Hiring Based on Skills Instead of College Degrees is Vital for the Future, IBM CEO Says (gizmodo.com)

What does the future of getting a job in the tech industry look like? According to the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, it's important that tech companies focus on hiring people with valuable skills, not just people with college degrees. From a report: Rometty made the comments yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The CEO said that technology's fast-moving pace here in the 21st century makes it harder for people to find jobs and has led to disillusionment with the future. "With the new technologies that are out there, I think there is a huge inclusion problem, meaning there's a large part of society that does not feel this is going to be good for their future," Rometty said. "Forget about whether it is or it isn't or what we believe. Therefore they feel very disenfranchised."

[...] "So when it comes to education and skills, I think the government can't solve it alone," Rometty said. "I think businesses have to believe I'll hire for skills, not just their degrees or their diplomas. Because otherwise we'll never bridge this gap." "All of us are full of companies with university degrees, PhDs, you've got to make room for everyone in society in these jobs," Rometty said as other business leaders on the panel nodded their heads. She added, "We have a very serious duty about this. Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis. [...] We have to have a new paradigm. You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."

Comments

"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

A degree and experience isn't mutually exclusive. We require both for prospective employees.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

I want someone who will invent the next wheel and not the process by which someone might invent the next wheel

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

hell yea!

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

Never say never, some jobs are not about inventing the wheel, but as you said, about the process by which someone else migth invent the wheel.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

I would not hire a company to work on such a process, that is so idiotic and would be a good way to decide who not to work with

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

A degree and experience isn't mutually exclusive. We require both for prospective employees.

If you re-read the headline you will notice there is a third element: SKILLS.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to figure out how you will get to the moon before you can get there.

Re:"Instead of"

[Austerity Empowers]

A degree and experience isn't mutually exclusive. We require both for prospective employees.

The problem is how many skilled people might you be excluding based on your college degree requirement. A college degree should be a crutch, it helps you acquire new skills rapidly and should offer the foundational knowledge to give insight into why the various tools and processes behind those skills exist in the first place. Essentially it should be something the student elects to get on his own accord, not because someone requires it. Thus the cost/benefit analysis of a college degree can once again fall upon the person paying it, and he doesn't feel obligated to it (and perhaps universities can finally get around to reshaping themselves to fit the needs of the world, not existing to serve themselves).

Anyone who can learn a skill should have equal chance at the job, provided he can demonstrate competence with that skill in some fashion. Doctors have to pass their licensing exam, lawyers have the bar exam. It makes sense that to declare competence with a skill should require some meaningful demonstration of that skill.

A college degree has never offered that, and I spend a lot of time interviewing people and basically administering them a final exam, when I really should be talking to them about other things. However, if they can't pass my final, the rest is worthless anyway. They may have a great attitude and really want to contribute, but if they don't have the skills... I got nothin. HR makes sure I don't see anyone without at least a Master's degree, and precious few of them seem to have the skills. So I'm not sure the status quo is really working for anyone.

Personally I think the only solution to this problem is to forbid college degrees from being considered in employment. Obviously this is a huge grenade to throw in the field, but until we can come up with some better way, the system will continue to be broken.

Re:"Instead of"

[jythie]

Ah yes, the 'programming challenge' final.. i.e. the 'guess what specific niche that if you have a solid base can probably look up in 10 minutes but if you don't know it off the top of your head and solve it the way I picture it, that means you don't know anything!' test.

Re: "Instead of"

[sycodon]

What they want are monkeys trained in a specific skill who will exactly as they are told and won't ask questions.

Trained monkeys are a dime a dozen and will be treated commensurately.

Google sure wishes they had trained Monkeys working on that search engine for Totalitarian regimes.

Re:"Instead of"

[jellomizer]

You forgot skills.
A degree (use too) correlate to how flexible you are to change. You have been taught on how to learn new things as well being exposed to more advanced topics in such major.
Experience increases the number of tools you have in your toolbox. As opposed to the degree, you know more stuff, and have better instinct on what will work and what will not.
Skills it is how well you can do a particular job. Say for a software developer career, you may know the theory on how it works, you may have been doing it for decades, but your output is just crap because you don't have skills in your job. I have seen this with a lot of old timers at a company, where their job over the time has been limited to just changing a few data fields and perhaps an if statement. When faced with something new say having to make a web application. They just don't have the skills to do it. Where some kid with the skills and without any degree or experience could exceed them.

Now if you want a disposable employee, then just hire based off of skills. Work them until you don't need that skill anymore then toss them aside.

However if you want someone who will grow and expand with the company, you really need to focuses on all three traits and be sure you are encouraging and promoting them for having all three traits. They are adaptable to change, they can pull from past experience to prevent reinventing the wheel, and is able to complete the task at hand well.

Re: "Instead of"

[edris90]

Unless you just try multiple different approaches and parallel until what happens to work and then work your way backwards to see how you did it.

Re: "Instead of"

[edris90]

But it would be the first step towards cleaning up the mess.. the problem is that acquiring documentation and created a reputation of skillfulness, is much easier than actually learning the skills. As a result, people spend more time on posturing in less time on learning to be useful.

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work at a place where even the minimum requirement for even a receptionist was a 4 year degree. That rule was to prevent the blue collar shop employees from working their way into an office position and seeing firsthand that management did not have a clue.

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

If college degrees were not a valuable tool, do you think companies would be using them?

For every competent self-taught applicant you get, you will get 10 incompetent self-taught applicants. Requiring a degree greatly reduces the number of people overall who will apply. Big companies may be able to afford to sift through the dust to find the diamond in the rough, but smaller operations should go to the jewelry store. There are people who make money mining for gold, but you don't see me out there digging with a shovel.

Off the top of my head, some benefits of hiring a degreed candidate include:
- it's hard to graduate with a decent GPA from a decent school without knowing SOMETHING and having some degree of self-discipline in your (school) work
- it's hard to graduate from college if you are abjectly poor or constantly in and out of the criminal justice system
- people who hold degrees realize they have an asset they paid for with (at a minimum) opportunity cost and are therefore motivated to see some ROI
- students are "forced" to study subjects selected by experts, which tends to create more well-rounded skillsets that are broader than deep

There is value in reducing variance to get more consistent results more quickly. Would you take out a loan to bet a million dollars that you'd flip ten heads in a row, if the prize were ten billion dollars? No? The expected value to you is several million dollars. No sane person would take this bet unless a million dollars didn't matter.

Re:"Instead of"

[Shaitan]

^ The reason for the alleged talent shortage in a nutshell.

Linux/Unix admin to devops is a great example of this. You have thousands of highly experienced people floating around who are perfect candidates to shift into devops but overnight all of what is essentially performing administration with some new toolchains listing are looking for software developers with the same prejudice toward high degrees the software development field is plagued with. The big problem? Administration was not plagued with this prejudice.

The need to get familiar with git/jenkins/and an automation framework should not bar you from hiring someone with 10-20yrs experience managing enterprise systems into your enterprise. A degree certainly shouldn't. You don't need someone who can spout impressive theory you need someone who has experience with those massive loads and critical operations and who knows where design choices will block you in a few years down the road. Those tools are easy and a degree really makes no difference one way or another the skill at play here is just coding. It's takes longer to get familiar with the specific environment in any large organization than it does to pick up a new toolset.

I would certainly be looking for diverse experience (a handful of shops vs sitting in one seat for 10-20yrs) but a proven track record is more valuable than a degree any day.

Re:"Instead of"

[Shaitan]

"The problem with hiring all the best and brightest for the company, is I would expect a high turnover."

Agreed. I would say though, that I highly recommend you make your final exam open book... like all problems in the real world are. I can't speak for everyone else but honestly everything has reached a point where I don't memorize much of anything anymore. Except maybe on a short term basis while working extensively with the same things. But I do retain a mental scaffolding of how to find and accomplish a task.

Also, that exam should be a challenge of some sort that involves the person sitting at a computer with a block of time and without you there. Plenty of people bomb while nervous in interviews and who will surprise you afterward.

Honestly though, the environment and system of achievement people get used to in college almost seems to inhibit them in the workplace. They are used to someone having the answer and the expectation the material will be provided. The real world isn't like that, YOU have to figure out an answer and the material might not exist.

Re:"Instead of"

[Shaitan]

"For every competent self-taught applicant you get, you will get 10 incompetent self-taught applicants. Requiring a degree greatly reduces the number of people overall who will apply."

That isn't the issue, the issue is that your rate of diamonds doesn't go up with the degree requirement. In fact is generally goes down. The methods of learning found in a classroom that people with degrees have gotten used to don't translate well to the real world where the issues aren't contrived and there is no book that just provided what you need for the answer.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

They are mutually exclusive from what I've seen.

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

Your HR is nuts unless you're in a very researchy arena. The sweet spot for a successful college-educated producer is a bachelors with around a 3.4 GPA. Higher degrees or GPA tends to result in lesser success (in general, on average, etc for those who are going to scream the exceptions which are certainly there).

Re:"Instead of"

[swillden]

Ah yes, the 'programming challenge' final.. i.e. the 'guess what specific niche that if you have a solid base can probably look up in 10 minutes but if you don't know it off the top of your head and solve it the way I picture it, that means you don't know anything!' test.

If that's what you get, the interviewer doesn't know what they're doing. Programming tests should test your ability to solve problems and write code. They shouldn't require any knowledge beyond basic algorithms and data structures, plus, of course, a knowledge of the syntax and idioms of the language you're using.

And if the interviewer is expecting you to solve the problem in the same way they would, that's bad, too. Any correct solution should be fine. I had one candidate who created a better solution than the one I had in mind, which is pretty impressive since I'd already had several of my colleagues and a few dozen interview candidates give it a shot, plus spending a fair amount of time on it myself. Yes, he got the job, and has excelled.

Further, if the interviewer is doing the job right, it shouldn't even matter that much whether you solved it correctly! That's not the point. The point is to see how you think your way around the problem. Someone who blunders around blindly and happens to stumble onto a good approach is not going to get as high marks from me as someone who methodically and intelligently works through the possibilities and can clearly explain their rationale, even if they happen to miss something. (Though the best programming challenges don't rely on the candidate getting any flashes of insight, and can be solved fairly quickly by anyone competent.)

Re: "Instead of"

[SomePoorSchmuck]

You have to figure out how you will get to the moon before you can get there.

You clearly haven't spent any significant time in academia.

It's more like "you have to figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will figure out how you will form an exploratory committee to determine the cultural impact of selecting a committee to figure out how you will justify getting to the moon to the Provost with a 3 minute video montage presented at the university coordinating board meeting four months from now".

I've seen plenty of instances where folks who've had to roll up their sleeves, self-teach, and learn experientially on their own, far outperform a once-bright mind which was institutionalized into just another make-work fapdrone by Higher Ed's culture of endless "impact/engagement committees".

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

They want a synergistic rock star thatâ(TM)s a ninja who can design and program and make coffee and be so scared of deportation that they work 80 hrs a week. Minimum.

