6 ms·

Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree

103 points by 01-_- 9mo ago

skybrian 9mo ago
Not sure this is actually news, since it seems like Google would sometimes hire people like that from the beginning. Still a lot of PhD's though.
- 9rx 9mo ago
  Not to mention that to the extent that it is newsworthy, it was already widely reported decades ago. e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2013-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-... Slow news day, I guess.
cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
He might be right but during my time at Google (coincidentally without a degree), I never found Brin to have much of any idea of what was actually happening inside the company. He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.
kappi 9mo ago
Forget not having degree, to get even an interview call, you need to be T20 alumni! Shows how execs are out of touch day to day operations of big companies.
- Arainach 9mo ago
  This isn't true and hasn't been true for 20 years, if ever. Maybe in the very beginning they had such a bar, I wasn't there. As late as 2007 they were still recruiting on-campus at non-T20 schools like Michigan State. Much of my team are from various Big Ten/similar universities that aren't top 20 but are solid (plenty are also from more prestigious universities, but unless you explicitly ask someone at lunch about their education no one ever talks about it). I've been involved in hiring and interviewing for 7+ years there and have done interviews with people from all caliber of school - top 10, middle of the pack US, HBCU, international - so there's no such requirement for that now either.
JohnLeitch 9mo ago
Interesting Microsoft is mentioned as recently dropping degree requirements. First time I worked there as an FTE without a degree was 2012. I don't see this as any sort of turn of events in the industry. It's always been "degree or equivalent experience" as far as I can remember.
- taurath 9mo ago
  They cull resumes in the pile by degree - you can get in with a reference nowadays but most places the front door is closed unless you have a pedigree.
  - JohnLeitch 9mo ago
    Maybe things are different now, but I'm on my third year with my current employer, and I found them organically, sending my resume out on Indeed. Admittedly the MS stuff was largely kicked off by contacts, but that's the only instance throughout my career. And those connections were gained through other work, of course.
- 627467 9mo ago
  Seems like the immigration revolution is having an impact on the tech sector after all
reactordev 9mo ago
This has always been true in tech. Degree’s pave way to leadership but skills opens doors. If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.
- selimthegrim 9mo ago
  I invite you to come apply for remote jobs out of Louisiana and be so glib.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    Being remote, why would I look in Louisiana? Look anywhere in the US. Live anywhere. Work anywhere.
    - selimthegrim 9mo ago
      The trick is getting the interviews. "Out of" meaning with that address.
      - reactordev 9mo ago
        So take it off the resume. The only time they need to know your address is when HR adds you to onboarding so they can pay taxes. There’s more nuance than this but ultimately it’s not really that important. Some states require the employer to post salaries or do this or that to do business in the state. For those companies that refuse to hire from your state, refuse to do business with those companies. Easy.
marginalia_nu 9mo ago
Why does the article suddenly start talking about power grids before jumping back to its topic like nothing happened? > If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent. > AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows. > This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs. > What's being done about changing hiring practices? The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
- GoldenMonkey 9mo ago
  AI generated content?
  - jeron 9mo ago
    need to add "make sure article flows cohesively and doesn't jump around topics" to the system prompt
  - 01-_- 9mo ago
    On Yahoo!!!?? I don't think so.
    - RankingMember 9mo ago
      Haha, I don't even know why Yahoo exists these days- my only interaction with them is occasionally getting linked AI-generated crap like this.
      - spullara 9mo ago
        you don't use yahoo finance???
2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago
It shows
- kasane_teto 9mo ago
  real
  - andybak 9mo ago
    I wonder how many HN readers you just insulted. Me for one.
    - freeplay 9mo ago
      I'm a senior engineer and have no degree. I never get offended by people making comments like this. If we're both in similar roles, making quality contributions, and are progressing in our careers, the only difference between us is, I didn't spending 50k-100k on a degree. Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.
      - sodafountan 9mo ago
        I fit the same criteria. I think college is probably a wholesome experience, but I don't really know, as I only went for two years and didn't really get much out of it. I had a few major issues with the experience: One: It was force-fed to you in High School, it almost seemed like there was no other choice at the time, and it was far too easy to go into massive debt at such a young age. Two: I was already self-taught in computer science, and the coursework didn't really expand upon my knowledge any. Three: The bureaucracy was insane, having to deal with Student Aid, registration, and signing up for classes. It was nauseating. Four: While there were some interesting classes in other domains of knowledge, the fact that there were so many required courses, like Writing and "English Composition." Kind of soured the experience. I didn't learn anything in the Comp Sci classes, and probably 60% of the other stuff I wasn't interested in. As an Adult who's paying tuition, you should be able to 100% pick and choose what courses you want to take, but because I was only 19 and fresh out of high school, that liberty didn't really dawn on me until after I had finally left. I went to a community college. I assume a four-year school or something more academic by nature would be interesting, but not worthy of hiring one person over another strictly on credentials.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
lazyasciiart 9mo ago
Sure, for a value of “many” meaning more than 10. I doubt it means anything close to, say, 10% of new hires. Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?
- warkdarrior 9mo ago
  Takeaway is clear: "College grads are not that great, so they should expect lower pay."
aabajian 9mo ago
