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Google, Apple and 13 Other Companies That No Longer Require Employees To Have a College Degree (cnbc.com)
The economy continues to be a friendly place for job seekers today, and not just for the ultra-educated -- economists are predicting ever-improving prospects for workers without a degree as well. From a report: Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group. In 2017, IBM's vice president of talent Joanna Daley told CNBC Make It that about 15 percent of her company's U.S. hires don't have a four-year degree. She said that instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational class.
Theodp is going to hate this.
Having a degree means your "ultra-educated"? How much more will we dumb down society through anti-intellectualism so that uneducated rubes can make themselves feel better for being dumb?
Apple has never required a college degree. Neither Woz nor Jobs had a degree when they started Apple.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
To the extent I help out with hiring iOS developers, my primary concern is apps in the store, and their quality. How you learned how to make a quality app is less important.
The list is obviously filled with a lot of usual jobs that would have never required a degree anyway.
It's cool that companies like Google and Apple are opening the doors to people who are technically gifted but just didn't go through college, but "cashier", "housekeeper", "barista", and "plumbing associate" are not really worth putting on the list.
A sign the collage bubble will soon burst.
No wonder AI, something that is literally "Do X, if not Do Y, if not Do....", get such a hype. And no wonder a lot of programmers are building it, even at the expense of their own jobs [1]
Shut up and code...
[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ai-write-code-microsoft
I learned more in a 2yr tech school than I did in a 4yr university. I don't think I have ever actually applied anything that the University taught me. The classes I learned at the tech-school I'm still building on and leveraging knowledge from. I actually regret going to University and not just taking a few certs instead at the time.
I've had a 20 year career without a degree. Most employers don't really care, and the ones that do aren't much worth working for. It's a bit of a red flag if you care about a check mark (in what could be a completely unrelated field) over actual experience.
How many non-college degree holders at those companies are getting the huge six-figure salaries vs $10-15 an hour support roles? And for those lucky enough to get more productive roles, is their pay comparable with their coworkers who have 4 year degrees, or are these companies using this as cost-cutting and just bringing in cheaper people to do the same roles?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?! Thanks for the info....but I've been working as a developer in High-Tech for the past 30 years...without a degree...
With college costing more and more, I think we are way way past the point where going to college actually makes a lot of sense for almost anyone.
You could get housing near a college, take only online courses, and learn more than most students for probably 100 times less outlay than a college would cost. And probably eat a lot better.
Sure for technical degrees you can make back the money you spend on a college degree, but it's still a lot of money that you have to pay back, that you could have used to start savings earlier - and it's not like what you learn in a CS degree cannot be replicated by external courses.
I would say hiring-wise it's harder to tell if someone knows something without a degree but is that really true? People get interviewed anyway and that is where you are supposed to figure out if they know enough to be helpful; it's not like all college graduates know the same things anyway.
It's especially good to see Google dropping the requirement for a degree, as I believe they used to require not just a degree but a graduate degree for some positions...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It will still be harder to move between jobs without a degree; you'll be more likely to put up with them than quit. The bulk of coding will be made simple enough that it is more accessible to more people. The CS majors will do the big picture planning and optimize the horribly slow parts. AI will be a library where most of it will just more like training a pet... again with a few experts handling the tough bits and trying to make better tools so lower skilled people can access it.
JAVA was really all about corporate savings; not making better software or making life better for nerds. Same trends will continue... if enough CS people are willing to give away the magic tricks that make them magicians. (Sure, just like a DIY person watching you tube to do their plumbing they will not do good work over all, but it'll be good enough for many.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You could get a job as a Slashdot editor, you don't even need to know elementary school English.
In my experience, many people who have a degree in computer science are worse coders because they are taught that there is a specific way to do something rather then being able to creatively solve problems.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
They give you a brief overview of a variety of subjects while teaching very little. A dedicated student could likely cover the whole degree in about three months through self-study. It's ridiculous to have people waste a lot of time and money just to get a certificate.
I regret wasting my time on a degree. I know somebody who works as a very highly paid programmer who has a law degree. Most companies are far more interested in your programming skills rather than your degree. Sure, you'll probably have to start off in a more junior position, but it's more than worth it for the time and money you save on the degree.
If I pray hard enough and get enough likes on Facebook, my code just writes itself at the end of each sprint. Everyone on my team seems a little grumpy, but oh well. I just turn the other cheek like Jesus taught me.
Trump won uneducated white men, and educated white women at same % as uneducated white men. He also won every category above $50K annual income.
....but never read it
Nobody codes a red-black tree or writes a game engine from scratch now, it's all libraries put together like legos. None of which are taught in school by the way.
