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LinkedIn Testing 1970's-Style No-CS-Degree-Required Software Apprenticeships (mercurynews.com)
theodp writes: The Mercury News reports on REACH, a new software apprenticeship program that LinkedIn's engineering team started piloting this month, which offers people without Computer Science degrees an opportunity to get a foot in the door, as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce. For now, the 29 REACH participants are paid, but are only short-term LinkedIn employees (for the duration of the 6-month program). LinkedIn indicated it hopes to learn if tech internships could eventually be made part of the regular hiring process, perhaps unaware that no-CS-degree-required hiring for entry-level permanent positions in software development was standard practice in the 70's and 80's, back when women made up almost 40% of those working as programmers and in software-related fields, nearly double the percentage of women in LinkedIn's global 2016 tech workforce. Hey, even in tech hiring, everything old is new again!
theodp hates this idea. These people and kids who are learning from Code.org are going to take his job.
Most companies already don't require a CS degree, or any degree, for programming jobs. Your GitHub activity carries more weight. Show me what you can do, not where (or if) you got a piece of paper.
Oh the irony of a website that presents its members as basically a resumee decides to ignore resumees....
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds awesome. White male here tho... So I'm probably shit out of luck.
Trump here. Is America great again yet? This job is tough!
I find this interesting. I did an EE degree, but only did two papers on software, and to be honest, they were pretty basic. I had taught myself programming before hand but was much more interested in hardware and circuits rather than software. However, as my career progressed, I basically just became a full time software developer. For some reason, having an EE degree is considered the same (or for some people better, if you have software experience) than a CS degree, because supposedly I know how computers work at a gate level.
In the end I use almost nothing that I learnt in my EE degree to do software development, and certainly none of the really hard math/sig pro stuff, and I can't see why someone who has gone through all the self taught/on the job training I did to learn programming wouldn't be able to do what I do now. Of course there is causality - if you can finish an EE degree you can probably do anything technical if you put your mind to it, but it does seem a bit pointless spending all that money and effort to get a piece of paper.
The PHB who came up with this is sure to get a big bonus this year for coming up with this desperately needed new source of cheap child labor.
I drop out of university in the 80's. Went on a 4 month government run programming/job placement course at a different university learning to program COBOL on VAX/VMS. I was found a job doing C programming on Unix, where I was giving on the job training and sent on courses. I've gone on to have a successful career, with the last 20 years running my own consulting business. Without this opportunity and taking a chance on me, I would have never had my career.
Since then, I have gone on to get 2 degrees, Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci, but this was after I was already established, had changed jobs a few times to better positions and didn't need the degrees to be looked at.
After learning math, and studying Knuth, learning Java, database theory, Lisp, Prolog, sure I have a better understanding now than when I started, but lack of the knowledge didn't stop me from getting started.
One of the best programmers I work with had a degree in English.
A lot of people, who could either be talented or good enough would miss out if only Comp Sci degreed people were considered.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
Slashdot Testing Clickbait Headlines by Mixing LinkedIn with Non-Degree Coding Jobs for Women
OJT it was called on the job training was offered, and half the class of about 20 or so, were from the employee ranks, who had ideas, from their day-to-day operations but just did not know how to make those ideas work. We were taught COBOL and RPG2, which wasn't a bad way to start when you work in a bank. I was lucky to have been part of that class, but then I hadn't expected sh*t like outsourcing and rent-a-coder, when all I really wanted to do was be like Buckaroo Banzai, performing in concerts and doing open heart surgery in his spare time. I really wanted to be Perfect Tommy because, you know he was perfect
I have a CompSci degree from a few years back, and it was heavy coding/dev/math. There is no way you could have gotten through the degree and been unable to program. I have run into recent CompSci graduates who have a hard time or can't write code, and don't even like coding. What has changed in the curriculum? Has CompSci become the catchall for 'I want a computer degree'? With that sort of expectation, I can see why I'd rather hire someone excited about dev work, than someone who has it on paper but no urge or drive or skill.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
just in general for diversity and to break the back of the whole "Bro..." culture.
