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Top Established and Emerging Tech Companies Prefer To Hire Highly Educated Candidates, Not Dropouts (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report:It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts, but in fact, they're the exception to the rule. Going to college pays off, and to land a job at one of the most coveted tech employers, you'll need to stay in school. Data analysis site Paysa looked at over 8,200 job posting and over 70,000 resumes at tech "titans" (companies worth at least $100 billion with an IPO more than 10 years ago) and "tech disruptors" (companies worth at least $10 billion with an IPO within the last 10 years) and found that employees at these companies are highly educated, not dropouts. A disproportionate number of employees at these sought-after companies actually have advanced degrees, and one company stood out as employing the highest percentage of workers with Ph.D.s -- Google. A whopping 16 percent of positions at Google require a doctorate degree. Less than 2 percent of Americans have earned a doctoral degree and an even smaller percentage have studied topics that are relevant to Google's work.
Getting an advanced degree is a huge gamble that not many people are willing to make. You need to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years of your life, on the chance that you may get one of these 'plum' jobs. There is an equal chance that you'll find yourself overqualified for everything and nobody willing to hire you, deep in debt, and past your prime. For some people it's just not worth it.
Because they don't actually do anything but marketing and sales. They aren't "tech," they're salesmen. Salesmen need connections.
2 decades in and I've yet to meet a single developer who was both not self-taught and was competent. College can't teach someone to code, only how to read code (partially at that.)
The only Drop-outs you see in the tech industry are people who dropped out because they got too busy managing a company they created themselves. The quality of developers is bad enough even among those who graduated. The people who couldn't even be bothered to finish their degree and then have to send out resumes looking for jobs are even worse off.
Your best bet is to complete your degree and do interneships or co-op placements to get real world experience. In addition, you should be working on your own personal projects in your spare time so that you actually understand how to do software development by the time you graduate. It may sound like a lot of work, but if you only depend on what they teach you in class, you will get out of school with very few marketable skills.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
A degree is not merely about demonstrating that you can acquire some minimal base of knowledge to start your career from. It also demonstrates that you can finish what you start, even when it is a long process that requires you to do many things you have no particular interest in doing.
The rise of the credentialed class. You can't get a job without that piece of paper, and the price of that paper just keeps rising.
What, did you think that "highly educated" actually means anything? They're certainly not learning anything about doing their new jobs.
Top Tech companies still need Engineers, not "Engineers".
Engineers can take the blame, and responsibility for that the code-monkeys or "Engineers" do.
It's not just the degree, it's that little piece of paper, liability insurance, errors and omissions insurance, etc.
Someone has to certify that the self driving car is safe. Who are you going to believe, the college dropout, who put in all those cute easter eggs, or the engineer that did the crazy-hard math and supervised the code monkeys.
I'm guessing this is addressing that silly tech narrative that you can drop out of college and become a billionaire Does anyone really believe that? If you take even a cursory glance at the rich 'dropouts' they were all from well to do families who could afford to take a break and come back. Meanwhile my kid basically gets one shot at college since if she takes even 1 year off because she didn't get into her 300 level courses (not enough space for somebody with a measly 3.8 GPA / average is 3.9 to be admitted to her major) all her loans come due and you can't get more loans until the first batch are paid off.
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It may seem like Silicon Valley is populated entirely with celebrity college dropouts
No it doesn't.
And by the time you get a PHD for that unique/coveted role at google... they'll look at you funny and say "that position disappeared 5 years ago.... NOW we need a doctorate with such-and-such skills... oh you don't have those skills? No problem, just go back to school".
I did a couple onsite interviews with Google a few months back. I didn't end up getting an offer. So it's probably just the sour grapes talking.
But if I had one word to describe my impression of Google it would be "bleak". There was an overwhelming sense that most employees at Google were, fundamentally, cogs in the machine - a punchcard and a paycheck - etc - that they did their time and collected their (very generous and prestigious) paychecks. But the whole vibe was very corporate - in a huge disorganized organization sort of way. The free lunch was massively overcrowded and chaotic while the food was meager and pretentious - some sort of curry with a small piece of pizza with dense crust and goat cheese and arugula on top - the opposite of what someone doing genuinely interesting and creative work would need to relax and recharge over a good meal.
