will be other, bigger problems too.
  - ticmasta 7y ago
    This is the attitude of someone with a good job or lots of opportunities and seems pretty common on HN. Many (most?) people do not have the luxury of high-minded ideals like this. Plus, you do realize you're categorically ruling out a company by projecting one trait onto their entire culture, for the crime of using an arbitrary signaling factor?
    - kissgyorgy 7y ago
      > you do realize you're categorically ruling out a company by projecting one trait onto their entire culture I usually don't do that, but I can't tolerate this kind of rigidness with old habits.
rootusrootus 7y ago
I've been on both sides. Sometimes you definitely care. If I have a small pile of resumes for a fairly specific job, I'll give each of them a lot of consideration and nobody will get tossed just because they have no degree. But if you hand me a stack of 300 resumes of [presumably] largely qualified individuals, I'm going to pick some reasons to make the stack more manageable. Some people definitely use degree status for that purpose.

eternalny1 7y ago

Who needs a CS degree? I don't have one and I've been a software engineer for decades. Nobody has ever asked or cared.

rootusrootus 7y ago
If you are going through the front door, it will matter. Your resume has to make it through some filters before the hiring manager sees it, and they might have their own filters. If you only get jobs by referral, it doesn't matter.

fillskills 7y ago

In my 18 years of career, the best of the best engineers I have worked with did not have a degree. They learnt engineering as a passion. It just boggles my mind that there is still a requirement for a degree despite that.

WhitneyLand 7y ago

I have a degree in computer science and still think degree screening is bullshit. Ironically, it probably hurts companies more than candidates. If you really look into it there are some good ideas out there on how to do better. One big problem seems to be that alternate approaches break down when scaling up. For example they can't be easily automated, or cant be easily handed to human recruiters with little tech understanding than are culling tons of candidates each day. Screening based on college reminds me of screening based on an "IQ test", it may have some correlation to good candidates so people think it's good. However the correlation is weak and highly inefficient. Hard to imagine the productivity and opportunities lost compared to a high-correlation more fair process.

selfipaprazzi 7y ago

Another interesting job board would be for people who are trying to switch fields. For example, how do you transition into web-dev with 5 years of experience in embedded (or vice-versa)? I find it funny that in the era of standard tests for interviews (i.e. Leetcode style), employers still ask for relevant experience in their tech stack, too. Somehow the industry helped them have their cake and eat it too.

lostgame 7y ago

My lack of degree has never been relevant in my 12-year-long coding career, I have never had issues getting jobs I want and often seen them choose me over someone with a degree. Side projects, my obvious passion for coding, and eventually, of course, my experience got me where I’m at, making a triple-digit salary as a senior iOS developer at a major bank here in Canada. I’m so very glad I avoided the horrors of student loans that half the people my age I know are going through. I was able to see ‘higher education’ as the debt trap it was like I can see the sky is blue on a clear day. At the age of 18, it was: 1) make $50k a year doing something I’ve been doing for ten years every day, know how to do well and love, or 2) go $50k in debt every year for four years paying to struggle through the school system - I hardly passed high school, the way school works just does not click with me or many others. If you are a coder without a degree, even if it says a degree is required - just apply. This is how I got to work as an iPhone developer at LEGO, Winners, Universal Music, et cetera, until the list of these names became so notable they’d essentially be dumb to not at least look my resume over. The other most solid piece of advice I can give - just keep doing side projects. If you’re going for your first job, an impressive side project is actually a way better way to get their attention than the dozens of people who will apply with degrees. It’s different, it will always be different, because you made it your way. A degree isn’t anything unique, and is not actually any serious indication of actual programming talent. A degree in CS basically gives your potential employer the promise that you at least understand the fundamentals of computer science enough to slog it through school. Whoop-de-do. You meet the basic requirements and can even be considered. Coded a custom instant messenger client while you were in your teens? Played around with ROM hacking, assembly language? Created a Mario fan game? Show them this. You, your passion and your side projects are. I know this from the utmost experience - because those examples I just gave, I did all of, from the ages of 9-16, which got me doing web sites for real estate agents at 16, which got me working in software at Chase banks at 18. I’ve never looked back and watched my salary and experience grow year by year. :)

