12 ms·

Your Credentials Are Worthless Here

245 points by emmett 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
The author's Google Plus page: https://plus.google.com/105795650153890257976/posts https://plus.google.com/105795650153890257976/posts I'm not sure if the "attended Yale University" is part of the Google+ page layout or a conscious choice on his part, but either way it says something. Not that I disagree with his point.
- justin 14y ago
  I think that is the default Google+ layout to show where you went to school? If it says anything, I think it reinforces my point that US culture by default places too much emphasis on where you went to school. Not that I don't value my time at Yale, but I don't feel like it is particularly worth highlighting on my resume: tens of thousands of people graduate every single year from top universities. Hardly something unique.
  - jgh 14y ago
    It's the default layout because my G+ account displays my shitty school prominently.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Not "unique," but certainly not meaningless either. In particular, my experience with top schools is that, more than "average" schools, they're often hard—the people that get in are very competitive and competent, and the material and pace reflect this. It's useful information to know that somebody was up to dealing with all that, because not everybody is...
    - justin 14y ago
      The hardest part about Yale was getting in. Yes, many if not most of the people who get in are smart, but are they all competitive and competent? I don't believe so. Top school == a signal, but it is a weakly correlated one with being productive in my opinion.
- notatoad 14y ago
  from the article: >Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing.
MatthewPhillips 14y ago
> I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up. So Kan's companies are ageist, gotcha.
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  Maybe you only need to be a child at heart (fingers crossed). : P
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    If he's looking for people without degrees I suspect it's more important that you have a child's salary requirements...
- sixothree 14y ago
  Incidentally, that was my only take-away from that article.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    "Stay(ed) up until 5am coding" was what really jumped out at me. I think the modern college market is just a credentialing racket, so I don't mind steps taken to disrupt it. That doesn't mean I'll support any step to disrupt it.
- abstractbill 14y ago
  Justin.TV certainly wasn't, and I'd be very surprised if Exec is. I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV, aged 33 at the time (a full decade older than one of the founders!). Nobody cared about that, they cared that I'm a good hacker who gets things done.
  - MatthewPhillips 14y ago
    That's good to hear, the article's tone made it sound like he's only interested in hiring young inexperienced engineers (code for cheap).
rdl 14y ago
I think there may be a difference between the credentials which matter to big dumb companies and the credentials which matter "here".
- krapp 14y ago
  I was all hyped up until I remembered I was 35, went to a technical school no one cares about and code in languages everyone loves to hate. Something tells me I wouldn't make it past the lobby.
  - rdl 14y ago
    My personal biases (which I understand, and thus look at a bit more, but tend to consider valid): 1) People who hacked on projects on their own is WAY more important than "worked for a big successful company" or school. Even if the project fails. 2) Personality/performance traits matter a lot more than specific skills. 3) I'm generally biased toward hiring military veterans (US, Israeli, etc.); yet, there are parts of the US military which have a higher-than-ambient density of idiots, so it's gotta be selective. 4) Hiring mostly makes sense through network of existing people (founders, early employees), although "soft" connections to that network matter more than core membership. I also probably shouldn't admit this legally (but I think it's safe) -- I would be biased toward 25+ year olds, vs. 18-25. I don't see much difference after mid/late 20s, but teens or early 20s, not so much. I would absolutely hire a qualified 18 year old, but I don't really look in the 18-25 year old range when hiring, and due to the historical accident of dotcom 1.0, people who were at least aware of their surroundings in the tech industry (even if in a junior role) in 1997+ would be a huge win.
    - taproot 14y ago
      Something tells me you're not going to be strung up for letting on you prefer older techies; at least, not while most of the industry is the inverse.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I know what you mean... I generally ask people "What was the last code you wrote for yourself that wasn't for work or school?". I learned that one from a friend and it is a great question that tends get to people who I want to work with.
richardjordan 14y ago
I think one of the uncomfortable truths that people don't like to talk about in Silicon Valley is how much nepotism and old-boy-network is wrapped up in the clothing of "hiring from top schools". Social proof sounds really good until you start to think through that a lot of so called social proof actually comes from relationships built through serendipity of what school your parents could afford to send you to. It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere, to be born on third base and think you hit a triple. I see this even more with MBAs than comp sci and particularly in downturns (having been in Silicon Valley a long time now) where weaker VCs invest in MBA buddies as easy decisions in tough climates. Credentials are great as lazy decision making tools for big co hr departments - you don't get fired for hiring the Ivy Leaguer. But for startups make sure you're hiring for what someone can do and has done, not for what paperwork they've accumulated. I've made the mistake of hiring the high flying Ivy League wunderkind straight out of college, highly recommended... it was an absolute disaster but my own fault for taking this as proxy for being good on a startup.
- pcl 14y ago
  It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere, to be born on third base and think you hit a triple. That's a fantastic expression. I just looked it up -- the internet thinks that it originated with Barry Switzer, a former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23536.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23536.html
  - shawnc 14y ago
    Cool, thanks for sharing that. I new it from the Pearl Jam song 'Bushleaguer' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nhyhlzLwIw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nhyhlzLwIw
  - mjn 14y ago
    My sense of order would've been served better if one of baseball's many famous wisecracks had come up with that line. A football coach originating baseball metaphors, egads!
  - richardjordan 14y ago
jhuckestein 14y ago
I fully agree with this post and this is exactly what I keep telling people that do things for their resume. The one notion that always irks me though is talent. It seems to measure some combination of confidence and the amount of praise a person happens to have received in their life (i.e. how often someone told them they're talented) and is for the most part not well-defined. Yet, this article uses talent just like another credential. I don't think talent is a thing that you either have or don't have. There's certainly some people that I'd like to hire that wouldn't with certainty say that they have talent. Vetting for confidence is a bit more interesting, but I also know plenty of confident people (i.e. that think they're talented) that can't get the job done. The best way I've come up with to characterize what we're all looking for is people who can solve our problems/get the job done. That makes it mostly about what the applicant thinks they can do and less about the amount of praise they've received previously in live. This reminds me of how Kyle Neath posted yesterday that he thought he was not a great coder or designer but he could get the job done. When he was twenty, perhaps he didn't consider himself talented but I'm pretty sure nobody would have regretted hiring him.
- incision 14y ago
  Talent is one of those words with a thousand pet definitions. Personally, I see the word used most often a kind of negative rationalization. A way to disregard success as lacking in effort, to say it's inborn, incidental. I'd generally prefer to be described and to describe people as passionate, dedicated, capable or plain smart rather than talented. I think those traits, often in combination with a lot of thought/practice, but not necessarily direct experience are the things that add up to what's often described as talent.
zbruhnke 14y ago
As a multi-time founder with an exit to my credit and about 3/4 of a college degree from a small liberal arts college in Louisiana(Dropout) I completely agree with the sentiment here. That said, I also think there is nothing wrong with going after candidates from top tier schools since most of those people have been properly vetted in the past and will likely handle themselves well in high pressure situations. All in all Justin's article is spot on that credentials really shouldn't matter all that much as long as the talent is there. However, The fact that someone has to write a blog post stating that and calling it bold really shows the lack of direction our country has as a whole right now unfortunately
ajaymehta 14y ago
Good values aside, this is deceivingly brilliant as a hiring technique. Hire the undervalued "hungry" people who the Googles/Facebooks of the world won't even give an interview, and they'll 1) be easier/cheaper to convince and 2) work super hard to prove themselves (especially if it's their first job out of school). If the startup does well, it's a win-win.
- thedufer 14y ago
  But without the filter of "top schools", how many candidates do you have to sift through? People use that criteria because its easy and means something (although maybe not much), not because they think it's perfect. You can only afford to spend so much time recruiting talent.
  - ajaymehta 14y ago
    You can still sift through resumés, but don't filter by school. Filter for people who have "created something" or who have a thoughtful online portfolio.
  - wnight 14y ago
    Code or GTFO. I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them further. First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it customizable, etc. I also like the idea of saying 'mention (some shibboleth) in your cover letter' to prove people read the add. If I was writing an ad I'd ask someone, maybe, to provide their favorite code snippet and describe why. Anything would be okay, as long as someone has an articulate reason. I get disappointed in an interview if the company don't want to see code. Someone in this thread discussed how school doesn't correlate to the ability to ship code; I'm good at having an executable answer to a problem in minutes. If they don't want to see what I can do it usually seems like it's because they don't know how to judge it, and thus aren't who I'd like to work with.
    - thedufer 14y ago
      > I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them further. First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it customizable, etc. This doesn't even come close to scaling when your applicant pool is 100 (or more) times the size of your interviewer pool. You have to have some quick filtering method, or you'll never get anything done.
npsimons 14y ago
Jacob, our designer and first hire at Justin.tv, now Twitch’s Director of Product, hadn’t finished college in New Mexico I've got a good hunch what that college is. A little hint: it was one of the top three Gates mentioned in "The Road Ahead" that MS regularly hired from, and with good reason.
- bcbrown 14y ago
  Saint John's?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