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

One problem was introducing debt for college degree's without limiting what degree's were subsidized and capping the total investment per degree. That's flooded a system with lots of capital that doesn't need it and at the same time, ruined the ability of a college degree to indicate competence. The idea with civil engineering degree or physicians degree is you had a credentialed person who had the basic experience and studying that they wouldn't, for example, build a bridge out of toothpicks or use yarn for sutures; to enforce some standards on the management and industry by providing a body of people who furthered a particular science or study. You introduce free money and politics into the equation and competence takes a back seat.

Another problem is companies have messed up their compensation strategies to such a degree someone could come in, save them millions of dollars a year, walk out, and they wouldn't notice anything but the bump on the cashflow report. Accountants understand risk and cost, that's it; MBA's understand Risk, Cost, and Process, but lack the skills to engineer the process in the first place. A research lab is effectively 10,000 workcenters and the correct routing and BOM gets you the shiney, and to figure your way through the maze, you need to understand the maze, meaning have specialized knowledge and experience, in order to navigate the maze effectively.

So what you effectively have is accountants and MBA's experimenting with shortsighted ideas to make more money which, because they abstract everyone into a number, creates machinations that have zero respect for human life, dignity, or for the persuit of science because they are really just fancy guardsmen and slave drivers who cannot innovate. They lack specialized knowledge and experience, and because they don't value that, come to view it and any innovation it might create that is key to an organizations success as key man risk. There's therefor no reward to innovate, so companies stagnate from the inside out and die slow deaths.

At least in silicon valley the versioning of products also forces the versioning of corporate structure, which is an improvement over previous generations of business management.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to this. It's also harder to start a business if you DONT run your business like that. Because of the way you are treated by banks and investors.

Which of course causes systematic economic stagnation.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

Thatâ(TM)s great when it is the case. I have seen many many many self taught hacker wonder boys who have giant glaring gaps in knowledge or plain inaccuracies, whom have no idea of detail or scope on what they donâ(TM)t know. Much of it is Dunning Kruger related, which has a higher chance of being caught in a good scolastic environment.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take a "self taught hacker wonder boy" _any day_ over a witless, credentialed drone from your old boys' club.

Re:"Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

guess what specific niche that if you have a solid base can probably look up in 10 minutes but if you don't know it off the top of your head and solve it the way I picture it, that means you don't know anything!

I've been on both sides of the interview table over the years and I can tell you that when I ask the question I really don't care if the interviewee gets the right answer or not. In fact spitting out the right answer straight away, especially when it's clear that the answer was memorized, is the worst possible result. I usually prepare several programming questions from a large pool and pick at random during the interview to minimize the chance of this happening. What I'm really interested in is their approach to a problem. How do they analyze the problem? What questions do they ask to clarify their understanding? Can they explain their reasoning and coding choices when challenged? How do they respond to critique of their code? The correct solution to the programming interview problem is the answer to the least important question of them all.

Re:"Instead of"

[strikethree]

There has to be something people can use to discriminate amongst potential new hires. Using something random, like the color of their hair, will have no correlation to how they might perform.

There are two main discriminators that can be used. Education is one. A referral is another.

Neither of those two discriminators can guarantee anything. They are to be used as filter for potential candidates. To allow you more time to examine people who have more potential to fit than the average random person.

If you have no discriminators, then you could potentially be evaluating a world class chemist for a janitorial position. If you let the system sort that shit out, it will take forever for that world class chemist to stop being a janitor and start working as a chemist. Inefficient. To speed up the process, discriminators are used.

But then, I have the most eerie fucking Quote of the Day at the bottom of the web page right now: Optimization hinders evolution.

How to balance the Quote of the Day and optimizing hiring practices? A little beyond me at the moment.

I guess my message is: There is no Silver Bullet to the hiring process.

Re: "Instead of"

[Anonymous Coward]

No. This has the same problem as exams. Knowing stuff from memory doesn't make you smart. It just means you put in effort to memorise a bunch of stuff. I would much rather a developer talk me through a design solution of one of his past projects that he worked on than regurgitate googlable facts.

Noooooooooo.

[Anonymous Coward]

She added, "We have a very serious duty about this. Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis.

Stop demanding two years of experience for shit that just came out and there wouldn't be any "crisis" - which is entirely made up, IBM. Because you people use it to justify sending thousands of programming, engineering and other tech jobs overseas to cheap ass countries.

Re:Noooooooooo.

[pr0fessor]

I've totally seen that job posting. The department head gives a basic description of the job duties for the position to a recruiter who has no idea what any of it means a places the add. We usually have the department head approve the add before placing so it usually gets caught before you see it.

Re:Noooooooooo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Stuff like "five years of Windows Server 2019" is crazy.

I'm not enamored about IBM. For development, they love heavily dipping into the H-1B pool, even though there are plenty of developers with newly minted degrees coming out of colleges domestically.

I agree -- this is a made-up "crisis". IBM needs to stop trying to chase after Infosys and Tata, and focus on what assets it has, such as its patent portfolio, and make relevant products.

Re:Noooooooooo.

[Opportunist]

This. You have job openings for people with 10 years of experience in a field that only existed for 5, preferably not older than 25.

After you don't find any, you qualify for H1B. India seems to be from the future, considering how many insanely experienced people in technology that barely exists are coming from that place.

Re:Noooooooooo.

[HornWumpus]

They're asking how many years of experience you have bullshitting skills you don't actually have and then learning fast.

You know you have decades at that.

The Indians are good at the bullshit part, not so much the learning fast part.

Re: Noooooooooo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfft. You know software patents are almost all bullshit tight?

Yeah... nothing innovative is coming out of that portfolio. The sole use of software patents is as an anticompetitive club to bludgeon small companies and open source with.

Sorry to disappoint but if you still are hoping IBM has something actually useful im that patent portfolio I have a bridge to sell you.

In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

A college degree turns out to be useless.

How is it that a student is certified as being "educated" and yet does not possess the expected skills? Education must be a sham.

It's time to get the Government out of education; government money is propping up rotting institutions.

Re: In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

College is not about education. Its about building character.

Re:In other words

[nucrash]

I attended a private school. That school is now closed because it churned out the lowest quality product it could, flooding the market with under skilled employees.

A drop in college quality right now has a lot to deal with trying to run colleges like a business which cuts into the ethos of how a college is supposed to operate.
I have some college teachers who run their classes like businesses and I do have to say that they have a proper ethos in that, class is cancelled, but assignments are still due.
Granted my professor is the exception, not the rule, but that person left the business world because education was more fulfilling.

I am now in a public university and the difference can be noted between private for profit colleges and public universities. I would be far more willing to work with public university students. Teachers are more focused on making certain the students grasp the knowledge instead of trying to pass the student to the next course because tuition is everything. I think if we are to get quality students from quality public colleges, we need to properly fund our colleges so that they are less reliant on tuition and can focus on only passing students that put forward the effort.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that escalated fast.

Re: In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

And binge drinking.

Re: In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

College degrees aren't useless (well, some diploma mill degrees are). It wasn't until sometime after WWII that our culture adopted this concept of college a job training.

College was about cultivating education and had some correlation to jobs in a few industries but was not a requirement. Instead it was geared to individuals who sought further education, not pay per se.

Businesses love it because federal loans, subsidies, and employees essentially pay for their own training at no cost to businesses. Heck, they even leverage public R&D. It must be nice simply making money off others' work. Sure, financial risk exists for new entrepreneurs but as wealth becomes more and more concentrated, those financial risks are pretty small relative to the amount of wealth and near guaranteed growth rate of what isn't risked, so don't pander the risk argument to me--one or two successes can negate most risks assuming assets are safely managed thereafter.

Real risk is spending years specializing in a profession which could drop in demand and leave you with huge unrecoverable time investment. For a business they just drop the person and transfer their pay to the next person in line that fits the current specialized trend. We no longer need a surgeon, instead we need a world class dancer. It may take a few months depending on how picky they are but the business has changed that need. Now, have the surgeon become a world class dancer within the decade. Good luck.

You might argue that that wealth took risk to garner that level of financial security and to that I say so much of the current concentrated wealth is simply inherited wealth, passed along in what's beginning to approach a feudal system masked in layers of corporate hierarchical structure.

These "successes" are children or children of children of children of one person who truly *did take risks* and that individual deserved their successes. These days, not so much. It takes complete fools not to lose mass inherited wealth. Look at our sitting president as a perfect case example. I don't care what you think of him politically, as a business man he's a joke and without all of his inherited wealth, he'd probably be struggling to maintain low skilled labor positions.

Who is the ultimate winner? Businesses who now simply expect a huge line of people who have been training specifically for their list of qualifications. I don't know about you, but as a consumer, if I want a specific product or service that doesn't quite match the norms, there's rarely a line of businesses ready to invest time and money into satisfying my specific needs unless I expect to pay a very high premium. I can call Tesla and say, "I don't like the shape of this car, change the frame" and they'd laugh in my face but Tesla or some other company could expect far more time investment from an individual to meet their employee requirements for a position, then drop that industry entirely for another where another specialist is needed, at the near drop of a hat.

People were fed this image and sets of lies during their education and no matter how much they struggle, they continue to support the corrupt system we live in that disproportionately continually rewards a few members of society that do not serve or support most our interests as a society.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about a private (non-profit) college or a for-profit (private) college? The U.S.'s most elite colleges are mostly private institutions. These include Harvard University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Princeton University, etc.

It goes without saying that all of the for-profit colleges are a joke and not to be taken seriously by prospective students and prospective employers. In a sad sense, the for-proft colleges are a test. Those who attend those schools and pay the remarkably high tuitions are demonstrating that they are too stupid to hire for any important work.

I can only imagine its because most Americans' brains have turned to mush from too much television (where they probably were bombarded with ads for the for-profit colleges) that they even consider the for-proft colleges and not the public schools: community colleges, public 4-year colleges, and public universities. Even if the public schools are rather poor in the world of college rankings, they will in all likelihood at least be less expensive than the for-profit schools and you'll likely not have to worry about accreditation.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

College (can) offer a great education - but that's not what companies want. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development. But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge. And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.

Re:In other words

[jythie]

Depends on what kind of role they are hiring for. Planning on a long term investment with someone who will be contributing for the next 5-10 years? Theoretical foundation and deep knowledge. Need a warm body to finish a project with a set end date or one with a high turnover? Practical skills so you don't waste time on a throwaway employee.

Re: In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

And student loan debt.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

"How is it that a student is certified as being "educated" and yet does not possess the expected skills"

We generally call them "doctors".

Re: In other words

[Opportunist]

In theory, yes. But you should probably tell the college students that leveling your 10th character in WoW is NOT what this means.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

And the concept of a throwaway employee is a big part of why companies have so much trouble finding talent at their desired price point. You just want to hire me temporarily to use my existing skills to finish your project? You'd better expect to pay contractor rates for that shit - employee rates are based on the assumption of a long-term relationship that increases my value.

Re:In other words

[Opportunist]

In my country, public universities are the norm rather than the exception, and they are free. Yes, free.

The caveat? Well, that it feels like a million students enter every year with about 100 graduating.

This basically means that nobody, really nobody, gives a shit about you. Nobody cares, and there's also not any reason to give a shit, too, since where you come from, there's plenty more. If you're good, study hard and put yourself behind it, it's very doable. If you don't, well, move aside, there's like 500 people who want your slot. NEXT!

