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US Tech Firms Recruiting High Schoolers (And Younger)
ShaunC writes: Is there a glut of qualified American tech workers, or isn't there? Some companies like Facebook and Airbnb are now actively courting and recruiting high school students as young as 13 with promises of huge stipends and salaries. As one student put it, "It's kind of insane that you can make more than the U.S. average income in a summer." Another who attended a Facebook-sponsored trip said he'd "forego college for a full-time job" if it were offered. Is Silicon Valley taking advantage of naive young workers?
Mark Zuckerberg got into Harvard, he recruits heavily from people who got into Ivy League schools. Why? Because IQ tests are banned for employment purposes, and he has to use the proxy of SAT scores which allowed people to get into competitive schools. Any actual benefit of attending said schools is purely secondary. Here he's found another way to find the smart kids, and they don't have to spend $30,000 a year to prove they are smart kids. It's a win, win.
Short term. But when he tried to change jobs, he'd find a lot of opportunities closed to him because just about every company wants a degree. I've known a number of non-degreed programmers who have gone back to get one for that reason.
Quitting school to found a startup might make sense; at least it's honest gambling. Quitting school to take a regular job doesn't; the job or one like it will still be there when you graduate.
why not nerds?
For every 1999 there's a 2001. Jobs like that tend to get either very competitive or just abandoned when the market contracts. Or they just replace you with some other youngin', since that seems to be the way that job segment is working.
Calculus + coding = Job for life, it's a combo that works really well and it's a market where age adds, rather than subtracts, value.
Oh yes, definitely, very not new...
During the Industrial Revolution, factory owners were declaring that it was a waste of time for children to be going to school when they could better be spent making money mining for coal or scrubbing pots in factories. Why waste their time learning when clearly a child's life is better spent earning profits?
So...
It may not have changed his earning potential, but it greatly improves his opportunities if your company lays him off, goes bust, or just sucks. Having a degree on your resume is often needed just to get past the HR filter. I've met several folks who did very well despite their lack of degrees, and all want their kids to get one. You have to really sell yourself and rely on luck much more to get that next good job if you do not have a degree.
Out of curiosity, what drove you to try going back to school, after successfully starting a career?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
But equivalent work experience is a lot longer. I might believe that someone with no degree and a decade plus of experience is as good as someone with a degree and 3-4 years, but he'd have to prove it. I find almost nobody without at least 3 years of college has a decent grasp of the fundamentals of computer science- data structures, algorithms, critical thinking and design. The people without degrees tend to just know how to google for answers and copy the results, and god forbid you change frameworks or languages on them- they're hopeless. Its to the point that no degree and less than 6 or 7 years of experience isn't going to get an interview over a guy right out of college because the odds favor the college grad having a higher ceiling.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Most companies want degrees OR equivalent work experience. I went back to school as a 23 year old and quit soon after because I got tired of professors telling me things that I had taught myself years earlier as part of my job.
Varies with the discipline. I returned to school to study history after some years of political organizing and found value in professors' teaching of historiography that I never would have gained from years of reading history. After ten years of working as a software engineer I started a masters in computer science and found professors were woefully behind the industry. YMMV.
Wir sind geboren, um frei zu sein - Rio Reiser
Actually, some supported schools quite a bit. Schools trained their employees. Factories had a problem with farm kids just wondering off and doing other things like they would on the farm. This was a big set back for industrialization so schools were opened in order to teach the children how to pay attention, follow direction, add and subtract and so on to be ready for the factories.
Perhaps after they were "trained", they decried their further education but initially, it was for their benefit for the most part.
http://www.geopolitics.us/why-...
Well when you cannot poach employees, you need to get to them first.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
but after 20+ years competing head on with cheaper Indian, Malaysian and Chinese tech workers it's more like BS + on the job + maybe a few years working for free at an internship and your dad knows a guy...
Don't like it? Form a Union and get organized or get another line of work.
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I guess I don't agree. School is for the young and unattached, it is not an easy thing to go back to at some later date. I'm not saying that no one can do so, I'm saying that no one I know has done so, but continue to either wish they had, or try to make it work but can't find the time between a day job to keep the mortgage paid and kids fed, and the vicious hours studying and doing homework.