pclark 14y ago
The unfortunate (to this article) truth is that the odds of x person being talented is higher if they went to a great school. I think it's often safe to assume that if you went to a top school you have either (or both) determination or raw intelligence. If you didn't do this you'll spend forever screening dumb people.
mathetic 14y ago
That is a noble yet unfortunate decision. The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring candidates will still be fairly inaccurate. However, good credentials (I'd normally include internships but it wasn't mentioned in the original article.) simply means that there's a higher chance of the kid having a better understanding of programming than another candidate coming from a less competitive pool. What the author does in order to suppress this statistical strategy is giving anecdotal evidence. Problem with that is for every example the author might come up, this community can produce 100 nontrivial counterexamples. One other issue is most founders who do not come from top schools have a tendency to think that kids in these schools are simply giving so much money to have a cheesy-easy undergraduate life and are terribly spoiled (and that might be partly true). Yet the fact is those are the top schools because students have to produce work that is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to their counterparts in other schools. This is not because of everybody are geniuses in these schools but because the average student starts at a higher level so the academics can push the students further without overestimating their capacity from day 1.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  I would not call it unfortunate. After giving people from Ivy Leage schools a chance to work with me I've realized something. The amount of people who can ship software (not only write code) is basically the same everywhere. A college education does provide a lot of things, but the ability to ship software seems to not be included. Seems a lot of people out there are worried about the code being perfect, or their VIM setup being ideal, or anything else but shipping. I wish that somehow colleges of all levels would teach their students that the discipline to get shit done is worth more than anything else.
  - mathetic 14y ago
    That depends on who you are hiring. If you're hiring Computer Science graduates than "getting shit done" is not a priority at all (at least in the meaning you imply). Computer Science graduates gets the discipline to be scientists not to be code ninjas or rockstars and it should stay that way. On the other hand if you're meaning people with Computer/Software Engineering degrees then you're right.
lmm 14y ago
Interviewing is hard and time-consuming. So hard that any filter that's even (say) 5% effective is worthwhile. People who went to less famous universities are only undervalued when you don't think about the total cost of hiring.
- rwallace 14y ago
  Leaving aside the ethics of discrimination and considering it from a pure profit motive, the above would be true if you were the only employer in the world. You're not, and on average the companies competing with you for the best recruits overvalue paper credentials. That means it would be in your interest to attach negative value to those credentials, to get a higher percentage of good candidates who haven't already been snapped up.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  The filter is worthless. I've known lots of disinterested CS grads who coasted through school and fight anything that requires any expenditure of effort on their part (like using a new library, etc.). They went to school and now they feel entitled to their seat in a bloated corporation where their lack of contribution can't really stand out against the larger background. The best way to hire someone is to sit down and chat with them on multiple occasions for 1-2 hours at a time. Another programmer can generally tell when someone is incompetent and/or BSing. It doesn't guarantee the employment will work out, as working styles can be incompatible, employee can be/become depressed and/or unmotivated, etc., but it at least allows you to discern the competence to a reasonable degree of satisfaction. When I interview programmers we're so busy talking shop that school doesn't even cross my mind. Thus far very few mention anything related to their schooling as a qualification while we're discussing, i.e., not a lot of "Yeah, I did a project like that in school once...". If one is hiring for a heavily theoretical position, academic credentials may be slightly more meaningful (though it's still about the final output, much of the personal research/development for that type of thing would occur at a university, whereas "working" software engineers mostly go through school as a formality), but for most other things, it's so irrelevant that it never comes up after several searching technical interviews.
geoka9 14y ago
I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented. I don't care if you're talented as long as you are good. I think the word "talent" is getting more and more misuse in the startup field. Talent is innate ability. While it helps, it's not a prerequisite to being good.
btilly 14y ago
Let me summarize. If your credentials are worthwhile, that will become obvious. If not, then they don't matter. For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for recent graduates, you may have little else to point to.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  >For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for recent graduates, you may have little else to point to. They should skip a few homework assignments and write a few simple yet interesting tech demos and upload them to GitHub.
  - btilly 14y ago
    A nontrivial fraction of people go from one subject in college to a tangentially related career upon graduating. If they had known 2 years later what kind of work they would want to do, then sure. But if you're not willing to give them a shot, you could be missing out on some cheap talent. (I was an example when I came out of pure math and looked for a programming job back in the 90s, with no programming background.)
addlepate 14y ago
Yeah, that's what they all say.
criley 14y ago
I keep seeing this talk about "six figures" in the valley as code for "overpaid". I don't live in San Francisco but everything I can tell about the cost of living shows me that a $100,000 salary in SF is roughly equivalent to what, $45,000 here in Atlanta, GA. (http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667000&city2=51304000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667...) Which is certainly a good salary for a college grad but it's NO WHERE NEAR "overpaid", in my opinion...
- emmett 14y ago
  It's deceptive though. Making $100k/year in San Francisco means that rent is very expensive, relatively speaking, but that consumer goods are incredibly cheap. Living in SF: Eating out at restaurants, buying the latest iPhone, plane tickets, clothes shopping all relatively cheap. Living in Atlanta: Getting a big house in a desirable neighborhood, parking are cheap. So if you'd prefer to consume more real estate and real estate dependent goods, you should prefer to live outside boom zones. If you like to buy experiences and consumer goods, you should live in the boom zone.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    The problem being that everyone who has children eventually moves into the former group.
  - dpeck 14y ago
    Not sure I understand this. At 100k/year eating out at restaurants, buying latest iphone, plane tickets, clothes shopping, etc are all relatively cheap most anywhere, aren't they? There are plenty of Atlanta people who fall into the real estate trap, and it is a trap, but there are also plenty who live in slummy east atlanta, or get a reasonable condo/apt in midtown. Leaving them with relatively huge amounts of disposable income for experiences and shiny things.
    - wmeredith 14y ago
      Yeah, this doesn't compute for me either. The price of iPhones and plane tickets have little to do with geography until you start crossing national borders.
gesman 14y ago
"...I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented." But of course. The problem is that talented people usually do not carry the sign "I am talented" to make it easy for you. It's up to you to figure that out. And you never know who is "talented" upfront unless you give that person a space and time and let the person express himself. So you may not give a shit, but you have to give it a time and take a risk of finding out that cool looking and smooth talking dropout you hired 6 months ago is not talented at all.
- doktrin 14y ago
  I don't think "talent" (or, the ability to produce a quality work product) is that inconceivably difficult to ascertain in this field. Also, while I realize you were speaking generally, I am familiar with at least one of Exec's non-traditional hires, and I sincerely doubt he will be regretting that decision.
- mnicole 14y ago
  How does a formal education make that any different?
- mahyarm 14y ago
  Designers and Engineers are incredibly fortunate to be able to show portfolios and work samples that we can use to evaluate people with. You can also give real work sample tests during interviews! Try doing that with an MBA. My personal experience has shown a Stanford comp sci PhD doesn't mean that person is necessarily a good software developer, and if you can't even rely on that, then you might as well evaluate them directly.
dpiers 14y ago
My dad's business began to decline when I was in middle school, and he had to shut it down by the time I was in my junior year of high school. I'm the second of seven children, and by the time I graduated my parents' savings were wiped out and they were just barely managing to keep food on the table. They couldn't afford to help me pay for school, but my test scores were high enough to get a full scholarship to a public university near my home town, so that's where I went. I lived at home, used public transit to commute, and made due with what I had available. It's easy for me to say that credentials are worthless, I went to a school you've probably never even heard of, so it's nice to hear this from a successful individual who graduated from a top school.
tnuc 14y ago
And how does one prove they are talented?
- AdamTReineke 14y ago
  - Github. Contribute to (or start) open source projects that show your skill. - Blog. Write technical articles explaining confusing topics in the areas you are skilled in. - Freelance/Contract work. Do work for others who can vouch for your skills.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  Survive multiple serious (but not overly specific) technical interviews, have a decent and/or interesting body of work online, and demonstrable involvement and working habits from contribution to open-source projects, mailing lists, tech journals (my last hire had several Linux-specific articles carried by an online publisher over 10 years ago), etc. A degree is honestly one of the least useful metrics for actual talent out there. Its value is basically limited to showing a tolerance (but not necessarily an aptitude) for bureaucracy and corporate mind games.
stevenameyer 14y ago
Formal education in my opinion is really only good for one thing when determining how good of a hire someone will be. Ensuring a certain level of exposure to areas that may otherwise be overlooked in self study. When people learn things by themselves they tend to focus on what they love the most and have a tendency to ignore what they don't. Formal education forces you to learn all areas that are covered and often bring things to light that are very useful, but would often be overlooked in selfstudy. So formal education provides a base-line level of exposure to a lot of topics, what a student chooses to do with this level of exposure is what will determine wether they will succeed.
benatkin 14y ago
