5 ms·

Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical

Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers. > If there are two candidates — one with a degree, one without, “to many hiring managers, it will feel risky,” he said. But the above quote seems logical for me as well. In an interview situation, I have evidence that the person with a degree can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success. Like it or not, that is a signal of something that’s relevant in lots of business/office situations and so, all else equal, I’d expect managers to lean towards the degree-holder.

pknomad 3y ago
> Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers. There's an element of self selection. Perhaps you're working at a place where only highly capable employees work and people without college education who work at your place are capable of succeeding without one in the first place? My manager seems to fit the mold you're describing. There are definitely people out there who are brilliant and don't need a college degree to show that. I am a frequent poster at /r/itcareerquestions and a mod for /r/engineeringresumes and my anecdotal observation is that on average, college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest. I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws (whether it's from nature or nurture) those flaws would get in the way of their success even if their respective employer didn't look at college education as a measuring stick for hirability.
- ZephyrBlu 3y ago
  > college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest Yes, it's obvious to everyone that a degree is correlated with being hireable because having a degree is also correlated with a lot of favourable attributes like intelligence and conscientiousness. If you want a warm body a degree is a good filter. This is contradictory to strongest/highly capable employees though. For that case, having a degree is an extremely lazy filter. You filter unhireable people, but you also filter extremely hireable people.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Which sounds like a pretty reasonable heuristic for a lot of companies absent some other strong signal. Sure, there are probably circumstances where you're willing to swing for the fences on a speculative superstar but a lot of the time you want a reliable bet on someone being solid. For some jobs, e.g. sales, that have strong quantitative metrics it's fine to not worry as much about hiring and just fire anyone who isn't making their numbers. But that works less well with things like engineering positions.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws What in the world are you talking about? Citation definitely needed. Note that only 38% of Americans have a college degree.
  - pknomad 3y ago
    No citation available because it's an anecdote/sample data from 2 subreddit communities...
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Quoth Dr. Bryan Caplan, who has an excellent book on the matter: """ In a world of costly information, employers sensibly rely on a lot of statistical generalizations. One of these, I’ll warrant, is that weirdos [non-degree holders here] are, on average, worse employees than conformists [degree holders]. Admittedly, the truth of this probably varies from industry to industry. (Check out Peter Jackson). But typically, usually, normally, normality is the best bet. The upshot is that some clever but unconventional ideas sit on the shelf, untried. """ The term to Google around for is, apparently, 'statistical discrimination'. There are of course plenty of other ways to be a weirdo in the eyes of an employer, but degree vs non-degree is one of the biggest ones.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  Academia filters a lot less for conformity than it used to. Indeed, in some very elite places, any attempt to enforce the old-fashioned style of conformity on students would be seen as Problematic. On minority students, doubly so. This does not need to be a bad thing - how many nose rings someone has and what color their hair is, is not a good proxy for whether they are any good at a particular skill like coding, for example.
red_admiral 3y ago
The, uh, signal-to-noise ratio seems to be quite variable though.
SaltPork 3y ago
Sure a college degree shows they can do whats expected and still get by. A counter point to this would be You are interviewing to individuals for a job and the only thing missing from one is a degree? Perhaps the person without a degree didn't have the money for college or had personal life happenings that prevented them from going. Yet they managed to get into an interview. Shouldn't a few more justified questions about how they get to where they are now? This could show you that the person who didn't go to college as the favorable hire(through hard work), opposed to someone whom is or was more economically advantaged? Instead this one has a checked box(college) and this one doesn't, the more checked boxes justify the outcome.
bigDinosaur 3y ago
Am I wrong in thinking that "not completed" is often vastly closer to "having a degree" than "never started"? Obviously some people fail out of degrees completely, but many start a degree because they're capable and simply find out they dislike the content.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  That would be a situation for which I'd request a transcript - probably the only situation, because the second you're handed that degree I no longer care what your grades were. Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
- ako 3y ago
  Not completing something simply because you dislike it is a big red flag. At work you often have to finish stuff you don’t like, you don’t want employee that will start something but rely on others to finish it.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    What if it aint "dont like", but "not worth"? Like, if there is no value in wasting time on completion
    - al_borland 3y ago
      Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect. This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
    - ako 3y ago
      There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag. But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.
ghxst 3y ago
Are there alternatives to demonstrate those qualities to the equivelance of a degree to you? Just wondering if all else is equal what could people without a degree look to add to their resume to benefit from in these situations.
- nickff 3y ago
  It’s tough, because a degree demonstrates perseverance and conformism. There’s no short-cut to either because a short-cut would be the choice of non-conformists & less perseverant people. There’s a great deal of work on this, known as the ‘signaling model of education’.
  - ghxst 3y ago