So what eventually graduates is really, really, REALLY good. These people are perfect in self organization (because without, they wouldn't survive a day, let alone a semester or even graduate), they are perfect in the field they studied (because the profs don't give a shit about anyone not making it, the general sentiment is that if have a drop out rate of 90% in your course, at least you don't have too much dead weight to haul around) and they are in general quite capable of holding a sensible and polite conversation with a customer or supplier without compromising their position and without being unreasonable (because basically if you're either a pushover or pushy, your chances of getting anywhere with the department secretaries are zero).

And yes, these people are in high demand.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development.

Yes. But I don't find that in university graduates. I find that in smart people who have finished the early years of their career, and took the initiative to learn and generalize along the way.

Perhaps that's because software engineering isn't yet a mature field, but I hear the same from other engineering fields.

But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge.

Every place I've worked looks for both. At entry level, practical skills matter more as you won't be designing much yourself, but you won't get far in your career without the foundational stuff.

And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.

Where did that line of BS get started? It was when universities were for the children of rich nobles, who would never actually work in their lives. We live in a different time.

Can you afford to spend $60k-100k and four years of your life for a bunch of stuff that's interesting but has no practical value? Only if your family is rich enough to carry you. For the rest of us in the 99% colleges damn well better produce graduates with the skills to get a good job.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

>Where did that line of BS get started?
As you say, it was there right from the beginning. Colleges offer a place for scientists and other intelligent experts to do research rather than causing trouble amongst the general population, and for would-be intellectuals to learn from them. If you want a more practical education, go to a different kind of school.

The real problem is that colleges have been marketed as career-training institutions, and used as proof of competency by employers, so that people will pay far more than the education is worth in practical terms. When in fact, the primary practical benefit of college for your career is the networking with those children of rich nobles, who will end up being the ones hiring you. Unfortunately nobody tells you that, and that value falls off rapidly as college becomes more popular, and the noble-to-commoner ratio diminishes.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC as a commentary in and of itself... :-P

There is a joke among my peers, having a BS degree is not about the education, but instead about how much BS in which one can navigate. While I had a few good classes while working on my degree(s); overall I only made developments in skill in Computer Science (my Associates) , Software Engineering (the Bachelor's), or Humanities (which consumed a large portion of my classes, not that they were not interesting). That said, my personal and on-the-job experience developed the bulk of my major-related skills and my high school teachers, being passionate about their interests and work, had a fairly comprehensive coverage of the same Humanities subjects (the college could not help the overlap, and the review does not hurt).

Free college is not readily available in the US where I reside. I did qualify for Pell (a type of Federal grant) during my Associates, but obtaining a job in industry raised my income where I quickly did not qualify (raising income was the higher priority since minimal wage in multiple jobs is not livable; my own upbringing also meant that at the time I did not expect it to be livable, so I am not complaining so much as explaining). I do not think that the fact that college is not free changes the experience significantly other than reducing the numbers; although, I would suspect that professors and secretaries may be more jaded over excuses and such due to the increased numbers. Not is not to say that the ability to navigate people and bureaucracies is not valuable, but I think it is only one factor.

Concerning the original topic, skills are difficult to objectively measure in a cost and time effective measure. Standardized tests are good at measuring knowledge, but not application. Papers and portfolios are a bit better. The former has the same potential troubles as papers in academia; the latter requires recognition of the need and the ability to actually have time to invest into the endeavor (not considering the "if it is important then one will make time"). Endorsement systems such as LinkedIn might seem usable at first; however, there is a few problems. I find in my own profile a number of people will endorse my skills, but quite a few are so separated from that type of work that they would not be able to actually judge ability in the area. Adding something such as ranking skills instead of mere endorsement might help, particularly if weighted by type of occupation and the ranking of the other ranking (would end up looking similar to a series of "fellowships" of sorts, by my guess).

As far as the value of the education itself, it is debatable. While I am not in the field of training, I have been numerous times responsible for training new hires in IT and software development positions. I can say (yes, casual and anecdotal) that there is only a limited correlation between performance of the hires to having any sort of degree. What I do find is that those that are already good benefit greatly from college, particularly if the projects on which they are working involves the production of libraries or high performance "tuned systems" (regular "high-level" projects also benefit, but the effect is more apparent on the "low-level" projects). I have seen those with only Associates degrees (which was the lowest I regularly seen non-interns hired) quickly develop into excellent developers, IT workers, and project managers and people with Master's degrees never become more than helpless within and after training (not stating that the higher education implies the failure, but just that there is lack of anecdotal correlation of level of degree with performance on the job as personally observed).

I might note that I have found a lot (but not all) of HR workers to be woefully ignorant of the professions for which they are hiring. It is a given that they are HR specialists and would not be subject matter experts on the topic; however, the difference between one in which makes an extra effort of learning (or perhaps

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's talking about stuff like Liberty University, University of Phoenix, ITT Tech, Devry, etc. While I can't speak to many of these, I have a friend who graduated from Art Institute and he's been extremely good at his job for awhile there (took software development). I suspect that it's like my experience in (overpriced) culinary school: You get what you put into it. If you go in just trying to get a degree doing the bare minimum, don't be surprised if you just get a bullshit education. If you go in with that Asian Tiger Mom mentality, you'll come out with good grades and (probably) a good foundation for your future endeavors. And then there's everyone else. I'd argue that if you're not willing to put in the work, from an actual education standpoint, you'd just be better off with community college and transferring to a local state school. If you want tech, I'm actually interested in Western Governor's University.

But let's be real, this is 2018. Why the fuck is a degree so expensive? Let's take Computer Science, for example. Exactly what is it about computer science that requires $20-50k/year? Everything could be done remote. No building maintenance. Lectures could be done via (some fucking shitty) Blackboard or similar, with on-demand streaming of the course, tests can be proctored out of fucking china for pennies. A cheap ass second/third-hand thinkpad, an internet connection, and a webcam (and linux would be fine, with full Windows compatibility if desired). My gf is in an experimental law school program and their cost is a fraction of a traditional brick and mortar, and they currently have one of the highest BAR pass rates in the state (california), but they're also super selective in their process.

I decided to reteach myself math. I was going to enroll in community colleges, but I've held off because between the free shit on KhanAcademy and looking through MIT's OpenCourseware, I think I got it covered, but without any sort of "credit."

Re:In other words

[lgw]

I'm sure there are a couple thousand people in America entering college each year who won't need any job skills. That's not who the university system is for, nor who it should be for. It should be for people who want careers with a skill floor higher than what you can learn on the job, from engineers to doctors. That's a real, concrete benefit to society. Babysitting the scions of noble houses, not so much.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

Why? College offers very little for such people. You want trade skills, go to a trade school.

The problem is that colleges market themselves as "white collar" trade schools, which they aren't.

Let me put it this way - which seems easier to you? Altering an institutional mandate that has endured for centuries across many disparate colleges? Or cluing the populace into the fact that they're the victims of an ongoing scam?

Re:In other words

[HornWumpus]

Imagine a school where all of your classmates are also serious about it.

That's the main benefit of a good school, the main drawback of all the 'four more years of HS' bullshit degrees.

There's great potential for online groups to be that group of serious students. But S/N ratio.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

College offers very little to whom? Engineers and doctors? Are those "trade skills"?

Overall, I think the university system in the US has lost its way, and the tuition bubble will pop soon. We've fallen behind the world in STEM graduates, but graduate more people than ever.

Of course universities should be "white collar trade schools, at least in the modern sense of white collar jobs that can't be replaced by automation (e.g., not talking about call center jobs).

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

>Are those "trade skills"?

Trade: noun. A skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training.

Absolutely - doctors are little more than bio-technicians, not scientists of any sort. Engineers straddle the line a little more, but both are real-world practical jobs - a.k.a. trades.

Both benefit from some of the theoretical knowledge colleges excel at - but nobody's getting hired out of college to be a "real" doctor or engineer - that comes after years of real world experience as junior flunky to one or more "real" professionals. (Or years in a dedicated medical school, for doctors).

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

I should be clear - I absolutely think we need the sort of high-end trade schools you seem to be advocating for colleges to become. I just don't see any reason (or way) to gut the college system to provide it. Lets build the schools, call them whatever you want, and let the colleges go back to focussing on their real strengths, rebuild themselves in the new style, or collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

Ahh, semantics.

But I don't think that works: the modern deal between society and university needs to be "you produce the skilled workers needed in the modern world, and in return you keep a bit and get to do research". If the system collapsed to a few dozen universities offering nothing of practical value, that wouldn't allow for much academic research.

Or would your "white collar trade schools" also have a research focus and a plethora of grad students?

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

More than semantics - institutional attack strategy.

If you're going for a graduate degree in a field with a high demand for grad students, then you're probably on your way to being an academic (or at least an intellectual) and the university system is probably serving you well. Well, except for those fields where there are few careers outside academia, in which case the fact that there's a lot more grad students than professors should be a giant red flag.

A "white collar trade school" would be for the rest of the middle-class population - all those people looking to lay a foundation for "real" career out in the world. Nobody is looking for grad students in IT, medical services, etc. other than a source of cheap, desperate labor. You need grad students for labor-intensive research.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

OK, I get your point, but you missed my point. The other thing colleges are for is research. If 99% of colleges collapse and are replaced by trade schools with no research, academic research would effectively stop in the US. That's not good. Without the places that we need a lot of to turn out engineers also being the places that turn out scientists, I don't think that's workable.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

Yeah, I realized I failed to address that point. But the fact is universities mostly don't fund research, rather the research grants,etc. help fund the university via "administrative overhead", etc. And from what I've seen, most grad students tend to be employed within their own program - so the engineering grad students mostly aren't working for the scientists anyways, nor vice versa.

And that's before we even get into the institutional exploitation of grad students - if researchers paid their assistants what a person with the needed skills and experience was actually worth, then they wouldn't need a captive pool of grad students. Why should we subsidize the enrichment of the researchers and their funders off the backs of the middle class?

I do agree that there is much to be said for having a breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and experience available at one institution. I just don't see any way to pressure universities into changing their foundational institutional mandates in order to serve a population that didn't exist when they were conceived. Far easier to create a new term for a new class of dedicated high-end trade schools designed to serve the middle class, distinct from the universities designed to fleece the middle class, and let market pressures do the rest.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

>You get what you put into it

So, "you know what you taught yourself"

I'm not disagreeing, but then it sounds like the degree is fluff in the equation. And judging by the second half of your post, you think so too.

Re:In other words

[lgw]

What exactly would be the point of a university that only teaches future professors? Sounds masturbatory. The research goes hand-in-hand with training the next generation of professionals to benefit form past research.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

Same as it's always been: research and entertaining the nobility. Professors generally don't get the job for their impressive teaching skills.

And you don't need experience doing first-hand research to benefit from past research.

Re:In other words

[HornWumpus]

Anything practical is a 'trade'? You realize that's your private definition?

The word you are looking for is 'profession'. Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer, Prostitute.