Scoundreller 7y ago
> iOS developer at a major bank here in Canada. Is it the one that forced me to upgrade their app to a version that didn’t support scheduled payments anymore?

jahlove 7y ago

great url

adamredwoods 7y ago

It's interesting to see job boards becoming so diversified. Are there ones for women in dev, PoC in dev, and LGBQT in dev? What about disabled people? What about over-middle aged people? (...there probably are, I didn't search)

honkycat 7y ago

How do you know someone doesn't have a CS degree? They'll tell you. You're right: Nobody cares you don't have a degree. It's not impressive, it is just normal. What I have a problem with is the huge chip on people's shoulders about "not having a degree" and insisting on dissing anyone who chose to go a different route. I have a CS degree, I went to school on a scholarship, did not have these massive loans and "wasted years" everyone keeps harping on about. I volunteered my time, I was on the programming team, I did internships, I got amazing insights and advice from my professors. I went to school at night and worked during the day. I consider my CS degree the best decision I ever made. I found the training and education I received extremely valuable. However, not all degrees are created equal. I went to a really great school. Probably would have had a different experience if I went to whatever crappy state school was nearby. I also don't think it is necessary to have a degree to be a great programmer. What I DO think is necessary is study and honing your craft. Experience for software development is worth much less than people give it credit for. Hacking sucks. Just hacking at stuff for years on end leads to you being an expert beginner. Do you have 10 years of experience? Or have you done the same thing for 10 years. This applies to everything: You can get twice as far in half the time if you don't have to figure everything out for yourself, and listen to and learn from experts. What I look for in a developer: READS BOOKS. ( Audio books count ) That's the only thing. I'm sorry, if you are not reading and studying to keep up, you are getting left behind. There are so many brilliant people writing amazing books on a huge array of subjects. If I could get every one of my developers to read ONE book in on software design[0] a year, I would die happy and the entire industry would be 10 years ahead. They don't even have to be technical books. I just want to see intellectual curiosity and a commitment to self improvement. - 0: In the vein of Clean Architecture, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man Month, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, The Google SRE book, etc.

mywittyname 7y ago
> Probably would have had a different experience if I went to whatever crappy state school was nearby. I went to a bottom-ranked state school and loved it.
- honkycat 7y ago

cromulent 7y ago

When you have 100+ applicants for a job, you have to apply a filter. Requiring a degree is an easy one to apply that your boss will support. Whether you get the best candidate or limit your hiring pool is immaterial. A guy I met years ago at a very large company had another filter - he used to split the pile of resumes in two, and throw half in the bin. He then said "I want the guy I hire to be lucky".

courtewing 7y ago
For every one position we hire for we’ll see 100s of applicants, and we might have 5-10 good choices to hire. Filters are a critical part of managing a candidate pipeline, and for better or worse a degree is widely used as a filter for those companies that don’t lack a pool of qualified candidates, which also tend to be pretty attractive companies to work for.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> Requiring a degree is an easy one to apply It’s also a safe one in terms of low rate of false positives and low rate of false negatives. There are a few, of course (if there weren’t any, there’d be no need to meet the candidates), but ability to complete a four-year-degree correlates highly with ability to complete software projects.
- RussianCow 7y ago
  > ability to complete a four-year-degree correlates highly with ability to complete software projects [citation needed]

ericmcer 7y ago

I have done some interviews for front-end positions and it is interesting watching non-degree candidates crumble on certain really easy questions. Even something simple, like a while loop can trip up some of the newer devs who try to figure out which of the canned JS array library functions I am asking for. Not that you often need a while loop, it's just interesting that modern web development has shifted to be so functional that you could be a professional programmer who does not fully grasp a while loop.

quickthrower2 7y ago
I am not sure how this is correlated with not having a degree. In my degree they didn't teach me while loops specifically. I taught myself them before the degree because I programmed as a hobby. I'm sure bootcamps would teach `while`. I also don't see what this has to do with FP. I bet there are few people who understand map/reduce functions and don't get for/while loops, unless they are literally just memorizing tutorials without understanding them.
- ericmcer 7y ago
  map/reduce deals specifically with an array whereas a while doesn’t? Most people get traversing an array with a for/while loop vs traversing with map, but using a while loop in a more algorithmic question trips people up. Let’s say my terminating case is that a number no longer has a remainder when divided by X, that confuses people, different from terminating at the end of the array.