When your most potent competitor companies (FB, MSFT, Apple) and investments (OpenAI) were all founded by college drop-outs, it does make you wonder whether college itself was holding these individuals back. I'm sure they are exceptions rather than the rule.
- mikkupikku 9mo ago
  If you already have the necessary skills and knowledge, and connections, then wasting years of your youth (when you have the most productive potential) in extended schooling is going to be a disadvantage. If.
  - gambiting 9mo ago
    Here in UK it's "well known" that going to a prestigious school like Eton is about being in one class with kids of prime ministers, presidents and oil sheikhs, so you have those connections for life and you can always call up on those. In that context going to university and studying almost anything could be a waste of time if you have someone who can help you get into places straight away.
- newman8r 9mo ago
  I think just because you've studied something for years doesn't mean you're good at it. I've interviewed plenty curious hackers with no degree who are miles ahead of CS people with degrees. Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives. I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.
- bluedino 9mo ago
  On the whole, there's a difference between 'got accepted to Harvard and dropped out after 2 years to start MegaCorp', and 'never went in the first place'
  - 9mo ago
nixass 9mo ago
Traditional Germans in this thread going through mental breakdown
- gtirloni 9mo ago
  Anyone that went through the German visa process as well.
  - lazyasciiart 9mo ago
    Or the US visa process, like all of Google's H1B hires.
- jakub_g 9mo ago
  Same about traditional French. In my first company, to be hired you needed a degree, preferably from a French "Grande École".
elAhmo 9mo ago
And this is news why? Isn't this always been the case, sure CS majors were employed, but so many people in the industry have no formal degrees.
- cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
  It's somewhat relevant in the context of Google only because the mythos behind the early part of the company (two Stanford PhDs, etc) and also because the general vibe at least in the early part of the company was really like it was kind of a big university of its own. Boatloads of Masters and PhD students, lots of talk about which school you came from, blah blah blah. Complete with a form "publish or perish" and "poster board sessions" and stuff that all felt very foreign to me when I joined (as someone not coming from academia). It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place. I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result. I think that reputation has lessened.
  - 9rx 9mo ago
    Only thing is that Google already publicly announced this exact same fact nearly 15 years ago, and it already filled the news cycle back then[1]. To have it show up again now is like today's news reporting on the movie Frozen being released. But, whatever attracts the most clicks goes, I suppose. [1] For example, - https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2013-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-... - https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
    - cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
      For sure, I 100% agree and see my other comment, it's questionable how much Brin even really knows about hiring practices or anything else happening inside Google these days anyways.
farceSpherule 9mo ago
[dead]
kevin061 9mo ago
This isn't really news... 11y ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/UNzUl30ZUe https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/UNzUl30ZUe
parliament32 9mo ago
Anecdotal, but some of my best hires were either degree-less, or had education in an unrelated field. I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.
nsoldiac 9mo ago
The type of roles w/ non-degree holders matters here. I'm sure Google offers a great career in any of its roles, but the article makes it sound like positions Stanford grads apply to (PM + eng) already have lots of non-degree holders. Pointing at company-wide stats to support that claim is weaksauce. Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs (if this is true: https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google). Who's to say the vast majority of non-degree holders aren't clustered in their sales and support org? I think the 77% stat is a great signal, love to see reduced gatekeeping in any job market. But, signaling you'll find folks without degrees in eng squads across Google doesn't seem obvious.
- elzbardico 9mo ago
  I have a few friends either without degrees or degrees in unrelated areas working as engineers for Google. In my experience, most tech companies were always a bit flexible for that. Google at their beginning, was a bit anal about wanting only PhDs from Stanford, but this was really during their initial years. It is like Facebook that once wanted only young people and now have their share of greybeards. It is traditional economy companies and consultancies like Accenture that usually don't have exceptions for people without formal credentials.
- zrn900 9mo ago
  > Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs Another statement from Google way back said that 14% of their engineers had no degree whatsoever.
summerlight 9mo ago
This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.
- lazide 9mo ago
  Uh, says no one who has been in the industry awhile?
cultofmetatron 9mo ago
CTO of a startup. built the entire cloud backend and added features as a sole backend dev for the first 3 years. Before that I worked for several years in SF as a developer working all the way from a self taught junior to senior engineer to now a CTO with 4 engineers working with me towards out series A. Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree. with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
- ottah 9mo ago
  A degree used to be a class distinction, a signal that someone belonged to the affluent in-group. The same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society. We were never supposed to be invited to the club, but we snuck in because they were desperate for skilled labor.
  - JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
    > same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society Strongly disagree. I say this as someone who went to a state school and didn’t start reading literature until well after college. The classics are classics for good reason. Even if one can’t learn to appreciate them, they’re critical for understanding entire epochs of political thought and history. It would be like trying to navigate modern retail politics while ignoring memes.
    - j_bum 9mo ago