Anyway, getting to the point, I did my PhD at a huge public university and my experience dealing with the massive disorganized bureaucracy at the university would have almost certainly been good preparation for working at Google. If Google was looking for genuinely interesting and creative people, they would probably put more focus on people without degrees. But since they seem to actually be looking for cogs in the machine, requiring advanced degrees is a good way to filter out people who wouldn't be comfortable as a cogs in the machine.
Debt Slaves are easy to manipulate
love is just extroverted narcissism
I worked my last position as a contract-to-hire for two and half years. Since I only have an associate's degree, they were barely able to get me approved at the initial hire. Human resources ended up making that bachelor's degree mandatory by the end of my contract and they refused to even consider hiring me. But I'm okay now, because somebody else hired me, eventually. Fingers crossed that this contract-to-hire works out!
There are some things that you learn when pursuing certain degrees which would be fairly difficult to learn on your own, but most job minimum education requirements out there are less about getting someone who has learned some advanced stuff and more about having a worker that has been trained for the job you want to assign to them on that worker's own personal dime instead of the company's. As a bonus, most degrees incur debt on par with an expensive car or a mortgage and the debt plus interest can potentially take decades to repay in full, so not only do the degree-demanding companies get a worker bee they didn't have to spend money training, they also get a more loyal worker bee starting financially well in the red and who can't afford to just walk away if the employer treats them badly.
You're practically guaranteed to not become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, but that doesn't mean you require a degree to succeed. Persistence and constant autodidacticism are far more valuable things than a college degree. A degree is no substitute for persistence or personal desire to learn and grow.
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Very few jobs actually require a graduate degree - teaching and research and maybe, some very very specialized field where it's just researchers who are doing the work; like getting a project form a uni. When I was at IBM, the PhD I ever saw were in the R&D section that worked on things like AI and processors and memory - and those were the supervisor scientists. The rest of us just had undergrads.
But most of the time, companies have these degree requirements just to be able to say that they have Ph.D.s on staff- bragging rights. Or to weed people out. When you're getting hundreds or even thousands of applications from folks with BS degrees, you got to narrow the list down somehow.
And then there is the school snobbery. For an anecdote, this young full of himself Stanford grad came in a cleaned house at a company a friend of mine worked for. He was told that only Standford grads were any good.
See subject & as I said here earlier in reply to creimer https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10923455&cid=54898381/ regarding hires in the security end of the spectrum, I'd take EXPERIENCE (lots of it hands-on) over certs/degrees (yes, I have both, noted there).
* HOWEVER: Ideally, I'd look for a combination of BOTH (certs/degrees + experience), of course!
(The rest would show in technical interviews you go thru for hire in the art & science of computing)
APK
P.S.=> Nice thing about degrees is you get a DECENT foothold on 'tricks' minus having to learn them yourself (& making giant mistakes, or inefficiencies, on things men spent huge portions of their lives solving in some cases that is PROVEN) but, of course, you can LEARN THIS YOURSELF TOO, just pickup some books & "go" - E.G. - I found datastructures IMMENSELY USEFUL during my career coding as an "example thereof"... apk
It's interesting to compare software development communities that appreciate having higher education versus those that do not.
Take for example the Rust, Ruby, JavaScript and PHP communities. Higher education is looked down upon within these communities. Many of these practitioners are actually high school dropouts. They aren't even qualified enough to apply for acceptance to any higher education institution.
Look at the software they produce. Most of it is slow, bloated, and far too complex for what it actually does. Since these people have no formal education, they often end up reinventing the wheel very poorly. They also introduce unnecessary complexity, perhaps in an attempt to feel smarter than they actually are. Rust is perhaps the epitome of this. The language itself is so absurdly complex that it's nearly unusable. Most of the software that these programmers create actually gets thrown out because it failed so badly.
Compare those communities to the C, C++, Java and Python communities. These are communities that respect, if not demand, higher education. Despite being relatively simple languages, the practitioners of these languages use them to write some of the most important and widely used software around. Essentially all of the major operating systems, windowing systems, network servers, web browsers, compilers, interpreters, virtual machines, and business systems are written in one or more of these languages. These are the kinds of systems that are used and extended over the course of decades just because they're so vital and useful.