I can see that a CS degree is largely pointless now. The non-CS classes are good so that you have a grounding in math and humanities, and you know how to write like an adult, but yeah.
Does having a college degree mean that you are "ultra-educated" ?! Are you now "one of them" and worthy of contempt because you managed to stay in school and learn something useful for the duration ?
Is this another class thing the left is starting to divide ? Like the ultra-rich that mean just everyone who has more money than me (i.e. everyone who has a job), does having a college degree now mean you are another class worthy of contempt for the left ?
Are we really that stupid to celebrate mediocrity to such levels in this country ?
Can we just all get along without artificial classes to seed discord and these ceaseless attempt prove that we are better than everyone else ?
I am sure there will be someone who falls into this category but the culture will be extremely rigid. Google has many good things going for it, it is however, culturally monolithic and extremely conservative. After my MBA I was interviewing for a product manager position there. It was a rather interesting experience I was speaking with several members from their autonomous car division. Great conversations. During lunch they gave me a chance to speak with one of their team, off record so I could actually ask honest questions, I think this is another very good idea. While I enjoyed the conversation's earlier, I noticed they all were similar. I also noted that while they had different college majors they all dress similar they all spoke similar, they had all gone to the same schools. I ask quite honestly "Hey I noticed that everyone I spoke with today all had a Harvard, Princeton degree, do I honestly have any chance I went to good schools but not the Harvards" his response without any irony was "Don't worry, I am from Stanford and we have a bunch of people from Cal Tech" I laughed and almost just walked out.
Until there's a problem that needs to be solved that's not in "the book."
Makes sense.
"I'm sorry, we only hire people who have proven their maturity by spending their parent's retirement for four years while burning couches on the weekends after drinking binges."
stuff like this. The uneducated masses make up the Trump base ...
Who the fuck do you think you are passing judgement on millions of people you don't even know ?
I'd like to see you walk into a bar full of those uneducated masses and tell them how stupid they are. You'd get an education, all right.
I have seen self taught programmers come up with some astonishingly bad ways of doing things. One guy implemented a user id which started at a million and _decremented_ for each new user. If the startup had survived a couple of years the system would have blown up. Very creative.
Explain how they employ so many H1Bs then? In order to apply for a H1B filling your job you haven't found a local to fill, the job must require a college degree...
... is self-serving, so I'm in.
I was a contractor (Manpower Temps) for Mobil Oil, doing data entry on an Arnold Schwarzenegger IBM portable (OK, it did have a handle).
In an unprecedented move, Mobil flew me to Fairfax, Va. to talk with some people, including the CFO.
The CFO said, "You get very high ratings up and down the line and people relate to your methods (IT guy).
"The problem I'm having is that you don't have a college degree."
I said, "In your position, as a rule, I'd want only college graduates. You've heard the saying that 'There are exceptions to every rule' I, sir, am that exception.
"I don't have a college degree, but I'm teaching your people who do."
I'm retired from Mobil.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Apparently Trump's H1B limits are finally forcing Google et. al. to do the right thing and hire US workers.
You have no understanding of what a computer science degree is or gives you. It doesn't force you to solve problems a specific way. It teaches you how to learn new technologies. It does teach you some common programming patterns but design patterns still need to be applied to the situation and you still need to recognize them.
Knowing the runtime for a hashmap implementation vs a list when doing a lookup is a good thing.
I taught myself programming and then went to college. There is value in a CS degree.
I've found the exact opposite. People with degrees not only are faster at picking up new things, they have more exposure to different paradigms and can adapt more easily, their critical thinking skills are better...
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I've seen a lot of code that was 'creative'. Typically it's been the worst, most unmaintainable code I've had to deal with. WAY too may people think that once they've solved the immediate problem at hand, they're done. That's not how software works.
The Y2K event should have demonstrated very clearly that code you write will be around for MUCH longer than you think, and somebody has to maintain that code. I don't want creatively solved problems. I want boringly solved problems with obvious, self-describing code that can be easily updated later on.
This is their way of paying everybody less, make no mistake about it. When computer programming has turned into vocational bootcamps, you can bet they are looking for any way to make labor cheaper so they can be trillionaires one day instead of billionaires.
Hey man, why allow your grunt workers to afford homes when you don't own a small continent yet?!?!?!
These companies have been hiring none college grads for decades now. I know that for 100% certain.
I've seen "educated" programmers come up with equally astonishing bad ways of doing things. Anecdotes, what's not to love? https://pics.me.me/the-plural-...
