Zoho Don't Need No Stinking Ph.D. Programmers

theodp writes "When it comes to tech academic credentials, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has The Right Stuff: a Ph.D. in EE from Princeton. But Vembu has eschewed Google's Army-of-Ph.D.s approach to software development in favor of tapping into the ranks of high school grads who would not normally go to college for Zoho. Seeing his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree convinced Vembu that others could follow that example with the proper training and guidance. And studying the best employees in his own company led to another epiphany: 'What if the college degree itself is not really that useful?' thought Vembu. 'What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?'"

Comments

Re:No degree, bad citizen

[Grishnakh]

I don't know which country you're in, but here in the USA, I'd say that non-college-educated people are generally dim-witted drains on society, mainly because 1) the public school education system in this country is so bad, that virtually no one graduating from high school has anything approaching a decent education, and kids here HAVE to go to college in order to overcome their poor prior education, and 2) everyone with half a brain in this country realizes this fact, and goes to college because of it if they can.

Furthermore, you don't have to go to some stuffy institution to get a better education. State schools are just fine, and there's community colleges all over the place that are quite cheap and definitely not stuffy.

Finally, I believe that living in a dorm in college is also a good preparation for life, for children who have lived protected lives with their parents up through high school and have no idea to live on their own.

And yes, attending college DOES make you better at something: learning. The pace at which you have to learn material in any college is so much higher than any public high school it's not even funny. I think I learned as much in freshman Chemistry in two weeks as I did in a whole year in high school science class.

Now, if you live in a country that actually has a decent public education system, then you can disregard this and feel good that you're lucky to live someplace where you have that luxury. But for us in the USA, we're cursed with a 3rd-world-quality public school system, so going to college is a necessity if you want to be considered "educated" beyond the level needed to clean toilets.

Re:Finally

[AlgorithMan]

Apparently you don't have a CS degree, so why do you think you could even remotely understand what they are doing?

shure, kernelizations, branching-vector minimization, modelling things as graphs and using matching- or networkflow algorithms seems like bad programming, because these things need far more code than a simple backtracking algorithm (so these guys are wasting time and stealing money from their employer, right?). but these things make the difference between "applicable" and "too slow".

Without a CS degree, you won't even understand why.

or take parsers - you'd probably write very simple parsers. e.g. for configuration files of the form
property1 value1
property2 value2
you'd probably just extract the strings from a stream and do lots of if(str1 == "property1") { property1 = converter(str2);} else if(...

I'd use lots and lots of gotos, which would seem like bad programming to you (because you've been told that goto=bad), but I would have written it as an automata, which is FAR faster than your stuff (and for huge database programs, this is again the difference between "fast enough" and "to slow"). Using this technique I've written one of the fastest XML parsers there are...

Re:Yay for common sense

[daem0n1x]

It amazes me how such an obvious troll is modded insightful. Did you even care to go to Europe or you just made up everything, right there in your momma's basement in a shithole town in Kansas?