      Well I am pretty much you but maybe several years junior. I went to a state school, was obsessively focused only on my field of study, and scoffed at the idea of exploring anything else (save for some Jung and Nietzsche). But as I’m “aging” into the real world after grad school, I’ve similarly realized how silly it was to turn my head to literature. Curious if you’d be willing to recommend a classic, or share the genres that you’ve been enjoying.
dinobones 9mo ago
It's not that hard to notice this, just google "{university} {degree} syllabus" and you can see all the courses that the student will take. In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience. Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.
donohoe 9mo ago
I have hired many talented programmers with degrees, but those degrees were in Economics or Literature. Very few from Comp Sci background. I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
- ironman1478 9mo ago
  I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post. Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.
  - internetter 9mo ago
    I taught myself how to program as a teenager by… programming. While I didn’t have an academic background, I was perfectly capable of contributing to OSS and working. Rarely ever did I think “I wish I had a degree to do this.” The little bit of academics I did need I also self taught, like time complexity. The only case really where the degree may be helpful is leetcode type interview questions where you need to know the algorithm.
    - ironman1478 9mo ago
      So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS. There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software. The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
    - 9mo ago
nospice 9mo ago
As far as I know, Google never had a requirement to have a degree for any software engineering job. What they did pretty aggressively, though, is sourcing candidates from universities with top-notch engineering programs (CMU, Stanford, etc). So they ended up with a significant proportion of such hires not because they rejected everyone else, but because their intake process produced more leads of this sort and treated them preferentially. Basically, for applicants going through that funnel, they guaranteed an onsite interview. But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
- spike021 9mo ago
  I attended San Jose State University and not once did I see Google at a CompSci/eng career fair or trying to hold any events. Can't comment on if that's still the case as it's been several years now since I graduated, but it was notable. same could be said for Adobe and their HQ was even closer to SJSU than Google's was.
- koakuma-chan 9mo ago
  I just (formally, technically) started my career in 2025, and I don't have a degree. How would I get into Google? What qualifications should I have?
  - nospice 9mo ago
    Big Tech can afford to be selective, so if you don't have a degree, the basic answer is that you need to stand out in some other way. This can be several years of interesting industry experience or other publicly-visible work (open source code, winning some competition, or even having a good blog). It also helps to know someone who works there and can help you get the first interview.
    - deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    - eycin 9mo ago
      I worked at Google. What you say is true for getting an interview, but the upside is that big tech cannot afford to be selective once you pass their interview, because very few can. At that point you are pretty much guaranteed an offer.
Attummm 9mo ago
There is evidence that exceptionally high intelligence can work against someone in the normal world and is linked to negative school outcomes.
- internetter 9mo ago
  This is my intuition according to empirical evidence but I’m curious if you have any studies on this matter?
  - adrian_b 9mo ago
    I am not aware of studies, but my experience agrees with this and I see nothing surprising in it. In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades. The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
    - r_lee 9mo ago
      I dropped out as soon as I could, I have ADD and school was the most excruciatingly painful thing I've ever experienced mentally. It felt like my entire life purpose was about waiting for it to finally end. I enjoyed discovering new things and learning stuff that genuinely was interesting to me. Howeverlearning what a "big rock" symbol was in a map in geography class was the kind of stuff that made me want to chew my own arm for stimulation. Plus not to mention having to accept wrong things as right because the teacher lacks the information and is just reading off a book. I never did homework, except for a handful of times. I spent my time programming and learning about industry stuff in the tech scene. And I love working, because you're actually like building towards something, not just "trust me, this'll be valuable later on" (which my brain can't interpret as a motivator) I envy those that get excited about acquiring credentials and getting formally educated about this and that, it's a way easier way to live in this world.
josefritzishere 9mo ago
The grammar and structure of this is weird like soen trash AI wrote it.
arrsingh 9mo ago
I remember when I was at the CMU Robotics institute in the graduate program (Robotics / AI) in 2003 and Google came on campus and they wouldn't even consider anyone without a PhD - the campus recruiter advised me to apply when I had completed my PhD. Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS. My how things have changed!
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
lvl155 9mo ago
There’s a weird bias that software development is difficult. It’s mostly monkey stuff. 80-90% of the job is basically coding up things to spec. You can make an argument that being a car mechanic is far more difficult than being a front-end monkey.
- tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  It’s very easy to take that knowledge you built over years for granted. Of course it is easy if you have been internalising it over your career.
- sodafountan 9mo ago
  I actually have a good friend who was a car mechanic for a few years; we sort of grew up together. I became a developer, and he ended up driving for a towing company after he burned out in the shop. I don't know who had it more difficult. Both are careers worthy of respect. Mechanics need more spatial awareness and are hands-on; it's relatively easy to change the oil or swap out a tire. He taught me how to do brakes once, but I didn't internalize any of it. It's not so easy to replace an engine. I did full-stack development for five or six years. He actually came over once, and I taught him a few things about the modern front-end stack. How to run Node.js, how to install dependencies via npm, and how to use GitHub. All things he was curious about. I would assume it's pretty annoying to work at a local or small-scale shop and have a car come in with modern electrical issues that only the manufacturer knows how to deal with.