College education is not expected to give you the knowledge to succeed in the business world. College education should teach one critical thinking or, in other words, being analytical. Any code jockey can learn to code few thing here and another few there, but of he/she (will be referred as he in general from this point on, not to be confused with sexism) doesn't know why he needs to write the code that way, this person is doomed to fail. And knowing why the code has to be written in a certain way, requires understanding of the need for that code, hence the analytical mindset. Take a network "engineer" who is not a college grad, but he knows that a 100baseT or 1000baseT cable can not be any longer than 328 ft in length. It is a fact that anyone can memorize. But if you have the electrical engineering degree, or similar, you know, you can go farther than that under certain condition, but you can not go say 1000ft without causing major strain on your network. And the reason for that comes from the physics and the Ethernet signalling of CSMA/CD principle. Can't you find anyone who understands CSMA/CD without a college education. Of course you can, but as one lowers the barrier to entry, more of the clueless will trickle in and at the end of the day, ones who understand what is behind the scenes will get tired of the dummies and leave. Then your shop will be run by proverbial monkeys, who knew what to do to get a banana but don't know and don't care where that banana is coming from. And some of these monkeys, will be called engineers. What a travesty...
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
Jesus doesn't need you, but you apparently need to learn a little tolerance. Your wish is my command.
In other words, how can we hire more programmers, but not pay them more?
Alternate reading: they write maintainable code.
So they're not uneducated because they could presumably beat up GP?
So now h-1b work work for 50% will be cheaper.
Previously worked with h-1b and a team of 30 did not know the difference in cr/lf causing problem for the AIX box.
Took over a week to convince and retrain them.
Is it the short term quarterly myopic view of company profits a great thing !
Don't tell me the system didn't support negative user ID numbers. What was wrong with him not to implement negative UIDs?
Dumber employees have a harder time seeing that they're being screwed out of health care and other benefits.
> In my experience, many people who have a degree in computer science are worse coders because they are taught that there is a specific way to do something rather then being able to creatively solve problems.
In my experience, the exact opposite is true. When you don't have a background in thinking about the structure of code, the algorithms it will use, how that will translate to memory and CPU usage, you are likely going to code your way into a big mess. A good CS school will not teach a specific way to solve each problem - they teach various programming styles, algorithms, and concepts. If you think that a coding bootcamp can make you a good programmer, I simply beg to differ. What makes a good programmer is having the right knowledge and the right experience. That's not to say that all CS schools do a great job of this, or that the right hands-on experience and post-graduate learning can't replace it. IMO it can if someone is passionate enough about their craft. That is the key - passion, experience, and studying the craft. And talent. I just take issue with the idea that somehow having a background in CS would make you a worse coder. I have never experienced that. Maybe you've just worked with people who had degrees but no passion or talent? That I have experienced.
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
You definitely don't learn this in college. That's the main thing I've had to teach new grad hires for most of my career.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I
I've seen many people with no flexibility in problem solving. Just too few tools in their mental toolbox. They think there's One True Way to solve problems, and that all problems are really the problems they know how to solve. I haven't seen any correlation with college degree on that one though - it's mostly people who have not worked for software companies who have that problem. Not enough exposure to multiple coding styles, tools, and methodologies, since everyone in their shop (e.g., bank) was forced to rigid compliance with one approach.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I see nothing but good things for this. In the development world, real talent is discovered prior to students even entering college. I'm sure companies like Google have discovered this correlation and decided that it isn't worth putting their employees into debt before permitting them to get a job. On top of that, colleges have become a cartel, constantly raising prices because of the requirements many businesses have. Google can snipe capable developers early and stick it to these colleges that give their deans 500k yearly bonuses. I've always felt that a Github account is a far better indicator of skill and talent than a piece of paper anyway.
If you're doing any education past HS and it's all about "getting a good job", tech schools should be considered first.
Tech schools are great for getting hands-on skills to do something necessary and valued by society. It's the age-old American path to success (like apprenticeships, only you pay with money instead of time and cheap labor.) With hard work and fiscal wisdom/savings, you can eventually make a ton of money following this path without any degree (when you inevitably start your own business).
Universities, on the other hand, are for getting more educated in any field you enjoy studying. Liberal studies, law, mathematics, medicine, history, engineering, humanities, etc. (Steve Jobs had a humanities degree, IIRC - and he clearly understood what humans wanted. :) )
If you go to a university and are primarily hoping just to get a job with your degree, then just remember two things (regardless of what you study):
2) Degrees are only keys that can open the right door to a solid career. They're worthless without knowing where to find a matching career door.
3) Finding that right career door to unlock and get your foot into is the single most valuable asset that a school can provide. Motivated people use their time in school to get internships and pursue employers they can meet via the university's excellent networking opportunities.
