Slashdot Mirror
Why More Tech Companies Are Hiring People Without Degrees (fastcompany.com)
An anonymous reader writes: According to a recent article on Fast Company, tech companies are looking to hire people without degrees. From the report: "For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace. As a result, tech continues to stumble when it comes to diversity. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on 'new-collar jobs.' The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. 'We consider them based on their skills,' he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. 'We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps,' says Ladah. Intel has also been looking to find talent from other educational avenues. One program gave people either enrolled in or recently graduated from community colleges internships with the company. Similarly, the company has been trying to get a foothold in high schools by funding initiatives to boost computer science curricula for both the Oakland Unified School District and an Arizona-based high-school oriented program called Next Generation of Native American Coders. Intel, for example, invests in the program CODE 2040, which aims to build pathways for underrepresented minority youth to enter the technology space. Likewise, GitHub has partnered with coding-focused enrichment programs like Operation Code, Hackbright, and Code Tenderloin."
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
Congratulations companies. You have now figured out that 4 year degrees are not on the job training seminars.
My local high school has an "IT" track that is very hands on approach to a sysadmin style job without the college. There are multiple job positions across all industries that are better served with a hands on approach to learning just like plumbing, electrical, pipe fitting, etc.
When you build a house you don't need 50 architects and engineers. You need a handful and then another handful of people that know how to put hammer to wood. I don't know why people think that IT, coding, etc is any different.
Tech workers have been saying the best talent is self trained for decades. No university can teach someone how to be a passionate nerd. As for their motives.... I think it's much simpler. People with degrees want more money, so they can pay off the loans.
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Women are FAR more likely to get a degree these days than men.
That has been the case for many years.
So by hiring more people without degrees, these companies will be able to hire more men.
Way to go! (might not be what they intended though...)
https://www.google.com/search?...
You're right. There's a good chance that it's going to be written by someone with a ME or EE background in controls. Most likely in Simulink. The job descriptions back this up.
To do a code monkey's job, you do not need much in the way of a degree, as the Microsofts of the world well know. And the latter can get away with lower pay packages.
There are people who'll organise boycotts if you don't have the right spread of facial features across your team photos. That's a potential hit to the money.
If you're looking for someone trained for a task, you don't look for a university degree... that's a filter for "People willing to put 4 years and a massive amount of debt into a piece of paper to get past an HR/social hurdle".
Because university is about broadening your horizons and teaching you how to think so you have the capacity to develop the next thing other people will be going to job training for, and using it for anything else is the giant, expensive, frustrating thing that's keeping otherwise talented people out of your shop.
If you want a programmer, you don't need someone who can think up the next great programming language. You need someone who knows a current programming language and has the capacity to learn the next one, with a side order of sufficient social skills to work cooperatively and (in some cases) interact directly with clients.
Corporospeak for 'Let's cut labor costs'.
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
This and there is a strong belief by many in management that the actual performance of the employee isn't as important as cutting costs. It's driven by short term gains.
All hail the Lord of Diversity.
Exactly, and when the primadonnas with degrees whose only skill is getting a degree end up costing money, out they go!
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues
If you don't consider homogeneity the homos will have a hissy-fit.
I got my degree from community college. I can haz six-figure income now?
Diversity is a mandate now, so HR departments have to pay homage to the idea. None dare call it quotas.
"For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace."
That's odd. I thought that if your college application included a bio about being a minority abused child who evacuated refugees from Syria using your own homemade soapbox racer, the Ivy League schools would be fighting over you.
"Tech Companies" can be anything tech, so we are looking at companies here that hire exclusively from universities.
Sorry IT. You can leave now. This story isn't about you.
Engineers, this is your story.
We all know how sausage-heavy the engineering departments can be, but this probably isn't really about diversity. It's probably about saving money by "giving people a chance". Of course that "chance" comes with a significantly lower paycheck and drastically limited career paths, but hey, at least they're working.
...These get old fast, people.
Now, now, don't be ageist!
(ducks)
"We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps" - I call bullshit. There's no way you can get a good coder from a crash course. Best you'll get is a code monkey.
Those of us with four year degrees in the field form a non-elite university?
Many Ruby on Rails projects are a great example of how focusing on short term cost savings ends up resulting in long term cost overruns.
Lots of not-so-bright managers heard the hype about Ruby on Rails. They heard how it could supposedly let web apps be created really quickly, often by cheap programmers who had dropped out of high school. There were also all sorts of acronyms like "ORM", "DRY", "CoC", and "RESTful" that these managers could use to convince their managers that Ruby on Rails was the way to go. So whenever a new software development project came up, they chose Ruby on Rails.
What was the actual result? Disaster. Many of these projects were huge failures, far beyond the typical failures we see for complex projects. It turns out that Ruby on Rails is often extremely slow on its own. Combine that with high school dropout programmers who don't know what runtime complexity analysis is, and you get even slower software. The main way of dealing with this slowness was just to throw more hardware, and usually more expensive hardware, at the problem until the slowness was mitigated sufficiently. Even then the software was often pretty much unusable because it didn't actually do what the users needed it to do, because high school dropouts aren't capable of properly analyzing the needs of the users. After many delays, performance problems, and usability problems, much of this software was just thrown away.
With Ruby on Rail's reputation quite tainted within the industry, these managers and high school dropout programmers had to find new technologies to push. As hard as it may be to believe, they actually chose to go with a worse language, JavaScript, and a worse framework than Ruby on Rails, Node.js! Now we're getting to witness all sorts of Node.js projects ending up just like how the Ruby on Rails ones did: disasters.
What projects have been successful? The ones that ignore the most hyped technologies, and stick with proven technologies used by experienced and costlier professional software developers. Many of these projects use "un-sexy" technologies like Java and C#/.NET. They don't have much hype surrounding them, but they can be used to get real work done. The upfront cost might be slightly higher, but in the end the ongoing hardware costs are minimal, and the software can actually be used for years to come, instead of rapidly thrown away.
It's not as easy to get street-shitters anymore, and hackers without a degree are likely to be happy to do the job for less pay, since it still beats working at mcdonald's. Now all they need to do is to convince SJWs that they're not doing it to save money.
I know someone without a degree wrote that summary. Take this section, and read it carefully (emphasis mine):
The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
companies don't care about diversity, they just care about paying lower salaries. You're welcome.
I have been in the IT industry for almost 30 years and I am a college dropout, I'm guessing I have about 60 credits to my name. I got my start working full time for the University I was attending. Since then I've moved around, gone through buyouts, acquisitions, and layoffs. I've worked for some very well known large companies and received offers from others. In my almost 30 years I'm only aware of two companies that wouldn't even talk to me because I didn't have a degree, one was a financial services firm and the other was a telco. There may have been others that I never knew about but I have no way of knowing.
I have no way of knowing if a degree would have helped me, then again what I'm doing today, WAN/LAN design and implementation wasn't taught when I attended college in the mid 80's, computer engineering was programming, usually Pascal, Fortran, or C, while cisco was barely a company when I started. I do think a degree would have opened up more options to me since I focused strictly on what interested me without regard to what skills might be needed for other jobs, both in or out of the IT industry to improve my marketability.
Over the years I've had the opportunity to interview potential candidates for positions, I never paid much attention to college degrees, I probably made a mental note if they did or did not attend college but I was more interested in the experience they had listed and if they could backup what was on the resume.
They will hire a SUB PAR candidate, just to make the snowflakes happy that they are a "diverse" company?
C was made in the 70's and not standardised till 1989. So pretty much everyone in the 80s was self trained. You can do a degree, but it was on Vaxes not PCs and in Fortran not C or C++.
The people who are teaching degrees are typically 10-20 years behind the loop and what you're learning today isn't what is being used at the moment.
The a robot professor on 'Robot Wars' and he shows his little robots playing connect 4 and then talks about self driving cars, and he is sooooo far behind as to be laughable.
This article summary cut-and-paste the same paragraph 6 times.