Can people without higher education try to create software? Of course. But the end result is like when an untrained "handyman" tries to build his own shed. Maybe it kind of looks like a shed, and maybe it only partially collapses, but it's still a pathetic disaster compared to what somebody with proper training could produce.
A degree is about indoctrination, as is all education. You are made to think the way that your betters believe that you should think, so that they find you useful in their bureaucracy.
A degree has nothing to do with intelligence and not even much to do with persistence. You'll make it through as long as you can pay the bill and show up occasionally.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
universities always win. Why are universities still defended as these pure, intellectual institutions just innocently teaching people to think?
They're rapacious businesses only concerned with their bottom line.
Robert Kiyosaki has a book called "Why 'A' Students Work for 'C' Students and Why 'B' Students Work for the Government", where A students (graduates) work for C students (dropouts) and B students (everyone else) work for the government. You don't need a college degree to own the corporate ladder, you just need to hire people who are smarter than you.
http://www.trending9.com/top-1...
Sure they don't hire dropouts, those who do the hiring _are_ the dropouts, they _own_ the company.
No one in the white-collar world should worry about losing their jobs to robots before they worry about being treated like peasants to the tech companys' feudalism. Requiring advanced degrees is just another form of elitism. Experience means nothing, actual know-how means nothing, they want you to have an expensive piece of paper hanging on the wall (that you'll be paying off until you're 50) just because. Meanwhile more than half of these people with the expensive diploma can't put 2 and 2 together and get 4. I work with so-called 'engineers' all day long. One of them didn't know the difference between 'positive' and 'negative' on a power supply and was damned lucky they didn't blow up what they were working on. Others couldn't put together a crystal radio without consulting a YouTube video. Meanwhile there's guys like me who have NO degree whatsoever (because frankly I couldn't AFFORD to get one) with decades of experience who can do the job of a low-level engineer even without the education, and we're making a fraction of what they're getting paid for being good at passing tests and writing papers.
Experience used to count. Right now it doesn't. Shit's got to change. You want to 'make America great again'? Stop valuing expensive education that doesn't mean you know how to DO anything, and start valuing actual know-how and experience instead.
See, it's because the name "Comp Sci" is misleading. They should instead call this program "Programming circa 1961"
If you don't have a mountain of debt hanging over your head, they don't have anywhere near as much control over you. Companies never want the best candidates, they want the easiest to control, hence policies like this and the H1B visa abuse.
I find it ironic that Google invests so heavily in online education programs, but only hires people who have gone through the higher education song and dance. They straight up claim that their Udacity Android nano-degree will get you a job in the field, but how many of those grads are they hiring?
and doctorate degree is not for IT help desk or sys admin work. Unless they want to hire an H1B with an job that no USC can be slotted into on paper.
I suspect this is where the 1 in a million successful dropout screams, but I make 6 figures! College is bad! OMG, don't waste your time or mommy's money.
EvilBankCorp. , student loan servicing division.
EBC - investing in your future.
College is a _lot_ more competitive than it used to be. 20 years of non-stop federal funding cuts (mostly to finance tax cuts) mean they've had to be insanely selective with students. Even with a 4.0 GPA she'll still have an interview because there's too many applicants with high GPAs.
This is one of those things nobody talks about. The only way to solve it is to fund schools again, but fat chance of that. It means people going to the polls and voting for tax increases. Yeah, those tax raises would need to come out of the rich mostly (since they've got most of the money) but folks just hear tax raise and shut it down. I'm guessing it's because so many folks live paycheck to paycheck (60-70% depending on which study you're reading) that they're terrified of even a 1% raise.
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we need to end student loans and have more trades schools. IT / tech needs the union apprenticeship systems. you don't need an PHD to be an good plumber and by the time you make master plumber you will have a lot real work experience with out the student loans.
Every time I read an article here where education is brought up, I always see posts such as, "Well I graduated in the 80s/90s." That's not very insightful or encouraging to recent college graduates in the present day who are struggling to find a job.