    I agree with this broadly speaking, I wasn't necessarily asking for a shortcut or way to undermine it, more just of a way of demonstrating this ability assuming you have it.
    - nickff 3y ago
      The problem with demonstrating this equivalence is that signalling must be expensive to work; there's no 'low-cost' substitute for signalling. One example is natural diamond engagement rings; they must be expensive to signal commitment; an imitation doesn't do the job, no matter how beautiful.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  I don't know a great answer (and I wish I did, because one of the high performers on my team is "undergrad equivalent of ABD" and I want people like them to succeed without unfair negative treatment). I would say that it's hard to directly target an equivalent in an interview, because you don't want to needlessly draw attention to the fact that you don't have a degree. ("Hey interviewer, if you're worried about me not having a degree, think about the fact that I earned an Eagle Scout honor or trained for and completed a marathon or <XYZ>." Maybe the interviewer hadn't ever thought about the fact that you didn't have a degree and now you've soured them a bit.) For the concern I raised in the GP post, I would say anything that shows persistent and consistent dedicated effort, over a long (ideally multi-year) period of time resulting in a successful outcome would qualify and would be something that I'd tried to work into one of my answers.
Meekro 3y ago
That's a fair analysis. It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc. "Bring back unpaid internships" is one obvious way to re-create the signal, assuming companies would be willing to take on ambitious 18 years olds and teach them. As a hiring manager, do you think there is any way to make this happen?
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
  > many people learn very little in their college classes Is this because the student doesn't pay attention, or the student already knew all the material?
  - forbiddenvoid 3y ago
    You are missing option C: College classes simply don't teach very much.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Because they didn’t pay attention. Or were too busy partying. I wasn’t the best student, but I learned a ton in those four years.
  - lukan 3y ago
    It is likey just anecdota from bad colleges/bad students. I went to a normal german university, did not complete on my own terms, but I surely learned there a lot. Even though the university intentionally did not hold my hand teaching me programming. I had to do that mostly on my own. But they gave the theoretical foundation of all the important concepts about IT. Algorithms, data structure, information theory, math, .. things I did not often see at the time any direct benefit "to get shit done". But it payed off.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  In the US context, I'm strongly opposed to unpaid internships [at least in tech] (because I believe that paid internships are inherently more equitable and unpaid internships have a bunch of moral hazards for bad employers to exploit that even a local minimum wage internship does not have). Paid internships are great and whenever we're expecting to have open entry-level positions the following year, we run a paid internship program. It's an excellent source of future talent for us and (IMO) is good training/experience for the interns. I think it would be illegal to have an unpaid internship program in many states unless the intern was doing the internship as part of a degree-granting [or at least academic credit earning] program. (That's at least a close summary of the law in MA where I am.) And in tech, I can't think of much reason to have an unpaid internship program, even if legal. If I can afford the staff time to direct and supervise the interns, I can afford the $15/hour minimum wage* and that aligns everyone's incentives better. * We pay substantially more than this to interns, but even paying the legal minimum wage aligns incentives.
mrj 3y ago
Just as I look at that person and consider how scrappy and determined they must have been to get a start in an industry that's not terribly friendly to juniors. I know because I did it. Then earned a degree later that filled in some gaps, which I seldom use. Of course, it's just one tiny metric and not the most important of anything I would consider, but a degree earned or not maybe a decade or two before I meet them often tells me more about their family upbringing than it does their current ability.
lapcat 3y ago
Many of the big tech companies were founded by college dropouts, who became billionaires.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school. And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    I would note that just as dropping out of college can be good for elite scions without being good for you, going to college can be good for elite scions (the concept was developed for them!) without being good for you.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school. Steve Jobs spent 1 semester at Reed College. > And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families. So for non-wealthy people, dropping out of college is a sign of badness, whereas for wealthy people, it's a sign of goodness? That sounds a lot like discrimination to me.
- blitzar 3y ago
  99.999999999% of college dropouts do not become billionaires.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    99.999999999% of degree recipients do not become billionaires either. The point is that using a degree as decisive evidence of "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is kind of ridiculous. Especially if you're evaluating a candidate with years of actual job experience. (And it would be quite hypocritical if a hiring manager for a company founded by a dropout disrciminated against droputs.)
  - 3y ago
mcmoor 3y ago
I think there's a part of Simpsons paradox here. If there's someone without degree reaches the place where you are, they must have some extreme talent somewhere else.
makerdiety 3y ago
The only thing having an "education" signals is conformity to mediocrity. Yeah. An entire society is inflating its value and its capabilities. And that's a serious error to have for a planet. So, maybe someone like Richard Feynman isn't really someone to look up to? Maybe you should be looking down on people like him? Considering his type is all about "education, science, and development."
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > conformity to mediocrity So that means a "safe" hire, doesn't it? > Richard Feynman Had a PhD from Princeton!
  - makerdiety 3y ago
    Correctly calling the smartest person in the world an idiot is only absurd because intelligence was improperly defined in the first place. And the dominant cultural trend is all about improper definitions.