Apparently well reasoned blog posts are worthless too. What does Steve Jobs have to do with people Justin Kan wants to hire? He's famous not for being hired but for starting a company. He also doesn't fill the roles on Exec's hiring page.
- aeflash 14y ago
  Exactly. Reminds me of that classic C&H strip. "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well mine are even worse!" Being a college dropout doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good hire, just like having a degree doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good hire.
- TillE 14y ago
  That's another thing that amuses me about all these companies looking for superstar developers. A fairly large fraction of them will be far more interested in doing their own thing than working for you.
  - benatkin 14y ago
    Yes, but trendy startups often convince superstar developers that it's just like doing their own thing. It might be. Personally I'm more interested in open source than I am on working on someone else's startup.
barce 14y ago
Great rant except for the part wanting to hire kids. That's age discrimination.
thirdstation 14y ago
> Your Credentials Are Worthless Here The impression I got was more along the lines of "We're willing to overlook your lack of credentials if you can prove you're talented." These articles always come off a little pompous to me. But, I guess if you have the money, and you're hiring, you get to say what's important.
michael_miller 14y ago
> "[Top schools] don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer." I've found this statement to be false, at least at my alma mater(UT Austin). My Honors OS class unquestionably made me a better programmer, teaching me about how programs I wrote interacted with the OS to a very deep level. My algorithms class gave me an extremely deep understanding of how algorithms+data structures worked, giving me a better intuition as to what tools to use when confronted with a problem. My HCI class made me acutely aware of how users interact with software. I'll agree that the purpose of universities is not vocational. Without a doubt, a lot of classes I've taken will have absolutely no impact on my career (unless Buddhist Art becomes an in-demand field!). But a good school gives students the opportunity to gain applicable skills that are needed in the world. If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer. You can't do well in the class unless you truly understand code. Using a coarse grained filter of "Harvard University" is bad, but using a "Passed CS50 with an 'A'" filter is a very good metric to use.
- tptacek 14y ago
  What kind of intuition did you get from algorithms class? What's an example of the kind of intuition you feel like you got that you wouldn't have gotten on-the-job?
  - michael_miller 14y ago
    I don't believe there's any intuition I got from my algorithms class that couldn't be gained on the job. However, the class does provide intuition in an accelerated manner, and it proves to employers that I have the intuition. Some examples off the top of my head: - Memoization / DP - Divide and conquer - Using a bounded approximate algorithm in place of an exponential one for NP complete problems I feel like it would have taken me a lot of time to internalize those types of algorithms on the job, but seeing them presented in my algorithms class made it easy.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Ok, actually, those first two do sound like things I'd have learned more effectively in a classroom. Point conceded.
_delirium 14y ago
Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing. If you’re lucky, you might learn how to create a financial model or craft a solid argument. If that's what you got out of college, you were definitely doing it wrong. Maybe in a business degree, but most people who do a science, engineering, or math degree learn some, you know, actual science, engineering, and/or math, not merely schmoozing skills. You could learn that elsewhere, but if you care about scientific progress, my experience is that few people without a science degree ever get around to developing a rigorous scientific education, whether out of disinterest, lack of time, or whatever other reason. Lots of people plan to one day work through some textbooks, but most people don't. You see it in a lot of self-taught programmers, many of whom have a weak grounding in computer science. That might be okay, depending on what you're hiring for, but there are many cases where you want some more solid foundations. For example, if you're doing anything with machine learning, you might want people who understand statistics. Oh, and if you're designing aircraft, you might want someone who's studied aeronautical engineering, or at least some kind of engineering, whether at a university or through equivalent self-study. Even Google, a canonical Disruptive Silicon Valley company, seems to prefer its technical employees to understand computer science, rather than to hire pure programmers. If someone is a true autodidact, learning on their own the equivalent of what they would've learned in a rigorous 4-year degree, that's fine, and there are some of those, so I have no problem making sure to look out for them, or even actively seek them out. I don't run across them very often at all, however, especially if we're talking about people without any formal mathematical training who are able to do solid mathematical or engineering modeling work. When you do find such a person, they're often amazing, but they're not common. Maybe MOOCs will increase their numbers, but it's a bit early to tell. That said, I agree in not caring about the actual credential. If someone studied CS at CMU but left without the piece of paper for whatever reason, but learned the kind of stuff people learn in the CMU CS program, I don't really care about the missing document.
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  I think this is mostly about the resources available to self-taught programmers. I know on many occasions I've sought to strengthen my mathematical and theoretical background without a lot of tangible progress because the resources online don't really approach things comprehensibly or accessibly. I have a friend getting advanced physics degrees and even he says the usual suspects like Wikipedia are uselessly over-technical for him. I've bought a couple of textbooks without much progress in penetration, and Khan Academy and/or Open Courseware is kinda OK for specific issues but they're too tight and "locked up" in video format to really constitute a generally useful guide, and I think they lose some relevance without the greater context. Better Explained is also selectively useful, but most of his analogies don't click with me and the site tends to ramble. What I really need is a decent tutor who is willing to help me specifically with the issues I have but I've sought in vain for one who is willing to free-wheel it with me instead of just copying out of a textbook. I tried one briefly and he came up with a cop-out shortly after our first lesson, because I don't think he liked the unconventional questions I was asking, like "Why and/or how are sine waves relevant to non-geometric data? The only definition I can find of a sine casts it in strictly trigonometric terms, so how is it applicable to non-trigonometric data? Is everything encoded into a representation of a triangle before these calculations are applied?" Heh, that one made him pretty annoyed and he didn't really have a good answer. I would love to increase my background in statistics and comp sci theory (which is basic but imo sufficient, and I seem to have a better grounding than most of the CS grads I've worked with), but I don't really know of a good option to receive that training. If someone wrote tutorials for graduate-level math from the bottom principles up like they write out tutorials on PHP or whatever, I'd be all over it. I really want to increase my formal mathematical literacy.
SparrowOS 14y ago
Yer an India-nigger.
ctide 14y ago
The comments here are generally super confusing to me. Are there companies in San Francisco who actually give a shit about where you went to college? I've only been here for 5 years, but I spent 2 or so of those just bouncing around from startup to startup doing consulting work. I've never worked with anyone who gave a shit about what college people went to. Literally, none. The startups I've joined have been predominantly staffed with college dropouts (even including a high school dropout or two), and a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees. Where are all these startups that are hiring based on credentials?
- alaskamiller 14y ago
  The ones that don't know any better.
- richardjordan 14y ago
  I'm not sure that it's startups hiring based on credentials as the bigger more established companies. I am pretty sure Google is famous for its hiring strategy. IIRC Facebook has taken a similar approach, no? Lots of fresh new startups with no money or traction take what they can get, and that perversely often leads to talent that would be rejected by more established companies. But you only have to read job listings to see how many of the well funded more established companies, out of the very early stage, look to hire from a very narrow range of schools. YYMV but I see ads like that ALL the time.
- ruswick 14y ago
  > And a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees. I think you are conflating coders with engineers. The latter entails a lot more requisite knowledge, and generally requires formal education of some sort.
  - jiggy2011 14y ago
    But what is the practical difference? Plenty of jobs advertised as "software engineering" are mainly about writing wordpress plugins.
larsberg 14y ago
Having been involved in quite a bit of college recruiting in my former life as a hiring manager for a development/test org, I learned a couple of very important lessons: - Every real school, no matter how low in the ranking, produces at least one competitive graduate each year and rarely an amazing candidate. - The top schools produce not only a large number of competitive graduates, but also at least one amazing candidate each year. For companies searching for a large number of candidates, hitting the top schools makes a lot of sense. Further, you also start to get data on your hiring so you can know if your yield was low in a given year; if some bad attrition means the manager is likely poor or if that school's candidates are just larger flight risks; etc. Sourcing candidates from small schools, at least for us, usually meant that they had either done something noteworthy or an alum already at the company was contacted by a professor at their alma mater, who passed along a resume and asked us to interview them. That said, the amazing candidates from top schools are usually funneled off to graduate school without ever touching the recruiting process, whereas at non-top-tier schools they are much more recruitable for either a startup or software development shop.
scelerat 14y ago
Moneyball.
Irregardless 14y ago
I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new employees? There's an upside to this, though: You can easily identify short-sighted companies that probably aren't worth working for based on the degree requirements stated in their job listings. If you require 3 years of experience and a CS degree for all your 'junior' and 'entry level' developer positions, there's a good chance you couldn't think your way out of a paper bag. That's often code for "I expect a lot out of you, but I'm not going to give you much in return". Tech companies need to adapt more quickly than most others just to stay afloat. Following the same hiring practices that have been around since the 19th century is a great way to fall flat on your face in that regard.
- lordofmoria 14y ago