I certainly wouldn't comment without having experienced the system.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
If you have little to no experience, a degree is the most basic filter the HR department can apply to the 12,384 resumes they are receiving for the open positions. No degree? Garbage, and yes I'm well aware of how unfair that is and how many potential good people they lose. A degree from the right program shows you can at least stick with something that's reasonably hard long enough to make it through, and can probably solve a few non-trivial problems given enough time and guidance.
I've been working for big companies for almost my whole career, and the simple truth is that you have to play a lot of stupid, asinine retarded games to get and keep a job, and advance in your current one. if you don't like it, go work for one of the 4 billion "Dude, GitHub is my resume!" web startups. A zero-knowledge, C-student HR generalist is going to apply whatever it takes to reduce that pile of resumes down. She has a degree -- it may not be CS and she may have spent most of her time at sorority functions, but she's going to feel she's college-educated and you should be too. If you're trying to cold-call your way into a job, it's a rare medium to large company that will even consider someone who hasn't completed a degree of some sort.
I'm in IT and we have _plenty_ of people with just a BS, AS or no degree at all who are very good at what they do. A lot of us don't even have a traditional computer science background. But, woe upon any of these smart people who can't network their way into their next job when they need one, because it puts them at a disadvantage no matter how smart they are.
Accomplishment is the salve for your ego, not sheepskin.
But you're apparently one of those snowflakes. Keep it up with the REEEEEEE... It'll get you far.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The drop outs they want to hire aren't applying for jobs because they're busy starting their own companies. I started my own companies and completed college and worked full time. It was frankly nuts and I would have been better off dropping out to just start my own companies. No customer has EVER asked me for my diploma or even where I went to college. They want to know I'll solve their problems, not what my education was.
Let's get this straight: you've been writing code for 30-40 years and you're pissed that someone didn't learn to code as well as you in four years? Also, you dropped out in 1981, when a lot of universities didn't even have undergraduate computer science departments and had no problem finding a job? It's almost like technology and the economy have changed since then.
but at the same time bypass trade / tech schools people are more trained for the job and then say the college people have skill gaps in the hands on work.
Like that PHD at google who had no idea on how to turn his workstation on.
This is because computer science is a theoretical discipline, one of whose applied skills is programming. Complaining that new CS grads aren't amazing programmers is only slightly less ridiculous than complaining that a person with a mathematics degree is a lousy accountant. Sure, a math student understands the math behind the accounting but they're not very familiar with the accounting process itself. Now imagine that everything anyone knows about accounting changes every five years and perhaps you'll understand why brand new CS grads face hurdles at their first jobs.
I'm a high-school dropout. Went all four years but lived in a city far away and was not able to make it to a city council meeting which was a requirement to graduate.
Earned 240k last year working on C++.
Self-taught and been programming since I was 7
A whopping 16% of Google employment ads request a PhD, but what is the actual hiring rate? Are 16% of new hires PhDs? Also, what's the retention rate - when a PhD is hired, do they stick around for 20 years, or are they out in 2?
Maybe they don't like you and suddenly the interview seems like more effort than it's worth.
Most of computer science doesn't involve writing code but getting the degree demonstrates mostly that you catch on quick. Truefact once I shut down a glorified helpdesk interview at google because I already had a strong feeling that the job would suck and the interviewer seemed extremely square and then he told me to write a java program to reverse a string and do it inside of a word processor instead of a text editor or whiteboard. I told him google must be a great place to work but I think we're all wasting our time.
"Bu-Bu-But dee ees googul!!". I simply didn't feel like sitting through hours of this bullshit for an extra 10k a year and a potentially worse workplace. I don't know why he would conduct a half-assed interview and then bother making an argument that I should try and finish it.
Don't forget we're interviewing you too. Maybe they thought they were getting determined people by making them jump through lame hoops or maybe he was used to dealing with desperate h1bs so he thought he could be lazy.
eom
I hope that made you feel better, buying all that bullshit.
Now, the truth. Colleges do not teach people how to be good programmers. Almost all of the biggest lazy, no-talent shitbags in the industry are CS graduates. The colleges indoctrinate people into subservient, bureaucratic modes of thought that are conducive to operating as a cog in a large organization. That, and a little English Comp to compensate for the illiteracy of those that are turned out of high schools.