Re:In other words

[Immerman]

Google "definition of a trade". I lifted it directly from definition #2

Re:In other words

[HornWumpus]

And then you ignored it and used: 'are real-world practical jobs - a.k.a. trades.' your private definition.

HR will screen you out

[sinij]

Without degree HR will screen you out and you will never get a chance to demonstrate your skills. With a few exceptions of world-class experts that are already known, you need a degree. Degree is also necessary if you are mediocre, as at that point you are just a replaceable cog.

Re:HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

If only there was a recognized institution where you could demonstrate your skills without worrying about bringing down vital systems and where employers don't need to pay you. This organization could grade your abilities as it were and then provide a recognized certificate of sorts for you to use as proof.

Re:HR will screen you out

[jythie]

Heh. I would actually put the people with degrees as the less replaceable, and the people who one hires for specific skills as the more replaceable 'warm body' cogs. For years tech has been pressuring universities to not waste time on anything that feed directly into new hires having the exact minimal skills for entry level positions today with the assumption they will be dropped soon after. So it makes sense IBM and such would advocate having even more cheap developers with only the skills they need immediately and then replace as soon as the project changes.

Re: HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

If only... Too bad the only thing we have is college where instead of testing skills they teach them. No wonder it takes years to finish.

Re:HR will screen you out

[i.r.id10t]

Universities perhaps but community or junior colleges or tech schools or whatever you want to call them DO focus on teaching the skills in various AS degree programs, like nursing, radiology or nuke med tech, respiratory therapy, and even IT stuff. here is a sample degree audit for a AS degree in "Programming and Analysis". Could use technical writing vs. a second term of college composition (aka writing about literature) but otherwise not bad.

Re:HR will screen you out

[farrellj]

These days, you also get filtered out if you are over 45 or 50 years old. People whine about not being able to find skilled workers, but I *know* lots of unemployed highly skilled workers who lost their jobs due to company bankruptcies and downsizing, and no can't find a job in their field.

Re:HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe that works in the IT sector. That doesn't help me when I'm looking to hire people for electrical engineering work for major semiconductor companies. There is the PE (professional engineer) license, but in many states you still have to have a 4-year degree to acquire that.

Re:HR will screen you out

[ArchieBunker]

I work with an engineer who has 20 years of EE experience and he is the most incompetent person in the company. He's barely done anything in four years.

Re:HR will screen you out

[supremebob]

Knowing what I know about IBM (I used to work there), I'd imagine that this is more about having an excuse to have lower starting salaries for new workers than actually being concerned about skill gaps.

IBM's HR department knows that people without a college diploma tend to make $30,000 a year less over their lifetimes, and that benefits the companies bottom line.

Re:HR will screen you out

[lgw]

Without degree HR will screen you out and you will never get a chance to demonstrate your skills. With a few exceptions of world-class experts that are already known, you need a degree. Degree is also necessary if you are mediocre, as at that point you are just a replaceable cog.

It's damn hard to break into software development without a degree, to be sure. But once you have a few years experience, almost no one cares.

What appeals on a resume is a history of difficult or interesting problems that you've solved, or having worked at the big-name companies where it will just be assumed that you were solving hard problems. The ideal candidate is always someone who has already solved the problem you're faced with, or more realistically someone with a track record in the same problem domain (experience with the specific tech stack is usually "nice to have", at least at larger companies).

Beyond entry level, a track record demonstrating you can do good work is what managers generally look for (recruiters of course just do keyword searches, but that's a different topic).

Re: HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad they don't teach any actual skills in college either like the most important skill, critical thinking a.k.a. Thinking for yourself. All you get in college is outdated useless information from old washed up teachers that never made it in life either. 80% of the people I've met with degrees are self centered, foolish people that can only recite random useless things they read in a book one time that was written 20yrs ago and doesn't even apply today.

Re: HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

"80%," huh? I'd love to see the analysis that went into that figure..

Re:HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Sr. Mechanical Engineer backfilling his BSME right now, not always.

Re:HR will screen you out

[HornWumpus]

Two possibilities:

1. You are right.
2. You don't understand what he does.

How are you qualified? What metric do you use? Is your hair pointy?

Re:HR will screen you out

[sjames]

True for managers. As long as you find a way to bypass HR so that those managers actually see you.

Re:HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that, but good universities teach you things, things you would never think to even look into yourself.

I've interviewed plenty of so called "self taught programmers" with no formal education, and they can't answer a basic question about design patterns or data structures. You are not a software engineer, you are at best a bash scripter.

Re:HR will screen you out

[dwpro]

Too bad for IBM, because even with this cutthroat but seemingly cunning strategy they will lose essential knowledge on their projects and end up wasting more man hours. Thinking on it, H1Bs are the perfect match-- cheap, modestly competent and won't/can't leave despite hating your boring projects.

Re: HR will screen you out

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, are you that turd who always asks about linked lists in an interview? Yeah, I've worked with (copies of) you many times. You couldn't program your way out of a paper bag - and _everyone_ knows it.

Costs

[Nidi62]

It's too expensive, both in time and money, for HR or hiring managers to test every single applicant to assess their skill level. Much easier and quicker to use education as a proxy or filter, then, if testing is necessary, you are only testing the skills of a few people.

Re:Costs

[Kohath]

It's too expensive, both in time and money, for HR or hiring managers to test every single applicant to assess their skill level. Much easier and quicker to use education as a proxy or filter, then, if testing is necessary, you are only testing the skills of a few people.

Versus the expense of spending 4+ years at a college?

The simple answer would be to create an independent skills testing service that can tell hiring managers what they need to know. Even if it was very expensive, it would cost applicants a tiny, tiny fraction of what college costs.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

The key here is cost applicants. The companies don't want to front any of the costs.

Re:Costs

[AmiMoJo]

His point is a little different though. Even if getting a degree was free, a lot of people still wouldn't get one and feel locked out of the jobs market. Would coal workers be so frustrated if they could get decent jobs in other industries, instead of being met with a wall of "degree required" and left to fight over the low level service jobs?

Of course that means that companies need to train workers.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely agree, University Degree assumes completion of couple of dozens assignments taking up to 2 months each. Every assignment assume balance of studies and utilization of background experience. Person should capable to work out problem in the given time frame. The interview usually takes 1 hr or in case of large corps up to 4-6 hours. This is absolutely shallow approach which will result in hiring a bunch of code ninja looking for hacks instead of driving large scale consistency of the project. The contemporary interviewing process is perfect match to open office and agile based people micromanagement.

It looks like IBM plans to architect new processors in agile methodology :-) Lets wish good luck to them!

Re:Costs

[gtall]

You aren't reading this correctly. This is IBM saying they want to concentrate on "skills" rather than degrees. First off, IBM wouldn't know any skills were they to walk in naked through the door. Second, what they are really saying is "we really like low pay employees which we get when they cannot point to a degree." Other companies might be different, but we've seen too many of IBM's tactics to believe anything they say at face value.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very difficult to develop a test that accurately measures a person's ability to think and to solve problems. If you've ever worked at a large corporation, you'd quickly recognize that they are largely incapable of discerning who the most capable person is from a stack of resumes after doing phone screens and personal interviews.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"Versus the expense of spending 4+ years at a college?"

Newsflash - the employer is not the one paying for the 4+ years at a college.

The employer _is_ the one paying to evaluate the prospective employee.

Re:Costs

[Anon-Admin]

> It's too expensive, both in time and money, for HR or hiring managers to test every single applicant to assess their skill level

Ill say it, this shows that you or your company has poor people skills.

This is based on the idea that every employee or potential employee is trying to lie to you or rip you off. Which is not the case.

Is it really that expensive to read a persons resume and spend 10 to 15 min talking to the ones that appear qualified on their resume? A good interviewer can easily assess a persons skill set and knowledge by talking to them. It does not have to be adversarial!

Re:Costs

[jythie]

I know companies that use these 3rd party services. I won't even apply at them now, the services are always a nightmare of meta thinking, trying to figure out what some test writer values. The run into the same basic problem HR does.. they need to get applicants through the process as quickly as possible and produce some arbitrary score that can be used to widle down the large stack of applicants... time is money and the customer only cares about the ratio of rejected vs accepted in order for THEM to save their money time.

Re:Costs

[jythie]

Ugh. Last company I interviewed at had a 'test' to try to determine if people knew how to program in C. It consisted of all bitshifting questions (nothing else) on a clock and I spent the bulk of that time trying to figure out why their C interpreter was behaving differently than the C compiler I had on my laptop. But they have been using these tests for years and swear by them.

I sometimes thing the whole 'reduce the pile' thing should just be handed over to dice.

Re:Costs

[Opportunist]

Not for us, it is not.

Then again, if you have the requirements that we have (and no, they're not some sham to say "look, we can't find anyone domestic, give us cheap code monkeys from abroad!"), the number of qualifying applicants is usually in the single digits. You can actually invite them all to an interview and even pay their travel expenses...

In other words, it depends on what your skill actually is. If it's rare and sought after, you can rest assured that HR will get their ass kicked if they dump you for having the "wrong" schools (or none). Then again, there's usually a good reason that a skill or a combination of skills is rare...

Re:Costs

[Opportunist]

I dare to disagree, I still prefer our system over here where unemployed are qualified with courses and education to fill those jobs where there is an actual shortage. That way a government can steer people to jobs where there is an actual shortage of labor, even if these fields cannot (easily) perform the relevant education themselves, while avoiding a surplus of workers vying for jobs in a market where employers can afford to hire cheap labor with the pretense of training on the job because it doesn't matter if unskilled personnel (that you can usually hire at sub-standard wages, too) is slow or prone to error.

For example, we have a severe lack of geriatric care specialists (like, pretty much, all the world), which isn't exactly something where you can simply put people into "training on the job" situations (or at least you should not!), while training them is something that the usually charity-funded care centers cannot afford themselves. On the other hand, it would be trivial to hoover up anyone without a training by large corporations to use these people as cheap labor for menial jobs where they barely learn anything while at the same time existing on a "you work here 'til your first accident" base.

In other words, I wouldn't want to hand training people to organizations that don't really want these people beyond what they immediately need. Get these people a solid, well rounded education that they can take home with them and that also allows them to switch employers.

Re: Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

You and your HR department are morons of you actually believe this... Skilled or not, what they can do is always listed on the resume, which is the point of the resume and a simple interview of the people who seem to have the appropriate skills listed will quickly weed out the bullshitters. IME, college grads are the biggest bullshitters of all and talk a big "education" game but when it comes right down to it, they simply lack the required skills and experience to do the job and/or figure out the job and future work involved.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus few if them understand the skills hey would be testing.

Re:Costs

[StormReaver]

As someone who has been on the programmer hiring side for a small company (about 600 employees), I totally agree about H.R. being useless. But testing our applicants for the knowledge we needed (it was C++ at the time) was fairly easy. I created a simple 12-question questionnaire to assess their C++ knowledge. It became readily apparent who was completely useless versus who knew their stuff.

At the end of the process, there was one applicant who stood head and shoulders above the rest. In the two years he spent with us (he left for higher pay, and told me years later that he had regretted leaving), he proved himself to be a very competent programmer and a very likable person.

