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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."
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.
I include those. University degrees are for training people to push knowledge forward, to research and hopefully invent, create, or develop the next new thing in their field.
Just because the degree is in mathematics or a hard science doesn't make that any more applicable to the purpose of job training.
And a decent university would never let you away with taking only courses in your major anyway. There's a requirement to broaden your horizons... which, if you're in it for job training, is a massive waste of your time and money.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Some of what you say seems correct, but some seems like unwarranted bias. There are exceptional programmers out there that are exceptional because there was no school capable of teaching them - they are the ones that create the study material that others follow.
And good programmers tend to love reading, no matter what their education level is. And not just reading, but questioning.
If anything, I'd say that those who only soak up what they're being taught by teachers and books, and never have an original thought are mere robotniks. Good enough to repeatedly crank bolts on an assembly line, but they will never become more than mediocre, no matter what the degree says.
Yes, there are good people with degrees. And not so good ones. Just like with educated people. There may be a correlation between education and value, but it's not super strong. The ability to continue to educate themselves without schools, training classes or mentoring is something I value in employees. But having a degree doesn't guarantee that. Some just stagnate, and have no drive to always learn, always discover, always improve.
To take a car analogy, you can learn to drive by teaching yourself how a car's controls work until you can drive around the block reasonably smoothly and consider that more than adequate to qualify somebody as a driver and let them loose to drive at a 130 km/hour down the autobahn. If you are the conscientious type you can even read a drivers ed textbook before burning rubber and speeding into live traffic. However, I think we can all agree that the streets and highways are considerably safer and there are fewer accidents precisely because every driver has not only been given driving training in actual traffic by an instructor but also because that instructor gave his student driver a thorough grounding in the traffic rules and laws followed by a written and practical test to confirm that person was paying attention. Degrees are not an expensive license your daddy pays for at an 'elite university' so that you can be an 'elite' ass hole who lords it over all those scrappy self taught guys by rubbing a diploma in their faces. You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
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.
Here it comes, the college tuition bubble is about to burst! Not just for everyone getting gender studies and philosophy degrees, either.