The weeding you claim - hah. Just about every no-talent shitbag ends up getting a job somewhere. Most firms don't bother with a good interview process, and government agencies least of all. You'll find a home eventually, even if you suck. Only those who refuse to show for interviews, or refuse to relocate don't get hired. Obviously, getting a programming job in Bumfuck, IA is not happening, unless you can telework it.
On a related note: the interview process you describe reminds me of the scrum of people looking to get into the 'best schools' the summer after they graduate high school. Both groups - the young programmers and the prospective college students - have been marketed to heavily. They think this somehow makes a difference, working for MS or Amazon or Google - or in the other case going to a highly rated school.
Both groups are seriously deluded. Your internal wherewithal counts far more than acting as a cog in some bureaucratic machine. Having that line item on your resume is not that helpful in the future. Accomplish something, have some drive, and all of those certifications - which is all the degree or the job at the firm with the flaming hoop interview process are - become irrelevant faster than you would think. Caring about these certifications is all about despair, a belief that you have nothing unique to offer. I suppose some people might feel that way, but that sounds more like a mental illness - depression - than a logical strategy, to me.
And how is it persistence to drink beer, smoke weed and experiment sexually for (more like) five years while you occasionally pay attention to studies while someone else foots the bill(...at least in the short term)? I suppose it's persistent hedonism, so you might have a point there.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Let's get this straight. You took the statement "They both had almost no ability to write code" and morphed it into "...you're pissed that someone didn't learn to code as well as you in four years?"?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I hope that made you feel better, buying all that bullshit. Now, the truth.
Yes, please try to explain the "truth" to someone who has seen things from both sides. Who dropped out of a computer science program the middle of their sophomore year to pursue a unique startup opportunity, worked in such an environment for a couple years, moved to a more traditional software development job, went back to school and finished their degree.
Colleges do not teach people how to be good programmers.
The classroom is not the sole source of knowledge for computer science and related fields. You learn as much from your peers, fellow students, and from self-study as you do from professors. A University is a unique environment. Not only is it dense with peers from your field of study but also with peers from other areas. Other areas that may provide insights that are beneficial. A University also can provide access to equipment and software unavailable by your own means. Been there, done that. Access to people, info, equipment, software, etc, is amazing at a University. Add to that the University making me take classes I expected to be of little value, and much to my surprise turned out quite useful on the jobs years later.
In summary, a formal degree program can make you a better programmer than you would have otherwise been. It is additive to what you are doing on your own.
Since nearly it's start in the 90's (before user IDs) (not worth my time to log in anymore), I would say it's a combination of being actively killed in the OS/2 / IBM sence and an end of interesting and relevant and truly innovative technologies being developed. IOT and 3D printers meet neither of these criteria. Neither do Musk's ventures.
I too have a 30+ year career. However I earned my CS degree 5 years into that career, not 25 years into it. Who might have the better perspective on how a CS degree affects the early portion of one's career?
Let's get this straight: you've been writing code for 30-40 years and you're pissed that someone didn't learn to code as well as you in four years?
No. The post you are responding to said:
They both had almost no ability to write code.
Not having 40 years experience is understandable. Not having any ability, and a piece of paper saying you have that ability, reflects poorly of the people who hand out pieces of paper.
This. IT is stable enough [1] that it doesn't need even a B. S. in CS to work well. It should be a trade, and vendor independant. Certs are pointless, because if one uses plumbing, why would you need to know ProPex's specific pipes in order to know plumbing in general?
Plus, it sets a standard. Someone can be a chatter-monkey, but it would be like an A/C repairman without their TACL license (here in Texas).
We need a licensing and trade body. We already have junior, mid-level, and senior IT, might as well make that apprentice, journeyman, and master.
[1]: Stable as in in 10 years, we will still have the same issues as now. Mail will still have spam, databases will still have bad table designs, we will have ransomware, and so on.
This advice is ignorant. DO NOT TAKE IT!
The bubble popped in lawyers roughly 10 yrs ago. It's not the path it used to be.
would stop crashing every 10 years. But it's been doing that since I was a lad and if I want to look it up before that.