Re:Costs

[Bengie]

From what I've read about creating tests, psychologists claim the current thought is testing creativity, which includes novel problem solving, is fundamentally impossible. Any question on a test is by definition not novel. It is already well understood and known about. And even the "answer" to complex novel issues are subjective. In the end, the only way to "test" is to have a track record. The proof is in the pudding. Does that person have a history of creating solutions that are stable and reliable.

Re:Costs

[drainbramage]

Has anyone experienced an HR person that actually understood what the IT department really did?
Has anyone experienced an HR person that did not believe they were inherently and deeply superior to the IT person, and superior to the entire IT department?
If so, perhaps you are the lucky one.
When that person with a BA in literature is assessing your 'abilities' don't be surprise if someone with another BA in literature gets the job instead of someone with 20+ years of successful experience and references from successful peers.
Now, I don't want to go off on a rant here but.... Screw you gerald.

Re:Costs

[nerdonamotorcycle]

More importantly, at least in the US, generalized skills and aptitude testing were effectively rendered almost impossible to implement by Griggs v. Duke Power Co., because testing was found to have had a disparate racial impact. The Griggs case was the one in which SCOTUS first recognized the concept of "disparate impact", meaning that a practice or policy is prohibited if it has a disparate impact on a suspect class even if the overt intent wasn't to discriminate.

You can still do skills-based testing but it has to be very narrowly drawn and you have to be able to prove it's relevant to the job. One example of the kind of testing that's permitted would be the whiteboard coding tests many of us are familiar with. If you're hiring, e.g., a Java programmer, it's not unreasonable to have them demonstrate familiarity with Java during the interview.

Some writers, most of them politically conservative, have blamed SCOTUS's holding in Griggs as being at least a partial contributor to the credential inflation that started in the 1970s. With generalized aptitude testing now banned, businesses needed a substitute indicator of generalized ability and the bachelor's degree became that substitute. I personally think the picture is bigger than that and involves a number of factors, many of them likely more important. Start with the dumbing-down of the high school diploma, federal subsidies for college attendance, a large number of young men attending college in order to avoid the military draft during the Vietnam War era, and go from there.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

How is that different from the way it works now?

Re:Costs

[Rick Schumann]

Ah, I see: so only The Rich can have high-paying jobs, since only The Rich can really afford a proper college education? Experience and know-how mean absolutely nothing? Because being a student means you're smarter than anyone else? Passing exams outweighs actually being able to produce things of value? LOL, NO.

Re:Costs

[kalieaire]

Allow me to flip this the other direction.

It is too costly to assume that a specified level education is good enough to assess whether or not someone has the innate ability to recognize problems and come up with creative solutions.  It's one thing when you're poaching MIT doctoral candidates, it's completely another when you're bringing in 23 year old security researchers with 10 years of experience using creativity to find ways to get into stuff they don't belong.

If you're a startup looking for a very unique skillset, focusing on education as a filter will likely prevent those candidates from ever meeting the hiring manager, the guy that actually wants to hire that guy.

When you're looking to revolutionize an industry, you don't hire a book smart manager w/ an MBA degree.  You hire someone from the operations staff who's been through multiple iterations of process improvements for their input on what's been tried, what doesn't work, and what does.

Re:Costs

[zlives]

newsflash, the employer is paying some one for having spent time at college.

Re:Costs

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

What interviews? A lot of management types have trouble even discerning who the most capable person is from the stack of bodies they currently have reporting to them ;)

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

And the ability to assess skills, particularly for programmers, is not simple or easy.

If the system wasn't so streamlined and optimised for profit over all else there would be time for competant people to sit down together and assess each other.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

"A good interviewer"

a good interview probably but not a hiring manager or HR.

Re:Costs

[Anonymous Coward]

These already exist. A Certified AWS Solutions Architect, for example, has taken an exam that covers a broad range of topics related to AWS. However I am not sure that subbing certifications for degrees was the point of the article. The point is HR and the hiring manager need to 1) be trained to look beyond the formal level of education so that they can 2) hire the most qualified application based on skills they have acquired through work history and/or non-traditional educational experiences (think code boot camp). There is always going to be a need for folks with a formal degree. But this is not necessary in all/most cases, and I am glad that some companies are beginning to take notice.

What is old is new again

[RedShoeRider]

"You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."

So, respect for a person who can get shit done.
The 1890's is calling. That's not a bad thing.

Re:What is old is new again

[PolygamousRanchKid]

"I call it new collar."

. . . but what she really wants is a dog collar and the ability to put down the dog, when the skills are now longer in fashion.

Someone with a solid CS degree should be able to acquire new skills as they march in and out of fashion.

A simple single skill person is disposable.

Re:What is old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

And then everyone will be wondering why IBM had a security vulnerability in their code and revealed all of their customer info. Surprise! You hired people without formal training, and you get informal code.

Re:What is old is new again

[JaredOfEuropa]

Skill based hiring would be a game changer if they'd apply it to upper management. For one, you'd get fewer people using words like "new collar"

Re:What is old is new again

[Anonymous Coward]

It's newspeak for hiring women who got ridiculous so called degrees in gender studies, art, and the rest of the bullshit.

Well that explains a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

"not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar." - Oh lord. This does a good job explaining my biggest problem with doing business with IBM these days - the total disconnect between their pricing and the rest of the market. But hey! We can just pretend the old is new, and now we're not charging a premium for IBM-rebranded-but-otherwise-commodity-hardware - we're right-priced.

Oh, and completely unrelated to the CEOs dumb thing here; I'm also a HUGE fan of how IBM is completely transparent about their goals in any transaction. The only thing they're about these days is the revenue, "customer satisfaction" isn't anywhere on their radar. Probably another CEO redefined term.

Its about passion

[Anonymous Coward]

I have interviewed so many candidates who have zero passion for tech and only studied it because some career adviser told them it was a good field to get into.

And its been my experience that even though those people have little to no knowledge about computers and technology, that is not a hindrance to them passing classes & obtaining a degree in the field.

Just yesterday i interviewed someone who has a A+ cert and is weeks from finishing their CCNA, and does not know what an IP address is.

Re:Its about passion

[b0s0z0ku]

^^^ How is the thing about an IP address even possible -- did they cheat on their CCNA exams or have someone else take them? Or does the exam refer to an IP addy by a different term like "network address?"

Re:Its about passion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a while since I studied CCNA stuff, but I do recall them using "network address" more frequently than "IP address". Still, getting a CCNA without knowing "IP address" is arguably impossible unless he paid off the proctors and had someone else do the test in his place. A+ I can understand, even a computer-illiterate could pass that on the first try.

Re:Its about passion

[Anonymous Coward]

3 words

University of Phoenix.

Re:Its about passion

[pr0fessor]

They did what the boot camps for those certs do they pound it into their head in a short time and test them quickly before it falls out again.

Students that can read a few chapters in a book and retain the info for only a short time just long enough to pass a test isn't a new thing I did it all through high school with my History classes. Pissed my history teacher off to no end because he knew exactly what I was doing reading through the material twice the night before acing his tests and then forgetting everything I read a few days later.

Skills-Assessment-Certification-Degree

[Anonymous Coward]

So how would a company know what skills one has ? Test everyone who applies or "oursource" that testing to outside companies.
That means someone got to have a program to assess the skills in question. Outcome of that assessment is certification.
If you gather up bunch of certifications, what do you call it if not "education and degree" ?

On a separate note, would this apply to CEOs too or do they get hired based on which college they went to and who they rubbed shoulders with ?

Ok - come up with another system

[bjdevil66]

...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree. Is there a better merit-based system out there? Or do we start going by IQ test results? Why not go to our genetic profiles (Gattaca-style)?

The problem isn't with the current system of looking at college degrees to judge someone's abilities. It's the devaluation of the college degree itself. People that aren't college capable are being pushed through the system for all the wrong reasons (universities are marketing to students harder than ever, student loans are being shoved down the throats of students that shouldn't ever be going to college, etc.).

Those students need to be given/shown another path to success, and the cheapest solution is to make high school diplomas matter again in real life - not just the college preparation, STEM world. High schools shouldn't just be a farm system for college recruiters; They should have more vocational skills introduced again - or at least make better connections with vocational schools to diversify what they have to offer. (My childrens' public high school - which is allegedly a "Grade A" school in a strong school district - has ZERO hands-on work classes like autos, shop, etc. The closest thing you can get is an Art class. You have to bus over to a vocational school for most of the day to get the hands-on work.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[ahoffer0]

If I had points, I'd mod this up.

Re: Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

I decided one day to begin a new career. I would search the earth for mod points to give to you. Every day I walked, drove or bikes to anywhere there was a rumor of mod points. At first I carried a backpack to hold the points. Over time I switched to a wheelbarrow, then a pick up truck, a dump truck, and finally one day I rolled into your driveway with a team of draft horse pulling all the mod points I could find. I realize it was very early in the morning and I woke you up, but here they are.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not go to our genetic profiles (Gattaca-style)?

My current employer has fingerprint scanners at the door and I think of that movie every time I go through. "INVALID".

I'm a developer. My neighbor does HVAC. He makes way more money than me, and his job can't be outsourced.

I'm trying to convince my son to go into plumbing.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

Those students need to be given/shown another path to success, and the cheapest solution is to make high school diplomas matter again in real life - not just the college preparation, STEM world.

We need to have a societal push that working with your hands is not just acceptable, but good.

High schools shouldn't just be a farm system for college recruiters; They should have more vocational skills introduced again - or at least make better connections with vocational schools to diversify what they have to offer. (My childrens' public high school - which is allegedly a "Grade A" school in a strong school district - has ZERO hands-on work classes like autos, shop, etc. The closest thing you can get is an Art class. You have to bus over to a vocational school for most of the day to get the hands-on work.

And the vocational schools have a huge stigma in both the kids and adults. But they shouldn't. I'm a sysadmin for a university, and I have friends who are welders, plumbers, and tree-trimmers who make more than twice what I make for the same amount of time invested in work. Working with your hands is good money, and there's a side benefit: when I'm off the clock, I'm still often planning work stuff in my spare brain cycles. When they're off the clock, they're off the clock.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[110010001000]

Why not ask for a raise? Go ask an experienced plumber what HE thinks of his job. If you actually talk to plumbers you might get a different story.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in high school we had wood shop/civil engineering/metal shop, but they were entirely voluntary electives that mostly were comprised of students who used the classes as extended study halls/safe spaces to chew tobacco and teachers who didn't give a shit as long as nobody sawed their fingers off.

It also comes down to individual initiative. Many schools (sorry that your's doesn't) offer classes that teach practical skills, but lots of students don't really want to study them. I admit that I took some cakewalk courses in high school (music production and web design) but I also took wood shop and civil engineering because I was momentarily interested in those subjects. Maybe schools need to start making wood shop/metal shop/auto repair/whatever else mandatory for graduation, so that if all else fails you know some sort of useful skill, since there are plenty of kids who will graduate knowing little more than mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[drinkypoo]

...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree.