pknomad 3y ago

> Some (not all) of the strongest employees I’ve worked with had no degrees (often “not completed” rather than “never started”) and my own degree is in Mechanical Engineering, despite only ever having worked with computers. There's an element of self selection. Perhaps you're working at a place where only highly capable employees work and people without college education who work at your place are capable of succeeding without one in the first place? My manager seems to fit the mold you're describing. There are definitely people out there who are brilliant and don't need a college degree to show that. I am a frequent poster at /r/itcareerquestions and a mod for /r/engineeringresumes and my anecdotal observation is that on average, college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest. I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws (whether it's from nature or nurture) those flaws would get in the way of their success even if their respective employer didn't look at college education as a measuring stick for hirability.

ZephyrBlu 3y ago
> college serves as a decent filter for separating hirable people from the rest Yes, it's obvious to everyone that a degree is correlated with being hireable because having a degree is also correlated with a lot of favourable attributes like intelligence and conscientiousness. If you want a warm body a degree is a good filter. This is contradictory to strongest/highly capable employees though. For that case, having a degree is an extremely lazy filter. You filter unhireable people, but you also filter extremely hireable people.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Which sounds like a pretty reasonable heuristic for a lot of companies absent some other strong signal. Sure, there are probably circumstances where you're willing to swing for the fences on a speculative superstar but a lot of the time you want a reliable bet on someone being solid. For some jobs, e.g. sales, that have strong quantitative metrics it's fine to not worry as much about hiring and just fire anyone who isn't making their numbers. But that works less well with things like engineering positions.
lapcat 3y ago
> I apologize for my incendiary comment but I see that many people who lack college degree tend to have big character flaws What in the world are you talking about? Citation definitely needed. Note that only 38% of Americans have a college degree.
- pknomad 3y ago
  No citation available because it's an anecdote/sample data from 2 subreddit communities...