I can only assume Slashdot is leading the charge in hiring uneducated people.
Because they can pay them less.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
Because it's easy to pay people less who are already accustomed to lower pay and the people capable of high intellect jobs who make it in and are entirely qualified get promoted to the top, assume everyone with the same skin color as them is just as good as they themselves are and try to promote it (e.g. the whole "Microsoft has too many white males" bit from a few years back, where the MS CEO at the time drove Nokia into the ground by firing every white male (which was the whole engineering department.)
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
There is plenty of skilled labor, they just don't want to pay what it's worth.
Diversity for the sake of diversity is the most racist thing you can do. Hire based on merit.
that's not correct. i know a number of people with degree's who have trouble finding jobs in the it field. the amount of skilled laborers is not an issue, it's how much the companies have to pay them vs untrained workers..
I have read every comment to the present time. Passion? How many of you have read "The Art of Computer Programming," all four volumes cover to cover and worked through most of it. Do that and I will say that you are passionate. I only made three volumes. Going through just three volumes, how many would say the person is unqualified. I would say that a person that made it through three volumes probably has a greater fundamental and advance knowledge than most programmers and experts. I have an advance degree in CS and I say that. I mean it too. College? Taught me how to say what the instructor wanted to hear, not what worked. Most of my assignments the TA's said would not work. I told them that I had to turn in the source with the project and they could compile it. They told me that the compiled program was not compiled from the source. In each of those instances I had to go to the instructor who overrode the TA's every time. College at the technical level is more a case of the blind leading the blind. As far as the generals, I never paid much attention; did not care, and to this day am unconvinced of their validity excepting adding time to earn a degree and supporting failing academic departments.
Hey! Great editing! Thanks for repeating yourself!
"The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees."
I happen to know it was written by someone with a Masters who is working on his PhD.
Well, no, not really. I have no clue who wrote it. But I don't believe making cut-and-paste errors and failing to proof read your writing is limited to that part of the population that doesn't have (at least) a four year degree.
I usually proof read the things I write, and still I manage to send emails and post things that have glaring errors that I somehow overlooked. It's an unfortunate side effect of the email culture we have today.
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, at the price they want to pay!
FTFY
so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
In the form of lower salaries. Expanding the pool is not about getting more workers, it's about getting cheaper workers. Those big companeis care about the bottom line, and having a larger pool is secondary to having cheaper workers.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
You are correct about some companies, but wrong about most of them.
Companies are run by people, and most people are not aspie fucktard sociopaths.
Perhaps they write like you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace. As a result, tech continues to stumble when it comes to diversity."
Anybody got an answer? When did white people ask to irreversibly transform their countries into multi-racial ones, ones in which we will eventually become a minority, with no white countries left in the world for the 99% of us who simply want to live around our own kind?
Good luck destroying your companies by hiring people purely to meet a 'diversity' target, which white people didn't ask for. How 'democratic'. Our employers now think they are entitled to tell us what our political opinions should be.
Geez, Slashdot, you dumped the entire article into the summary. Fair use requires only a small portion of the original content. When I submitted this story as AC, I put in the first two paragraphs (89 words) for the summary. The revised summary has 337 words. Whatever happened to 120 words or less?
For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace
Many companies would love to have the problem of having a largely talented and well-educated workplace obtained by recruiting people from elite universities.
Ezekiel 23:20
God I used to love VAX/VMS. DCL was a wonderful command environment. VAX Fortran was everything you could ask for.
When you sit down and think long and hard about the title of credentials that compose an engineering position, it is all beyond technician and operator class but the etymology of engineer has more to do with a station for regulating a steam boiler.
An engineer is being glorified all these years: just throw more coal in the oven, monitor the gauges.
All the rolls have been reversed. Yet a company has business contracting powers based on how many credentialed personel are in it's payrol.
America thrived as a 3rd world nation founded on Alcohol andctobacci and firearms.
The lock in on tech that South Asians (primarily Indians) have on tech in the US is causing chafing with diversity values.
Since most visa maggots do not have a legitimate credentials big tech is trying to end run around their own requirements to get more cheap, exploitable labor if only to bring down the remuneration for anyone else with any skills.
The industry has long know that the best developers are self taught to the point they actually didn't need the degree. I'm not saying the material learned in doing the degree isn't useful. (Some programs are better than others mind you.) but the best are self trained, typically from their early teens and will take on projects during high school that are often beyond undergrads in university. It also demonstrates initiative and the ability to adapt with the expense of formal training. Many university only computer professional stop learning after they graduate. Not all, but some. And if the candidate has only recently graduated from university with no pre-university experience, there is no way to prove immediately they they will continue to learn throughout their career. So there it is. The key to IT (and any profession in my opinion) is to be a lifelong learner, and that is what IT pros without degrees had to prove to be hired.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
There is something to be said about not being able to write software that caters to the needs of poor people of color when most of the white guys working in your company haven't spoken to one except at the checkout counter.
What I want to know is if a company just cares about profits, why would they filter prospective candidates based on the university they graduated from. It seems to me that given 4 years and a $100k budget one can gain much more education and relevant job experience than going to a university.
The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need
Then why are these companies - who are so desperate to get skilled staff - laying off so many of the skilled people they already have?
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
I could understand the H1B and extra education programs, but I was under the impression that "diversity" in many US colleges didn't expand the graduate numbers, merely replaced some applicants with other applicants to be accepted instead. Of course they could just accept more people...but I guess that's too simple to work. ;)
Ezekiel 23:20
Absolute Fucking Bullshit.
What do un-degree'd and H-1B people have in common? They are cheap labor.
What is happening is that these companies (Ironically run by all those SJWs) saying to all the people who did things the right way, stay in school, get a degree, etc, "Fuck You, we can get cheaper labor elsewhere."
And yes, Intel sure as fuck would respond to SJWs. Have you fucking read the news lately?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
[...] it's how much the companies have to pay them vs untrained workers.
I work in IT support (think virtual ditch diggers). I have no high school diploma and two associate degrees (General Ed and Computer Programming). Except for two years after the Great Recession, I never had problems looking for work. I'm connected to 800+ recruiters through LinkedIn and get 20 emails or phone calls per day from recruiters. As a W2 contractor assigned to projects, I'm typically paid more than people with four-year degrees doing the same work.
A person that has spent $100-150k+ for four years of education is inherently more expensive than someone who avoided that time and cost, but not necessarily better for all tasks. Building a company of all superstars has its benefits, but isn't really a sustainable business model.
Perhaps they write like you.
Your comment need to be more positive. The AC strung two sentences' together. Not bad for a millennial.
Hmm, let's see. Looking at Intel engineer salaries, $100k seems like a reasonable average for a quick sanity check. So $300m invested, let's say that due to their diversity programme they can hire engineers who are just as productive but only cost $60k/year. $40k/year saved, $300m invested = 7,500 engineer-years to recover their costs.
(source: http://www.payscale.com/resear...)
How many $100k engineers does Intel employ? What are the overheads of firing thousands of them and replacing them with brand new diversity hires? Seems like kind of a crap money-making scheme if you ask me.
Especially since a plan to break the law by hiring diverse candidates at lower rates, and then publicly announcing it so that you get maximum scrutiny by social justice organizations probably isn't the most sensible way to pull off such a diabolical scheme.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some 'SJWs' criticised them? "
Something along those lines, absolutely! Intel has been an extremely successful company with its predominately white, predominately male workforce. This "diversity" bullshit is nothing but a collective mental illness which permeates contemporary culture & Intel is trying to capitalize on it. The whole effort is a big public image campaign.
It's not just "some SJWs" criticizing them. Every single time this is discussed in the media, government or academia, the "whiteness" and "maleness" in the tech industry is framed in the context of a problem that needs to be solved.
e.g.
Wired: Intel isn't diverse enough
Gizmodo: The Alarming Downsides to Tech Industry Diversity Reports
It's even framed as a problem from a public policy standpoint!