Stop right there. A college degree does not prove that an applicant can do the job. So arguably, a college degree is actually worthless to recruiters, except that it shows that you are willing to jump through hoops, and it reduces the total number of applications they have to look at. Unfortunately, the non-degreed applications may contain the best candidates, and they're not even going to look at them. It's just another way to get out of actually doing the job for which HR employees were hired. They seem to have loads of them.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not ask for a raise?

Damn, I never though of that! Thanks! I'm off to the boss's office RIGHT NOW!

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[AmiMoJo]

College degrees were never offering the kind of value people think they were. Graduates would not go straight into a job and know how to do it, they would go straight into training and the company would be reasonably sure of getting a decent employee at the end of it.

Employers don't want to spend money on training so they ask universities to teach students skills directly applicable for their jobs. That was always a terrible idea and just doesn't work.

People complain about useless degrees. My mum has a degree in Latin. A dead language. At the time it was popular and no-one expected it to be of any practical use, and employers were falling over themselves to give Latin graduates a job so they could train them.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

This! My kids' school system has a great facility where the high school students can do specialized classes from auto mech to music production, cooking or even IT security. They facilitate other classes there so it is easier for them to transition between locations and keep their core classes. That lets them concentrate teaching expertise across the district and make it available to everyone. Kids do have to show initiative and qualify to attend due to limited space.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

What beautiful snobbery you exhibit. That dirty, working class man, he can't possibly be as happy as me with a degree and a meaningless white collar job and crippling debt to pay off the luxury SUV that has never driven on a dirt road.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[jythie]

Well, if they have access to one's transcript, it shows which 'hoops' have trained tested their knowledge of particular concepts and technologies. Some hoops are arbitrary, but when you get a degree it lays out exactly which functional hoops one has gone through which might be of interest to an employer.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree. Is there a better merit-based system out there? Or do we start going by IQ test results? Why not go to our genetic profiles (Gattaca-style)?

The problem isn't with the current system of looking at college degrees to judge someone's abilities. It's the devaluation of the college degree itself. People that aren't college capable are being pushed through the system for all the wrong reasons (universities are marketing to students harder than ever, student loans are being shoved down the throats of students that shouldn't ever be going to college, etc.).

Those students need to be given/shown another path to success, and the cheapest solution is to make high school diplomas matter again in real life - not just the college preparation, STEM world. High schools shouldn't just be a farm system for college recruiters; They should have more vocational skills introduced again - or at least make better connections with vocational schools to diversify what they have to offer. (My childrens' public high school - which is allegedly a "Grade A" school in a strong school district - has ZERO hands-on work classes like autos, shop, etc. The closest thing you can get is an Art class. You have to bus over to a vocational school for most of the day to get the hands-on work.

THIS.

It's funny to me (and not in a good way) - decades ago I saw the problem - everyone needed a degree to get a job. So to get a job, get a Batchelor's degree. When they were common, well, now you need a Master's degree. We're almost to the point where to really get looked at, you need a PHD.
We have devalued degrees. And, we have devalued trades, as well - huge mistake there. You're ALWAYS going to need someone to fix your plumbing, electrics, etc.
What we need are certifications in specific skills, and they need to be certifications that actually mean something.
Bring back the guilds.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Comrade Ogilvy]

The hands-on vocational programs were always expensive by certain measures, but not necessarily in how they showed up in the short term budget. They could run on a shoestring budget as long as the old man who had been there for decades and knew how to keep the equipment running for near nothing was around. When he retired in the 80s or 90s the principal & superintendent were faced with two choices: (1) find a replacement with the right skills, but that new person is only likely to sign on if given a real budget to upgrade/maintain equipment (where are you going to find the money?) (2) sell that equipment, but that gives you a few bucks to defray the costs of converting that giant shop classroom into two normal classrooms, and now you can brag about the improved college prep program you will roll out (the prep program might be baloney but at least you have two shiny classrooms to show off).

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[lgw]

Unfortunately, the non-degreed applications may contain the best candidates, and they're not even going to look at them. It's just another way to get out of actually doing the job for which HR employees were hired. They seem to have loads of them.

True, with an important exception: female coders. The big companies are so eager to hire women in tech that they'll consider anyone with the slightest plausibility to her resume. It's how it should work for everyone, really, being accepting to unusual paths to being good at software development. It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[sfcat]

It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.

Its really odd that you put the date at which that happened in the mid-90s. The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998 (I should know, I was in that class). So really that can't be true. What you saw in the mid-90s was folks who liked programming but often had degrees in other things plus the occasional CS PhD. The pure CS major undergrads didn't appear in mass for about 10 years (say 2008 or so).

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[lgw]

The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998

Was that a typo? You're off by decades. CS degrees existed in the 70s, but more as ad-hoc custom programs (I'd bet some university, somewhere, had a program in the 60s) . By the 80s, it was pretty normal for a university to have a CompSci department - heck the school I went to in the late 80s had both a normal CompSci degree, and a related degree in numerical methods for math. The field was well established by the 80s, with professors who had themselves graduated with CompSci degrees not uncommon.

The field just wasn't very popular until the mid-90s. It was only with the financial success of Novell and Microsoft (the dawn of the dot-com bubble) that people started pouring into CS programs because it looked like a good way to make money.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[HornWumpus]

HVAC work involves crawling in very tight attics and crawl spaces. Often they are very hot and/or full of brown recluses.

It's shit work, mostly done by kids. They have to pay well because the working conditions SUCK so badly.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[HornWumpus]

You realize the CMU isn't the whole world?

CS goes in waves. It's more or less back up to the level of 1985, the first computer gold rush.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

During the 1940s, as new and more powerful computing machines were developed, the term computer came to refer to the machines rather than their human predecessors.[11] As it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. Computer science began to be established as a distinct academic discipline in the 1950s and early 1960s.[12][13] The world's first computer science degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953. The first computer science degree program in the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962.[14] Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own rights.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not ask for a raise? Go ask an experienced plumber what HE thinks of his job. If you actually talk to plumbers you might get a different story.

Why not ask a unicorn to shit a rainbow?

Oh I know, just go to another universe where unicorns are real and shit rainbows if you can't do that, right?

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is not working with the hands, the problem tends to be the shit you have to put in your hands when you are working with them.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

CS degrees existed in the 70s

The world's first computer science degree program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science, began at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1953.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right of course. The problem is most skill assessments ultimately converge on IQ testing, and IQ testing as a job screening method is illegal since IQ is racist.

College degrees are also a form of IQ test of course, but for some reason they're still considered legal.

Re:Ok - come up with another system

[strikethree]

There is a subject line and a box for informational discussion. When you abuse the Subject Line, some people, like myself, miss part of your sentence. Here, watch what a naive replay does:

...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree.

That is what referrals are for. If you get a resume without a degree, you throw out the resume. Don't have the time or money to assess whether or not this person is reasonable and our competitors could use it as a sort of DDOS on our HR department. So yeah, no degree = tossed resume...

But what about referrals? I guess you could assume that your own employees hate you and your company and want to see it die... and honestly, that wouldn't be too far removed from reality not to actually consider it... but in a reasonably run company, you probably should be trusting your employees at least a little. Regardless, even if every single employee referred one inappropriate person, that is not a lot of people to have to examine more closely.

Fuck it. I don't care about responding anymore. I should just hit cancel but your annoying abuse of the subject line means that my comment will stay.

Why do you misuse the Subject Line? Does it matter to you that you are violating convention? Is that the actual goal, to violate convention? Seriously, crap like that makes comments MUCH harder to read. And read how my quote looks... psychotic, because the first part of the quote is literally missing. Why? Because you broke up your words into various areas and I don't feel like fucking hunting them down to make a coherent quote. Stop being a self-important dick and thinking that you are special enough to get away with abusing convention to make yourself seem more ... something?

Anyways, TL;DR, stop throwing away resumes from referrals just because of no college degree. There is a fucking reason a person puts their own reputation on the line to recommend someone else. This is not hard and it is not fucking complicated... unless you have an aversion to thinking... which most college graduates are explicitly guilty of. "Here is your degree", "Awesome! I know what I need to know, I can stop thinking now!"

Being trainable and persistent are valuable

[Anonymous Coward]

I once knew an employer who required entry-level programmers to have a 4-year degree.

It didn't matter if it was technical or not.

They were looking to see if you would stick with something for several years.

A relatively recent 4-year stint in college is a decent, if imperfect, proxy for sticking with a long-term project and for being trainable.

Now, the article is right - employers shouldn't disqualify people out of hand if they lack this credential. There are many ways a resume can demonstrate that you can be trained on new things and that you can handle long term projects.

I wouldn't discount a degree that severely.

[Anonymous Coward]

While hands on experience is more valuable than textbook, you shouldn't discount a regimented education so quickly. It's true that most of the things you learn in a classroom are forgotten, but the fact that the person took time out of their lives (and likely, money out of some source) to follow a curriculum gives them a valuable lesson in responsibility.

One of the reasons I'm not a Rometty fan is instances like this - she's more interested in the public spotlight and grabbing tech headlines than actually running an ageing company.

Re: I wouldn't discount a degree that severely.

[Anonymous Coward]

The most irresponsible people I have ever met in my entire life have college degrees.

The most down to earth people who take responsibility seriously are those that went to the school of hard knocks.

Turns out that stress builds character, and the only stress in college is worrying over which pub you'll booze at tonight.

Credit to IBM

[argStyopa]

I know it's hard to imagine, but it appears at first blush they're actually walking the talk: I checked a couple of entry level posted jobs at IBM:

Entry Level HW Computer Technician/System Services Rep- Palatine, IL
https://careers.ibm.com/ShowJo...

and
(Cyber) Security Services Specialist - Intern
https://careers.ibm.com/ShowJo... ..and BOTH required only High School Diploma/GED.

That's great and refreshing.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm very excited for being able to take my amateur architecture skills and join a firm and start designing buildings! I have been toying with architecture in Unity for about the last six months and I think I'm really good. Four year degrees in architecture just create designers who are out of date with old tools and systems, but I have the latest skills. Now I just need to find an architect firm like IBM who will hire me without any formal training, because I know better than architects who went to skooool for four long years and are now dinosaurs.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see if IBM continues this practice in a recession. In a "good" economy as we purportedly have right now, I cannot see why any capable technologist would want to work for IBM unless IBM paid an exceptionally high salary, which they don't. As far as I can tell, IBM is filled with old lifers just waiting to retire, H1-B flotsam who don't have a choice, and people who just aren't very good. I suspect that if Thomas J. Watson Jr. were alive, he'd come to the same conclusions seeing what has happened to the company.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

... Except they aren't actually "walking the talk," as IBM is notorious for laying off their older, thoroughly experienced and skilled employees to hire younger, naive and less expensive workers.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cybersecurity position says, "To qualify for this internship, you must be currently enrolled in a degree program with an accredited institution." So much for only needing a high school diploma.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

They're training an AI recruiter model and they need a large training set.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

It's refreshing that an intern position not require a degree? Or that an entry level tech not require a degree?

Are you kidding?

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't believe it until I actually see the position filled. At this point, I wouldn't even wonder that those positions will eventually be filled in by H1Bs.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are literally entry level IT support positions. Of course they don't need a college degree.

