4 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 Mechanic
by 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 agoWhich 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 agoNo citation available because it's an anecdote/sample data from 2 subreddit communities...