EEOC: "...the lack of diversity among high tech workers [has] become [a] central public policy [concern]."
You never (except in the comments section) hear the hypothesis that there just might be fundamental differences across the races and the sexes and that the composition of the workforce is a function of those differences. They also conveniently gloss over the fact that these evil white racists in tech seem to hire plenty of minorities of Asian/East Asian heritage.
F*** Intel. If they're going to have a big PR campaign where white men are viewed as a "problem", they won't be getting my $$$.
I know someone without a degree wrote that summary.
I submitted that article as an AC. I don't have a high school diploma but I have two associate degrees (General Education and Computer Programming). The section of the summary you quoted was from the article. You can't blame for the content or the editor adding more from the article than fair use allows.
I think it's like when my son has a toolbox with only a hammer in it. He attempts to resolve all problems with the hammer instead of considering other possibilities. In a business having employees who all have a common background and education is great when the focus is very narrow and all of your projects are suited well to your hammer. If you want to expand your list of prospective lines of business you would be well advised to add more tools. This doesn't mean you throw out the hammer and abandon all the projects which are suited to it. Instead you add other tools, which could even be more hammers that are better suited for slightly different tasks.
There is of course another completely different angle they could be chasing. The more homogeneous your staff is the more likely that anyone that is different will be poorly treated. An employee that has been the subject of abuse from other employees is more likely to take action which could cost you money or outright destroy the company.
As an anecdote, my Father was once hired by a business specializing in mainframe software. When he was hired he was the only person with any computer programming education at time of hire. The owner had deliberately been hiring people with a variety of backgrounds because he wanted them to develop software and systems that his competitors wouldn't have even thought of. The strategy worked and the company was successful enough to be snapped up by another much larger company.
When will people get that. People of the same race are so different it is crazy to look at race or demographics as a way to diversify. It shows they have no idea what diversity is that they assume a whole race or sex is the same. We need to assume all humans are the same and forget about trying to meet quotas or exactly equal the population distribution. A different culture is exists in every single city of the world. Just look at the U.K. And how accents change city to city.
I'm a university graduate myself in Comp Sci and what I often find missing in programmers that never went to post-secondary education is the theory of why certain things are done the way they are. While there often aren't any hard rules, some topics like how to deal with multi-threading, deadlocks and linear optimization will not be things that folks are good at programming unless they've had some exposure to the theory. Or programmers come up with the wrong solutions for complex problems which sort of work but usually less optimal or somewhat flawed. I should knowx I worked on a deadlock problem in high school and came up with something that worked but not reliably.
That said, experience and whether someone is actually good at programming can't be determined by a degree. I've met folks who are talented programmers who never went to school and folks who went to university who couldn't program if their life depended on it. About all the advice I could give to companies would be to take your best programmer (not your best HR or Manager) person who understands what they're doing and to have them pick the candidate to hire based on some actual programming tests. Talented programmers know each other and besides, you do want your programmers to work together I would assume.
There is a shortage of skilled labor but there are plenty of idiots who think they're skilled labor.
The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
. . . Tech hiring's job is to assemble the most competent team possible. When you have sufficient solid coders, architects, and engineers, then, MAYBE, you can worry about 'diversity". I'd put the money into education and training. And ignore H-1B entirely. . .
Nothing like being served a fine slice of truth cake!
By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Hahah wait, so people with certain skin colors will need degrees, and other skin colors will not? Get fucked with that racism lol
So you're boasting having 800+ recruiter connections on LinkedIn. Isn't that like having a 20 page resume? Too much noise. I'd think twice about hiring you .
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
In the USA it's federal law. Federal law prohibits discrimination on a pretty wide variety of reasons. How do you not know this?
Surely the wizards that run all the big outfits realize that, now that a majority of their tech base is comprised of foreigners from other countries, those values would be codified into operations of the big outfits themselves - in the example you mentioned - caste systems where equality and supposed diversity do not come into play...rather future employee candidates, at minimum, would have to be the same nationality and caste as those in the team because, wouldn't you know it, those team members would provide the hire or no-hire decision. Don't fit that mold? Well, your just not qualified. Hummmm.
Or possibly any degree at all, as long as they fill some diversity quota. Very comforting.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Companies with more diverse workplaces make money money, because you don't have 50 people with the same background that think mostly the same way. Companies voluntarily adopt diversity initiatives *precisely* because they're sold on the data that shows that becoming more diverse is better for their bottom line.
"Old man yells at systemd"
An optimistic view of this situation would be that these tech companies are trying to avoid the monoculture that occurs when all of your employees went to the same 10 or 15 schools, are white, Asian or Indian males, all got near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs, and all have the exact same ideas on how to approach a problem. Google used to only hire top-10 CS graduates for a while in its early history. I think what tech companies are trying to do is to get out of the mindset that no one could possibly be useful without a masters in CS from Stanford, CMU, MIT, etc. It's possible they're just chasing cheap labor -- high school grads would be very happy to have a job that pays anything near what an IT or dev job does. It's also very possible that they're just having trouble finding enough people by limiting their pool of workers to those CS graduates. There's a really big tech bubble that's been inflating for years, and it's just like the one in the late 90s. Back then, if you could spell HTML or did even basic sysadmin work, you were hopping from job to job every 6 months for huge raises.
I'm in IT, and IT tends to have way more people who don't have degrees. Some do really well and have enough drive to teach themselves very advanced stuff. But like development, IT has a lot of technician work and a little bit of design/engineering work. If you work for a typical large company doing IT support (sysadmin, etc.) then you're basically chasing down answers to support tickets in a very narrow subdivision of the company's IT environment. Smaller companies' sysadmins do a lot more jobs, and have to know a little about everything because they don't have hundreds of people each doing one little thing. Those who break out of the support ticket mold end up designing new systems for projects, enhancing the existing environment, and generally do more interesting work. This requires skills beyond the basics, and in my mind having some kind of degree helps mold a person's mind into thinking this way. One thing I really like about my job is the ability to teach junior admins and other IT staff how to make that next career move, and it's obvious to me that people who have had some exposure to post-secondary education work out better. It's not a guarantee, and people without degrees can have the same drive required to pick up something new fast. Here's a perfect example from my life -- IT is shifting both from on-site to cloud and from traditional silos to "DevOps." This is 2 huge shifts for many IT people; I'm learning as fast as I can and teaching others as I go, and it's very clear to me who's going to get it and who isn't.
Am I a cheerleader for higher education? Yeah, maybe I am. While it's unfair to not give people who have a degree a chance, I think there's definitely valid reasons to get one today even with the high cost and possible negative ROI. I don't think everyone needs one, but your career prospects will be much better with one than without. I work for a company with many employees who have extremely long service (20+ years) and who are every bit as good as people with degrees, but they don't have one because you didn't need one back in the day. When those people get laid off, unless they have a professional network to fall back on they're screwed...no one cold calling for a job will get past the first HR filter of a college degree no matter how good they are.
In my opinion, education is what you make of it. If you screw around for 4 years and graduate with some worthless degree and no skills, you're still going to have trouble finding work. If you use your time wisely, show interest beyond the basics, etc. companies looking to hire will notice that.
So you're boasting having 800+ recruiter connections on LinkedIn.
That's 800+ recruiter connections from a 20+ years. When I do an active job search, I typically communicate with 32 recruiters and track 20 to 50 positions per day.
Isn't that like having a 20 page resume? Too much noise. I'd think twice about hiring you.
A recruiter was having trouble to figure what a company wanted in a candidate because the hire manager kept turning them all down. She asked me to go in for an interview to figure out what the hiring manager wanted. I went in with my two-page resume with last three positions in detail and ten years of positions in bullet points. Hiring manager complained about that resume which have gotten me jobs before and after the interview. I reported back that the company was in pre-IPO mode, so anyone being hired then would get stock options, and the hiring manager wanted a computer scientist at a help desk pay rate. I didn't get the position because I was too "corporate" for a startup.
