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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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