If university-attending job seekers skip #3, they're making a very costly mistake they'll regret for decades.
Even if you do all the right things in school, educations alone can fail you in the real world. There's a great quote from an old Michael J. Fox movie (The Secret of My Success), where a post-graduation job fell apart. When the main character asked his boss (that let him go on his first day) about why they went to college, he replied: "Well, you had fun, didn't you?"
(Corollary: People who are cheat in college classes are only ultimately cheating themselves. Who REALLY cares about grades after you graduate? Learn - or don't learn. Don't cheat.)
Fifteen years ago I applied for a job at one of these companies. I was told to go pound sand by the HR department, who wouldn't even approve my application -- because apparently my two year associates degree left me unqualified to do the job.
Despite the fact that I was _doing_that_job_ as an F/OSS contributor -- to a project and code-base they were maintaining a fork of internally.
Oh, and I'd been asked to apply by one of their own engineers.
Talk about needing a BS.
Since that day, in nearly every job I've walked into as a consultant / contract employee brought in to 'save the project' or 'help us get better' - I'm typically the least formally educated person in the room. Go figure.
> creatively solve problems.
Do you want to read code that is logical or "creative?" I know my opinion on that.
My biggest beef with computer science majors is that the majority of them have no clue what version control is about. How the hell does a student pay tens of thousands of dollars a semester to learn how to computer, yet never get taught the basics?
Was that contrary to specificway-taught coders? It sounds like you two refer to the same group:
People who flounder facing problems that weren't in "the book"
People who can't find creative solutions
No degree might get you in the door, but if you want a good job, not just a job, you're going to need an MS or MA.
You have no understanding of what a computer science degree is or gives you. It doesn't force you to solve problems a specific way. It teaches you how to learn new technologies. It does teach you some common programming patterns but design patterns still need to be applied to the situation and you still need to recognize them.
Knowing the runtime for a hashmap implementation vs a list when doing a lookup is a good thing.
I taught myself programming and then went to college. There is value in a CS degree.
Yep, it wasn't until I took some college courses that I discovered how bad of a programmer I actually was. Also allowed me to fix a lot of inefficiencies that another self-taught programmer baked into a bunch of software and got reports that required all night to run to be able to finish in less than an hour, among other things.
This will somehow be men's fault.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
Computer science (one of my degrees) doesn't teach you how to code, it teaches you how to learn. The percentage of code-monkies stemming from Computer Science is minimal compared to coding boot-camps or whatever.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Getting a college degree was once reserved for either people with wealthy parents, or people who had worked a few years, saved up, and wanted it badly.
When you turn it into a free-for-all (literally) the value of a college degree as a filter becomes zero.
Yes, hiring people because their parents are wealthy is silly, however, sometimes that's what companies want. What they don't want is someone who went to college because their high school counselor said they need a college degree (any college degree) to be employed, because that results in someone who gets one point above the minimum in a worthless degree.
No Degree. 25 years experience. High 6 figure salary.... Nuff said?
I went through undergrad during the dot com bubble/bust. Companies were pulling people out of college to fill all the available seats. When the bubble burst, guess who those companies kept and guess who was working retail...
The bad news? Robots are cleaning themselves up, looking in the mirror, checking their battery chargers. looking for jobs that did not require a degree, and they will be taking your job in a few weeks.
Apple, Google and friends already have their own independent evaluations of someone's ability. They can afford to be picky and hire geniuses. For a time in the early days of Google no one got in without a top-10 CS degree. When employers like that run out of elite CS grads to pick up, the next stop is finding people who can pass their interview process. These companies are looking for once-in-a-generation savant geniuses to come up with the next world-shattering trillion-dollar product. If they don't have degrees that doesn't concern them as long as they can extract the product from their brain.
Where this doesn't work is the outside-of-Silicon-Valley world. It's common knowledge that really good IT people don't have a CS degree, just a knack for troubleshooting. I have a degree in chemistry from way back and wound up in IT. But, when you have more people applying than positions open, the sad reality is that anyone who doesn't check that "degree in anything" checkbox is going to get their resume thrown out by most employers. Whether that's fair or smart is another story...but traditional employers employing traditional people for run of the mill tech jobs are going to list it as a hard requirement and frankly they're not concerned if they miss anyone.
Call me an elite out of touch intellectual, but I think some time working on a degree in a non-vocational setting is a good thing. Even the really good people I've worked with that don't have degrees are often tunnel-vision focused on the technical aspects of their job. If nothing else, it's a good time for students to finish growing up if they hit age 18 without all that complete. You're exposed to a small amount of courses in fields unrelated to your technical major and students that do it right learn how to absorb new information quickly, write well and communicate effectively. There are tons of people who waste the opportunity also, or pay way more than the education they receive is worth. I think these folks as well as the people complaining about not having a degree are the ones who are most vocal about not needing one.