Re:Credit to IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you're right about the first one, although the problem is often that companies will never promote people from these "entry level" positions.

What would you expect for an intern job though? If you're willing to accept intern conditions the expectation is that you haven't finished college.

Re:Credit to IBM

[strikethree]

Cyber Security is the area where you will find the largest number of absurdly competent people without a degree. There is something about data protection that precludes a degree from being an indicator of true overall competence. Probably because society itself is mildly insane.

Re:Credit to IBM

[argStyopa]

No, I'm not. I have 4 kids in their 20s. The number of internships and "entry"-level jobs today that nevertheless require either a completed degree or (mostly internships) require a degree or being in the final year of a degree program in a 4 year school was pretty disheartening.

New collar?

[Red_Forman]

Rometty said "I think businesses have to believe I'll hire for skills, not just their degrees or their diplomas. [...] Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis. [...] You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."

She keeps talking about skills and then calls this new class of employees "new collar" instead of "skills collar".

What a dumbass.

Re:New collar?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine all the meetings at IBM that just went in to what to name this new type of collar? Can't be pink because that's too feminine. Can't be black because that would mean minority targeting. Can't be grey because that implies shady business practices. On and on...

Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Hiring based on degrees is vital for the future of the Old Money, (not necessarily White, includes scions of rich families from the Middle East, India like Gandhis Nehrus Patels Boses) to maintain their hold on power.

Back in 1000s a bunch of aristocrats joined together and bargained for their rights and made John The Great sign Magna Carta. Its significance is limiting the power of the Monarch. Then the aristocrats ruled the country with their fiefdoms. Only they would get to be inducted into the Officer Corps of the army and all the teeming masses were consigned to "Other ranks" aka cannon fodder.

Renaissance, industrial revolution, the rise of mercantilism, colonialism all gave rise to new classes of wealthy people and they were inducted into the power structure by doling out aristocratic titles etc.

But the teeming masses, unseemly ungrateful bunch, made a power play and grabbed the hard won rights of the aristocrats for every one, suddenly the Old Money is on the back foot. They removed the power of the House of Lords, and The Commons had all the power, the Monarch a mere titular head, hereditary aristocratic titles have no meaning, the Heir to the Holy Roman Empire, Her Most Serene Princess someononeortheother is working for a wage in Economist or Tribune, ...

The remnants of inducting only the aristocrats for the Officer Corps of the armed forces, merchant marine, and Civil Service morphed into "Degrees from Top Universities". Eton and such schools in Britain, Ivy League in USA, where there is a significant quota for the Old Money in the form of Legacies. About 50% on merit, 25% for the minorities, 25% of the Old Money Legacies seems to be the current quota system. Once these degrees are awarded, the graduates with connections get on to the fast track and get very rewarding very light duty sinecures, risk free jobs sitting on boards and VP of Beer Analysis or Executive Vice President of Trivial things. The graduates with merit end up with ulcer creating tense difficult, but well rewarded careers. The token minorities with degrees from top school, their prospects depend on cultivating/developing connections with the other groups. The degree alone does nothing for the minority graduates.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Old Money

Despite the fact that you might not like it, "Old Money" as described in your post can be more accurately described as Jews. Check the enrollment at the universities you mention in comparison to the population. Compare the representation of Jewish people in the top 1% with their representation in the population. We'd love to hear your impressions after your research is concluded, but somehow I suspect that you won't check and we'll never hear about your surprise to find out that your disdain for "Old Money" is really a disdain for Jews, but you're unwilling to notice or acknowledge such.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Nope, it is not a veiled anti-semetic analysis. I studied this a lot when my daughter was applying for college. From the Indian-American POV.

In fact the Jews' lunch is being eaten away by the Indians. Old Money in USA was WASPs, Jews were the merit candidates, getting a degree and a ticket to ulcer inducing tense long hour financial industry jobs. The Indian immigrants since 1990s are giving a good run for the money for the Jews. Have you seen any spelling bees lately? Indians in Ivy Leagues typically score 150 points in SAT over other groups. No matter what holistic assessment crap the admission officers come up with, the Indians beat them and get in. It is so difficult to keep the Indians out, they are scrapping SAT scores, ACT scores and are going for totally subjective admission criterion.

The real losers in this arms race and battle are the merit WASPs. After old money WASPs take their fill, and Jews and Indians and Chinese take a bite out of merit quota, and minorities take their quota, there is very little left for the old fashioned meritorious upper middle class studious WASPs.

I ran the rat race in India, and won, got through JEE, got into IIT, got to USA and was hoping I ran the rat race, at least my daughter does not have to. Sadly mistaken. Along with me came a million Indians, all who had run the rat race and they brought the rat race with them. Winning a rat race is all they know. They dont realize even if you win a rat race, you are still a rat. A typical fly-over country WASP with decent education has no chance, does not know what hit him. Kumon, math lesson at age 2, multiplication tables memorised by age 4, local spelling bee geography bee champs by age 6, next year academic work completed in private summer classes, all year left to game the holistic admission criterion....

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[DrSpock11]

I guess you didn't go to an Ivy League school or never worked with someone who went to one. I didn't go to one but nearly every person I've worked with who has gone to one has been extremely bright and hard working. And the overwhelming vast majority do not end up in "very rewarding very light duty sinecures, risk free jobs..."

The whole point of Ivy League is that it suggests a high level of rigor in the course work that only the hardest working and smartest people will be able to complete.

Yes, having family that went to an Ivy League school helps acceptance but it does not help you get good grades or pass classes. As an example, look at George W Bush. He got into Yale because his family is as close to aristocracy as it gets in the United States, yet he managed to only barely graduate with a 2.35 out of 4.00 GPA (the equivalent of a C).

Your spiel sounds like a nice conspiracy theory (though you did forget to mention Illuminati anywhere), but I don't think it has much basis in reality.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[The Grassy Knoll]

made John The Great sign Magna Carta

John "The Great"? Hardly. He was known as "John Lackland", because he lost so much land to the French!

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Dubya got a better grade than John Kerry too. He too went there with connections. So did Trump into UPenn.

I guess you didn't go to an Ivy League school or never worked with someone who went to one. I didn't go to one but nearly every person I've worked with who has gone to one has been extremely bright and hard working

I am an IIT grad myself. The Ivy Leaguers I work with admire me. Of course, the respect is mutual, because the legacy quota Ivy Leaguers would not deign to rub shoulders with working stiffs like us. Even if they did they would not even grasp half of what we talk about.

For every minority grad dissed as an affirmative action baby, there is a legacy admission living on reflected glory.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Really? In my high school text book he is referred to as Maha John, meaning John the Great. (Maha is a prefix in Indic languages meaning Great. )

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[HornWumpus]

It is dogma of English history that there has only been one 'The Great', Alfred. He was never king of all of England.

Of course there were kings of kingdoms within England, Wales and Scotland that called themselves 'the great', but 'official story'...you know how those are...e.g. never tell a Russian that Vodka was invented in Poland.

John? No, someone was trying to sell you a story or something got lost in translation, maybe both.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

In Indian text books the monarch who signed the Magna Cara is referred to as Maha John, to indicate he would be known as John the Great in English. I searched after the post and I could not find any instance of him being called John the Great.

The Magna Carta itself is translated as The Great Charter and is referred to as Maha Word_for_Charter_in_IndianLanguages. It is possible I was confused and conflated the two. I never studied European history formally in English.

Re:Degrees are vital for the legacies.

[HornWumpus]

Almost certainly just a translation issue.

'Magna' became 'maha'. 'Magna' is latin BTW, not english. Europe was weird like that back in the middle ages. Would be like India using Sanskrit for official business.

Diploma mills caused this

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the inevitable result of too much available government money, causing colleges and universities to create bullshit degree programs.

The other cause is our ridiculous visa system. When your market is flooded with H-1B "university graduates" that have the equivalent of a western High School education - you start to become skeptical of all of these so-called university graduates.

Hiring the right people is hard. HR departments should know this but unfortunately, most are run by people with degrees in grievance studies.

I'm confused

[ahoffer0]

The title says we must hire based on skills. The summary quotes Rometty as saying "...these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change". Said another way, technology is changing faster than the workforce can adapt, therefore we cannot hire based on experience or education -- we have to hire for the skills we need. Where do these skills come from? If the workforce is not learning the new skills fast enough and education is not providing the skills, then how are people obtaining these valuable skills?

Re:I'm confused

[tomhath]

She's saying she wants code monkeys who can be contracted to work on a project for one of their clients, then let go when the project is over.

Want another gig? Update your resume to whatever the new hotness is this month and learn enough jargon to bluff your way in the door again.

Re:I'm confused

[ceoyoyo]

She wants single-purpose contractors. You have something you need done, you put out a contract, it's fulfilled, and then you move on. No need to worry about budgeting for your staff to acquire new skills.

Trying to obscure that with business doublespeak makes for a confusing article.

Re:I'm confused

[strikethree]

Look dude, they are explicitly looking for people who are like me.

I am curious. I like to see reality. None of the technologies that we have created are really "amazing". All of this shit is basic; however, some is VERY VERY tedious.

As a species, our brains are exceptionally weak when it comes to Understanding. We are dominated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But then there are people like me who reverse the flow of entropy. I study random shit because I have a curiosity about it. I delve in deep into topics until I am looking at raw reality (scary, confusing, truth is not as concrete as we seem think it is). I then reassemble everything from basic reality until I am back where humans live. Once I hit this point, people tend to call me a wizard or say that I can do "deep magic" in relation to whatever topic is at hand.

But on any typical day, like today, all I do is rant about nonsensible and seemingly nonsensical things.

TL;DR, the Real Shit is rarely taught in school. You are merely given a set of tools and let loose into Reality with no effort being given to help you actually understand WTF is going on. You don't need to know, you are just a cog.

But cogs can't think, and even if they could, they wouldn't be able to communicate it.

TL;DR to the TL;DR, The powers that be decided the masses don't need to be able to think for themselves, but the powers that be are in over their heads and they are desperate for help and are willing to look into the uncultivated portions of their gardens for a solution because the answer is explicitly NOT in their cultivated gardens.

I can't say that I am not pleased about how arrogance has come back around, but, I don't live at that level. From me, all I will say is, "that's a shame", and continue on with what doing what I do, hoping beyond hope that certain types of mental disease will disappear or die off.

Hiring Based on Skills intead of to meet quotas...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to fight back against the feminazis.
Hire on skills not on degrees, gender, whatever else is irrelevant.

And make manhating feminazi academia do the same:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4418903/

Skills

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty handy with a bo staff. Gosh!

So then why the age discrimination?

[eth1]

"We want skilled employees!"

later...

*lays off skilled older employees*

Re: So then why the age discrimination?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you read between the lines, they're trying to steer from all those equal opportunity political correctness that is dumbing down everything

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[PolygamousRanchKid]

*lays off skilled older employees*

IBM considers being young as a important skill.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!!

EXACTLY!!!

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[crgrace]

SPOILER ALERT!

It's not about skills. It's about lower pay.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[byteherder]

Simple, IBM wants cheap skilled employees. Older skilled employees are expensive.