Your analysis makes no sense.
Nobody said anything about hiring "diverse candidates at lower rates." An increase in labor supply will pull salaries down for everyone. That's how supply and demand work.
This situation really is very simple. They are not willing to significantly increase salaries in order to attract more degree-having talent. So they are just lowering the bar on the requirements. They are banking on the idea that a degree doesn't actually make one a better developer, or at least not better enough to justify current salaries.
If true, this will further reduce enrollment rates...it simply doesn't make sense to get a degree if you can get a job and equivalent pay anyway, and especially not once the salaries are nice and low.
I have no degree and no relevant certs. I'm a system admin, I just worked my way up the chain, found a gig that would train me and here I am.
The downfall is I would probably be making 10-15K more if I had a degree.
By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
For example: failing to "proof read" your Slashdot post:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/proofread
Not too long after the millennium you could write your own ticket with a good cert. The demand was huge because of the networking boom but also because certs like CCNP could cost ~$60k.
This was until Indian out-slavers figured they could replace more US workers if they passed whole classes on cert. exams based on the results of the highest grade and destroyed the value of any of certs through incompetence.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
This is why species extinction and non-reversible environmental destruction is happening on a global scale.
Employees to companies are like water to a person. By offering progressively worse working conditions over the last 20 years they have now pissed in their water supply and are complaining there is no water to drink. Congratulations companies, you participated in the race to the bottom and it bit you in the ass. Wonderful progressive business planning.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues.
Usually because they've made the foolish decision to locate their company in Silicon Valley. Refusing the fully embrace the SJW agenda there will get you harassed by professional protestors and politicians alike.
Good news though if you have a vagina or dark skin and don't mind taking a job where you do fake make-work while your white male and Asian co-workers have to shoulder all the load. "Better bring in some more H1B's so we can afford more fake women and minority workers," said the virtue-signalling CEO who wants to brag about how "progressive" his company is, while hoping no one notices that he's a white male himself.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Thank the gods.
Don't be picking on the brown noses, now. It's an important skill in a big corporation to know what to focus on because it's on Friday's test.
There's a patch of bare wall showing over there! Slap a certificate from that seminar last Friday on it!
Wrong.
Companies also exist to enhance the social and political standing of their owners and stakeholders. Google does not get a seat at the State Dept table without preaching the mores and beliefs of the upper classes. Eric Schmidt is not simply running Google to "make money" and neither are the rest of the CEOs.
Did you just call graduates superstars? Cause my experience is the talented devs skip school, while the hard working devs spend their time in academia and have little talent in delivering value.
One day I will write my memoiors and
Please don't.
Who's the superstar here? Are you really going to base that on a degree? My experience is that being a "superstar" has to do with passion and not education. Granted, you can't really get a serious feel for that in an interviewing process that is still sane and legal but in the end who's going to do what it takes shouldn't be based with too much weight on formal education. I know a lot of dopes with and without degrees.
There is a shortage of skilled labor but there are plenty of idiots who think they're skilled labor.
Anyone who down voted this comment has never had to hire a significant number of IT workers.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But I forgot whether that's degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit.
The odd thing ia that I have rarely encountered a software developer with a university degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, whereas ones with degrees in Electronics or Physics are quite common.
Blah blah homogenity issues blah blah
Let's be realistic here. People with degrees cost more. It's as simple as that. Not only that, they're going to be older and so be more likely to be advancing to the next stages of their lives (ie: family, etc).
The younger you can get em, the less you can pay them and the more you can abuse them. It's not as good as H1Bs, but it's a great Plan B, and to the ignorant who can't extrapolate their end game, the companies even get some publicity points.
I can't wait to see the looks on the 25 year olds when 18-20 year olds start declaring that the 25-ers are "too old" to be in the business. I'd laugh if it didn't have my palm covering my face.
Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
Re-read my comment. That quote is from the article itself, not the person (me!) who submitted the article to Slashdot. I know tech writers with master degrees who can write worse than that.
Who's the superstar here? Are you really going to base that on a degree? My experience is that being a "superstar" has to do with passion and not education. Granted, you can't really get a serious feel for that in an interviewing process that is still sane and legal but in the end who's going to do what it takes shouldn't be based with too much weight on formal education. I know a lot of dopes with and without degrees.
As an adjunct professor at a local college, I can confirm that there are a lot of idiots in college. I have had several students who were close to getting their degrees that I would be embarrassed to say they received their "education" from my school. They barely passed my classes with a C or a C-, but that's good enough to count towards their degree.
You know, I'm self taught in the area of embedded development. You know what I do? Right now, write an IP stack fully in assembler. Because I know the assembler of the MC I use better than I know its C. Plus the compiler creates shit code.
Do you want that in a professional, production environment? Hell no! That code can be maintained by exactly one person: Me. If that. This is not what you want! What you want is someone who has the skill to plan his code for a team, who understands the necessity of well defined interfaces and who can code to spec. That isn't exactly what you get from self taught programmers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sums it up well. ^^^.
Lower the bar == cheaper workers == more profit
To be fair, that assessment applies to a fair number of professors as well.
While in general I agree with your sentiments, I have no illusions that hiring managers or bean counters can think that far ahead.
More likely, companies are getting hammered about diversity, and lowing costs they can flog to investors. Why not put the two together, hire diverse people without degrees and play them less. Two birds, one stone, both dead.
This is mostly the praddle of those that dropped out or never went. Sure, if you want to be a Systems Admin drone, and think that it's the apex of IT, fine. But if you want to be a serious software archatect who understands the global issues and actually builds the future, no, sorry, a high school dropout usually doesn't cut it.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
HELPDESK
HOW MAY I HELP YOU?
I don't know about you, but I know a lot of people who work in HR, and no, it's not about paying people less.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Spoken like someone who wants to keep using the same old stuff they learned years ago and does not want to bother learning something new. Believe me Java and C#/.NET have plenty of failures as well and according to you these are tried and true languages and platforms. Just because you can't learn new techniques and tools does not necessarily mean it is bad.
The loudest troll gets all the attention, and creimer is a loud obnoxious troll. I've worked with his kind before. The brainless moron who doesn't ever do any real work, because he can't. No technical skills at all because he's only ever developed his social skills. Bullshits his way into positions by getting noticed for being sociable. Scams everyone he meets with the same handful of bullshit stories about how great he is. But because his puny pea brain has limited capacity, he repeats the same bullshit over and over again. Once his associates catch on to the fact that he's really a totally worthless fraud, he moves on to continue his troll scam with new people who haven't heard his exaggerated tales of how great he is.
Creimer is too fucking stupid to post AC, but it wouldn't matter, because creimer's troll stories are specific enough that he would be recognizable immediately. He's not creative enough of an asshole troll to write any variety into his stories.
Especially since a plan to break the law by hiring diverse candidates at lower rates, and then publicly announcing it so that you get maximum scrutiny by social justice organizations probably isn't the most sensible way to pull off such a diabolical scheme.
Jeez, if that's all they want to do, they can just hire women at 77 cents on the dollar for the same type and level of education and the same amount of job experience, and save a hundred million right off the bat.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
Repeating itself is what creimer does best. It's such a shame since creimer was made obsolete by the invention of the tape recorder. He doesn't let his lack of skills stop him, though; he's got the gift of the gab, you see. A hundred years ago, creimer would have been somebody!
And they exist. There is not enough properly trained people. Diversity is bullshit to hide the fact that the industry is lacking people.
In much of the industry you can find an expert developer with a masters and a twenty years of architecture experience who has mastery of several problem domains and he'll be making a third of what a new lawyer with a two-year degree is making.
This doesn't encourage people to go into tech, and outside of the 5% of people who work in the highly-competitive urban centers your head of Marketing is probably making more than your head of Engineering.
It's not supply vs. demand, it's a culture of paying engineers low wages and engineers accepting that kind of treatment. But that also prevents many people who can do other things from going into engineering. Many of us know people who are qualified and still program for a hobby who went into some of those other professional fields, and they're handsomely rewarded for having done so.