Computer science (one of my degrees) doesn't teach you how to code, it teaches you how to learn. The percentage of code-monkies stemming from Computer Science is minimal compared to coding boot-camps or whatever. Good luck finding non grads knowing and utilizing properly best practices and design patterns. Ask them if the known and use SOLID (each letter) or other equally important design patterns. I've seen methods with repeated code and thousands of lines of code in them, makes me want to punch the hell out of them.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
I am in a position to make hiring decisions. I have seen NUMEROUS candidates with masters degrees in computer science who cannot answer even the most basic of questions about software development. I have seen other candidates who have 3 years experience, no degree, who can write solid code, be a team player, and have an awareness of business practices. If you choose to pursue a degree, make absolutely sure you get academic work or internships that look like REAL JOBS. Come to me knowing how to work on a team. Come to me with 2 or 3 different projects. Be prepared to tell me what YOUR ROLE was on those projects Be prepared to tell me what you would like to have done if you had more time on the project. Have an idea of what my business does, you can find out from the internet, and be prepared to tell me how you can contribute. You can obtain these skills in college, or you can obtain them via life experiences. But if you don't have these skills, you don't get a job.
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
You definitely don't learn this in college. That's the main thing I've had to teach new grad hires for most of my career.
And you are basing this assertion on the poor experience you had taking your college degree?
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I've seen commercial accounting software that used enforced-unique signed int transaction IDs for their general ledger database tables. This ensures that any organization of sufficient size will run out of addressing space in their ledger a little after 2 billion transactions, and will do it twice as fast as necessary because they are wasting half of their address space on "negative" row IDs that will never be used.
That's probably fine if you're a small business, but if you ever grow into a large business you are guaranteeing yourself a fucking accounting disaster at some point down the line.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Like Zuckerberg, they don't want to see you if you are over 29.
Also you succeed in customer support without a degree.
The summary doesn't say anything about dev positions.
I had a senior electrical engineer who wrote code for some widely used telecom equipment who for the life of him couldn't understand why his C union wasn't giving him all the data he assigned to it on the other end. No amount of explaining could get it through to him. He worked fine in version control. A college degree should mean you can grok basic software concepts if explained to you, not that they have basic working knowledge of every piece of the industry. If they can't get source control after explanation, then their school failed them and society. If you think they should just be handing you the perfect cog for your machine, then you don't understand what college is for.
What have colleges ever given us?
When you're looking for skills rather than credentials, that tells me you're more concerned with doing good work than looking good in sales proposals.
While some career-minded people might seek credentials to "demonstrate" their skills to potential employers, there are a lot of great people out there who don't bother.
And you may see less poaching of skilled employees simply because they don't have the right mix of buzzword bingo to attract the scavengers.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
My day job is cleaning up after 'educated' programmers.
Some individuals have the ability to design elegant solutions. Comp-Sci degree plans can be passed without those abilities, and the skills can be learned outside of a classroom.
The gist is that degrees have been used as an indicator of coder quality and it's a very poor tool for that.
No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In my experience the reason students don't know about version control is that they never need it. Most of the code they write has one version, the one they turn it for their specific assignment.
Just looking at the present CS program at my old school. There's a lot of math. An algorithm course. One on data and file structures. Computer engineering and digital logic design courses. A C++ and Program language concepts course. Even a single Operating Systems course.
At the 400 (senior) level the student selects three courses from a variety of courses which include Database Management, Operating Systems II, Crypto and network security, Compilers, AI, robotics, Android and something called software design and development.
Very little on anything like User Interface Design, Versioning or Software lifecycles, or anything that would really prepare a student to write programs or more important maintain other people's code in a software organization.
Remember also that at the 400 level a student is only taking three out of 15 or so courses. I suspect a lot of students pick some combination like AI, Robotics and Principles and Applications of Multimedia or some other not highly useful combination, at least not highly useful in a real job, just because they think they're interesting (or easy.)
And in general with anyone who feels the need to bring up credentials. That never seems to occur to the highly skilled. They want to talk about the cool new thing they're working on, or elegant solution instead.
Higher education seems to at best give some structure to the self initiated learning for the really gifted folks, where it's not an impediment. It's more useful for the rest of us.but by no means the only way to excel. Mentored learning works better for example.
I'd only begin to believe this if the TFA title read "Google, Apple and 13 Other Companies That No Longer Require Employees To Have a College Degree For Scrubbing Shitters".