eganist 7y ago

I hope you pronounce it "knock-sock" because that would be brilliant. Leave the "No CS OK" reference for people to think about.

amdavidson 7y ago

I understand the desire for a site like this from a job seeker's perspective (no CS degree here either), but what is the incentive for the employer? Are these no-CS job hunters not on every other site? As a job poster just put "No degree required" and your inbox should be flooded. I don't see "no degree" as a skill that needs to be sought by paying $99 to post a job.

fucking_tragedy 7y ago
It's the same value-add as any other niche job board.
Jaygles 7y ago
I can imagine a company reasoning that someone who doesn't have a traditional CS education may approach problems from a unique perspective as they wouldn't have the standard logical flowchart in their heads you might expect from a CS graduate. I remember taking a geology class as a substitute for an ecology class I couldn't get in to before I moved states for my environmental studies degree where the professor would often comment that my descriptions of certain geological principals were interesting to read through because I couldn't just regurgitate the info my classmates had from taking pre-requisite classes I didn't have to take.
sportanova 7y ago
It's another distribution channel for your job, with a highly concentrated audience. It's like you want to advertise to parents, so you put your ad on the park bench at the playground

Phillips126 7y ago

I may have to try this job board out sometime. I hold a 4 year degree in Graphic Design and sort of fell into programming. I was working at a small print company as the only graphic designer and was being "groomed" to take over the management position. I was asked often to provide quotes, make orders, take calls from customers, etc. We didn't have a good system in place for quoting or keeping track of our workflow so I started building a dashboard with PHP. In the end I really loved the work I was doing, it felt good knowing I was providing a ton of value. When they asked me to take the management position I told them that I was going to work for another company as a web developer (they loved the dashboard there as well). I worked in that position for 2 years making similar dashboards/internal applications when the company decided it was time to start a Software Department and hired another developer to work beside me. I've now been with the company for 5 years but things are starting to get a bit rocky with the lack of meaningful work to do. I'm dreading the interviewing process as I feel inadequate not having a formal CS degree - despite several years of experience in software development. We've made cool things (surgical training simulators, dashboards for manufacturing, custom BLE Mesh network, mobile applications to name a few) but I feel they may just be overlooked by the recruiters.

souprock 7y ago
I didn't know that degree existed until I found a coworker with it. He switched careers because being a color-blind graphics designer was difficult. He had to constantly use a color picker to read out the RGB values. We got him doing assembly code. He was lots better at that.

archeantus 7y ago

I dropped out of college about seven years ago, about 24 credit hours shy of getting my IS degree. The classes left were a mix of business classes I don't care for (Accounting) and generals I don't care for (Biology 100? PASS). I haven't had any problems finding great jobs as a software engineer throughout my career, including working at Apple in Cupertino straight out of college. Recently, a guy in my neighborhood who works at the school I went to tried to talk me into going back and finishing up. He talked to the dean and said they could waive four of the eight classes I had left to do! So now I only have four classes left, all doable online, most of them easy generals like arts and letters... That sounds pretty tempting and everything, but part of me has also enjoyed achieving success outside of the path that our society more or less mandates as a requirement. I almost want to skip the degree to continue showing that it isn't the paper that matters, but the line of work that you pursue and the effort you put into it. Am I crazy? Should I just go get the silly degree?

tempestn 7y ago
Can't tell you what you should do, but if it were me I would. Who knows if it could help get you a higher salary at some point in the future, for instance, if nothing else. Given the small amount of work remaining, I'd say go for it.
mosselman 7y ago
Who cares about showing people you can do something without a degree? It might get you more money or different opportunities at some point in life at the cost of doing some classes. Which in turn will teach you something you didn’t know already know, which is also a positive and possibly fun thing. It isn’t as if people are sitting around saying “wow look at archeantus doing all that stuff without a degree, he is sure telling them.” Do whatever feels right for you, not others.
bduerst 7y ago
At the risk of committing a sunk cost fallacy, I would definitely say that's worth it since you are already so close and a sizable segment of society places a minimal expectation on having such a thing. Degrees are more a certificate that signal something to employers rather than actual vehicles of continued learning. Even if it's not needed now, it would certainly open more doors. But that's just my opinion. Do whatever feels right for you.