Frankly, getting some non-traditional blood in the industry might be good for everybody if they bring along the attitude of fighting to get what they deserve.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Really I didn't; I am calling the "top graduates of top colleges" superstars... which is still a stretch I will admit.
What I want to know is if a company just cares about profits, why would they filter prospective candidates based on the university they graduated from. It seems to me that given 4 years and a $100k budget one can gain much more education and relevant job experience than going to a university.
Because it's easy. Given enough experience with graduates from the most common universities that provide them with prospective employees, the employer can tell which universities inflate grades and which don't produce graduates with the necessary skills. Those universities are then effectively blacklisted, the known goods are whitelisted, and the rest are evaluated as time allows. When you only spend a few seconds on each resume, that one line item can quickly weed out a bunch.
So we need someone to raise the bar?
Who can do that?
James Cameron can!
One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.
One brass ring to rule them all!
Exactly. We get plenty of applicants for our jobs, but a large number of them are not qualified to do the job. The people who are qualified are already working somewhere else. If and when they are hired, at any price, the company they left will now have to find another person. There is a limited number of skilled individuals to go around.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
You get what you pay for. If you run a software company, you could hire a bunch of high school students to do the work and pay them 10 bucks an hour. I'll continue to hire software engineers with 4+ year computer science degree's and we'll see which one of us wins in the market.
On a similar note, I'll continue to go to doctors that have graduated from medical school, I prefer living.
Here it comes, the college tuition bubble is about to burst! Not just for everyone getting gender studies and philosophy degrees, either.
I think these two comments (parent and grandparent) hit the nail on the head. There are plenty of idiots who think they are skilled labor - both with and without degrees. And there are plenty of people with skills - both with and without degrees, some of whom have a very hard time finding a position. The problem seems to be that companies have a hard time figuring out how to tell who is skilled, and who isn't.
In general, a college degree should be a good indicator of whether someone can stick to a task and walk away with a result. Couple the degree with a GPA, and it might give some hint as to the quality of the work that person can do. (yes, degrees vary in quality, and some schools degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on; I'm just talking in general.) However, the absence of a degree doesn't automatically mean a person is an idiot. I worked several years without a degree, and I did good work. I went to school and got a degree after observing that people seemed to get paid more with a degree, and significantly increased my rate of pay while working for the same company. (Although I looked at the degree at that time as "just a piece of paper", I now believe that my schooling *did* improve my capabilities and make me a more valuable employee.)
After I worked for the same company for quite a while, I quit to resolve some problems. When I returned to the workforce, I had trouble getting a new position. A big handicap for me was that I suck at being an interviewee, other factors could include my age. I finally landed a position, but at 20% less pay. A year and a half later, after my employers saw what I could do, I got my pay bumped up 25% (i.e., back to what it had been at my previous position). At the same time, I saw an individual with whom I had worked in my previous position, who was definitely less skilled than I, get a job with one of the companies that chose not to hire me (in the same general field), probably making just as much as me (based on my knowledge of the position and the firm).
This is obviously anecdotal evidence, but it reflects my experience. I can add more anecdotes - my wife knew of an open position with the company for whom she works, we had a friend who was a good fit for that position, and my wife asked him to apply as he was looking for a new position. Despite having a resume that showed he was very qualified for the job, he didn't even get a telephone interview - his resume never made it through the HR screen to the hiring manager.
I'm glad that I'm not looking for work right now, because my experience looking for it a few years ago really sucked. On-line applications that took an hour or two to complete, often with little or no response other than a "we got your application" for my trouble. I hear that on the other side, companies are drowning in resumes submitted to on-line positions. A wealth of applicants, and no sure way to screen them that really separates the wheat from the chaff.
So, if companies are making major commitments to finding skilled applicants from all sources, and not just focusing on people with college degrees, perhaps that is a good thing. But I hope that they have figured out how to determine who is good and who isn't... and I really hope that they can do it in a race/age/sex blind manner. But that's probably asking for too much.
Repeating itself is what creimer does best. It's such a shame since creimer was made obsolete by the invention of the tape recorder. He doesn't let his lack of skills stop him, though; he's got the gift of the gab, you see. A hundred years ago, creimer would have been somebody!
I suggest you never listen to Guy Kawasaki. He's been repeating the main body of his speech about developing a dog food app since the dot com bust. His delivery of the speech never gets old.
Having been self taught, I do understand that there are some extremely intelligent people who just dont fit the college experience. But let be realistic about this. Because there are not enough of particular groups, we are now going to lower the bar?
Creimer is too fucking stupid to post AC, but it wouldn't matter, because creimer's troll stories are specific enough that he would be recognizable immediately.
This is why I submit articles to Slashdot as AC because I get crap from asshats like this all the time.
He's not creative enough of an asshole troll to write any variety into his stories.
I don't think you ever read any of my published short stories.
https://www.cdreimer.com/credits/
In most economic analyses, supply can expand if you are willing to pay more. In the case of tech talent, this can't happen so pay will just continue to rise until some companies can no longer afford to pay the market rate and leave positions unfilled. Unless there is a strange confluence of circumstances, good people are already employed and will usually only change jobs for big opportunities or salary increases. But changing jobs doesn't expand the supply of labor.
Want to know why they aren't hiring from 4 year universities and instead are picking people with no degrees?
Snowflakes.
Who wants to hire a thin skin walking lawsuit?
Answer: no one.
Spin it how you want. Maybe this is how the companies are spinning it to reporters. The truth is, this generation of aggrieved students is toxic to employers and every CXO is completely conscious of that fact.
I can learn new techniques and tools. And I use them, when I can gain an advantage. However, I'm also quite happy to use the old well-worn stuff when it's appropriate.
Not everything new and shiny is gold. Some of it - a LOT of it - is just tinfoil. RoR was a case in point. Used well, it could make you productive (or at least apparently so). But the problem was that it was not in and of itself designed for performance or security and that too much of its attraction to management was that untrained monkeys could spit out shiny UIs quickly using wizards.
The kicker was that as long as it was a matter of simply re-writing the same set of programs over and over again, it was fine, but the minute you had to reach outside the box, the untrained monkeys couldn't deal with it. They were, after all, untrained. working with a "black box" that they didn't know how to extend. That's what's probably killed more "programmer-less" development systems over the last 3 decades than anything else. Including the ones that were based on otherwise capable platforms.
Title: Why More Tech Companies Are Hiring People Without Degrees. Body: "... or recently graduated from community colleges"
So... community college degrees aren't even considered degrees at all now?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Why are tech companies hiring non-graduates? Easy, because they cost less.
Also they're just as trainable as anyone with a degree, and can actually be brought up in that company's tech & culture. A homegrown OJT education if you will.
Look, people are being brought up in tech, so they already can 'do some stuff'. By hiring noobs with a hunger to learn, (and make money), any company can justify the low-level hires by saying they'll be trained in house and remind the new hires that no one makes good money at first, but later.
A regular Factory Town bunch of On The Job training & employees if you ask me.
I wouldn't doubt for a moment that you submitted it in good form, and they screwed it up from there.
The submission itself, as processed by the /. "editors" (cough) is an editing fail, the ultimate responsibility for which lands in ./'s lap. No question about that.
Slashdot's continuing refusal to hire competent people is responsible for a great deal of this particular kind of malfuckery.
<RANT>
And that's not even nearly all. After a reasonable number of years wandering around here, I'm pretty close to bailing. It's painful to watch the place stumble into the future with incompetent management, editors utterly unworthy of the name, still missing posting amenities (including various font characters darned near any other place would take in stride, code formatting, etc.) that other sites have had for over a decade now, and with the inherently (still) broken moderation system screwing things up so badly, losing great AC posts and crushing great logged-in ones, and the laughable "meta-moderation" system making it even worse, compounding the moderate-by-disagreement fault many times over.