  I also see this as a huge problem. Without the "credential crutch", identifying talent and true ability is nearly impossible for a hiring manager who isn't deeply involved in the business on a day-to-day level. The problem is, the managers who ARE deeply involved are usually too busy to spend time searching for and hiring new employees (GREAT managers though, will always find time for this). Hiring is especially a problem in tech, because there's an even bigger disconnect between the hiring managers' understanding of the actual position.
- incision 14y ago
  >I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new employees? * In general, I think there has been a strong trend away from investing in people, to treat them as interchangable cogs or simply farm out as much as possible. I've seen larger organizations which almost seem scared of having exceptional people, or more specifically allowing them to do exceptional work. It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique institutional knowledge with them. * Assessing "talent" costs time. The time of reasonably talented people you are or will be paying, in some form another. * Unless you find a way to turn it into an automated, repeatable process, the decisions made are subjective and subject to all manner of criticism and allegations. This might not rate in a startup, but once you're large enough to have anyone titled "hiring manager", I expect these things are going to be relevant. * Scale is a problem. If I put out an entry-level job I'm gonna get 500+ applicants. Reduce it to something almost criminally narrow (You already know who you're going to hire, but you have to go through the motions and make the selection defensible) and I'm still looking at 100+. * Not sure what exactly you mean by training. It's hard enough to find people who can drop into a new environment and apply their existing skills immediately. Finding people who are so smart and capable that they can drop and learn skills while applying them would be that much harder.
brycehamrick 14y ago
As an MBA, take this with a grain of salt, but the hiring decision is all about managing risk. Most companies, not just American ones, are risk-averse. As such they hire vetted candidates, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hiring decisions carry the same risk & reward pairing of an investment. You can take a risk on an un-credentialed candidate that you have a good feeling about, and in turn they won't expect the same pay as someone with a well-respected degree. Graduates from top schools get good salaries because there's a sense that these schools adequately vet candidates and prepare students for the real world. You could argue this is untrue, but it all depends on what you're looking for. The truth is academia is less relevant to startups. MBA programs focus on case studies on Fortune 500 companies with multinational reach and departmentalization of business functions. Startups don't act this way, so hiring an MBA doesn't necessarily mean that candidate is going to perform better than someone without the same degree. What it does tell you is that they have some ability to organize, manage priorities, and ultimately complete a plan, which is still valuable. As any statistician will tell you, citing anecdotal examples is misleading. Steve Jobs may have dropped out of college, but there's millions of dropouts that don't go on to create multi-billion dollar companies. I've worked with plenty of amazing people who were great at what they did without credentials behind their names. I've also worked with people I still have no idea how they managed to completed their programs.
trotsky 14y ago
They may be worthless to Justin as the hiring manager but Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. credentials are brutally helpful in funding and running your own startup.
skot9000 14y ago
Top CS schools don't teach programming, they teach Computer Science. CS students are very likely to become good programmers from side projects, but so can liberal arts students.
- jwoah12 14y ago
  Maybe something different happens in the "top" top CS programs , but I sure as hell did a lot of programming during my CS curriculum. Some was for classes meant to explicitly make you better programmers (software engineering), and some was as a tool to learn/practice the theory. I certainly felt like I became a good programmer in part through my classes.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    How much of your course load would you say was directly related to programming topics, not CS? It is not so much a question of you not learning programming skills in the program, so much as what it would take to learn the same outside of the program. One software engineering class and a bunch of practice doesn't seem particularly difficult to catch up on, and even surpass, in the same time frame if you place your focus squarely on that topic.
Cub3 14y ago
This article exactly me, graduated high school (just) and managed to get into a very low brow university that I dropped out of within the first year it took me awhile but i've found its your experience and body of work that makes the difference, I finally, after working at a pizza shop at night and coding websites during the day for 6 months, a low paying "web developer" role at a publisher that turned out to be hell... still... every day I was there was real experience in the industry. After two years of waiting I got headhunted by an international brand and am currently one of the lead UX devs, when lecturing at career nights etc. I always say the same thing, "do not worry about university if your field is anything to do with the web, go CISCO / MSDN or, do what I did, be self disciplined and teach yourself.
6thSigma 14y ago
As someone who started at a top-tier university and later left to a "bad" school, I can say this post hits close to home. I was doing well at the top-tier school and left for personal reasons, but doing so has very clearly cost me opportunities in my career thus far. As Peter Thiel so eloquently put it, I inadvertently gave myself a dunce cap.
- gems 14y ago
  Great cop out.
kyro 14y ago
Tell that to the medical field.
- kamaal 14y ago
  In case of a doctor hospital is nearly indistinguishable from the college. They are more or less the same. A doctor wouldn't be too great if all he has done is read a lot of books, and attended a lot of classes but hardly treated anyone. Even when it comes to things like law and medicine, practice and experience are vastly more important.
spitfire 14y ago
I'll wait for tokenadult to show up and set us all straight on the matter.
tokenadult 14y ago
From the end of the blog post: "I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented." It's not clear what he is doing to figure out which of his applicants are talented. That's still something important to do, even if you disregard schooling credentials. Disregarding schooling credentials has some warrant in research on company hiring procedures, but as long as you are blessed with more applicants than jobs, you still have to figure out whom to hire. I suggest using work-sample tests to hire, and backing up those work-sample tests with a general mental ability test whenever that is legally permitted. The full rationale for my advice appears in a previous comment, a FAQ post I developed for HN that appears to be my all-time most popular comment here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
ruswick 14y ago
I find it somewhat ironic that this piece can get the reception it did on a site associated with what is effectively the Harvard of startups. (Although, honestly, a comparison to Harvard can't do the prestige of YC justice. It is far harder to get into YC then it is to most any college.)
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
This is really hard-hitting out of the box thinking on Hacker News! .... Just kidding. I don't want to be mean but come on; we are not only beating a dead horse with this stuff but smashing it straight into a glue container.
- SqMafia 14y ago
  Haha! Nice. Yeah this is just pandering to the HN crowd. Also, come on, put some effort into that article. Say something that hasn't been said already.
enraged_camel 14y ago
Unfortunately this would never work in companies that hire foreign workers. As part of the H1B process, the government wants to verify that the position actually requires an "advanced degree." The way they check that is by looking at whether the other people currently in that position have college degrees. The company's HR department has to provide all of that as evidence (among many other things) when it files for an H1B petition for the foreign worker. I'm also questioning whether the article's claim could actually be proven with data. On the one hand I want to believe that credentials do in fact make no difference. On the other hand, it doesn't ring true when I think about my own experiences. I'm the founder of a local not-for-profit community service organization. When I was still actively involved as president, we were very ambitious with our goals and therefore sought to recruit high quality people to join the board of directors. We interviewed many people, and the thing is, there was a stark difference between people who had degrees from the local Cal State college and those who graduated from the better schools in the Pacific West (University of Washington, UCLA, Berkeley, etc.). Over the course of three years, I interacted with both groups of people and found out that those who went to good schools actually had a superior breadth of knowledge and a much wider perspective in things they dealt with. They always had great ideas and often times took the initiative to make those happen. In contrast, those who went to the local Cal State college (Cal State Long Beach) were just lame. They were nice people, but they were generally unmotivated, bland, and never thorough with the things they did.
kamaal 14y ago
College credentials at most work like Interviews(Its easy to game these things), once you get a Ivy degree stamp you can pretty use that to BS your way to absolutely any position you want. Every time I see a senior exec leaving the company during difficult times, I see one thing manifest. The guy is super job hopper known to milk his Ivy league degree and networking potential to get anything he/she wants. Beyond that try to measure his performance or actual value he is adding to the company and you will see nothing substantial apart from making congratulatory noises during occasions, or blasting people when something went wrong or at most acting as a information aggregator/distributor to the rest of the company. Big name schools serve as a aggregating points for good people, but many times you also get people fit for nothing. The best test to hire an exec(or anybody) is not look at his degree or names on his resume. Do a good background research on the guy and try to see if he has actually done something nice in the past, what sort of contributions he has made to what kind of projects/businesses. Never hire people at senior positions just because some one from his network happens to be in your company. Unless the guy has some good rock solid performance in his past, he is not worth your time. No matter from which college he comes.
paganel 14y ago
> Your love of building things makes you great. I'm a Computer Science dropout myself, but I do work with a couple of people that graduated Ivy League schools (one of these schools is even mentioned in the article). What I did find out is that no matter what school you graduated or no matter what your credentials are, if you're always driven by curiosity ("hey, how does this work?") and always eager to actually build stuff that other people use than the differences easily fade out.
kriro 14y ago
The assumption is that you can outsource some of the evaluation to the university (it acts as a filter). The chances of getting someone that can solve problems and think is higher if you pick from a pool of university grads than non-university grads. If it's worth the premium you pay is another question (I'd say the answer is yes) If you have some method of generating a higherEV applicant pool then by all means do it and print the money.
srlake 14y ago
Being brilliant doesn't disqualify someone from being brilliant.

