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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 suc
by 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.
- ghxst 3y agoAt the company I currently work at we are open to look at GitHub activity as a good indicator, this might work for some candidates but definitely not all.
- sokoloff 3y agoI think non-trivial quality github activity over a sustained period of time would be an excellent indicator of the type of persistence that I'm thinking of, and something that a candidate could pretty easily work into an interview answer in a positive light. Plus, even if they don't use it to break a tie in an "all else equal" interview, the contributions themselves will make the candidate a stronger candidate.
- ghaff 3y agoI'd make it a bit broader--OK, you have significant open source contributions on GitHub. So long as it's not OK you have a degree frm $X and have 5 years of experience with $Y so where's your GitHub?