You survived 20 years of layoffs, were rocking a college degree and still couldn't avoid bankruptcy. At some point we have to stop stop blaming the parents and blame the system. The government, using tax dollars taken from the wealthy must fund college. Why the wealth? Because they benefit most from having an educated workforce.
Parents already put massive amounts of time, effort and money into raising the next generations of employees. They're already doing their part. It's the other side, the employers, who aren't keeping up their end of the bargain.
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You are assuming a degree in computer science and computer engineering are the same thing, though it is not necessarily your fault. . Some Comp Sci programs in the US do not require students to write a single line of code. The thinking is that Comp Sci is about a higher level view of the concepts and principles of computing. There is a disconnect between what Academia and Industry think a Comp Sci degree is. Until that gets sorted out, there will continue to be problems such as the one you have encountered.
The more real world experience, the worse
Go back to reddit.
Huh? I rarely run across anything in phython that isn't some sort of command line tool. Compilers and operating systems? And java? I'm almost believe this comment was written to be sarcasm.
MSMASH, since you published this as a staff writer, you are responsible..
further more, this article seems to advertise education, thats wrong..
if you have the stills and can demonstrate your abilities.. Education doesn't mean ANYTHING.
Turn the coin,
highly educated individuals intimidate, seem to have behavioral issues, and become unreliable.
Unless there is a specific purpose that your education alleviates, (which wont last for ever), you will loose your general skills because of the college focus on your specific discipline.
Are we sure DICE has really let go of this property??
Clearly you're not a programmer! You have demonstrated a lack of understanding of basic Boolean operations and set theory.
The GP wrote, with emphasis added:
Do you see the "one or more" part? It means that the listed types of software are written in C, or C++, or Java, or Python, or a mix of them. See the "or"? See it? The concept of "or" is important! The GP is completely correct: all of the software listed is typically written in at least one of the listed languages. Of course that doesn't mean that each of those languages is used for all of those sorts of software! The GP in no way says that Python is used for OS kernels, for example.
The GP is completely correct. C and C++ are used for most of the software listed there. Java is used for a lot of network-aware software, especially servers, and business systems. Python is also used for network-aware software and business systems.
Additionally, Python is extensively used in academic and research settings. It has basically replaced Fortran for scientific computing, because it has excellent libraries, is easy to learn and to use, and it can call out to C code very easily when performance is needed.
You wouldn't have made such a dumb comment if you had actually gone to university and studied computer science or a related field. You would have studied basic Boolean operations and basic set theory within the first month there!
The fact that you think the GP's comment is a joke just goes to show that you're clueless. You apparently have no idea how real software is written.
If you're a drop-out, you might try to save the world from these same corporations. You might not believe in climate change bullshit because you know it's really just a shift of industrial wealth to China. You might not care about women in tech because it has nothing to do with code. Now move along you fuckwit corporations. Have your stupid programmers who design "simple" because they don't know how to design for productivity. Have your stupid armies of semi-retarded H-1Bs. Drown every response in "MUH AI" and brag to us how your single-threaded websites run the world. See where it gets you. Money can't buy talent and colleges don't teach it. That leaves you with no currency except for the violence and intimidation of the Deep State that built you.
I don't know you, so it's hard to say. But your CS degree doesn't intrinsically qualify you to say anything about perspectives on a social scale.
you're an idiot
But then how could colleges justify their overpriced and underperforming system?
So what's so special about university that makes it worth thousands of dollars? The knowledge is in books. Figure out the books used in a curriculum and buy'em used. Couple that with someone willing to help you in sticky situations and you can avoid college altogether.
Universities don't have any exclusive knowledge.
I had two particular grads from the University of Washington come in for an interview for some openings I had for software engineers. They both had almost no ability to write code. I was so pissed that they both got their degrees and I was left wondering just how did they get their Comp Sci degrees.
Frankly, I'd question your interviewing skills before I'd question their coding skills. They had at least 4 years of progressively difficult software education. You had what sort of training for interviewing? How often do you do it? How many years of progressively difficult interviewing have you put in? How often were you tested and reviewed on your interviewing skills by educated interviewing experts?