Is this a click bait or something? There aren't a lot of context in this article - of course you wouldn't need a degree for jobs that do not require higher level education/training (e.g. operations/maintenance, receptionist, book-keeper, security, janitor). And in the top 15 it has Costco, Whole Foods, Lowes, Home Depot, Publix, StarBucks, Nordstrom and Chipotle. Wow that's tons of insights.
Previously required cashiers to have degrees? What a crock this article is...
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Too many bugs are caused by 'creative' solutions where a library function or othr standard solution would have been better.
I would agree that there is value in a good quality computer science degree. With that said, I was recently working on a proof of concept. After I got a functional version, I started thinking about obvious optimizations and the first thought was around algorithms and data structures. What I found was I had ended up implementing a sparse adjacency list based on python's dicts which is likely a very efficient data structure.
Is that my college training that caused me to think about the problem in that way? I don't think so, I think it was more my experience coding and thinking about an easy but relatively efficient implementation and since python dict's are very convenient. Where my degree comes into place is I was able to quickly validate what is likely the best data structure and I could then assess my implementation to realize I had what is likely the best data structure. IF you have good programmers even without that training, they could have done the proof of concept and then I could have evaluated that it was functional and done an evaluation for optimizations.
Where I feel I got the most value out of my education, though, was in the diversity of challenges I faced, For example, having professors that valued different styles of programming language and felt there was value in learning them -- functional programming teaches you to keep your functions simple and single purpose which is VERY similar conceptually to the single responsibility principle in object oriented programming. By understanding concepts, they argued, I could pick up new languages, new technologies, etc and still stay relevant.
there is a specific way to do something rather then being able to creatively solve problem
Only if they went to a bad school, and/or are idiots. Their strengths are generally having a good working knowledge of how similar problems were solved in the past, and what was good/bad about them. If they get stuck on that, the problem is not education, it's IQ. The issue I have seen is being overly focused on finding the optimal algorithm, when simple or straight-forward will suffice, and being nerd baited into arguments over how to write good code, versus getting something done on a deadline.
I know I will take heat over that last statement, but let's face it, sometimes you have to do the nasty to pay the bills. Good coders will get rid of that abortion once the storm passes, bad ones just grouch about it until the end of time or carry it forward as a monument to the perceived stupidity of their bosses.
The proof is in the pudding. It is really really hard to make a quality app, one that launches fast, has smooth animations, reviews well, shows an understanding of interface factors...
What do you judge applicants on? Certifications? GPA? Whether they have a degree in an unrelated field like Computer Science?
I know several people who spent tens of thousands on college and are now in jobs that never needed that education. They seem rather happy other then they have remorse for paying so much for so little in benefit. Hands on experience is way more useful for many jobs and at least major employers are now realizing this.
That's too bad. CS used to actually teach stuff, but it has been dumbed down over the years. Coding is simple. If a company only wants coders then good for them but they won't be making great products that way unless they start mixing in people who can go beyond that and start thinking.
A college degree isn't just a way of getting a trade, it should be a way to get the student to learn, learn how to learn, learn how to think well, learn how to be logical, learn how to be abstract, and basically exercise the brain so that it can be useful. Once you've got that, then the problem solving comes more naturally. Learning about other subjects is great because programmes also need domain knowledge. Learning how to write is good too, even for engineers, because you end up writing documentation much more than you write actual code.
Right now, I wish I had computer science people working for me. I have a whole lot of EE types who learned to program on their own, and it shows. They're working on a code base written by EE type people who fundamentally didn't understand a lot of software concepts such that the result is extremely difficult to understand or maintain. But CS people don't like doing anything low level anymore.
My concern is that articles like this just tell a lot of lazy students that skipping college is good for them. If someone can go to college and can afford it, then they will almost always do better with college than without it.
The third way, learn how people did this in the past and adapt from that. Not just "in the book", which these days seems to be the same as "find it in the code library somewhere". Having a creative solution can often be just as bad. The creative solution may not work, it may have terrible performance, and so forth.
Yes I agree in many ways. I have heard the excuse of "but we didn't learn that in school" several times.
New languages don't solve things. As the saying used to go back in school, "you can write Fortran in any language".
It is a selection bias.
It is just that the self taught coders you met are exceptional. I mean, why was that self-taught coder hired? It is most likely because he has shown that he really is good, otherwise, the recruiter would have played it safe and hire someone with a degree instead. Also, why did they chose to code? For a CS graduate, it is a natural choice, for someone without a degree, it must be that he really wanted to do that because of an innate talent or passion.