nineplay 9mo ago
"Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates." Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.
tim-tday 9mo ago
Having worked at Google, been a hiring manager, been on numerous hiring boards: I don’t believe you. I mean, maybe if he means the technical meaning of the word namely “more than two” and not “a noticeable percentage” which is implied. In my time there I literally only knew two googlers without a college degree. I didn’t pry but people also aren’t shy about it. And zero people without degrees made it to offer stage in any hiring committee I was part of.
alphazard 9mo ago
CS degree is starting to become a bimodal distribution. There are enough people who thought they could buy a high-salary job by getting a CS degree, and universities advertising to that effect, that the market is now flooded with candidates who have degrees on paper, but don't have the mojo. Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard. Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.
- ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
  I wouldn't say it's a recent phenomenon. Hackers have been making unflattering jokes about mediocrity in corporate programmers at least as far back as the 1970s.
- elzbardico 9mo ago
  One thing that I always observed is that there is a huge difference between people who enrolled in a CS program to learn programming, and people who learned programming years before enrolling in CS.
- Nevermark 9mo ago
  I hadn't noticed, but you are right. When I went to school, all the non-CS engineering tracks involved two years of bootcamp. Harsh weeding out of underperforming students, not always in a responsible way. In my fourth year I was in a CS OS class (my own pedigree was EE/CE). A group behind me was talking, and someone openly expressed concern that they really liked CS, but they were unsure about their ability to program. Oh, ... man. I think the fact that any real CS talent had an easy time getting great employment for a long time, left some schools with less than the most ambitious grads as professors. Talent just self taught themselves past that, or had already done so before enrolling.
- laughing_man 9mo ago
  Programming requires a brain that's wired a certain way. In my career I saw highly intelligent people struggle writing simple, maintainable code for years without getting any better. It's all sort of orthogonal to college, too.
mmmlinux 9mo ago
There is no way you could even get remotely looked at with out being a rock star that came to their attention through some other means. No one applying cold with no degree is getting past the trashcan.
- lovich 9mo ago
  Yea, this seems like a submarine article. You won’t even get a human to look at your resume before the ATS trashes it if you don’t have the credentials they’re looking for and they still have those. I checked at random on their careers page for non entry level roles, ones you’d expect that you don’t need to rely on education as a signal like for entry level, and they are still having minimum qualifications of a bachelors, and preferred qualifications of a masters https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/139790908387140294-software-engineer-platforms-and-devices https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul...
dylan604 9mo ago
Why is this a thing to be surprised by? How many of the tech industry's biggest corps were started by college drop outs leaving them with no degree? The fact that they put needing a degree in the requirements for their job listings is something that has always been laughable to me. A degree pretty much just that you are more than likely in debt beyond belief and you didn't have much else to do so you kept with it long enough to finish. That's probably a bit cynical, but we all make fun of MBAs while cherishing CSE degrees??? Put someone to work that shows they can do the work regardless of having or not a sheep skin. If they can't cut it, get rid of them and do it again.
ggnore7452 9mo ago
I’m fine with hires without degrees. But if Google still filters people with LeetCode style coding questions, what’s the point of that in this day and age?
kittikitti 9mo ago
I agree with the premise of this article but too often has the argument been used to discourage going to college. You don't have to have a degree but it's also not a negative factor in your career.
0x4e 9mo ago
Speaking for myself: FITFO: Figure it the fuck out. Research and take action quickly. FAFO: Fuck around and find out. Do shit, make mistakes and try again. You’ll at least learn something from this. FPT: First principles thinking. Learn the basics and build from there. 80/20 Rule: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. ——— Cyberpunk thinking. You have the cyberspace to explore and do things that you find interesting. The punk is the DIY mentality.
4d4m 9mo ago
Cool to see that doing things and outcomes are more valued than learning theory :)
segmondy 9mo ago
sure, but let's look at the name of most folks leading their AI efforts, 80-90% have degrees.
hulitu 9mo ago
> Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree That explains the lack of engineering and test in today's software products. "If it compiles, ship it. If the user finds bugs, we can always make a new release"
ulfw 9mo ago
Random managed company. Used to require Stanford et al degrees (without a good reason), then basically IIT degrees, now no degrees. OK sure
zrn900 9mo ago
This was bound to happen as we freed knowledge from the monopolies of institutions conceived in the Middle Ages and made it available to everyone. Now, knowledge, even practice, is just a few clicks away from the people instead of being monopolized in gatekeeping institutions that you must get accepted and physically attend to. In a way, we are returning to the Open Science and Engineering of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that made the Scientific Revolution happen, but this time, it is for everybody instead of being monopolized in the hands of the elite. What is more, our knowledge is increasing at an accelerating rate, and no traditional institution of education can keep up with it, even further, with teaching it. We must start teaching people how to learn and how to use the scientific method and the core of any modern methodology, instead of trying to teach them individual topics, and even less, specializations. That way, people can keep learning and keep pace with technological development.