245 points by emmett 14y ago

The author's Google Plus page: https://plus.google.com/105795650153890257976/posts https://plus.google.com/105795650153890257976/posts I'm not sure if the "attended Yale University" is part of the Google+ page layout or a conscious choice on his part, but either way it says something. Not that I disagree with his point.

justin 14y ago
I think that is the default Google+ layout to show where you went to school? If it says anything, I think it reinforces my point that US culture by default places too much emphasis on where you went to school. Not that I don't value my time at Yale, but I don't feel like it is particularly worth highlighting on my resume: tens of thousands of people graduate every single year from top universities. Hardly something unique.
- jgh 14y ago
  It's the default layout because my G+ account displays my shitty school prominently.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Not "unique," but certainly not meaningless either. In particular, my experience with top schools is that, more than "average" schools, they're often hard—the people that get in are very competitive and competent, and the material and pace reflect this. It's useful information to know that somebody was up to dealing with all that, because not everybody is...
  - justin 14y ago
    The hardest part about Yale was getting in. Yes, many if not most of the people who get in are smart, but are they all competitive and competent? I don't believe so. Top school == a signal, but it is a weakly correlated one with being productive in my opinion.
notatoad 14y ago
from the article: >Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing.

MatthewPhillips 14y ago

> I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up. So Kan's companies are ageist, gotcha.

WiseWeasel 14y ago
Maybe you only need to be a child at heart (fingers crossed). : P
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  If he's looking for people without degrees I suspect it's more important that you have a child's salary requirements...
sixothree 14y ago
Incidentally, that was my only take-away from that article.
- danielweber 14y ago
  "Stay(ed) up until 5am coding" was what really jumped out at me. I think the modern college market is just a credentialing racket, so I don't mind steps taken to disrupt it. That doesn't mean I'll support any step to disrupt it.
abstractbill 14y ago
Justin.TV certainly wasn't, and I'd be very surprised if Exec is. I was the first engineering hire at Justin.TV, aged 33 at the time (a full decade older than one of the founders!). Nobody cared about that, they cared that I'm a good hacker who gets things done.
- MatthewPhillips 14y ago
  That's good to hear, the article's tone made it sound like he's only interested in hiring young inexperienced engineers (code for cheap).

rdl 14y ago

I think there may be a difference between the credentials which matter to big dumb companies and the credentials which matter "here".

krapp 14y ago
I was all hyped up until I remembered I was 35, went to a technical school no one cares about and code in languages everyone loves to hate. Something tells me I wouldn't make it past the lobby.
- rdl 14y ago
  My personal biases (which I understand, and thus look at a bit more, but tend to consider valid): 1) People who hacked on projects on their own is WAY more important than "worked for a big successful company" or school. Even if the project fails. 2) Personality/performance traits matter a lot more than specific skills. 3) I'm generally biased toward hiring military veterans (US, Israeli, etc.); yet, there are parts of the US military which have a higher-than-ambient density of idiots, so it's gotta be selective. 4) Hiring mostly makes sense through network of existing people (founders, early employees), although "soft" connections to that network matter more than core membership. I also probably shouldn't admit this legally (but I think it's safe) -- I would be biased toward 25+ year olds, vs. 18-25. I don't see much difference after mid/late 20s, but teens or early 20s, not so much. I would absolutely hire a qualified 18 year old, but I don't really look in the 18-25 year old range when hiring, and due to the historical accident of dotcom 1.0, people who were at least aware of their surroundings in the tech industry (even if in a junior role) in 1997+ would be a huge win.
  - taproot 14y ago
    Something tells me you're not going to be strung up for letting on you prefer older techies; at least, not while most of the industry is the inverse.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I know what you mean... I generally ask people "What was the last code you wrote for yourself that wasn't for work or school?". I learned that one from a friend and it is a great question that tends get to people who I want to work with.

richardjordan 14y ago

I think one of the uncomfortable truths that people don't like to talk about in Silicon Valley is how much nepotism and old-boy-network is wrapped up in the clothing of "hiring from top schools". Social proof sounds really good until you start to think through that a lot of so called social proof actually comes from relationships built through serendipity of what school your parents could afford to send you to. It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere, to be born on third base and think you hit a triple. I see this even more with MBAs than comp sci and particularly in downturns (having been in Silicon Valley a long time now) where weaker VCs invest in MBA buddies as easy decisions in tough climates. Credentials are great as lazy decision making tools for big co hr departments - you don't get fired for hiring the Ivy Leaguer. But for startups make sure you're hiring for what someone can do and has done, not for what paperwork they've accumulated. I've made the mistake of hiring the high flying Ivy League wunderkind straight out of college, highly recommended... it was an absolute disaster but my own fault for taking this as proxy for being good on a startup.

pcl 14y ago
It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere, to be born on third base and think you hit a triple. That's a fantastic expression. I just looked it up -- the internet thinks that it originated with Barry Switzer, a former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23536.html http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23536.html
- shawnc 14y ago
  Cool, thanks for sharing that. I new it from the Pearl Jam song 'Bushleaguer' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nhyhlzLwIw http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nhyhlzLwIw
- mjn 14y ago
  My sense of order would've been served better if one of baseball's many famous wisecracks had come up with that line. A football coach originating baseball metaphors, egads!
- richardjordan 14y ago

jhuckestein 14y ago

I fully agree with this post and this is exactly what I keep telling people that do things for their resume. The one notion that always irks me though is talent. It seems to measure some combination of confidence and the amount of praise a person happens to have received in their life (i.e. how often someone told them they're talented) and is for the most part not well-defined. Yet, this article uses talent just like another credential. I don't think talent is a thing that you either have or don't have. There's certainly some people that I'd like to hire that wouldn't with certainty say that they have talent. Vetting for confidence is a bit more interesting, but I also know plenty of confident people (i.e. that think they're talented) that can't get the job done. The best way I've come up with to characterize what we're all looking for is people who can solve our problems/get the job done. That makes it mostly about what the applicant thinks they can do and less about the amount of praise they've received previously in live. This reminds me of how Kyle Neath posted yesterday that he thought he was not a great coder or designer but he could get the job done. When he was twenty, perhaps he didn't consider himself talented but I'm pretty sure nobody would have regretted hiring him.

incision 14y ago
Talent is one of those words with a thousand pet definitions. Personally, I see the word used most often a kind of negative rationalization. A way to disregard success as lacking in effort, to say it's inborn, incidental. I'd generally prefer to be described and to describe people as passionate, dedicated, capable or plain smart rather than talented. I think those traits, often in combination with a lot of thought/practice, but not necessarily direct experience are the things that add up to what's often described as talent.

zbruhnke 14y ago

As a multi-time founder with an exit to my credit and about 3/4 of a college degree from a small liberal arts college in Louisiana(Dropout) I completely agree with the sentiment here. That said, I also think there is nothing wrong with going after candidates from top tier schools since most of those people have been properly vetted in the past and will likely handle themselves well in high pressure situations. All in all Justin's article is spot on that credentials really shouldn't matter all that much as long as the talent is there. However, The fact that someone has to write a blog post stating that and calling it bold really shows the lack of direction our country has as a whole right now unfortunately

ajaymehta 14y ago

Good values aside, this is deceivingly brilliant as a hiring technique. Hire the undervalued "hungry" people who the Googles/Facebooks of the world won't even give an interview, and they'll 1) be easier/cheaper to convince and 2) work super hard to prove themselves (especially if it's their first job out of school). If the startup does well, it's a win-win.

thedufer 14y ago
But without the filter of "top schools", how many candidates do you have to sift through? People use that criteria because its easy and means something (although maybe not much), not because they think it's perfect. You can only afford to spend so much time recruiting talent.
- ajaymehta 14y ago
  You can still sift through resumés, but don't filter by school. Filter for people who have "created something" or who have a thoughtful online portfolio.
- wnight 14y ago
  Code or GTFO. I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them further. First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it customizable, etc. I also like the idea of saying 'mention (some shibboleth) in your cover letter' to prove people read the add. If I was writing an ad I'd ask someone, maybe, to provide their favorite code snippet and describe why. Anything would be okay, as long as someone has an articulate reason. I get disappointed in an interview if the company don't want to see code. Someone in this thread discussed how school doesn't correlate to the ability to ship code; I'm good at having an executable answer to a problem in minutes. If they don't want to see what I can do it usually seems like it's because they don't know how to judge it, and thus aren't who I'd like to work with.
  - thedufer 14y ago
    > I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them further. First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it customizable, etc. This doesn't even come close to scaling when your applicant pool is 100 (or more) times the size of your interviewer pool. You have to have some quick filtering method, or you'll never get anything done.

npsimons 14y ago

Jacob, our designer and first hire at Justin.tv, now Twitch’s Director of Product, hadn’t finished college in New Mexico I've got a good hunch what that college is. A little hint: it was one of the top three Gates mentioned in "The Road Ahead" that MS regularly hired from, and with good reason.