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Quoth Dr. Bryan Caplan, who has an excellent book on the matter: """ In a world of costly information, employers sensibly rely on a lot of statistical generalizations. One of these, I’ll warrant, is that weirdos [non-degree holders here] are, on average, worse employees than conformists [degree holders]. Admittedly, the truth of this probably varies from industry to industry. (Check out Peter Jackson). But typically, usually, normally, normality is the best bet. The upshot is that some clever but unconventional ideas sit on the shelf, untried. """ The term to Google around for is, apparently, 'statistical discrimination'. There are of course plenty of other ways to be a weirdo in the eyes of an employer, but degree vs non-degree is one of the biggest ones.

red_admiral 3y ago
Academia filters a lot less for conformity than it used to. Indeed, in some very elite places, any attempt to enforce the old-fashioned style of conformity on students would be seen as Problematic. On minority students, doubly so. This does not need to be a bad thing - how many nose rings someone has and what color their hair is, is not a good proxy for whether they are any good at a particular skill like coding, for example.

red_admiral 3y ago

The, uh, signal-to-noise ratio seems to be quite variable though.

SaltPork 3y ago

Sure a college degree shows they can do whats expected and still get by. A counter point to this would be You are interviewing to individuals for a job and the only thing missing from one is a degree? Perhaps the person without a degree didn't have the money for college or had personal life happenings that prevented them from going. Yet they managed to get into an interview. Shouldn't a few more justified questions about how they get to where they are now? This could show you that the person who didn't go to college as the favorable hire(through hard work), opposed to someone whom is or was more economically advantaged? Instead this one has a checked box(college) and this one doesn't, the more checked boxes justify the outcome.

bigDinosaur 3y ago

Am I wrong in thinking that "not completed" is often vastly closer to "having a degree" than "never started"? Obviously some people fail out of degrees completely, but many start a degree because they're capable and simply find out they dislike the content.

tjpnz 3y ago
That would be a situation for which I'd request a transcript - probably the only situation, because the second you're handed that degree I no longer care what your grades were. Where I'm from, if you're bombing out of classes you'll be excluded from university. Takes about two years if you're terrible and incapable of getting the message. But it's something I would like to know because it is a signal.
ako 3y ago
Not completing something simply because you dislike it is a big red flag. At work you often have to finish stuff you don’t like, you don’t want employee that will start something but rely on others to finish it.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  What if it aint "dont like", but "not worth"? Like, if there is no value in wasting time on completion
  - al_borland 3y ago
    Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect. This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
  - ako 3y ago
    There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag. But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.

ghxst 3y ago

Are there alternatives to demonstrate those qualities to the equivelance of a degree to you? Just wondering if all else is equal what could people without a degree look to add to their resume to benefit from in these situations.

nickff 3y ago
It’s tough, because a degree demonstrates perseverance and conformism. There’s no short-cut to either because a short-cut would be the choice of non-conformists & less perseverant people. There’s a great deal of work on this, known as the ‘signaling model of education’.
- ghxst 3y ago
  I agree with this broadly speaking, I wasn't necessarily asking for a shortcut or way to undermine it, more just of a way of demonstrating this ability assuming you have it.
  - nickff 3y ago
    The problem with demonstrating this equivalence is that signalling must be expensive to work; there's no 'low-cost' substitute for signalling. One example is natural diamond engagement rings; they must be expensive to signal commitment; an imitation doesn't do the job, no matter how beautiful.
sokoloff 3y ago
I don't know a great answer (and I wish I did, because one of the high performers on my team is "undergrad equivalent of ABD" and I want people like them to succeed without unfair negative treatment). I would say that it's hard to directly target an equivalent in an interview, because you don't want to needlessly draw attention to the fact that you don't have a degree. ("Hey interviewer, if you're worried about me not having a degree, think about the fact that I earned an Eagle Scout honor or trained for and completed a marathon or <XYZ>." Maybe the interviewer hadn't ever thought about the fact that you didn't have a degree and now you've soured them a bit.) For the concern I raised in the GP post, I would say anything that shows persistent and consistent dedicated effort, over a long (ideally multi-year) period of time resulting in a successful outcome would qualify and would be something that I'd tried to work into one of my answers.

Meekro 3y ago

That's a fair analysis. It makes me wonder if there's any way to re-create that signal without forcing people to incur 6 figures in debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. As far as I can tell, many people learn very little in their college classes -- but it does still signal whether someone can shut up and do what they're told, turn in assignments on time, set a 4 year goal and accomplish it, etc. "Bring back unpaid internships" is one obvious way to re-create the signal, assuming companies would be willing to take on ambitious 18 years olds and teach them. As a hiring manager, do you think there is any way to make this happen?

HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
> many people learn very little in their college classes Is this because the student doesn't pay attention, or the student already knew all the material?
- forbiddenvoid 3y ago
  You are missing option C: College classes simply don't teach very much.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Because they didn’t pay attention. Or were too busy partying. I wasn’t the best student, but I learned a ton in those four years.
- lukan 3y ago
  It is likey just anecdota from bad colleges/bad students. I went to a normal german university, did not complete on my own terms, but I surely learned there a lot. Even though the university intentionally did not hold my hand teaching me programming. I had to do that mostly on my own. But they gave the theoretical foundation of all the important concepts about IT. Algorithms, data structure, information theory, math, .. things I did not often see at the time any direct benefit "to get shit done". But it payed off.
sokoloff 3y ago
In the US context, I'm strongly opposed to unpaid internships [at least in tech] (because I believe that paid internships are inherently more equitable and unpaid internships have a bunch of moral hazards for bad employers to exploit that even a local minimum wage internship does not have). Paid internships are great and whenever we're expecting to have open entry-level positions the following year, we run a paid internship program. It's an excellent source of future talent for us and (IMO) is good training/experience for the interns. I think it would be illegal to have an unpaid internship program in many states unless the intern was doing the internship as part of a degree-granting [or at least academic credit earning] program. (That's at least a close summary of the law in MA where I am.) And in tech, I can't think of much reason to have an unpaid internship program, even if legal. If I can afford the staff time to direct and supervise the interns, I can afford the $15/hour minimum wage* and that aligns everyone's incentives better. * We pay substantially more than this to interns, but even paying the legal minimum wage aligns incentives.

mrj 3y ago

Just as I look at that person and consider how scrappy and determined they must have been to get a start in an industry that's not terribly friendly to juniors. I know because I did it. Then earned a degree later that filled in some gaps, which I seldom use. Of course, it's just one tiny metric and not the most important of anything I would consider, but a degree earned or not maybe a decade or two before I meet them often tells me more about their family upbringing than it does their current ability.

lapcat 3y ago

Many of the big tech companies were founded by college dropouts, who became billionaires.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school. And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  I would note that just as dropping out of college can be good for elite scions without being good for you, going to college can be good for elite scions (the concept was developed for them!) without being good for you.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > They were college dropouts from the Ivy league not some non-name state school. Steve Jobs spent 1 semester at Reed College. > And the likes of Gates, Zuck and Musk came from wealthy and influential families. So for non-wealthy people, dropping out of college is a sign of badness, whereas for wealthy people, it's a sign of goodness? That sounds a lot like discrimination to me.
blitzar 3y ago
99.999999999% of college dropouts do not become billionaires.
- lapcat 3y ago
  99.999999999% of degree recipients do not become billionaires either. The point is that using a degree as decisive evidence of "can follow rules/policies and track towards a long-term goal with success" is kind of ridiculous. Especially if you're evaluating a candidate with years of actual job experience. (And it would be quite hypocritical if a hiring manager for a company founded by a dropout disrciminated against droputs.)
- 3y ago

mcmoor 3y ago

I think there's a part of Simpsons paradox here. If there's someone without degree reaches the place where you are, they must have some extreme talent somewhere else.

makerdiety 3y ago

The only thing having an "education" signals is conformity to mediocrity. Yeah. An entire society is inflating its value and its capabilities. And that's a serious error to have for a planet. So, maybe someone like Richard Feynman isn't really someone to look up to? Maybe you should be looking down on people like him? Considering his type is all about "education, science, and development."

drewcoo 3y ago
> conformity to mediocrity So that means a "safe" hire, doesn't it? > Richard Feynman Had a PhD from Princeton!
- makerdiety 3y ago
  Correctly calling the smartest person in the world an idiot is only absurd because intelligence was improperly defined in the first place. And the dominant cultural trend is all about improper definitions.