I've met people who became coders at a time very few people had CS degrees and demand was high. And well, they do solve problems creatively, while breaking everything else in the process. To put it bluntly, most of them were terrible coders. But now, times have changed, and people in general are better trained with computers, so there is no reason to hire unqualified employees unless they are somehow exceptional.
I have been getting full time tech jobs without a college degree since 1998.
I have applied to all manner of jobs for the past decade plus and made it clear I didn't have a degree and got interviews, and also got a job every single time.
The only company that actually said that I didn't qualify because I didn't have a degree was Johns Hopkins, and 3 weeks later they called me to see if I was still interested in the position, and I had to tell them I'd already gotten a job elsewhere.
Confused as to how this qualifies as news in 2018.
For the longest time I've known that the only reason companies put that on job descriptions is to weed out those who would not do well at the job. (don't have the confidence to apply) ... Within the last six years or so I have seen "or equivalent experience" next to every "4 year degree" requirement on every single job posting I've seen.
This isn't new stuff. And even before me other people were getting hired without college degrees.
You assume that being good programmer involves being good at solving problems, which is dar from truth. Good coded algorithms can be utter rubbish, far from optimal solution compared to another that turns out yo be badly/nonopyimally coded.
Does this mean I can get away with not mentioning all my education on resume when I apply for google, Apple and other 13 companies?
Yes, this! A thousand times this!
so true
I always thought you needed at least a Master's Degree to clean the floors in the data center.
Some people do better at college than others. Some people are good learners but poor test takers.
Look at the NBA for example. Kevin Garnett, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant didn't play college ball but were (are) exceptional players. Does that mean that every high school kid is ready for the NBA? Of course not...but some of them are. Some kids have great college careers (Jimmer Fridette for example) but lousy pro careers. Steve Nash nearly switched to soccer because he couldn't get any college to give him a try. Yet he had a great pro career.
Similarly, there are lots of outstanding college educated IT professional and lots of outstanding IT folks without a degree. As near as I can tell, from over 20 years in the business, there is no direct correlation between a degree and success in IT. Some have it and do well, some don't have it and do well.
Personally I don't think that having a degree should be a hard and fast requirement. As long as someone can demonstrate that they have the skills, aptitude and attitude I think they should be given a chance. Where they obtain those attributes is immaterial.
How much of that is because the application side of it was written in a language that has neither a 64-bit integer type nor an unsigned 32-bit integer type? PHP, for example, has no 64-bit integers unless it's running on a 64-bit architecture, and last I checked, a lot of virtual private servers were 32-bit in order to fit more pointer-heavy data sets in RAM without having to expand to the next larger size (and next larger price) VM. Has this changed recently, to where even 512 MB to 1 GB VPSes are 64-bit?
How the hell does a student pay tens of thousands of dollars a semester to learn how to computer, yet never get taught the basics?
By attending a school that doesn't provide a remote repository host for its software engineering students to use. Though Git can work purely locally, backing up a repository to a zipfile on a FAT32-formatted USB flash drive isn't the most convenient way of planning for possibility of media failure.
Here's the headline: "Employers continue to come up with creative ways to pay engineers less." In my experience coders with pure experience are great, they get to work and can start writing really bad code. On the OTHER hand, coder fresh out of college ask lots of questions, take lots of notes, and then eventually start writing really bad code. There's no replacement for some one with some education AND experience. Take a fresh grad or a hacker with no STEM education and ask him/her to sit down and write a PID algorithm for "the" application right now. The grad will know what you're talking about but not know how to do it for this particular application, while the hacker will have no idea what you're talking at all or will know what you're talking about but by another name. The grad with experience will scope out this problem like a normal, capable engineer, and get it done. You do NOT learn that at "coding camp" or bot scripting. I'm seen it too many times. These companies were hoping to save a few pennies with H1B visas. Now they're hoping to do it with "coding kiddies" with Python or Ruby or o0ne of these other non-hardware facing scripting languages. Good luck with that.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
The creative person might claim to have invented a new algorithm which is something the rest of the industry uses. The degree taught person might use the one and only way they were taught all those years ago. Continuous learning is the important thing. New algorithms and methods are always being published.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
A big brands enter a generation of demographic stupefaction.
Workers with no skills and who will need support working.
Once great US brands become charities? A work center for the local population?
Products and services the world wanted to buy from the USA will be found in nations with engineers and professionals.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
the nba and nfl need minor leagues / JR leagues Like the NHL / MLB
My intro to computer science class focused very heavily on problem solving.... But then the problem came from the teacher not telling anyone much about programming. He mostly focused on math problems, how to steal wifi from your neighbor, and how drunk we should get every weekend.