bcbrown 14y ago
Saint John's?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

pclark 14y ago

The unfortunate (to this article) truth is that the odds of x person being talented is higher if they went to a great school. I think it's often safe to assume that if you went to a top school you have either (or both) determination or raw intelligence. If you didn't do this you'll spend forever screening dumb people.

mathetic 14y ago

That is a noble yet unfortunate decision. The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring candidates will still be fairly inaccurate. However, good credentials (I'd normally include internships but it wasn't mentioned in the original article.) simply means that there's a higher chance of the kid having a better understanding of programming than another candidate coming from a less competitive pool. What the author does in order to suppress this statistical strategy is giving anecdotal evidence. Problem with that is for every example the author might come up, this community can produce 100 nontrivial counterexamples. One other issue is most founders who do not come from top schools have a tendency to think that kids in these schools are simply giving so much money to have a cheesy-easy undergraduate life and are terribly spoiled (and that might be partly true). Yet the fact is those are the top schools because students have to produce work that is quantitatively and qualitatively superior to their counterparts in other schools. This is not because of everybody are geniuses in these schools but because the average student starts at a higher level so the academics can push the students further without overestimating their capacity from day 1.

orangethirty 14y ago
I would not call it unfortunate. After giving people from Ivy Leage schools a chance to work with me I've realized something. The amount of people who can ship software (not only write code) is basically the same everywhere. A college education does provide a lot of things, but the ability to ship software seems to not be included. Seems a lot of people out there are worried about the code being perfect, or their VIM setup being ideal, or anything else but shipping. I wish that somehow colleges of all levels would teach their students that the discipline to get shit done is worth more than anything else.
- mathetic 14y ago
  That depends on who you are hiring. If you're hiring Computer Science graduates than "getting shit done" is not a priority at all (at least in the meaning you imply). Computer Science graduates gets the discipline to be scientists not to be code ninjas or rockstars and it should stay that way. On the other hand if you're meaning people with Computer/Software Engineering degrees then you're right.

lmm 14y ago

Interviewing is hard and time-consuming. So hard that any filter that's even (say) 5% effective is worthwhile. People who went to less famous universities are only undervalued when you don't think about the total cost of hiring.

rwallace 14y ago
Leaving aside the ethics of discrimination and considering it from a pure profit motive, the above would be true if you were the only employer in the world. You're not, and on average the companies competing with you for the best recruits overvalue paper credentials. That means it would be in your interest to attach negative value to those credentials, to get a higher percentage of good candidates who haven't already been snapped up.
cookiecaper 14y ago
The filter is worthless. I've known lots of disinterested CS grads who coasted through school and fight anything that requires any expenditure of effort on their part (like using a new library, etc.). They went to school and now they feel entitled to their seat in a bloated corporation where their lack of contribution can't really stand out against the larger background. The best way to hire someone is to sit down and chat with them on multiple occasions for 1-2 hours at a time. Another programmer can generally tell when someone is incompetent and/or BSing. It doesn't guarantee the employment will work out, as working styles can be incompatible, employee can be/become depressed and/or unmotivated, etc., but it at least allows you to discern the competence to a reasonable degree of satisfaction. When I interview programmers we're so busy talking shop that school doesn't even cross my mind. Thus far very few mention anything related to their schooling as a qualification while we're discussing, i.e., not a lot of "Yeah, I did a project like that in school once...". If one is hiring for a heavily theoretical position, academic credentials may be slightly more meaningful (though it's still about the final output, much of the personal research/development for that type of thing would occur at a university, whereas "working" software engineers mostly go through school as a formality), but for most other things, it's so irrelevant that it never comes up after several searching technical interviews.

geoka9 14y ago

I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented. I don't care if you're talented as long as you are good. I think the word "talent" is getting more and more misuse in the startup field. Talent is innate ability. While it helps, it's not a prerequisite to being good.

btilly 14y ago

Let me summarize. If your credentials are worthwhile, that will become obvious. If not, then they don't matter. For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for recent graduates, you may have little else to point to.

cookiecaper 14y ago
>For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for recent graduates, you may have little else to point to. They should skip a few homework assignments and write a few simple yet interesting tech demos and upload them to GitHub.
- btilly 14y ago
  A nontrivial fraction of people go from one subject in college to a tangentially related career upon graduating. If they had known 2 years later what kind of work they would want to do, then sure. But if you're not willing to give them a shot, you could be missing out on some cheap talent. (I was an example when I came out of pure math and looked for a programming job back in the 90s, with no programming background.)

addlepate 14y ago

Yeah, that's what they all say.

criley 14y ago

I keep seeing this talk about "six figures" in the valley as code for "overpaid". I don't live in San Francisco but everything I can tell about the cost of living shows me that a $100,000 salary in SF is roughly equivalent to what, $45,000 here in Atlanta, GA. (http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667000&city2=51304000 http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667...) Which is certainly a good salary for a college grad but it's NO WHERE NEAR "overpaid", in my opinion...

emmett 14y ago
It's deceptive though. Making $100k/year in San Francisco means that rent is very expensive, relatively speaking, but that consumer goods are incredibly cheap. Living in SF: Eating out at restaurants, buying the latest iPhone, plane tickets, clothes shopping all relatively cheap. Living in Atlanta: Getting a big house in a desirable neighborhood, parking are cheap. So if you'd prefer to consume more real estate and real estate dependent goods, you should prefer to live outside boom zones. If you like to buy experiences and consumer goods, you should live in the boom zone.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  The problem being that everyone who has children eventually moves into the former group.
- dpeck 14y ago
  Not sure I understand this. At 100k/year eating out at restaurants, buying latest iphone, plane tickets, clothes shopping, etc are all relatively cheap most anywhere, aren't they? There are plenty of Atlanta people who fall into the real estate trap, and it is a trap, but there are also plenty who live in slummy east atlanta, or get a reasonable condo/apt in midtown. Leaving them with relatively huge amounts of disposable income for experiences and shiny things.
  - wmeredith 14y ago
    Yeah, this doesn't compute for me either. The price of iPhones and plane tickets have little to do with geography until you start crossing national borders.

gesman 14y ago

"...I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented." But of course. The problem is that talented people usually do not carry the sign "I am talented" to make it easy for you. It's up to you to figure that out. And you never know who is "talented" upfront unless you give that person a space and time and let the person express himself. So you may not give a shit, but you have to give it a time and take a risk of finding out that cool looking and smooth talking dropout you hired 6 months ago is not talented at all.

doktrin 14y ago
I don't think "talent" (or, the ability to produce a quality work product) is that inconceivably difficult to ascertain in this field. Also, while I realize you were speaking generally, I am familiar with at least one of Exec's non-traditional hires, and I sincerely doubt he will be regretting that decision.
mnicole 14y ago
How does a formal education make that any different?
mahyarm 14y ago
Designers and Engineers are incredibly fortunate to be able to show portfolios and work samples that we can use to evaluate people with. You can also give real work sample tests during interviews! Try doing that with an MBA. My personal experience has shown a Stanford comp sci PhD doesn't mean that person is necessarily a good software developer, and if you can't even rely on that, then you might as well evaluate them directly.

dpiers 14y ago

My dad's business began to decline when I was in middle school, and he had to shut it down by the time I was in my junior year of high school. I'm the second of seven children, and by the time I graduated my parents' savings were wiped out and they were just barely managing to keep food on the table. They couldn't afford to help me pay for school, but my test scores were high enough to get a full scholarship to a public university near my home town, so that's where I went. I lived at home, used public transit to commute, and made due with what I had available. It's easy for me to say that credentials are worthless, I went to a school you've probably never even heard of, so it's nice to hear this from a successful individual who graduated from a top school.

tnuc 14y ago

And how does one prove they are talented?