I would make the opposite argument: there are always jobs and they always pay money. Unless you're talking about an opportunity with such a high compensation that you can afford to not work for 5 years and pay for school, it's a bad decision for most people. There are cases where it does make sense, but they seem to be the exception. Taking a wage slave job at FB versus going to school seems like a really bad gamble.
I worked at a Fortune 500 company that refused to train to workers because they would get certified and make more money at a competitor. Never mind that most people got frustrated from the lack of training, trained themselves and got certified on their own time, and made more money at a competitor. Corporate dysfunction at its best.
I wasn't ecstatic about all the non-major courses I had to take when my primary worry was getting a programming job after I got my degree, and I might have taken an $100K out if it was available. But now 10-15 years later I'm glad I that my formal education included a psychology class, a statistics class, a history class, and others. Maybe I would have picked all that up on my own, or maybe I'd have a giant black hole in my world view.
There's a training side to education and there's a wisdom side to education, and they're both important in the long run. Telling young people to get jobs right out of high school because being well-rounded isn't necessary for "smart" people just means it's going to be a crap shoot as to whether their decisions repeat history or learn from it.
if they're paying highschool kids the average yearly income in a summer then the kids are taking advantage of facebook quite frankly.
I saw this stuff happening with Nokia back in the later half of the '90s. they would hire _everyone_. literally everyone off from the yearly roster at technical university. they would literally hire highschool students for summer gigs for coding.
then they had too much people a few years afterwards and spent over a decade of getting rid of the people while being consumed by internal power struggles which greatly affected product quality.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Umm, Einstein wasn't bad at math. Apparently you're bad at history though.
http://content.time.com/time/s...
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
A good example on this site was a programmer asserting that "single bit operations are faster" presumably due to him bypassing all the boring stuff about hardware and clock cycles that many others here learnt in high school.
To get down to it, while it is possible few people when leaving high school have the self-discipline to learn a lot of difficult subjects just by going through textbooks or other resources. If nobody is talking to us about it we don't know where to get started - so University or similar provides that start.
Which is just as well because who uses Modula-2 today? How about the godawful VB of 15 years ago? Both apparently looked like winners instead of the weird Java thing and that antiquated C.
I've been doing technical interviews for 15 years. And any day of the week I'd take someone with a degree over someone with 5 or 6 years more experience without one. Oh, I'll miss a few good hires that way, but I'll miss out on more bad ones. And that's what far more important- its better to miss making a good hire than make a bad one. In those 15 years I have seen perhaps 4 people without a degree have even a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of the craft-- and 2 of those I'm thinking of dropped out their senior year of college for medical or family reasons. The rest have all been language of the week cruft who I wouldn't hire to write webpages. I won't even interview them anymore- too many have failed, the small percentage of useful hires you'd find aren't worth the time.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The theory lasts for a lifetime, the framework only lasts until the next fad comes out. I've found over time that those who are self taught often have the most trouble adapting to the changing job requirements whereas those with the education (even if it's not in CS) are more adaptable. The biggest problem with most of the self taught people I've met is that they avoid learning the boring stuff.
Granted, college plus experience is great, but experience without college is a handicap. Now that doesn't mean someone can not overcome that handicap, because a lot of people do manage it. Often people have a very good reason why there's no college and you can't fault them for it. However I find it amazing that someone would _voluntarily_ inflict themselves with that sort of handicap.
Tech companies want to make sure the Zuckerbergs make a gazillion dollars, but tech wages get driven down. 501(C) organization like FWD.us are all about getting "immigration reform" which includes a lot more H1B, which means you distort the intellectual capital market by bringing in more workers and thus driving down pay. Why pay money to an american with school loans when you can lobby government to get someone who can work for less as an H1B serf.
Paying kids is a new twist on this game. So, why even pay people who have careers, lets pay our employees even less by hiring children?
It is a race to the bottom, and make no mistake, it is so the rich can get richer. I don't want to sound like an "occupy wall street" loony, but don't workers deserve reward for their work just as much as industrialists. 40 years ago, CEOs only made a few hundred times more than their average employee, and that was scandalous.
These guys complain about the "economy," but that facts are clear, the U.S. economy was better when we had more wealth distribution, stronger unions, and a growing middle class. They want us to be China, and unless we figure out how to stop it, we will be.