There are alternatives now. Nothing's perfect, but /. is has drifted down near the bottom of the heap.
You would think the steadily dropping comment participation would be a hint to the owners that the place needs some serious attention... but it looks very much like they're just squeezing the dishrag dry. It's beyond benign neglect and well into pernicious decay.
Ugh. What a shame.
</RANT>
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
He is pointing out that the summary has an extra copy of the quote. The article does not.
Yeah, or something.
Same reason as always.
Well, that's the other thing, for women it's about 4% in tech, so the ROI is looking pretty bad at this point.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Got a mostly useless degree in philosophy? I know at least one tech company that specifically hired philosophy majors instead of Comp. Sci. because they didn't come with a bunch of baggage and could train them to become programmers. It worked I guess. The company is a thriving business in its industry. The downside: A large percentage of their programmers eventually ended up becoming lawyers.
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
If Intel really wanted people, they would spend that money trying to increase the pool of workers no matter what their identity is. For example, if Intel really wanted to maximize its available workers, it would try to encourage boys AND girls, instead of just girls. But if a company tries to encourage more boys (along with girls) into stem, the crazy portion of the pubic would flip out.
As a result, tech continues to stumble when it comes to diversity. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on 'new-collar jobs.'
The bold text is a duplicate information, I would guess maybe a copy/paste/paste? So...diversity in the editing world I suppose.
Aside from that, I have been doing QA since the early 90s, and I did get a CS degree. I have been a manager for over 10 of those years, and have looked at a lot of resumes. I am always interested in seeing if people have degrees or not, or what it may be in. It's just a point of reference, and not a deciding factor usually. I see people applying for QA jobs that have Marketing and Communications degrees. But some rules always apply - don't overstate your competency, you will be found out, and if you DO have a degree in communication, don't make a bunch of grammatical/spelling/formatting mistakes on your resume.
I also think it's funny that some people immediately see "tech jobs" and think "IT", or "networking" or "programmer". There is so much more that goes into technology than just those things. I have seen pretty much everything over the years, from genius self-taught programmers who sucked because they couldn't work on a team, to customer service people who were some of the best testers I had. I don't think you can force this diversity, because to be honest I have seen customer service people who were awful at testing too. I think what is more important is that hiring managers are willing to get the right people and not just warm bodies who can fill seats. I don't want to hire someone who is a QA robot, nor do I want to hire someone who is a "people person" and has no ability to be diligent and think critically.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
For software development, a 2 year degree might work out with a talented and dedicated employee. But what about computer engineering? Are the upper level 4 year degree classes required in order to be successful in say...designing a processor architecture or a designing a small computer like the pi? Unlike software development, computer engineering stuff like that is hard to learn independently.
Go back to your castle :)
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
I see... They are raving SJWs, and also hard nosed amoral exploiters. Who spend $300m on schemes that might supply a relatively small number of engineers in several years time, who they can pay 4% less than you.
Those are some evil geniuses.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
He didn't say discriminate - he said it doesn't matter.
If you have a liberal mindset, not paying attention to race is discrimination.
If you have a more libertarian mindset, paying attention to race is discrimination.
In recent history the former have been writing the laws, therefore companies must bear the burden of proof to prove they are not discriminating. HR must have piles & piles of documentation of everyone's race and gender to prove they are not taking it into consideration.
Madness, yes?
Keep looking. Maybe grade school is the place to start. Whatever you do, don't think about hiring, you know, old people with lots of experience.
Companies with more diverse workplaces make money money
If that is true then why are the most lucrative companies are so dominated by straight white men that we have had attempted social upheaval to change it?
Is there even evidence that greater ethnic diversity increases profits?
Show me a company that has an unusually diverse board and is beating every other competitor in their industry directly because of it.
Look up Group Think.
"they just don't want to pay what it's worth"
Labor is worth exactly what someone will pay. The same goes for real estate, vehicles and baseball cards. Just because some magazine says a rookie card is worth $20, that doesn't mean you can ever find someone willing to pay that rate.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
Plus, he can maintain his three hundred fifty pound fat slob self while power lifting and only eating 1500 calories a day! It is, literally, unbelievable!
Thanks for that. I hope you feel better for it. Esp. as an AC, you must feel especially proud.
I believe part of the point was that buying into a shiny new technology just because it's shiny and new doesn't make sense.
I'm all game for learning new approaches when they're actually new and show potential. I'm not game for grabbing up new technology just because it's the latest thing. I know a lot of people who pickup everything new (I used to be one of them) then I realized a lot of overlap. He'll, even failed design patterns or technology approachds are "rediscovered" and used.
I've met good programmers that don't get four year degrees. A lot of IT that pickup programming seem to be in this pool, from my experience. The main problem I've seen with these people isn't their inability to program, it's other issues like missing the larger picture of an application or poor design practice.
Many self educated programmers are quite clever, but they attempt to tackle a lot of well known and established problems that also have well established solution approaches. They however didn't go through enough formal or informal education to identify those problems early on in their design phases and have to learn problems "the hard way." As a result, they often are not equipped with the tools to approach complex problems in an efficient manner. With some additional education (formal or informal) they could be quite skilled.
Classy attitude you have there. Easily by your choice of words you are likely a Republican and/or Conservative. Throw some magic buzz words, throw some nonsensical statements, get the "SJW" and "progressive" boogie men as part of your comments.
The fact that you're not in the negative on moderation points is a shame and that individuals actually carry this attitude. Must make office work a joy to have those of your ilk around.
They don't care. But it's good PR to say that they care.
Tips on finding good candidates:
Require SW developer applicants to submit two pieces of code that they wrote:
1) A program that you assign each applicant. (This gives you a way to compare applicants.)
2) A project of their own choosing. (This code lets the applicant show off what their strong points are.)
And if your company has a way for users to submit bug reports to your company, then ask every IT applicant this: "Have you submitted bug reports to our company, regarding our products? If so, then what identifier (user name, email address etc.) did you use when you submitted them?" Then check that person's bug reports.
1) Did the bug reports demonstrate a knowledge of your company's product?
2) Were the bug reports well written? Do they indicate clear thinking, and the ability to see things from another person's point of view (the point of view of the person reading the bug report, who is trying to understand it)?
3) Were the bug reports polite or abusive? Would you want to work with this person?
I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
If you hire an unskilled worker who turns out to be great that's awesome. But they may also reach a limit in their ability so when you want them to learn something new you have to either hire another employee or fire this person and start over.
I attended a 2 year community college and worked towards an Associates' in Communication Arts. Came pretty close to getting it, with something like 8 credit hours left. But I was down to the classes I was least motivated to take, and an opportunity came along to help a guy I met who was taking a stab at getting a computer reseller shop going. So I dropped out and started working with him.
It sounds like I'm just trying to justify my decision and bash college if I say, "It was the best thing I could have done!" ... but in hindsight, I truly believe it was. I learned a great deal about PC hardware, building custom PC desktops and servers from the ground up. And because I wasn't just doing it on my own as a hobby, I got to work with a lot of high-end gear that was outside my own budget, and even got to blow a couple of things up when I made mistakes. (The shop owner didn't always pay me for my time because at that point, he couldn't afford to. So he was ok with having to "eat" the cost of a few screw-ups for the sake of my learning.) He let me try to get a side business going with a friend of mine, doing computer repair and consulting work, while running things out of his shop, too. That didn't go anywhere -- but at least it was more experience and cost me very little.
After that, I worked for various places as a computer "bench tech" -- mostly because of people I knew who already had jobs there and who vouched for me and my skills. That, in turn, led to my first real full-time corporate I.T. job in PC support as part of a small team. And I've worked in I.T. in various capacities ever since, including a stint running an actually successful on-site service and consulting business.
In all of my years of doing I.T. - I can honestly say that almost all of the best, brightest and most motivated individuals I ran across in the field were also folks who didn't have college degrees. I can think of one exception, but he majored in French and never took any computer-related college courses.