AdamTReineke 14y ago
- Github. Contribute to (or start) open source projects that show your skill. - Blog. Write technical articles explaining confusing topics in the areas you are skilled in. - Freelance/Contract work. Do work for others who can vouch for your skills.
cookiecaper 14y ago
Survive multiple serious (but not overly specific) technical interviews, have a decent and/or interesting body of work online, and demonstrable involvement and working habits from contribution to open-source projects, mailing lists, tech journals (my last hire had several Linux-specific articles carried by an online publisher over 10 years ago), etc. A degree is honestly one of the least useful metrics for actual talent out there. Its value is basically limited to showing a tolerance (but not necessarily an aptitude) for bureaucracy and corporate mind games.

stevenameyer 14y ago

Formal education in my opinion is really only good for one thing when determining how good of a hire someone will be. Ensuring a certain level of exposure to areas that may otherwise be overlooked in self study. When people learn things by themselves they tend to focus on what they love the most and have a tendency to ignore what they don't. Formal education forces you to learn all areas that are covered and often bring things to light that are very useful, but would often be overlooked in selfstudy. So formal education provides a base-line level of exposure to a lot of topics, what a student chooses to do with this level of exposure is what will determine wether they will succeed.

benatkin 14y ago

Apparently well reasoned blog posts are worthless too. What does Steve Jobs have to do with people Justin Kan wants to hire? He's famous not for being hired but for starting a company. He also doesn't fill the roles on Exec's hiring page.

aeflash 14y ago
Exactly. Reminds me of that classic C&H strip. "You know how Einstein got bad grades as a kid? Well mine are even worse!" Being a college dropout doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good hire, just like having a degree doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a good hire.
TillE 14y ago
That's another thing that amuses me about all these companies looking for superstar developers. A fairly large fraction of them will be far more interested in doing their own thing than working for you.
- benatkin 14y ago
  Yes, but trendy startups often convince superstar developers that it's just like doing their own thing. It might be. Personally I'm more interested in open source than I am on working on someone else's startup.

barce 14y ago

Great rant except for the part wanting to hire kids. That's age discrimination.

thirdstation 14y ago

> Your Credentials Are Worthless Here The impression I got was more along the lines of "We're willing to overlook your lack of credentials if you can prove you're talented." These articles always come off a little pompous to me. But, I guess if you have the money, and you're hiring, you get to say what's important.

michael_miller 14y ago

> "[Top schools] don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer." I've found this statement to be false, at least at my alma mater(UT Austin). My Honors OS class unquestionably made me a better programmer, teaching me about how programs I wrote interacted with the OS to a very deep level. My algorithms class gave me an extremely deep understanding of how algorithms+data structures worked, giving me a better intuition as to what tools to use when confronted with a problem. My HCI class made me acutely aware of how users interact with software. I'll agree that the purpose of universities is not vocational. Without a doubt, a lot of classes I've taken will have absolutely no impact on my career (unless Buddhist Art becomes an in-demand field!). But a good school gives students the opportunity to gain applicable skills that are needed in the world. If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer. You can't do well in the class unless you truly understand code. Using a coarse grained filter of "Harvard University" is bad, but using a "Passed CS50 with an 'A'" filter is a very good metric to use.

tptacek 14y ago
What kind of intuition did you get from algorithms class? What's an example of the kind of intuition you feel like you got that you wouldn't have gotten on-the-job?
- michael_miller 14y ago
  I don't believe there's any intuition I got from my algorithms class that couldn't be gained on the job. However, the class does provide intuition in an accelerated manner, and it proves to employers that I have the intuition. Some examples off the top of my head: - Memoization / DP - Divide and conquer - Using a bounded approximate algorithm in place of an exponential one for NP complete problems I feel like it would have taken me a lot of time to internalize those types of algorithms on the job, but seeing them presented in my algorithms class made it easy.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Ok, actually, those first two do sound like things I'd have learned more effectively in a classroom. Point conceded.

_delirium 14y ago

Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing. If you’re lucky, you might learn how to create a financial model or craft a solid argument. If that's what you got out of college, you were definitely doing it wrong. Maybe in a business degree, but most people who do a science, engineering, or math degree learn some, you know, actual science, engineering, and/or math, not merely schmoozing skills. You could learn that elsewhere, but if you care about scientific progress, my experience is that few people without a science degree ever get around to developing a rigorous scientific education, whether out of disinterest, lack of time, or whatever other reason. Lots of people plan to one day work through some textbooks, but most people don't. You see it in a lot of self-taught programmers, many of whom have a weak grounding in computer science. That might be okay, depending on what you're hiring for, but there are many cases where you want some more solid foundations. For example, if you're doing anything with machine learning, you might want people who understand statistics. Oh, and if you're designing aircraft, you might want someone who's studied aeronautical engineering, or at least some kind of engineering, whether at a university or through equivalent self-study. Even Google, a canonical Disruptive Silicon Valley company, seems to prefer its technical employees to understand computer science, rather than to hire pure programmers. If someone is a true autodidact, learning on their own the equivalent of what they would've learned in a rigorous 4-year degree, that's fine, and there are some of those, so I have no problem making sure to look out for them, or even actively seek them out. I don't run across them very often at all, however, especially if we're talking about people without any formal mathematical training who are able to do solid mathematical or engineering modeling work. When you do find such a person, they're often amazing, but they're not common. Maybe MOOCs will increase their numbers, but it's a bit early to tell. That said, I agree in not caring about the actual credential. If someone studied CS at CMU but left without the piece of paper for whatever reason, but learned the kind of stuff people learn in the CMU CS program, I don't really care about the missing document.

cookiecaper 14y ago
I think this is mostly about the resources available to self-taught programmers. I know on many occasions I've sought to strengthen my mathematical and theoretical background without a lot of tangible progress because the resources online don't really approach things comprehensibly or accessibly. I have a friend getting advanced physics degrees and even he says the usual suspects like Wikipedia are uselessly over-technical for him. I've bought a couple of textbooks without much progress in penetration, and Khan Academy and/or Open Courseware is kinda OK for specific issues but they're too tight and "locked up" in video format to really constitute a generally useful guide, and I think they lose some relevance without the greater context. Better Explained is also selectively useful, but most of his analogies don't click with me and the site tends to ramble. What I really need is a decent tutor who is willing to help me specifically with the issues I have but I've sought in vain for one who is willing to free-wheel it with me instead of just copying out of a textbook. I tried one briefly and he came up with a cop-out shortly after our first lesson, because I don't think he liked the unconventional questions I was asking, like "Why and/or how are sine waves relevant to non-geometric data? The only definition I can find of a sine casts it in strictly trigonometric terms, so how is it applicable to non-trigonometric data? Is everything encoded into a representation of a triangle before these calculations are applied?" Heh, that one made him pretty annoyed and he didn't really have a good answer. I would love to increase my background in statistics and comp sci theory (which is basic but imo sufficient, and I seem to have a better grounding than most of the CS grads I've worked with), but I don't really know of a good option to receive that training. If someone wrote tutorials for graduate-level math from the bottom principles up like they write out tutorials on PHP or whatever, I'd be all over it. I really want to increase my formal mathematical literacy.

SparrowOS 14y ago

Yer an India-nigger.

ctide 14y ago

The comments here are generally super confusing to me. Are there companies in San Francisco who actually give a shit about where you went to college? I've only been here for 5 years, but I spent 2 or so of those just bouncing around from startup to startup doing consulting work. I've never worked with anyone who gave a shit about what college people went to. Literally, none. The startups I've joined have been predominantly staffed with college dropouts (even including a high school dropout or two), and a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees. Where are all these startups that are hiring based on credentials?

alaskamiller 14y ago
The ones that don't know any better.
richardjordan 14y ago
I'm not sure that it's startups hiring based on credentials as the bigger more established companies. I am pretty sure Google is famous for its hiring strategy. IIRC Facebook has taken a similar approach, no? Lots of fresh new startups with no money or traction take what they can get, and that perversely often leads to talent that would be rejected by more established companies. But you only have to read job listings to see how many of the well funded more established companies, out of the very early stage, look to hire from a very narrow range of schools. YYMV but I see ads like that ALL the time.
ruswick 14y ago
> And a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees. I think you are conflating coders with engineers. The latter entails a lot more requisite knowledge, and generally requires formal education of some sort.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  But what is the practical difference? Plenty of jobs advertised as "software engineering" are mainly about writing wordpress plugins.

larsberg 14y ago

Having been involved in quite a bit of college recruiting in my former life as a hiring manager for a development/test org, I learned a couple of very important lessons: - Every real school, no matter how low in the ranking, produces at least one competitive graduate each year and rarely an amazing candidate. - The top schools produce not only a large number of competitive graduates, but also at least one amazing candidate each year. For companies searching for a large number of candidates, hitting the top schools makes a lot of sense. Further, you also start to get data on your hiring so you can know if your yield was low in a given year; if some bad attrition means the manager is likely poor or if that school's candidates are just larger flight risks; etc. Sourcing candidates from small schools, at least for us, usually meant that they had either done something noteworthy or an alum already at the company was contacted by a professor at their alma mater, who passed along a resume and asked us to interview them. That said, the amazing candidates from top schools are usually funneled off to graduate school without ever touching the recruiting process, whereas at non-top-tier schools they are much more recruitable for either a startup or software development shop.

scelerat 14y ago

Moneyball.

