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.

Comments

Is This News?

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Is This News?

[jellomizer]

Having been in college, and a masters degree. I have seen most dropouts are not from being too good for school, but usually due to poor time management skills, or separation anxieties from their home.
Both are not really good attributes for an employee.
The popular Dropouts were actually more then good enough to pass college. But they chose to start their own company, not drop out and try to get employed.

 

A degree is about ...

[perpenso]

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.

Re:A degree is about ...

[El Cubano]

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.

Not only that, but it is entirely different to drop out and start your own company than it is drop out and look for a "normal" job. Basically:

• drop out to start a company -> that says "I can create more value by forgoing the rest of my formal education because I see a perishable opportunity that may not be there when I finish" (Microsoft, Google, Facebook are all excellent examples of this; the proof is in your ability to persist and make your idea a success)
• drop out to land a regular job -> that says "I can't be bothered to finish my formal education (the reason itself is unimportant, though some people have legitimately good reasons for dropping out) and now I want to come work for you" (most sensible hiring managers would look at that and ask "well, what else are you going to leave only half done?")

• The point is that either way someone has to roll the dice on you (that is even true for someone who graduated, though the uncertainty tends to be less) their willingness to do so (either invest in your startup idea or hire you as a dropout) is almost entirely dependent on your ability to articulate the value that you bring to the table. That is decidedly difficult to do with a startup, but if you hustle you can start building up your track record with demos of your idea/product, early sales, etc. I would argue that it is much harder as a dropout to build the sort of track record that will convince someone to take a chance on you. I mean, the guy with the start offers investors the possibility of making enormous returns on their investment (if the idea survives). The dropout looking for a job offers the employer the possibility of doing pretty much what is expected of any employee, of which there are many prospective candidates, lots of whom have finished their degrees.

Re:A degree is about ...

[swb]

The larger problem is that the signaling value of a degree has come to greatly outweigh the vocational value of the education it represents to the point that the education has become nearly irrelevant, rendering it merely a signaling device.

We're literally requiring many people to spend thousands of dollars learning irrelevant information just to show that they're willing to do it. It's almost like an introduction to corporate insanity, where they will take jobs that require relentless volumes of busy work (TPS reports, say) for no apparent purpose.

How is this news?

[rsilvergun]

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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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Why 'A' Students Work for 'C' Students...

[__aaclcg7560]

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.

Still the most basic filter there is

[ErichTheRed]

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.

Re:Huge gamble

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a CS degree and cannot get a job in the tech sector you must be carrying around a substantial amount of negative qualities as a person. You most likely come across as the type of person no one will hire no matter how many degrees you have. Techies are not usually known to be very good interviewees. A lot of techies tend to be introverts and display a lot of social awkwardness. Only the really smart and competent techies can get away with carrying around those types of characteristics. Most of those complaining they cannot get a job are overly inflexible in their stated goals. They decide they only want to work with certain technologies in certain industries and are most likely unwilling to relocate. These two qualities also show someone unwilling to take the initiatives necessary to find their perfect job. A college degree is only really useful for one thing. It shows a person who committed themselves to achieving a goal, namely a college degree, and was willing to do everything necessary to reach that goal. But if you think a CS degree actually prepares you for the real world you are woefully misinformed. College curriculums have a hard time teaching the technologies currently in use today because the technologies change faster then the curriculums can be updated. You end up knowing the basics which should allow you to adapt and learn the technologies not covered in your degree program.

"and found that employees at these companies are highly educated, not dropouts"
This statement makes the gigantic assumption that "dropouts" may not be highly educated but that doesn't mean they are not highly intelligent. There are high school students capable of running rings around the degreed professionals. If you are paying a lot of money for your degree but feel you have the skills to make $100K a year instead of spending $50K a year for your education the smart thing is to "dropout" secure your job using the only thing that really matters which is your knowledge level and go back later to finish up your degree. A lot of companies will even pay to offset the cost of finishing your degree. Even if the company doesn't offer tuition reimbursement you will be in a better financial situation than you were when you started running up your debt to get a degree.

Re:Let's stop giving this turd frosting

[perpenso]

You are made to think the way that your betters believe that you should think

You are severely misinformed, at least for courses of study like computer science. In such a program you learn as much from your peers and from self study as you do from your professors. I also had little problem arguing with my professors about something. They in fact seemed to enjoy a student do so rather than just repeat back to them the book or the lecture.

A degree has nothing to do with intelligence and not even much to do with persistence.

No one claimed a degree is some exclusive evidence of intelligence. What it is evidence of is a broad comprehensive body of relevant knowledge, again speaking from a computer science type of perspective. People going the self-taught route exclusively often have gaps. Topics they did not study since they were not interested and/or mistakenly thought unimportant. For example aspiring video game programmers who spent little to no time studying data structures.

Regarding persistence, it absolutely demonstrates the ability to complete a multi-year project filled with things you have no inner passion for.

You'll make it through as long as you can pay the bill and show up occasionally

And get weeded out in job interviews. Its why even those with degrees are subject to the various programming "tests" as part of the interview process.