I'm not sure what to think of this Fast Company article Slashdot is referencing? It sounds pretty ridiculous if the only reason businesses are FINALLY trying to hire more non-degreed I.T. folks is some mission to get more "diversity". They've missed 25 or 30 years of opportunities to hire brilliant people if they've been tossing out resumes and job applications this whole time because the college degree was really a requirement for them.
But the kicker is, until recently, there really WAS little diversity among people interested in computers and tech! Degree or no degree -- the people who got hooked on this stuff years ago and invested decades of their lives learning it tended to be a pretty homogeneous group. The biggest change I see with the younger generation today is this idea that being weird is "the new cool". Pre-teens are some of the goofiest people around, and many embrace or at least have a "working knowledge" of all manner of sci-fi, fantasy, Japanese anime, and misc. oddities in anything from clothing and hairstyles to mannerisms and language. Plenty of females of any race or nationality are playing games like Minecraft. Smartphones are everywhere and teach everyone to have a familiarity with web services and Internet connectivity that was only the realm of a niche group in the past.
It might be the first time in history where you can actually start FINDING people other than white males from middle to upper-middle class backgrounds who have a real interest and skills in computers and tech.
By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
$25 an hour isn't much for living in California though. That's getting borderline poverty level.
So what's your counter-argument? "Proper graduates should be paid more just because?"
That's pure rent seeking. Just because you got a degree, does not axiomatically make you any more valuable than someone who didn't. It's up to you to apply the skills you've learned, to do that.
Based on your philosphy, I'll pay you $0.01 per year to do all of my house/yard work. The labor is worth exactly what I'm willing to pay, no more, I promise. I also have some swampland in Lousianna I'll happily sell you.
Because we should hire people who aren't buried under crippling debt.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
$25 an hour isn't much for living in California though. That's getting borderline poverty level.
I live a modest lifestyle, save 20% of my income and have a rent-controlled studio apartment in Silicon Valley. If I moved to the Sacramento or the Central Valley, things are more affordable. If you think I have it rough, there are plenty of people in Silicon Valley who only make minimum wage ($10 per hour). Not everyone around here is a newly minted millionaire.
It always amazes me that IT is the one field that everyone thinks they're qualified to do with no training. If you consider yourself a rock star because you read a book and conned someone to hire you instead of spending time to actually study the profession you're not cheap, you're the problem. It is the mass unwashed dips hits that want to write enterprise architectures in untyped interpreted languages that build disasters. Maybe not on release day, but your disaster will come to roost. It takes skill and insight to think and plan. Hiring people who were "too good to get an education" demonstrates a commitment to incompetent hiring for the sake of cost of an under informed person too lazy to go the route most have.
Shall we hire unlicensed plumbers? Let's see how this sounds... "I know lots of untrained uneducated plumbers who are Oh SO Great, and I know lots of trained licensed professional plumbers who are idiots." Yeah, let's see who is more likely to get the job done properly. IT is getting.and in some cases already is, more critical than the plumbing in a building. Let's have some respect for the profession.
I know, right?
This couldn't have something to do with the H1B Trump debacle, and the need to diversify their cheap labor.
They are specifically looking for people without degrees OR experience, to train them into a specific job. They want people who have no breadth of skills.
I mean, you don't genuinely think they'll be offering them $80k+, do you? It's all about the bottom line.
Cause my experience is the talented devs skip school, while the hard working devs spend their time in academia and have little talent in delivering value
I haven't found that to be the case, but it's definitely something the devs who skipped school tell themselves so they can claim to make the right decision and seem more marketable.
> I live a modest lifestyle, save 20% of my income and have a rent-controlled studio
Communism + low expectations.
Take away either of those and your example collapses in on itself. Things are simply unsustainable where you choose to live. You have to make grave compromises with your lifestyle PLUS have the government distort the rental market for you.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Better yet. Why are these companies completely unwilling to develop talent? They want some ideal candidate to magically appear out of the ether and be willing to take whatever pittance they want to offer. They are also unwilling to retain current employees.
There's one guy (I like to call him 2-Bobs) I know who's job it is to cull people from a large telecom. When things are slow, they just dispose of the excess workforce. I always wondered if they will get to the point where they've already burned everyone and no one wants to work for them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I was going to cite that one, but it was so outlandish I thought it had to be fake news. But apparently, it really happened.
You have to make grave compromises with your lifestyle [...]
Like what for example?
[...] PLUS have the government distort the rental market for you.
The rent control law applies only to large apartment complexes that were built before 1978. My particular apartment complex is 50-years-old. I got a great deal in 2005: $810 per month, $199 deposit and a free microwave. My current rent is $1466 per month and $300 below market rate after five years of rent increases. After the original owners sold out six years ago, three corporate owners tried to squeeze out as much money as possible. The first two slapped on paint, redid the landscape and charged "luxury" rates. Third one did the same but had to upgrade the apartments to keep up with the brand new apartment complex down the street. Funny thing is that this 50-year-old apartment complex has the same market rate as the brand new apartment complex and both have a 50% occupancy rate as the rental market is softening. Under free market economics, the older apartment complex should reduced rent to stay competitive with the new apartment complex. That's not happening. Must be communism.
Labor is worth exactly what someone will pay. The same goes for real estate, vehicles and baseball cards. Just because some magazine says a rookie card is worth $20, that doesn't mean you can ever find someone willing to pay that rate.
Wrong. Labor is worth what the buyers and sellers agree to. The buyers are attempting to usurp the population of their own nations by importing people willing to work for less, that's actual treason.
Or, by paying more. The other day I was reading an article about some construction company whining that they couldn't keep their workers because another company kept driving by their job site with a big sign saying they were paying more. The first company absolutely believed they were entitled to workers at the rate they were paying, and that everyone else should bend over backwards to ensure they got what they wanted.
Paying more worked just fine for the company with the sign.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Many [ Insert Language Here ] projects are a great example of how focusing on short term cost savings ends up resulting in long term cost overruns.
FTFY
In BOLD is the root of the problem here.
There are thousands of examples of 'high school dropouts' doing all sorts of amazing things. A College degree isn't worth what it used to be and has proven to become financial suicide for any kids coming out looking for entry level work.
The pickings from College are diluting in quality as well as quantity. The point of the article is that big business are shifting their focus to look for those that can self-educate and are motivated to acquire the knowledge they're looking for without having to pay for the overhead of an employee's student loans and other financial expectations. People that are passionate rarely demand perks and are simply *happy* to have their dream job.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
By late nineties, close half of Russian outsourcing sweatshops staff were highschoolers
Think
People who look like me and have similar backgrounds like me should get ahead. They get promoted to positions of high responsibility and have good salaries and benefits.
People who don't look like me don't deserve to get ahead, they should be happy to be alive and not starving. Fuck them, let them go back to where they came from.
Those are the ethical principles I've learned to live by over my several decades on this planet.
- elrous0 and many others
At least that's been my experience.
Back in 1966, when I got my first software development job at a computer manufacturer, my coworkers were everything from community-college dropouts to PhDs.
Diversity? We had females (one African-American), Orientals, a guy totally blinded in a military training accident, and another who realized he was a serious misfit at the US Naval Academy.
I suspect the motives for this hiring agenda revival are rather mixed, but I can't say I'm entirely against it.
Full disclosure: that company exited the computer business within ten years.
No it makes sense. "Diversity" translates into "brown dudes" which then translates into H1Bs and the like. It's just another way of framing that they'd like an increase in the number of H1Bs so that labor costs are reduced. There's nothing altruistic going on here.
Wrong, it can be sold for what the buyer and seller agree to. If it isn't worth more, in terms of value produced, than the buyer paid then the buyer paid too much.
Actually reality is abit grey...
Education is not a great way to distinguish talent, but it's still the best generally applicable way available.