Good on ya Linkedin!
I don't have a CS degree, and few than 50% of people my age (mid 40s) in the industry do (in the UK). Few of the most technically impressive senior people I've met had CS degrees, and only about half of them had technical degrees.
When I hire developers, I don't require ANY degree, much less a CS degree. What I require is the ability to write software.
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... but it is a quite good reason to assume certain basic knowledge and attitude. On the other hand, thinking that a specific degree provides all or most of the required knowledge to perform a given work is far from being true; even pure nonsense when talking about highly specialised positions. A misconception which only seems possible in people with low-to-no actual experience in the given work.
I have worked with computer-engineering recent graduates who weren't able to do virtually anything (or a few things under very specific conditions). Even after working for quite a few years under not too demanding conditions, a person with a CS degree might be a bad programmer. Same ideas apply to virtually any field, like mechanical/industrial engineering (what I studied at university): actual work experience is the most relevant factor.
Personally, I do prefer to work with university-degree holders (in a technical/scientific/engineering field), but am also sure that just the degree isn't a relevant factor to adequately assess the software development skills and related issues (i.e., learning capability, adaptability, working attitude, etc.). For senior/highly-specialised positions, the actual work experience/outputs and attitude (+ hiring people being able to adequately assess them) are almost everything.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Employer/employee loyalty is the thing that has to improve first -- then OJT will move beyond an experiment. Back in the good old days, employers would take recent college grads and even recent high school grads, knowing they were only getting raw material, and train them to their standards. Now employers see employees who will jump to the competition in 6 months or less just because they're upset about something or will get a small raise. Because of that, training is a liability and they'd rather hire consultants who may or may not have lied about their level of experience.
Employers need to come to the table too. We need to stop the constant cycle of layoffs and offshoring and maintain a reasonable level of steady employment. If employees feel safe in a job, they'll worry less about finding another one and worry more about doing a good job in the current one. This is one thing from the old days I'd like to see come back -- employers would have to think very hard about hiring someone because they'd at least have some sort of commitment to them.
Training on the job and starting in the bottom of an organization aren't totally dead. I know a lot of people who work for the state university system. Here in NY, university professional staff are effectively tenured the same way faculty are, after a long probationary period and having to convince your department to nominate you. Training is an accepted part of life in this environment because they're keeping the employees whether or not they're skilled up. In this case, it makes perfect sense to invest in employees because you'd rather have a good loyal employee than one who knows you can't get rid of them and doesn't advance their career.
Also, CS degrees are probably overkill for most web programming jobs that LinkedIn typically hires for. You may need a CS degree to write their deep learning algorithm that maps your connections and mines them for data, but you don't need one to be a JavaScript monkey cranking out the front end stuff. I'm in IT, with a chemistry degree, and the only thing I use from my degree is the ability to methodically break down a problem and troubleshoot. It's helpful but I know plenty of older iT people who have no degree or a completely unrelated to CS degree, and they do well.
The big Hartford Insurance companies had apprenticeships as recently as the late nineties. Take an aptitude test and pass. Go through their training program, spend a few months on trial, and you're in.
They NEVER bitched about having a 'shortage' of programmers/software developers or whatever.
I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
One of the big contributors to the software industry in the late 80's - early 90's was Henry Taylor, a Canadian Zooologist.
...as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help diversify its workforce.
as Microsoft-owned LinkedIn searches for ways to help Microsoft make H-1B irrelevant by churning out new American programmers until programming becomes a low-wage commodity-class skill. FTFY.
That's not to say they will, or even can, succeed in that goal - but I'm pretty sure 'diversity' is just a politically-correct red herring.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I say this simply because as a developer with no CS background. I've worked with graduates who could belt off different concepts from definitions they've memorized but don't know how to implement it or more importantly, don't know how to spot errors. My job interview consisted of maybe 1-2 minutes of discussions on my background before a 45 minute long whiteboard session where I had to hand write various algorithms and solutions to problems the interviewer would present.