Software engineers who are more used to constantly dealing with machines are typically poor judges of people. Add in the Dunning-Kruger effect and you get engineers who think their shitty interviewing skills are much better than they actually are and can't recognize their own interviewing deficiency.
On top of that, the software interview process is broken at most companies. Interviewers will base their hiring decision entirely on whether the candidate can answer some random algorithm question. If the candidate hasn't encountered that exact question previously and can't solve it exactly to the interviewer's requirements, which can often be ridiculous, then they're screwed. If the candidate has encountered the problem before, then they win the job lottery. You're not determining whether they can "write code" or not. You're finding out whether they've seen that problem previously.
Further, I bet you're not sitting them in from of an IDE and giving them plenty of time to complete the task. I bet you're doing it on a whiteboard or a text editor on a short time scale with the added pressure of an interview. The typical coding interview is so completely alien to the way that developers normally work that I'm surprised anyone gets hired.
And for what? Writing algorithms are maybe 10% of a modern software engineer's job. It makes no sense that you'd base your whole hiring decision on something that's relatively so trivial.
So what's so special about university that makes it worth thousands of dollars? The knowledge is in books. Figure out the books used in a curriculum and buy'em used. Couple that with someone willing to help you in sticky situations and you can avoid college altogether.
Simply reading a book is not the same as studying a book before quizzes or an exam. Further, most professors lecture on topics not covered in the books. Only shitty profs work straight from the book. Lab work and homework problems drill those lessons into your head.
Computer science courses are much more difficult than other courses at university. On weekend nights, the business majors are out drinking beer and hitting on girls. The computer science nerds are busy writing their programs. After 4 years of spending weekend after weekend writing code, you end up learning quite a bit. And no, it's not the same as just reading a few used books.
I've had managers fight with HR for over a year to give me pay raises. The HR peons just use charts to determine which "pay group" a person should be in and those charts have education requirements. They use the same charts for creating positions within the system (i.e. job openings.) Since there are more candidates than positions, they just cull all of the applicants that don't meet the absurd education level. Remove HR from the hiring process and most problems with finding top 1% candidates will be gone.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
you nailed it.
mod parent up!
Neither of you has the better perspective on your own because alone both of you lack a control to compare yourselves to. Only together do your experiences acquire comparability and meaningfulness, and for any inferences drawn to be significant, we need to take lots of one of you (no degree during early career) and lots of the other of you (degree during early career). Anecdotes are useless for drawing inferences about the worth of something.
I'm going to continue using the Host File Engine. Your software is well written, functional. The Host File Engine performs exactly as promised by mmell
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg
I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon
APK is kinda right. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo
I like your host file system by Karmashock
I find your hosts file admirable by vel-ex-tech
APK your posts on this and the hosts file posts, and more, have never been in error and/or bad advice by BlueStrat
* It's recommended & hosted by Malwarebytes' hpHosts!
APK
P.S.=> Even China imitated a technique of mine http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/26/boffins_supercharge_the_hosts_file_to_save_users_plagued_by_dns_outages/
Indian and partticularly Chinese graduates get the jobs here. Basically, they come with the mind set that Irish people will be given the jobs all else being equal (which is unfortunately not the case as it is in their countries) and they come to Ireland and study and do masters degrees often too. They generally get in ahead of Irish people with vanilla bachelors degrees. Education matters.
There seems to be an alumni converyor belt here too specially for the more prestigious colleges. Your expereince counts for nothing if there is someone from China fresh off the boat who is Irish alumni. The US tech companies create a lot of jobs in Ireland but I'd say 70-80% of those jobs go to foreign nationals.
" No customer has EVER asked me for my diploma or even where I went to college. They want to know I'll solve their problems, not what my education was."
This! The Diploma mills are there to part people from their money.
Are you calling Ivy League colleges and universities diploma mills? Hmm... Ah, I see you post as an Anonymous Coward. I guess that's the way you went.
it's pretty brutal. So much so she's been taking summer courses to keep up. That wasn't her idea, her consoler advised her to. She's still putting in full time hours to keep up.
To her credit she's keeping up, but it's been pretty tough. I don't envy her the work load. I have a full time job and she works harder than me.
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