There are awesomely talented people who didn't have a graduate degree by circumstance or by choice, but they are a needle in a haystack to discover and chances of getting duds are really high, so most companies find it easier and more productive to filter off those without degrees. Of course great hiring managers have the ability to distinguish talent, but how many great hiring managers who know their stuff do you get?
By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV. The minimum rate we see here in South Florida is $38 to $40 for "virtual ditch digging" work (and that's the lowest I've seen in a while and only for people w/o experience.) Starting hourly rates tend to be between $43 and $45 (about $89K to $95K)... and a lot more with experience.
$25/hour (what you call top rate), that's what I see for administrative/clerical jobs here in South Florida, with benefits (without benefits, you see that rate go up.
And South Florida is not cheap to live, but it is more affordable than SV. I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
Maybe they are tired the millions of fucking SJW resumes that can't fucking CODE showing up in their inbox that want "diversity" and 4 hour fucking work weeks ... with dental... at least in the bootcamps they have an interest in CODE.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV.
There are level-entry tech jobs that start off at minimum wage ($10 per hour).
I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
For the nation wide project I'm working on, all the system admins are getting paid $25 per hour and computer engineers get $40 per hour. Doesn't matter where you live. So the people who telecommute from the hills are making out like bandits. However, I'm halfway through a five-year contract, I get full benefit package with month of PTO (Paid Time Off), and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus
I seem to recall this has been a thing going on since the 1990s. I'd be kind of screwed if it wasn't.
Furries make the internet go.
Yes, the law prohibits discrimination on the basis of various things (race, religion, gender, etc...) but it does not prohibit discrimination based on ability to perform the job. Hiring the most qualified applicant regardless of anything other than ability is not discrimination. At least not discrimination based on race, religion, gender, etc...
I maintain that hiring people solely based on the "under-representation" of their race, religion, gender, etc.. in the company is, by definition, discrimination.
Markets only function in closed systems. Expanding to a global scale breaks the market, it's treason.
Yes - it is just because of sjws. Otherwise they would focus on increasing TALENT, not DIVERSITY.
Despite what sjws preach - there's not some magic efficiency gain from different backgrounds. Wait - different or all the same. I get confused on that point.
Oh right - the most homogeneous countries have the best efficiency.
The overeducated have higher salary expectations. Good coding bootcamps likely provide sufficient experience for companies to trust their output as Jr feedstock for engineering teams. Most practical skills are learned on the job. The fact that this increases diversity is a huge pr win with many potential benefits of having diverse perspectives
Have you ever really watched the firehose for a few days? I have.
There are tons of interesting tech articles that go by, some of which are strongly endorsed by those trying to use the firehose to encourage articles as we're told it is intended to do.
The editors (and oh, how loosely I use that term) dependably and repeatedly ignore the interesting tech stuff and spam us with garbage -- and poorly edited garbage at that.
I maintain that there are plenty of good articles bobbing around just under the surface. The the world is outright aflame with interesting stuff. What we don't have is good editors.
Sorry for the delay in response. I really don't come here that much any more.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This and as a person working in the field non-degreed people that are here usually outperform thier degreed brethren as they've floated to the top based on experience and skill vs a piece of paper that's largely paid for.
And the tendency to conflate "degree" with "competent" has become a pervasive recipe for failure. A lot of that has to do with dumbing down public schools to the point that fast food franchises look for 2 year degrees to be assured that the employees can count change.
On the flip side; there are tons of jobs that do not require a college education to perform but only about six months of on the job training. But, in the last two decades; human resources departments have been requiring a four year degree even to get interviewed.
In the actual work environment; a new hire with a 4 year degree may take up to two years to get up to the level a non degree employee with five years on the job will have. And the 4 year degree person will require a higher salary due to the crushing debt load from the overly inflated charges for formal education.
NRRPT/RCT
They want people without degree's because they see that the cheap labor pool of the H1B visa foreigners drying up. Non degree means you pay them 60-70 % less than a person with a 4 year or graduate degree. The effect of this is watching salaries in general drop as degree holding people having to take less in pay to be employed. Dumbing down the workforce will pay heinous dividends in general as most of these non degree holding people are at best qualified to work at a McDonalds asking if they want "Fries with that Shake". American companies will get what they pay for !!!
1+1=2 is a fact. That companies "exist to make money, period" is an opinion. Perhaps these companies have other agendas.
He's the one in the office that always has a story that tops yours. If I'm telling a story where I had to walk 6 blocks to elementary school, he'll interrupt saying he had to walk 3.67 miles to his then drone on and on over which shoes lasted the longest.
Really? They are? Maybe because all these people forgot technology is something NEW, yet treat Universities as if it had the practice and answers since Medieval Times? Good if this is realized. No University seems to have had any commercial success in systems, and the only system produced academically with real life success is UNIX. All very famous mediatic systems have been private initiatives, not academic outcomes. Simply put, University cannot cope with the fauna in Systems (the systems, not the practicats), if it wants to train (and keep) eternal truths and best practices! Those principles have not yet been very well discerned neither in academia nor in the private sector. See how far is a course on theoretical parsing from an actual quick hack based on experience, or the use of a generator like JavaCC. -Have you written a language yourself? -Nope, but I got straight 10 in parsing... Does not seem like a very good prospect to ask to QUICKLY, develop an in-house language to parse and query these logs such that... or to complete these n API optional functions along the lines of... for instance. 3:-D3 I passed from reading the manual of my first language to implementing animation then my first maze generation algo. We were taught bubble sort in the lab, middle school, but I went into insert-sort without even thinking first time I implement a linked list. No one I know seem to have followed a career in systems, but this story is not precisely what you get from people who do follow a formal career... and cannot admit when they could NOT make it run, but you were done a few months ago and waiting.
Absolute Fucking Bullshit.
What do un-degree'd and H-1B people have in common? They are cheap labor
Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs have degrees. How does that fit in with your hypothesis?
The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. 'We consider them based on their skills,
Talent and skill are two completely different things. Searching for talent based on skills is a poor way of finding talent. Many people are skilled but not talented. When encountering a new problem skill is useless.
Anything that you need to memorize is useless. The only benefit education gives is changing the way you think about problems. There are no complex problems, just problems made complex by those who can't understand them. My brother is on a fast track for a PHD in AI, leading multiple research groups at the same time. His greatest complaint is how stupid these masters and PHDs are. We both get to talk about some advanced topics. I love high concurrency distributed systems myself. I find them entertainingly fun and simple.
Nearly all of these "highly skilled" people are no better than first-line tech support at an out-sourced call center reading from a script. Except they memorized the scripts. Virtually zero understanding of the problems. Ohh look, someone's been stumped on a problem for a few years, solved it in a few minutes. Bah. What's wrong with these people? Then you get stuck explaining how your solved it for the next few days.
That's really effing low for a metro area like SV.
There are level-entry tech jobs that start off at minimum wage ($10 per hour).
I cannot imagine anything less than $40 for IT (or less than $20/25 hour for office work.) That's just nuts!
For the nation wide project I'm working on, all the system admins are getting paid $25 per hour and computer engineers get $40 per hour. Doesn't matter where you live. So the people who telecommute from the hills are making out like bandits. However, I'm halfway through a five-year contract, I get full benefit package with month of PTO (Paid Time Off), and last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus
Holy shit, that's bad. Honestly, I haven't see wages that bad in IT since the early 90's. And I thought we had it bad in South Florida.
>...A College degree isn't worth what it used to be...
>...The pickings from College are diluting in quality as well as quantity...
I remember when we took lead out of gasoline. I had hoped to see different results manifest in the area of education by now. Maybe we should put the lead back?
>Anything that you need to memorize is useless.
Maybe, but you cannot say that memorizing is useless, unless you want to say that for top athletes hitting the gym for conditioning purposes is useless. You can verify this at home. Spend six months laying on the couch eating salty snacks, drinking beer, and watching U-toob videos of sports all day. At the end of the six weeks put on a cup and boxing trunks and step into then ring with Mike Tyson.
I know it's Friday, but you should probably wait until the *evening* to get high.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.