In addition to your irony, TFA ignores some pretty important facts. In the 1970s we had Math, Engineering, and Physics. There was no such thing as a CS degree. One learned to code because it helped your education, not because it was seen as a cash cow specialty. The successful coders may not have all completed a degree, but were all the brightest of the bunch in College. If they left without a degree it was by choice, not because they lacked aptitude to finish.
Let me use a Basketball analogy. Linked in believes that anyone can be Shawn Kemp, or another player that never played college ball and was not highly educated. In reality, the Shawn Kemp like people are extremely rare. About 1 in a billion.
Can linked in find people "good enough" to get a job done without? Probably, but I would rather have people better than "good enough" as a hiring manager.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I have worked with and on computers since the early 1980's in various roles over that time. Office worker. SysAdmin. Tech Support. Application support. Along the way, I've picked up HTML and XML and some scripting. Programming is probably the one thing in the computer universe I have never done or been taught. The one time I put "learning a programming language" on my list of next year's goals, the vicious harpy boss I had at the time opening mocked me: "What do you want to do THAT for??!!?"
My point is, I would like to and believe I have the aptitude. I've proved I am trainable. I have a college degree, and a boatload of technical training. Also have held tech certifications. But I'm over 50. Why do I think that this very excellent, if old, idea will be just another way to communicate to older workers that they are not welcome. Sort of like those young smooth faces in the photo accompanying the article are telling me.
Good story, but I think that stories like yours are the exception rather than the norm. This kind of seems like survivor bias to me. Of all the people who entered similar government run programs there's probably a large number who just couldn't make the cut and we'll just never hear about them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So, the qualifications used to be "has a CS degree". Now they're "has a CS degree or isn't a white male". Good to know.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
After I graduated from community college with a A.A. degree in General Education, got kicked out of the university for playing too many games of Magic: The Gathering into the wee hours, and worked three years as a restaurant cook, I still didn't know what to do with my life. A roommate suggested that I applied for an "internship" (translation: "not enough money in budget to hire fulltime staff") at his company as a software tester. That six-month internship was the beginning of my technical career. Next job lasted six years as a video game tester and lead video game tester. When I became a lead tester, I went back to community college to get an A.S. degree in computer programming on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. I couldn't find a job in white box testing and got into IT support as a contractor.
Can't edit as an AC.
If degrees are so meaningless, why did you bother getting a "Bsc in Math and Post-grad in Computer Sci" later on?
I think that, whatever your answer, it proves that there is a good reason for them.
His answer to that question can be found in the title of his post: the obsession with degrees in the society. My career path was similar, where I started working with no degree and then received a BS/MS after about 10 years in. I learned nearly nothing in the BS, and barely anything for my MS (my thesis research project was a good experience), but those degrees had a big impact on my career. Not because of what I learned but because they check off boxes for HR and for hiring managers who like their software managers / architects to have MS degrees. I have found in the financial industry, which pays quite well, they find those things important.
But I did not go to a great school for my BS, and the MS program was at a school currently ranked #73 nationally, so it's very likely a degree from a more prestigious university would be useful even to those who learn well independently.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Interviewing is expensive. An easy way to tell if somebody is relatively stable is to look for a college degree. That works great when the economy is in the toilet due to offshoring and rampant Visa abuses. As an added bonus it makes it easier to abuse Visas. Sure, once in a while you miss a good employee, but odds are they're not stable anyway. Again, odds. In a large company you're always playing the odds when you hire.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You apparently flunked logic. First, he did not claim degrees are useless at all. He said they are unnecessary for programming. He went on to say that he then chose to get 2 degrees to further his knowledge. Indeed, a degree program is a valid way to do that. It is not the only way to do that.
I started college in EE and switched to CS when I decided that I liked systems and networks. I could write software, but never had a love for it.
So now I manage networks and systems.
CS is helpful for understanding WHY and HOW all these things work under the hood - yet I've met system admins with CS degrees who don't know the difference between different Internet Protocols and do not understand the OSI model.
A college degree is a good start, but it doesn't tell you anything about the degree/certificate holder's drive or skill. I'm glad LinkedIn is trying to find qualified and passionate people without relying on a college degree or an industry certification.