103 points by 01-_- 9mo ago

Not sure this is actually news, since it seems like Google would sometimes hire people like that from the beginning. Still a lot of PhD's though.

9rx 9mo ago
Not to mention that to the extent that it is newsworthy, it was already widely reported decades ago. e.g. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2013-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-... Slow news day, I guess.

cmrdporcupine 9mo ago

He might be right but during my time at Google (coincidentally without a degree), I never found Brin to have much of any idea of what was actually happening inside the company. He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.

kappi 9mo ago

Forget not having degree, to get even an interview call, you need to be T20 alumni! Shows how execs are out of touch day to day operations of big companies.

Arainach 9mo ago
This isn't true and hasn't been true for 20 years, if ever. Maybe in the very beginning they had such a bar, I wasn't there. As late as 2007 they were still recruiting on-campus at non-T20 schools like Michigan State. Much of my team are from various Big Ten/similar universities that aren't top 20 but are solid (plenty are also from more prestigious universities, but unless you explicitly ask someone at lunch about their education no one ever talks about it). I've been involved in hiring and interviewing for 7+ years there and have done interviews with people from all caliber of school - top 10, middle of the pack US, HBCU, international - so there's no such requirement for that now either.

JohnLeitch 9mo ago

Interesting Microsoft is mentioned as recently dropping degree requirements. First time I worked there as an FTE without a degree was 2012. I don't see this as any sort of turn of events in the industry. It's always been "degree or equivalent experience" as far as I can remember.

taurath 9mo ago
They cull resumes in the pile by degree - you can get in with a reference nowadays but most places the front door is closed unless you have a pedigree.
- JohnLeitch 9mo ago
  Maybe things are different now, but I'm on my third year with my current employer, and I found them organically, sending my resume out on Indeed. Admittedly the MS stuff was largely kicked off by contacts, but that's the only instance throughout my career. And those connections were gained through other work, of course.
627467 9mo ago
Seems like the immigration revolution is having an impact on the tech sector after all

reactordev 9mo ago

This has always been true in tech. Degree’s pave way to leadership but skills opens doors. If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.

selimthegrim 9mo ago
I invite you to come apply for remote jobs out of Louisiana and be so glib.
- reactordev 9mo ago
  Being remote, why would I look in Louisiana? Look anywhere in the US. Live anywhere. Work anywhere.
  - selimthegrim 9mo ago
    The trick is getting the interviews. "Out of" meaning with that address.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      So take it off the resume. The only time they need to know your address is when HR adds you to onboarding so they can pay taxes. There’s more nuance than this but ultimately it’s not really that important. Some states require the employer to post salaries or do this or that to do business in the state. For those companies that refuse to hire from your state, refuse to do business with those companies. Easy.

marginalia_nu 9mo ago

Why does the article suddenly start talking about power grids before jumping back to its topic like nothing happened? > If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent. > AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows. > This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs. > What's being done about changing hiring practices? The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.

GoldenMonkey 9mo ago
AI generated content?
- jeron 9mo ago
  need to add "make sure article flows cohesively and doesn't jump around topics" to the system prompt
- 01-_- 9mo ago
  On Yahoo!!!?? I don't think so.
  - RankingMember 9mo ago
    Haha, I don't even know why Yahoo exists these days- my only interaction with them is occasionally getting linked AI-generated crap like this.
    - spullara 9mo ago
      you don't use yahoo finance???

2OEH8eoCRo0 9mo ago

It shows

kasane_teto 9mo ago
real
- andybak 9mo ago
  I wonder how many HN readers you just insulted. Me for one.
  - freeplay 9mo ago
    I'm a senior engineer and have no degree. I never get offended by people making comments like this. If we're both in similar roles, making quality contributions, and are progressing in our careers, the only difference between us is, I didn't spending 50k-100k on a degree. Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.
    - sodafountan 9mo ago
      I fit the same criteria. I think college is probably a wholesome experience, but I don't really know, as I only went for two years and didn't really get much out of it. I had a few major issues with the experience: One: It was force-fed to you in High School, it almost seemed like there was no other choice at the time, and it was far too easy to go into massive debt at such a young age. Two: I was already self-taught in computer science, and the coursework didn't really expand upon my knowledge any. Three: The bureaucracy was insane, having to deal with Student Aid, registration, and signing up for classes. It was nauseating. Four: While there were some interesting classes in other domains of knowledge, the fact that there were so many required courses, like Writing and "English Composition." Kind of soured the experience. I didn't learn anything in the Comp Sci classes, and probably 60% of the other stuff I wasn't interested in. As an Adult who's paying tuition, you should be able to 100% pick and choose what courses you want to take, but because I was only 19 and fresh out of high school, that liberty didn't really dawn on me until after I had finally left. I went to a community college. I assume a four-year school or something more academic by nature would be interesting, but not worthy of hiring one person over another strictly on credentials.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

lazyasciiart 9mo ago

Sure, for a value of “many” meaning more than 10. I doubt it means anything close to, say, 10% of new hires. Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?

