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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps they write like you.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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
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
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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.
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
Actually it was the Huns that pushed into the Goths and drove them to Rome.
I didn't think that the Barbarians were that diversified.
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.
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.
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.
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.