When Universities are dropping math requirements and making social justice manditory, your degree is a clownish joke. We chuckle at people who boast about their degrees, yet have no experience on their resume. Not one life accomplishment beyond "getting daddy to write a check"
so every six months they get a new batch of disposable employees?
Very successfully. They hire intelligent people with a variety of backgrounds and train them how to program. New hire training was I think 6 weeks for people with a C.S. background and 16 weeks for non-cs individuals. There are some* dev positions with esoteric considerations that would really require a C.S. degree. Most however can be filled by a smart person with who understands the basics of programming. I would also like to point out Bloomberg has been turning profit at about 2.5 million per developer per year for the last 20 years.
For sure, on the course, I think only 3 of us out of 12 got jobs from their placement program. A couple of the people had no hope of getting a programming job. I know that I was chosen to be on the scheme as I had already completed one programming course at Uni before I dropped out - I had already programmed in Pascal on a VAX, before being taught how to program COBOL on VAX. I had previously taught myself DCL (VMS scripting). By picking people who already would have had a chance on getting a job helped their figures to show how good the government scheme was.
But... none of that invalidates the fact that at that time, I, and the others that got jobs, didn't have Comp Sci degrees, but were able to make a starting in the industry.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
The same reason why I also got an associate's level degree in accounting, and why I want to do a degree in Astronomy (now that I have the math background)..... I don't know what the reason is.... but it's the same reason.....
My wife says I'm addicted to learning, as I've been formally studying something ever since she's known me.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
... than a programmer engineering.
My degree is Mechanical Engineering. I've been mostly Sysadmin in my career but did data analysis when I started and now do DevOps with more dev than sysadmin.
I couldn't do the development I do now w/o my sysadmin experience. Engineering made me learn to look at larger systems with an analytic eye. Programming was part of the degree; I had to write a FEM sing Chebychev differentiation to find the optimal spacing for fins on a plate for heat transfer. It was calculating values on a NxN grid with initial guesses of the initial values at the grid points. Each time through the N^2 calculations, you'd get converge. When the difference between n and n-1 values was close enough, that's be your approximate answer.
I wouldn't expect a CS programmer to be able to come up with the formula, though I would expect them to be able to code it once it was broken down.
In my experience not having a degree hasn't been a big deal. My Dad worked for a large corporation and always crowed that they only considered college graduates with a B average, but that was a rural area. There are plenty of companies in the big cities that only care about what you can do.
I started programming computers in second grade and got a job in industry during my sophomore year of college. It's amazing how many people out there don't start learning their trade until college and who graduate with no job experience.
I foolishly didn't complete my degree due to already having a job when my credit check came back with a deficiency. I was young and invincible, tired of school and figured it wouldn't matter. To be honest it hasn't, but you do want to be able to open as many doors in life as possible and having a degree won't hurt. I found the general education requirements to be a big waste of time and money, but my computer science curriculum was pretty good and you will learn and work on things you wouldn't otherwise experience.
To be fair I know some of the developers working for them and basically they employ some of the lowest of the low end. I suspect starting with a blanker slate might actually improve things. The one developer hard coded a date into software because he couldn't figure out after 3hours how to use language function to format dates with years...
This is a good post. I have a similar story, only I dropped out of college in the late 90s and got into consulting right before the big dot com crash. I had developed my own basic computer skills as a kid, and was fortunate enough to find an employer who was willing to take a chance and train me. In my case, aptitude plus opportunity equals success. I am never going to be rich at the rate that I am going, but I am making comfortable money at a stable company.
My dad was a programmer in the mid to late 70s. I still remember him telling me that some of the best programmers he worked with were women English majors. The same neural patterns that are required to understand English or a "foreign" language make it easier to pick up computer "languages".
Over here in the Netherlands software developers with CS degrees are a tiny minotiry. Presumably the CS graduates go into banking or management.
My biggest gripe about how most other programmers "teach" is they want you to memorize everything because that's what they do. No better than a good hands-on technical college. What people need is more theory and practical application of theory.
Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.
Mediocrity at best breeds more mediocrity, but a master can better themselves.
And don't confuse expertise for mastery. An expert may spend a lifetime honing a skill to deliver mediocrity of a consistent quality. A master will intuitively understand new problems with no time spent. Expertise is dependent on knowledge and experience, mastery is not. One may master without being an expert, but master do tend to be experts.
They wanted degrees in the first place? You need a CS degree to generate spam?
"Joe-Blow-you-have-not-thought-about-in-11-years is still waiting for your response to his invitation on LinkedIn!!"
I know my reason. People wont listen to you on a subject unless you have a degree. What fun learning brings is dwarfed by talking about it or teaching it to others.
Many computer scientist do programming, some didn't even like to program at all!(Edsger W. Dijkstra) . Real computer science degree programs hardly focus on actual programming, it is more related to theoretical math. Rarely do you ever find someone that just learned to programming that has spent the time to understand computer science.
But I can see just having some programming grunts for the mundane tasks. Anything that is little more involved can quickly turn into a clusterfuck really quick. Worse items I have seen by "just programmers that didn't need school". implemented a sorting algorithm on accident that runs in O(n^4) time, no wonder the performance blows and brings the simulation to halt at times. Home rolling a new message passing system, that deadlocks every 5 hours(His name was Jason and he was dick that thought he was better than every CS major).Implementing your own rules management system in access. And the worse of all, saying a program crashed when their computer was off.
Baking is all about chemistry. However, most jobs in baking do not require a degree in chemistry... in fact, a degree in chemistry in most cases wouldn't help get the job done.
linked in is own and ran by n.i.g.g.e.r.s :)
never ever ever give a n.i.g.g.e.r your information for free
if you do, the n.i.g.g.e.r will try to make money off you and monopolize the entire industry
and fuck slashdot with a huge rubber cock for their censorship. gobble my semen you fucking snowflake censorship lame cocksuckers
So, if a CS degree is overrated
Which it is to some extent (I say that as a CS major).
I did find it useful and still find many of the concepts useful, plus I really enjoyed the courses. But the degree to which CS majors seem worshiped seems overmuch, or at least the degree to which non-CS majors are thought not to have the same skills seems overwrought. Non-CS majors can easily learn the aspects of CS that make a CS degree useful and give you a real-world advantage in the workplace. Think on it, what aspects of a CS degree are not able to be learned outside of college?
why isn't college in general overrated?
It is vastly overrated. If I were at an age to go to college today, I would elect to spend four years focusing self-study on a primary topic along with some kind of apprenticeship approach, or perhaps deep contribution to a set of open-source projects.
You could easily add in other aspects of study for rounding and spend vastly less than you would on a "real" college. Get a dirt cheap apartment around a college of your choice and you can enjoy all the social benefits with none of the massive debt.
why isn't high school overrated?
Public high school is not overrated, because the ratings are already horrendous. It certainly is not worth much currently, it serves mainly as a way to keep most kids off the streets for a number of hours per day. Far better to either go to a private school, some kind of charter school, or be homeschooled.
What you're saying is that education is pointless,
The actual thing he was saying is that EDUCATION is valuable, but you are only getting a real education to varying degrees from each of the steps you outlined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Microsoft should focus on more important things, first, like fixing the LinkedIn website that they broke.
I speculate that they've already tested this initiative - to make the recent changes that broke the site.
Now, to set things right, how about putting the UI and UX designers that did those awful things to Linked in through some proper schooling?
But I might be wrong, and forcing everybody to click-to-reveal most everything of relevance, and constantly have to click to "see 5 more" is a GOOD thing.
But.... no.
"...standard practice in the 70's and 80's..."
Have we really gotten to the point where people don't remember history? I got a C.S. degree in the late 80's and the main 'computers' we had access to were a DEC PDP-11 hooked to a bunch of green-screen terminals; the IBM-PC was first being introduced -- no color, no hard drive, and a couple of 5-1/4" floppies if you were lucky; and at home I had the venerable Commodore-64.