warkdarrior 9mo ago
Takeaway is clear: "College grads are not that great, so they should expect lower pay."

aabajian 9mo ago

When your most potent competitor companies (FB, MSFT, Apple) and investments (OpenAI) were all founded by college drop-outs, it does make you wonder whether college itself was holding these individuals back. I'm sure they are exceptions rather than the rule.

mikkupikku 9mo ago
If you already have the necessary skills and knowledge, and connections, then wasting years of your youth (when you have the most productive potential) in extended schooling is going to be a disadvantage. If.
- gambiting 9mo ago
  Here in UK it's "well known" that going to a prestigious school like Eton is about being in one class with kids of prime ministers, presidents and oil sheikhs, so you have those connections for life and you can always call up on those. In that context going to university and studying almost anything could be a waste of time if you have someone who can help you get into places straight away.
newman8r 9mo ago
I think just because you've studied something for years doesn't mean you're good at it. I've interviewed plenty curious hackers with no degree who are miles ahead of CS people with degrees. Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives. I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.
bluedino 9mo ago
On the whole, there's a difference between 'got accepted to Harvard and dropped out after 2 years to start MegaCorp', and 'never went in the first place'
- 9mo ago

nixass 9mo ago

Traditional Germans in this thread going through mental breakdown

gtirloni 9mo ago
Anyone that went through the German visa process as well.
- lazyasciiart 9mo ago
  Or the US visa process, like all of Google's H1B hires.
jakub_g 9mo ago
Same about traditional French. In my first company, to be hired you needed a degree, preferably from a French "Grande École".

elAhmo 9mo ago

And this is news why? Isn't this always been the case, sure CS majors were employed, but so many people in the industry have no formal degrees.

cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
It's somewhat relevant in the context of Google only because the mythos behind the early part of the company (two Stanford PhDs, etc) and also because the general vibe at least in the early part of the company was really like it was kind of a big university of its own. Boatloads of Masters and PhD students, lots of talk about which school you came from, blah blah blah. Complete with a form "publish or perish" and "poster board sessions" and stuff that all felt very foreign to me when I joined (as someone not coming from academia). It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place. I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result. I think that reputation has lessened.
- 9rx 9mo ago
  Only thing is that Google already publicly announced this exact same fact nearly 15 years ago, and it already filled the news cycle back then[1]. To have it show up again now is like today's news reporting on the movie Frozen being released. But, whatever attracts the most clicks goes, I suppose. [1] For example, - https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-2013-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-hiring-non-graduates-... - https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-top-college-graduates https://qz.com/180247/why-google-doesnt-care-about-hiring-to...
  - cmrdporcupine 9mo ago
    For sure, I 100% agree and see my other comment, it's questionable how much Brin even really knows about hiring practices or anything else happening inside Google these days anyways.

farceSpherule 9mo ago

[dead]

kevin061 9mo ago

This isn't really news... 11y ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/UNzUl30ZUe https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/UNzUl30ZUe

parliament32 9mo ago

Anecdotal, but some of my best hires were either degree-less, or had education in an unrelated field. I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.

nsoldiac 9mo ago

The type of roles w/ non-degree holders matters here. I'm sure Google offers a great career in any of its roles, but the article makes it sound like positions Stanford grads apply to (PM + eng) already have lots of non-degree holders. Pointing at company-wide stats to support that claim is weaksauce. Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs (if this is true: https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google). Who's to say the vast majority of non-degree holders aren't clustered in their sales and support org? I think the 77% stat is a great signal, love to see reduced gatekeeping in any job market. But, signaling you'll find folks without degrees in eng squads across Google doesn't seem obvious.

elzbardico 9mo ago
I have a few friends either without degrees or degrees in unrelated areas working as engineers for Google. In my experience, most tech companies were always a bit flexible for that. Google at their beginning, was a bit anal about wanting only PhDs from Stanford, but this was really during their initial years. It is like Facebook that once wanted only young people and now have their share of greybeards. It is traditional economy companies and consultancies like Accenture that usually don't have exceptions for people without formal credentials.
zrn900 9mo ago
> Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs Another statement from Google way back said that 14% of their engineers had no degree whatsoever.

summerlight 9mo ago

This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.

lazide 9mo ago
Uh, says no one who has been in the industry awhile?

cultofmetatron 9mo ago

CTO of a startup. built the entire cloud backend and added features as a sole backend dev for the first 3 years. Before that I worked for several years in SF as a developer working all the way from a self taught junior to senior engineer to now a CTO with 4 engineers working with me towards out series A. Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree. with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.

ottah 9mo ago
A degree used to be a class distinction, a signal that someone belonged to the affluent in-group. The same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society. We were never supposed to be invited to the club, but we snuck in because they were desperate for skilled labor.
- JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
  > same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society Strongly disagree. I say this as someone who went to a state school and didn’t start reading literature until well after college. The classics are classics for good reason. Even if one can’t learn to appreciate them, they’re critical for understanding entire epochs of political thought and history. It would be like trying to navigate modern retail politics while ignoring memes.
  - j_bum 9mo ago
    Well I am pretty much you but maybe several years junior. I went to a state school, was obsessively focused only on my field of study, and scoffed at the idea of exploring anything else (save for some Jung and Nietzsche). But as I’m “aging” into the real world after grad school, I’ve similarly realized how silly it was to turn my head to literature. Curious if you’d be willing to recommend a classic, or share the genres that you’ve been enjoying.