mcqueenjordan 7y ago

I dropped out of college. I self-studied CS and I've now worked at both AWS and Google. A degree is just a piece of paper. The only thing that actually matters is what you know and what you're able to do. Getting through the door the first time is the hardest part. Keep trying. Once you have any experience, you can keep building on it.

aehtyb 7y ago

the scrolling is messed up. has some kind of pseudo smooth scrolling javascript thing. really unnecessary.

jmlon 7y ago

Nice. Just wondering how are employers going to filter candidates qualified for their postings... Isn't this just transferring all the responsibility to verify qualifications on the employer?

marshallant 7y ago

I always laugh at this. You learn more by going to college then just computer science. I would say a degree is required, not necessary a CS degree, but something.

dboreham 7y ago

Hmm. Wouldn't this be just a regular job board where an applicant ignores any requirements in the postings that applicants have a degree? For me, hiring, the criterion is more like "could get a degree". Whether or not you actually have the degree doesn't matter to me. Someone who isn't smart enough/motivated enough to get a degree, if they wanted to and had the time/money, well I'd probably not hire that person. Perhaps this is what folks are really getting at when they say you need a degree?

Pete-Codes 7y ago

Just had first two sales now :)

Etheryte 7y ago

Not entirely on-topic, but the cover image on your homepage is scary — it looks like the exact type of workplace I wouldn't want anyone to end up, degree or not. Noisy open office where people are like cattle, essentially the same as cubicle era, except no cubicles.

swayvil 7y ago
It looks like a sweatshop.
- boopk 7y ago
  looks like a college exam room
- 19ylram49 7y ago
  Bingo. Environments like that seem to be the new “wave” now. I can’t stand them! Maybe it’s just me but I don’t understand how anyone can get any work done in those settings.
sylk 7y ago
Oh gosh. Change that to something else PLEASE!
redleggedfrog 7y ago
No man, check it out - get your own laptop. Yeah, that looks pretty terrible.
w1nter 7y ago
This is not an office, I took it during programming competition/hackathon. Originally posted it here https://unsplash.com/photos/QBpZGqEMsKg https://unsplash.com/photos/QBpZGqEMsKg

swayvil 7y ago

In other words, jobs for devs who are willing to work cheap. None of my dev jobs ever required a degree. None of them advertised the fact.

harel 7y ago

Is a degree absolute requirement an actual "thing"? I don't have a degree, never went to uni. I didn't even finish high school properly. But I've been in very good work coding for over 20 years now. Almost every position or contract I took had some sort of a degree "clause" in it, but not once was it ever asked, raised or inquired about anywhere. Ever.

bernierocks 7y ago

A degree only matters if you have zero experience, which could be supplemented by personal projects or open source contributions.

redleggedfrog 7y ago

This is a tough one for me. I wish I had a CS degree, because, well, I just want one. But I don't have one - I studied for a different BA degree, found computers, neglected classes, and then proceeded on to 27 years of programming. I'm nearly 100% self taught. And here's the weird part. At the handful of companies I've worked at there has most certainly been mild disdain for those with degrees. Nothing overt, but it was understood that if you didn't have the passion to teach yourself, and went to school to learn your programming, you were somehow inferior. We did have lots of people with degrees who turned out great, but they were always considered the exceptions, not the rule. I found this fascinating. Nearly all the senior developers, even lead developers, had no degree.

GoodGOYIM 7y ago
> Nearly all the senior developers, even lead developers, had no degree. Not true in France. How can one learn TDD and Agile Methodology without having at least an MS in CS?

xenospn 7y ago

I never graduated high school and have been in the software industry for about 20 years. No one has ever asked about my education or where I went to school.

SenHeng 7y ago

A lot of countries will not give you a work visa unless you have a degree.

crimsonalucard 7y ago

I hate these affirmative action initiatives. I get you want to help a minority, but you do so by implementing discriminatory practices.