Irregardless 14y ago

I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new employees? There's an upside to this, though: You can easily identify short-sighted companies that probably aren't worth working for based on the degree requirements stated in their job listings. If you require 3 years of experience and a CS degree for all your 'junior' and 'entry level' developer positions, there's a good chance you couldn't think your way out of a paper bag. That's often code for "I expect a lot out of you, but I'm not going to give you much in return". Tech companies need to adapt more quickly than most others just to stay afloat. Following the same hiring practices that have been around since the 19th century is a great way to fall flat on your face in that regard.

lordofmoria 14y ago
I also see this as a huge problem. Without the "credential crutch", identifying talent and true ability is nearly impossible for a hiring manager who isn't deeply involved in the business on a day-to-day level. The problem is, the managers who ARE deeply involved are usually too busy to spend time searching for and hiring new employees (GREAT managers though, will always find time for this). Hiring is especially a problem in tech, because there's an even bigger disconnect between the hiring managers' understanding of the actual position.
incision 14y ago
>I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new employees? * In general, I think there has been a strong trend away from investing in people, to treat them as interchangable cogs or simply farm out as much as possible. I've seen larger organizations which almost seem scared of having exceptional people, or more specifically allowing them to do exceptional work. It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique institutional knowledge with them. * Assessing "talent" costs time. The time of reasonably talented people you are or will be paying, in some form another. * Unless you find a way to turn it into an automated, repeatable process, the decisions made are subjective and subject to all manner of criticism and allegations. This might not rate in a startup, but once you're large enough to have anyone titled "hiring manager", I expect these things are going to be relevant. * Scale is a problem. If I put out an entry-level job I'm gonna get 500+ applicants. Reduce it to something almost criminally narrow (You already know who you're going to hire, but you have to go through the motions and make the selection defensible) and I'm still looking at 100+. * Not sure what exactly you mean by training. It's hard enough to find people who can drop into a new environment and apply their existing skills immediately. Finding people who are so smart and capable that they can drop and learn skills while applying them would be that much harder.

brycehamrick 14y ago

As an MBA, take this with a grain of salt, but the hiring decision is all about managing risk. Most companies, not just American ones, are risk-averse. As such they hire vetted candidates, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hiring decisions carry the same risk & reward pairing of an investment. You can take a risk on an un-credentialed candidate that you have a good feeling about, and in turn they won't expect the same pay as someone with a well-respected degree. Graduates from top schools get good salaries because there's a sense that these schools adequately vet candidates and prepare students for the real world. You could argue this is untrue, but it all depends on what you're looking for. The truth is academia is less relevant to startups. MBA programs focus on case studies on Fortune 500 companies with multinational reach and departmentalization of business functions. Startups don't act this way, so hiring an MBA doesn't necessarily mean that candidate is going to perform better than someone without the same degree. What it does tell you is that they have some ability to organize, manage priorities, and ultimately complete a plan, which is still valuable. As any statistician will tell you, citing anecdotal examples is misleading. Steve Jobs may have dropped out of college, but there's millions of dropouts that don't go on to create multi-billion dollar companies. I've worked with plenty of amazing people who were great at what they did without credentials behind their names. I've also worked with people I still have no idea how they managed to completed their programs.

trotsky 14y ago

They may be worthless to Justin as the hiring manager but Stanford, Harvard, MIT etc. credentials are brutally helpful in funding and running your own startup.

skot9000 14y ago

Top CS schools don't teach programming, they teach Computer Science. CS students are very likely to become good programmers from side projects, but so can liberal arts students.

jwoah12 14y ago
Maybe something different happens in the "top" top CS programs , but I sure as hell did a lot of programming during my CS curriculum. Some was for classes meant to explicitly make you better programmers (software engineering), and some was as a tool to learn/practice the theory. I certainly felt like I became a good programmer in part through my classes.
- randomdata 14y ago
  How much of your course load would you say was directly related to programming topics, not CS? It is not so much a question of you not learning programming skills in the program, so much as what it would take to learn the same outside of the program. One software engineering class and a bunch of practice doesn't seem particularly difficult to catch up on, and even surpass, in the same time frame if you place your focus squarely on that topic.

Cub3 14y ago

This article exactly me, graduated high school (just) and managed to get into a very low brow university that I dropped out of within the first year it took me awhile but i've found its your experience and body of work that makes the difference, I finally, after working at a pizza shop at night and coding websites during the day for 6 months, a low paying "web developer" role at a publisher that turned out to be hell... still... every day I was there was real experience in the industry. After two years of waiting I got headhunted by an international brand and am currently one of the lead UX devs, when lecturing at career nights etc. I always say the same thing, "do not worry about university if your field is anything to do with the web, go CISCO / MSDN or, do what I did, be self disciplined and teach yourself.

6thSigma 14y ago

As someone who started at a top-tier university and later left to a "bad" school, I can say this post hits close to home. I was doing well at the top-tier school and left for personal reasons, but doing so has very clearly cost me opportunities in my career thus far. As Peter Thiel so eloquently put it, I inadvertently gave myself a dunce cap.

gems 14y ago
Great cop out.

kyro 14y ago

Tell that to the medical field.

kamaal 14y ago
In case of a doctor hospital is nearly indistinguishable from the college. They are more or less the same. A doctor wouldn't be too great if all he has done is read a lot of books, and attended a lot of classes but hardly treated anyone. Even when it comes to things like law and medicine, practice and experience are vastly more important.

spitfire 14y ago

I'll wait for tokenadult to show up and set us all straight on the matter.

tokenadult 14y ago

From the end of the blog post: "I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented." It's not clear what he is doing to figure out which of his applicants are talented. That's still something important to do, even if you disregard schooling credentials. Disregarding schooling credentials has some warrant in research on company hiring procedures, but as long as you are blessed with more applicants than jobs, you still have to figure out whom to hire. I suggest using work-sample tests to hire, and backing up those work-sample tests with a general mental ability test whenever that is legally permitted. The full rationale for my advice appears in a previous comment, a FAQ post I developed for HN that appears to be my all-time most popular comment here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

ruswick 14y ago

I find it somewhat ironic that this piece can get the reception it did on a site associated with what is effectively the Harvard of startups. (Although, honestly, a comparison to Harvard can't do the prestige of YC justice. It is far harder to get into YC then it is to most any college.)

dinkumthinkum 14y ago

This is really hard-hitting out of the box thinking on Hacker News! .... Just kidding. I don't want to be mean but come on; we are not only beating a dead horse with this stuff but smashing it straight into a glue container.

SqMafia 14y ago
Haha! Nice. Yeah this is just pandering to the HN crowd. Also, come on, put some effort into that article. Say something that hasn't been said already.

enraged_camel 14y ago

Unfortunately this would never work in companies that hire foreign workers. As part of the H1B process, the government wants to verify that the position actually requires an "advanced degree." The way they check that is by looking at whether the other people currently in that position have college degrees. The company's HR department has to provide all of that as evidence (among many other things) when it files for an H1B petition for the foreign worker. I'm also questioning whether the article's claim could actually be proven with data. On the one hand I want to believe that credentials do in fact make no difference. On the other hand, it doesn't ring true when I think about my own experiences. I'm the founder of a local not-for-profit community service organization. When I was still actively involved as president, we were very ambitious with our goals and therefore sought to recruit high quality people to join the board of directors. We interviewed many people, and the thing is, there was a stark difference between people who had degrees from the local Cal State college and those who graduated from the better schools in the Pacific West (University of Washington, UCLA, Berkeley, etc.). Over the course of three years, I interacted with both groups of people and found out that those who went to good schools actually had a superior breadth of knowledge and a much wider perspective in things they dealt with. They always had great ideas and often times took the initiative to make those happen. In contrast, those who went to the local Cal State college (Cal State Long Beach) were just lame. They were nice people, but they were generally unmotivated, bland, and never thorough with the things they did.

kamaal 14y ago

College credentials at most work like Interviews(Its easy to game these things), once you get a Ivy degree stamp you can pretty use that to BS your way to absolutely any position you want. Every time I see a senior exec leaving the company during difficult times, I see one thing manifest. The guy is super job hopper known to milk his Ivy league degree and networking potential to get anything he/she wants. Beyond that try to measure his performance or actual value he is adding to the company and you will see nothing substantial apart from making congratulatory noises during occasions, or blasting people when something went wrong or at most acting as a information aggregator/distributor to the rest of the company. Big name schools serve as a aggregating points for good people, but many times you also get people fit for nothing. The best test to hire an exec(or anybody) is not look at his degree or names on his resume. Do a good background research on the guy and try to see if he has actually done something nice in the past, what sort of contributions he has made to what kind of projects/businesses. Never hire people at senior positions just because some one from his network happens to be in your company. Unless the guy has some good rock solid performance in his past, he is not worth your time. No matter from which college he comes.

paganel 14y ago

> Your love of building things makes you great. I'm a Computer Science dropout myself, but I do work with a couple of people that graduated Ivy League schools (one of these schools is even mentioned in the article). What I did find out is that no matter what school you graduated or no matter what your credentials are, if you're always driven by curiosity ("hey, how does this work?") and always eager to actually build stuff that other people use than the differences easily fade out.

kriro 14y ago

The assumption is that you can outsource some of the evaluation to the university (it acts as a filter). The chances of getting someone that can solve problems and think is higher if you pick from a pool of university grads than non-university grads. If it's worth the premium you pay is another question (I'd say the answer is yes) If you have some method of generating a higherEV applicant pool then by all means do it and print the money.

srlake 14y ago

Being brilliant doesn't disqualify someone from being brilliant.