dinobones 9mo ago

It's not that hard to notice this, just google "{university} {degree} syllabus" and you can see all the courses that the student will take. In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience. Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.

donohoe 9mo ago

I have hired many talented programmers with degrees, but those degrees were in Economics or Literature. Very few from Comp Sci background. I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.

ironman1478 9mo ago
I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post. Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.
- internetter 9mo ago
  I taught myself how to program as a teenager by… programming. While I didn’t have an academic background, I was perfectly capable of contributing to OSS and working. Rarely ever did I think “I wish I had a degree to do this.” The little bit of academics I did need I also self taught, like time complexity. The only case really where the degree may be helpful is leetcode type interview questions where you need to know the algorithm.
  - ironman1478 9mo ago
    So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS. There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software. The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
  - 9mo ago

nospice 9mo ago

As far as I know, Google never had a requirement to have a degree for any software engineering job. What they did pretty aggressively, though, is sourcing candidates from universities with top-notch engineering programs (CMU, Stanford, etc). So they ended up with a significant proportion of such hires not because they rejected everyone else, but because their intake process produced more leads of this sort and treated them preferentially. Basically, for applicants going through that funnel, they guaranteed an onsite interview. But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.

spike021 9mo ago
I attended San Jose State University and not once did I see Google at a CompSci/eng career fair or trying to hold any events. Can't comment on if that's still the case as it's been several years now since I graduated, but it was notable. same could be said for Adobe and their HQ was even closer to SJSU than Google's was.
koakuma-chan 9mo ago
I just (formally, technically) started my career in 2025, and I don't have a degree. How would I get into Google? What qualifications should I have?
- nospice 9mo ago
  Big Tech can afford to be selective, so if you don't have a degree, the basic answer is that you need to stand out in some other way. This can be several years of interesting industry experience or other publicly-visible work (open source code, winning some competition, or even having a good blog). It also helps to know someone who works there and can help you get the first interview.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - eycin 9mo ago
    I worked at Google. What you say is true for getting an interview, but the upside is that big tech cannot afford to be selective once you pass their interview, because very few can. At that point you are pretty much guaranteed an offer.

Attummm 9mo ago

There is evidence that exceptionally high intelligence can work against someone in the normal world and is linked to negative school outcomes.

internetter 9mo ago
This is my intuition according to empirical evidence but I’m curious if you have any studies on this matter?
- adrian_b 9mo ago
  I am not aware of studies, but my experience agrees with this and I see nothing surprising in it. In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades. The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
  - r_lee 9mo ago
    I dropped out as soon as I could, I have ADD and school was the most excruciatingly painful thing I've ever experienced mentally. It felt like my entire life purpose was about waiting for it to finally end. I enjoyed discovering new things and learning stuff that genuinely was interesting to me. Howeverlearning what a "big rock" symbol was in a map in geography class was the kind of stuff that made me want to chew my own arm for stimulation. Plus not to mention having to accept wrong things as right because the teacher lacks the information and is just reading off a book. I never did homework, except for a handful of times. I spent my time programming and learning about industry stuff in the tech scene. And I love working, because you're actually like building towards something, not just "trust me, this'll be valuable later on" (which my brain can't interpret as a motivator) I envy those that get excited about acquiring credentials and getting formally educated about this and that, it's a way easier way to live in this world.

josefritzishere 9mo ago

The grammar and structure of this is weird like soen trash AI wrote it.

arrsingh 9mo ago

I remember when I was at the CMU Robotics institute in the graduate program (Robotics / AI) in 2003 and Google came on campus and they wouldn't even consider anyone without a PhD - the campus recruiter advised me to apply when I had completed my PhD. Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS. My how things have changed!

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

lvl155 9mo ago

There’s a weird bias that software development is difficult. It’s mostly monkey stuff. 80-90% of the job is basically coding up things to spec. You can make an argument that being a car mechanic is far more difficult than being a front-end monkey.

tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
It’s very easy to take that knowledge you built over years for granted. Of course it is easy if you have been internalising it over your career.
sodafountan 9mo ago
I actually have a good friend who was a car mechanic for a few years; we sort of grew up together. I became a developer, and he ended up driving for a towing company after he burned out in the shop. I don't know who had it more difficult. Both are careers worthy of respect. Mechanics need more spatial awareness and are hands-on; it's relatively easy to change the oil or swap out a tire. He taught me how to do brakes once, but I didn't internalize any of it. It's not so easy to replace an engine. I did full-stack development for five or six years. He actually came over once, and I taught him a few things about the modern front-end stack. How to run Node.js, how to install dependencies via npm, and how to use GitHub. All things he was curious about. I would assume it's pretty annoying to work at a local or small-scale shop and have a car come in with modern electrical issues that only the manufacturer knows how to deal with.

