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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.
Android runs like it was coded by people who picked up a C++ Builder book from Egghead Software.
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?
stuff like this. The uneducated masses make up the Trump base, and most republicans. Why? Because they are uneducated. Yes. I AM being very nice. This is slashdot. Not reddit.
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.
Google and Apple have been rejecting my resume for nearly twenty years; and I already had ten years of experience as a UNIX systems administrator, when I started applying.
Fuck those arrogant assholes. I refuse to submit myself to Google's abusive excuse for an interview.
What's that? They don't do that any more? Prove it.
I say, once an asshole, you're not going to change your stripes.
~childo
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.
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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.
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."
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.
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.
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
In other words, how can we hire more programmers, but not pay them more?
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 !
Dumber employees have a harder time seeing that they're being screwed out of health care and other benefits.
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.
those uber-aasho7e I ever did. It you got there. Or I ever did. It
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.
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.
This will somehow be men's fault.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
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.
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.
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.....
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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.
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.
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?
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?
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".'
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
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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.