No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
50? I'm envious. The last 7 years of interviewing hundreds of candidates uncovers about 1 in 50 that actually understand data structures and algorithms, much less know anything deeper about how computers and memory work or how the language chosen can affect your performance and choice of algorithms/data structures to use.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I've found the exact opposite. People with degrees not only are faster at picking up new things, they have more exposure to different paradigms and can adapt more easily, their critical thinking skills are better...
It depends upon the degree. CS? Complete and total waste of time, generally. Some engineering degree where rational logical thought and problem solving are required to succeed that also utilize coding to solve problems? Absolutely, and those generally also tend to have learned a few best practices (see below)
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
Maybe 30+ years ago. The last 10-15 years worth of graduates appear to have only learned Java/JavaScript and HTML syntax. Critical thinking skills are on the level of an 8th grader, at best.
In fact, an 8th grader might be the better hire, they have less ego and are willing to learn instead of saying the latest gee whiz language or framework is the solution to all your problems. I mean, I'll have to train in any case, so why not go with the willing candidate? /s
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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Both sides are correct and both sides are wrong. You need both creativity and knowledge, but the creativity is more important in the long run in my opinion. You need to be creative in order to break down the problem in order to properly identify the problem. If you can't describe the problem, then you can't solve the problem. This part takes creativity because there is never a perfect fit. What you get is several "standard" ways to solve a problem, each with trade-offs. Quite often, the different ways are incompatible with each other and if you choose the wrong one, you're going to have a horrible time digging yourself out of a huge hole.
... I didn't need to be taught these ideas, they were self-evident when I looked at the hypothetical problems in my head. The benefit of having pre-knowledge is it would have taken less time and I would have had better engineered my code instead of organically optimizing it as I thought about these problems.
Many seems to think you need knowledge in order to find the answers to a problem, but I disagree. I have little knowledge, but I can describe the problem. To Google! If I can describe the problem, I can search for the answer. The biggest issue I tend to see with people who "know" a lot is that they only know what they know and nothing else. They have a hammer and everything is a nail. They will find the closest answer to their question and run with it as if they have 100% confidence.
Many times I can't find an answer fast enough, and I just create my own solution. Most of the time, my solution turns out to be one of the answers, just not as polished and ideal. I self-taught myself multithreading before I even had a computer. By the time I got a computer and started to learn how to program, it turned out my solutions to "threading problems" already had terms like "race condition", "pipelining", "atomic"
Personally, I prefer the creative aspect, biased because I have a disability that hampers my memory. Anecdotally, people with lots of knowledge tend to suffer from Dunning–Kruger effect and "I got a hammer". Scientifically, there is a knowledge/abstract-reasoning tradeoff. Beyond a certain basic amount of minimal knowledge, the more knowledge a person has, the worse their reasoning. Reasoning peaks in teens and cliff-dives in most people's 3rd decade. A small subset continue to get better at reasoning throughout their life, but they all seem to have learned how to purposefully forget.
This is indeed a problem but Computer Science is a mathematics degree. People like it because it has computer in the name and it means you're smart and it teaches you how to pass the tech interview.
Problem is the hardest parts of it don't have much to do with tech industry problems and employers are going to want you to know a bunch of "hot tech" to get really a good job.
Most people are not smart enough to pass Computer Science unless they're motivated to work in that field for some reason other than money. If they're so smart and driven that they pass and they don't like the subject matter, I say hire that smart motherfucker. If they do good and get along with people maybe they might even be management material.
Comp sci should not be passable without learning how to design elegant solutions. It's easier to pass CS without learning how to code than it is to pass without learning about the time and space complexity of problems. Design patterns are included as part of some CS programs as well. Perhaps your educated programmer is not motivated to produce elegant solutions.
Get a guy that has a 4 year degree and has a background with operating systems. Operating systems and advanced operating system courses weed them out quickly. Even graduate students.
Myself and probably about 30% of our team are degree-less and making $135K to $180K in Unix/Linux system admin/systems programming roles at a fortune-10 healthcare company. We are not atypical here... but I can't speak for other markets. I often do technical interviews for similar positions in my company - we never care or hardly ever even ask about education (HR may before the candidates get to us - I'm not entirely sure.)
That said I've been personally involved in hiring two people who's education played a role - one Stanford graduate and one local graduate who had a PhD in Math - both were, effectively, busts. Stanford was a nice guy but was never happy, hopped around internally and finally left to be an independant contractor. He's been doing the same thing for about 10 years now. PhD was a jerk, made enemies internally and is now contracting in the Milwaukee area, at basically the same level as he was at my company.