29athrowaway 7y ago

Consider these sets of skills: a) skills acquired through a CS program b) skills acquired on the job c) skills acquired in a programming bootcamp d) skills acquired studying on your own (MOOC, books, videos, documentation, etc.) To build the first iterations of a product, you may need only c) and d). Once that product gets traction, things get exponentially more difficult and problems can get very abstract. That's when a) and b) makes a difference. Most software engineers can create a simple Twitter clone, but only a small tiny fraction can make it work at Twitter scale.

winrid 7y ago

I was so lucky that my high school was able to send me to a three year vocational CS class. Don't have a real degree. But once I was shown what a function was my passion for this stuff just took off.

jlevers 7y ago

I agree with the many people who've said (in essence) that for 90%+ of programming jobs -- i.e., writing CRUD apps or the like -- a CS degree is unnecessary. But how about that last 10% of jobs? Does the degree open doors to cutting-edge, exciting opportunities that aren't available without it? I'm in the process of deciding whether or not to drop out right now. I know that I have what it takes to self-study and get to a similar level of knowledge as a CS grad, but I'm wondering if not having a degree will preclude me from the less common, more exciting jobs that I'm most interested in.

codeisawesome 7y ago

Immigration is the biggest reason for citizens of non-wealthy/previously-colonised countries to get a degree.

19ylram49 7y ago

Many a time, I’ve hired software engineers without degrees over software engineers with Ivy League or top-10 school CS degrees, and I haven’t regretted it even once. Nowadays, I don’t even put education “requirements” in job descriptions, and even if you mention your school during an interview, I don’t really care for it, to be quite honest. At the end of the day, our real technical/programming interview (no whiteboard nonsense) will tell me the things that I need to know about your technical abilities. I remember interviewing one candidate with a CS degree from RIT, and I honestly spent a good portion of the interview genuinely feeling like this poor individual just flushed the tuition $ down the toilet, because he was just failing the interview miserably! Funny thing is, he knew a lot of theory, but when it came time to produce, it didn’t work out too well for him. (He could use whatever set-up that he preferred, Google usage was obviously allowed, he was given space to work without disruption at various points, and most importantly, the problem was a legitimate problem that we had to solve at the company.) All of this to say: Just apply! If you have the skills and a company doesn’t give you a chance because of a stupid degree requirement, they aren’t a good fit for you and don’t deserve you! Cross them off of your list, move on, and apply to another company.

tylerl 7y ago

Very few "real" tech companies require degrees now, certainly none of the sensible ones do. Looking at the front page of job listings on this board, you see Dropbox, Google, Uber, Oracle, Amazon, Visa, Atlassian, and Bank of America all with serious tech jobs (some of them quite senior) with no education requirement. But what you will need is the knowledge that you would have otherwise gotten with a CS degree. If you don't know a priority queue from a linked list, or you can't name an example of an O(nlog(n)) algorithm, then you're going to struggle in way more than just the interview; this crap comes up in real life more often than might be obvious. Luckily there are more than enough free places to learn this stuff. It's far less structured than a college, and requires an absurd amount of discipline to do on your own time, but nothing is missing. Beyond the ad-hoc content, several top-tier universities put their CS courseware online for free, and you can totally get the same CS education that others pay $200K for. You don't get the paper that says you did it, but you don't really need it. Getting through the resume barrier is a bit more tricky, but here's a tech recruiting open secret: Stack Overflow. It's gold for recruiters, and extremely heavily used. They find people who consistently post strong answers on topics relevant to the company they're recruiting for and directly recruit them to interview. Skip the job listings. If you have a strong S.O. profile and provide enough information for recruiters to track down who you are, you'll get no end of attention. That and GitHub. Write some code that demonstrates good design and put it up. When I was doing talent vetting for small firms, a person's Github page was a far more valuable signal than their "qualifications".

0xdead 7y ago

Makes sense; You don't really need a degree to be a web-dev anyway. On the other hand, people with CS degree rarely become a web-dev.

non-entity 7y ago
> people with CS degree rarely become a web-dev Source? I think there definitely needs to be a better categorization between simple CRUD development, and jobs that require more in-depth knowledge of CS, but plugging "software developer" or "software engineer" on any job board seems to yield vastly more "web development" jobs than anything else.