nineplay 9mo ago

"Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates." Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.

tim-tday 9mo ago

Having worked at Google, been a hiring manager, been on numerous hiring boards: I don’t believe you. I mean, maybe if he means the technical meaning of the word namely “more than two” and not “a noticeable percentage” which is implied. In my time there I literally only knew two googlers without a college degree. I didn’t pry but people also aren’t shy about it. And zero people without degrees made it to offer stage in any hiring committee I was part of.

alphazard 9mo ago

CS degree is starting to become a bimodal distribution. There are enough people who thought they could buy a high-salary job by getting a CS degree, and universities advertising to that effect, that the market is now flooded with candidates who have degrees on paper, but don't have the mojo. Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard. Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.

ThrowawayR2 9mo ago
I wouldn't say it's a recent phenomenon. Hackers have been making unflattering jokes about mediocrity in corporate programmers at least as far back as the 1970s.
elzbardico 9mo ago
One thing that I always observed is that there is a huge difference between people who enrolled in a CS program to learn programming, and people who learned programming years before enrolling in CS.
Nevermark 9mo ago
I hadn't noticed, but you are right. When I went to school, all the non-CS engineering tracks involved two years of bootcamp. Harsh weeding out of underperforming students, not always in a responsible way. In my fourth year I was in a CS OS class (my own pedigree was EE/CE). A group behind me was talking, and someone openly expressed concern that they really liked CS, but they were unsure about their ability to program. Oh, ... man. I think the fact that any real CS talent had an easy time getting great employment for a long time, left some schools with less than the most ambitious grads as professors. Talent just self taught themselves past that, or had already done so before enrolling.
laughing_man 9mo ago
Programming requires a brain that's wired a certain way. In my career I saw highly intelligent people struggle writing simple, maintainable code for years without getting any better. It's all sort of orthogonal to college, too.

mmmlinux 9mo ago

There is no way you could even get remotely looked at with out being a rock star that came to their attention through some other means. No one applying cold with no degree is getting past the trashcan.

lovich 9mo ago
Yea, this seems like a submarine article. You won’t even get a human to look at your resume before the ATS trashes it if you don’t have the credentials they’re looking for and they still have those. I checked at random on their careers page for non entry level roles, ones you’d expect that you don’t need to rely on education as a signal like for entry level, and they are still having minimum qualifications of a bachelors, and preferred qualifications of a masters https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/results/139790908387140294-software-engineer-platforms-and-devices https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul...

dylan604 9mo ago

Why is this a thing to be surprised by? How many of the tech industry's biggest corps were started by college drop outs leaving them with no degree? The fact that they put needing a degree in the requirements for their job listings is something that has always been laughable to me. A degree pretty much just that you are more than likely in debt beyond belief and you didn't have much else to do so you kept with it long enough to finish. That's probably a bit cynical, but we all make fun of MBAs while cherishing CSE degrees??? Put someone to work that shows they can do the work regardless of having or not a sheep skin. If they can't cut it, get rid of them and do it again.

ggnore7452 9mo ago

I’m fine with hires without degrees. But if Google still filters people with LeetCode style coding questions, what’s the point of that in this day and age?

kittikitti 9mo ago

I agree with the premise of this article but too often has the argument been used to discourage going to college. You don't have to have a degree but it's also not a negative factor in your career.

0x4e 9mo ago

Speaking for myself: FITFO: Figure it the fuck out. Research and take action quickly. FAFO: Fuck around and find out. Do shit, make mistakes and try again. You’ll at least learn something from this. FPT: First principles thinking. Learn the basics and build from there. 80/20 Rule: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. ——— Cyberpunk thinking. You have the cyberspace to explore and do things that you find interesting. The punk is the DIY mentality.

4d4m 9mo ago

Cool to see that doing things and outcomes are more valued than learning theory :)

segmondy 9mo ago

sure, but let's look at the name of most folks leading their AI efforts, 80-90% have degrees.

hulitu 9mo ago

> Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree That explains the lack of engineering and test in today's software products. "If it compiles, ship it. If the user finds bugs, we can always make a new release"

ulfw 9mo ago

Random managed company. Used to require Stanford et al degrees (without a good reason), then basically IIT degrees, now no degrees. OK sure

zrn900 9mo ago

This was bound to happen as we freed knowledge from the monopolies of institutions conceived in the Middle Ages and made it available to everyone. Now, knowledge, even practice, is just a few clicks away from the people instead of being monopolized in gatekeeping institutions that you must get accepted and physically attend to. In a way, we are returning to the Open Science and Engineering of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that made the Scientific Revolution happen, but this time, it is for everybody instead of being monopolized in the hands of the elite. What is more, our knowledge is increasing at an accelerating rate, and no traditional institution of education can keep up with it, even further, with teaching it. We must start teaching people how to learn and how to use the scientific method and the core of any modern methodology, instead of trying to teach them individual topics, and even less, specializations. That way, people can keep learning and keep pace with technological development.