So here we have some idiots trying to conflate the current state of software engineering to 'programming in the 70's and 80's'?!?
Maybe you've hit the nail on the head -- back in the 70's and 80's programs were hideously simplistic because the computers were hideously simplistic. Hideously simplistic programs means hideously simplistic algorithms -- no need for what passes today for a C.S. degree. No surprise if there wasn't a tremendous gender gap in programmers back in the day.
As programs become hideously large and hideously complex, it takes a special kind of anal-retentive person to be able to do it, be willing to do it, and be able not to go crazy doing it. Sorry to break it to you, but that type of personality trait seems to manifest itself more in the male of our species.
A modern programmer is like a modern auto mechanic, in the 70's and 80's you could get away without specialized computer knowledge and be able to write programs or repair cars; but, in the modern day, you can't write programs or fix cars without more specialized computer knowledge. It's called progress people, try to keep up.
No need for dictation, short hand and smart staff with the skills to spell engineering, legal or medical terms.
Professionals do their own work with their own powerful computers.
Printer, fax machine, punch cards still need support per department? Accounting paperwork? Staff going to the bank during working hours?
Computers or outside contractors have taken many of the roles that normal working class staff could expect in the 1970's.
Legal is now a lawyer not a vast in house legal department with all its own support staff.
A real coffee machine has replaced a canteen full of staff to push a trolly around with coffee.
The phone system that needed a human to take a call, direct a call and keep messages is now a professionals own smart phone.
The role of poor people with no or few skills is not needed in vast numbers to support a few professionals or experts all day.
Working for a computer company in the past was doing maths by hand to get the work ready for computer programming, programming a computer by creating punch cards, ensuring the printer had paper. Waiting for the computer to print out why it failed, looking at the math by hand again and trying to work the complex math with on the computer again. Low paid staff had to help with getting the computer ready again.
Ordering more paper and punch cards, ensuring the supply of paper and punch cards was always ready for a larger project.
Keeping accounts on paper. Entering paper accounts in to computers, then paying bills on time and ensuring the generated paper work matched the computer records.
Connecting calls, taking messages, making coffee, greeting visitors and guiding them past departments full of support staff to meet the expert staff.
So a lot of people could claim they worked with "computers" or "programmed" a computer as a "job".
Doing the same "math" on "paper" all day to help a computer expert was not programming or a job with much internal advancement or good pay.
A few experts back then did all the real work like in 2017. Many other people with much fewer skills and low pay just ensured everything was ready for the complex tasks.
Tax rates and political import controls also helped. A company had to do all the complex computer work within their own nation or factor in complex import tax issues or for security reasons. Now a gov, mil contractor, the private sector can buy much cheap support globally.
The CRT allowed one expert to see and correct their all their computer work without staff having to prepare and load up the computer again.
So lots of low wage staff got to work on vast projects that only ever really needed a few smart people and better computers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is standard practice already everywhere anyone is competent, only they pay actual wages instead of internships. Everyone who has worked in the software development industry for any period of time knows CS majors are the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel worst programmers around, the CEO's 8-year-old kid is almost always better than anyone with a CS degree.
Good story, but I think that stories like yours are the exception rather than the norm.
Probably true, but I also think they're not all that rare. Over the years I've worked with dozens of professional programmers who didn't hold CS degrees. For several years in the late 80s / early 90s I worked for a startup with ten or so other developers, and there were only a couple other CS grad in the bunch. Other degrees include mathematics, architecture, business, physics; one guy had dropped out of college, but he was knowledgeable and wrote nice clean code that was reliable and maintainable.
And the product was system-level, not application - a middleware system with multiprotocol communications, an application engine, service resolution, etc. Not the sort of thing you could copy out of some source snippet you found with archie.
These days CS and cognate degrees are more common, so more developers have them, but I believe relatively few developers do much applied CS, and even fewer think about the theoretical side. While I'm glad to have my CS degree (and I do CS), and while I think there's a place for it in software development, most programming has really very little connection to CS.