IBM is never going to fix it's skills gap until they value their entire workforce.
Who would want to work there when you are just a cog until you get older or the "hot technology of the day" changes and then they "resource action" you (IBM's term for layoffs).

This is coming from an ex-IBMer

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[Rick Schumann]

Based on people I've talked to, I think it's more like "We want to reduce our payroll!"; *lays off skilled older employees, hires wet-behind-the-ears recent-college-graduates, who will work for peanuts -- and can't work their way out of a wet paper bag -- but are CHEAP LABOR*.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[Anonymous Coward]

"We want skilled employees!"

later...

*lays off skilled older employees*

Get over yourself. If you actually did a good job they wouldn't have laid you off. The fact of the matter is someone younger than you is willing to do as good of a job for less money.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[Anonymous Coward]

Age discrimination is a thing of the past. Now, everyone who wants to be a permanent employee is discriminated against. They want short-term freelancers who will do the job. Then, they're flushed.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[davecb]

They want cheap skills, not the ability to gain skills.

T-shaped engineer? Not a bit of it: PI-shaped or octopus-shaped engineer are what they need. Just not what they want.

Re:So then why the age discrimination?

[strikethree]

I like the other response to your words, but I felt the need to offer up this response too:

"We want skilled employees! (who don't cost much)"

later...

*lays off skilled older employees* (because they cost too much)

Would be nice if immigration worked the same way

[Anonymous Coward]

You got skills we need, go to the front of the line. ie. doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists

Instead of our first come, first serve or mom drops a baby and now the entire extended family comes in and gets on the public dole.

Lost opportunity?

[courcoul]

Back when I was in the 'front line' teaching before a class, ABET, SACS and other Certs were pushing for competency-based education and assessment, where you would grade the 'victim' on what they could demostrably do with tangible results. From what I'm reading either that pathway went bust or Rometty is full of it and looking for yet another profiteering scam.

Well, yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have interviewed so many candidates who have zero passion for tech and only studied it because some career adviser told them it was a good field to get into.

Well, yeah! Many do the same for medicine and engineering.

So, if someone's passion is English Lit. they should go and study that? Really?!

This whole passion BS is just to get people who'll work themselves to death and forgo having lives outside of work - and not be compensated for it. And if employers just want people who have passion, then they need to support Universal Basic Income so that people can pursue their passions and what they are meant to do while on this Earth.

Re:Well, yeah!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a degree in something (or claim to have a degree) you should know things about that field.

If your degree is English lit & you dont know who Shakespeare is, im going to assume that you are either lying about your degree or that you are unteachable.

Either way, this is not someone i want to hire.

People have been trained since birth to think that a college degree is vital, doesnt even matter what its in, you absolutely have to have a degree in -something-. Compsci is often promoted to people who "dont know what they want to study" or more accurately, dont care. And if you dont care about your education, you are unlikely to get a very good one. But that wont stop the uni's from taking your money and printing up a diploma for you.

Doesnt bother me really, i never went to college. Those of you who spent thousands and thousands of dollars & worked your asses off for years to earn a degree should be mad as hell though, its YOUR education that is being devalued by this.

Not all fields require passion, but some do. If youre not passionate, you wont do well in medicine, aviation, engineering, computer science, If you dont care about airplanes, if you dont have a personal interest in it, you wont make a very good pilot, if you dont care about peoples health & wellbeing, you wont make a very good doctor. Dont get me wrong, you can still go through all the motions & still get that degree (apparently) even if you dont care one jot about the subject material.. but you'll never be very good at it. And you sure as hell wont be the kind of pilot or doctor that I want to hire.

If youre not passionate about anything, go into business management or accounting or something that doesnt require it.

hiring based on skills is for millennial thinking

[goombah99]

At my company the party line is we hire the best and most distinguished people not the people who happen to be on hand for the job at hand.

At first this seems really dumb. A lot of jobs require some specific skills and it's hard to get people with less specialized experience to do them since they need to retrain.

But over the course of a career you see that the people who manage to stick around and succeed are the ones with a broad base and ability to shift and retrain.

THis is not exclusive from deeply experienced people who are good at one job. But the level of deep experience in new hires is nil. They have a few tricks they recently learned and maybe one great project they once did. But that's not deep expeince, it's more of a fad skill that could become the basis for getting started fast and developing, but it isn't deep experience yet.

Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.

But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills it's going to make people more disposable. It used to be the IBM was the pinnacle of developing career oriented workforces dedicated to the company. I guess not any more.

So what's so great about degreed people? Well especially for pHDs it proves they can take on a task and finish it. Postdocs show they can plan a job, and finish it on time. Undergrads show they can learn new things and if they have a masters, concisely reach for the right tools and apply them.

That's what degrees show. It's not just that you learned stuff, but you know how to learn, apply, and plan with new tools. Innovating, Planning the job and delivering on time are the real drivers and it's why senior people are actually worth their pay, at least the good ones are

Never Again

[Bigbutt]

I worked at IBM a few years back. You were a cog in the machine and replaceable with little notice. A guy across from me was told on a Monday to not return Wednesday. When they offshored my Unix Admin job to India, I was given the opportunity to be a Web Developer, Data Center creator, Backup Admin, or out. I did spend my own money to qualify for Backup Admin, a telecommute position. That was toxic enough that turnover was pretty high but also the random selection of our Customer Interface to be removed from the contract caused some hoop jumping as she transitioned all her information over to the team lead.

My manager certainly tried to keep me on and worked to find me another contract, but it was pretty harrowing to see some random manager looking guy come into the cube farm and hope he's not coming for you.

Granted, things might be changing or have changed, but in a very large company, change is hard so I'd be very skeptical about comments from upper management.

[John]

Re:Never Again

[Anonymous Coward]

AC playing devil's advocate here; but you didn't sound terribly useful to IBM.

Re:Never Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Never again is right! I worked for IBM a few years back too. The articles is correct about them looking for skills, but it's because they want the cheapest people with the skills they're looking for.

Skills vs Degree

[Bigbutt]

Heck, back in the 80's when I was starting out, IBM refused to even acknowledge my resume as I didn't have a college degree. My how times have changed.

[John]

Mod up, sarcasm on target

[Anonymous Coward]

wish I had mod points

College not needed

[Anonymous Coward]

I never finished college... it was too expensive. I started at the bottom and self taught myself the new, evolving tech. 25 years later, I'm a senior network and systems engineer with 2 books under my belt. All without college.

No, I didn't get a high skilled tech job off the bat. But There is a path without starting out with 100K in student loans.

Here be dragons ...

[damn_registrars]

Disclaimer: I have an advanced degree.

That said, I've dealt with the job market a few times in the past ~5 years. I can tell you that most jobs with salaries > $75k (in the job markets where I work where this is well above the median and easily a comfortable existence for a single person) are posted in ways that are intended to filter our applicants as quickly as possible. One very quick and easy filter for HR to select is education. While it is not always a great way to find who is qualified it is probably the best that they can easily use and verify.

If an applicant says they have a college degree, it is pretty easy for the employer to verify this. But if they say they have worked on model ABC123 advanced frobulators for 7 years, that is more difficult to verify. Now if the applicant can point to something they have done - say a patent or a published article - relating to the ABC123 advanced frobulator, that becomes something that the employer can verify more easily again. Unfortunately the application processes at most large (and many medium or small) employers are behind the curve on doing this type of verification. At the same time it doesn't seem that companies want to put more than the minimum amount of human activity into human resources, so we're left with what we can do to either fit into the system or attempt to circumvent it. Tragically the latter works less and less well with many companies as time goes on.

Re:Here be dragons ...

[Anonymous Coward]

For your anecdotal evidence I have some too. There was a master's degree person who couldn't program her way out of a bag got paid way more than me, but me without a degree had to pull all the weight while getting paid less (and I figure much less). College degrees aren't brains. Repeat it as long as it takes until you get it. There's many times I've had little to no respect for those who got a college degree and then stop learning and sit on their laurels. And, it's even more craziness when someone gives you their ultimate respect and praise and then in the next moment finds out I don't have a degree and then all of that respect and admiration turns to disgust and disrespect. The whole college degree thing is just a ruse for the most part for people to feel superior to others. I mean think about it, 4 years of learning/indoctrination vs. 20 years of experience and the college degree wins every time for HR. It's insanity that so-called learned people can't grasp that it's a problem.

Re:Here be dragons ...

[Micah NC]

Boeing used to count degrees as a certain number of years of experience.

I realize there's a difference between theory and experience (esp with breadth vs depth), but as a bottom line approximation it might surpass alternatives.

Ideally, of course, hiring/declining would be viewed as the highest company priority (cf. Eric Schmidt said it should be) and the effort would be made to assess to a certain confidence threshold.

Re:Here be dragons ...

[damn_registrars]

College degrees aren't brains. Repeat it as long as it takes until you get it.

I made no such claim. I merely said that a college degree is a really easy filter for HR to employ for automatically filtering out job applicants. I even stated it is at times not the best one. However verifying skill is much more work than verifying education, so as much as there is justification for changing the method it is not likely to happen any time too soon.

Re:Here be dragons ...

[Anonymous Coward]

College degrees aren't brains. Repeat it as long as it takes until you get it.

I made no such claim. I merely said that a college degree is a really easy filter for HR to employ for automatically filtering out job applicants. I even stated it is at times not the best one. However verifying skill is much more work than verifying education, so as much as there is justification for changing the method it is not likely to happen any time too soon.

Maybe not, but you still don't get it. A master's degree does not always mean they know their stuff. Either they cheat their way through or they have a fake diploma but when a Mater's in CS is asking me what a C pointer is, not to test me, but because they really have no clue, then that mater's degree to me means nothing. I've seen it time and again. So just trusting the degree is like saying they have something (a brain) that they do not. Trusting a piece of paper is a fools folly.

Re:Here be dragons ...

[damn_registrars]

College degrees aren't brains. Repeat it as long as it takes until you get it.

I made no such claim. I merely said that a college degree is a really easy filter for HR to employ for automatically filtering out job applicants. I even stated it is at times not the best one. However verifying skill is much more work than verifying education, so as much as there is justification for changing the method it is not likely to happen any time too soon.

Maybe not, but you still don't get it.

It looks like the one who doesn't get it is you.

Trusting a piece of paper is a fools folly.

I very plainly explained why education is used as a way to determine the qualification of an applicant. There is an open opportunity here though to show a better way. If you are such a great programmer you could write that better way into an HR application and retire young from the profit as large companies would be breaking down your door to pay you for it.

That and a lot of advanced degrees are supported by more than just the paper they are printed on; many masters and doctoral programs now require publication of peer reviewed work. This peer reviewed work often ends up going into open access journals that any employer could download and review if they wanted to.

Hire on aptitude and potential, not qualifications

[Anonymous Coward]

Hiring now relies 100% on machine pattern matching your CV with the text of the job description. This is totally broken and filters out many otherwise excellent candidates. When I hire I'm not looking for a perfect fit between the two blobs of text, I'm looking for a human being who most likely has a reasonable background in the subject, but more importantly aptitude and potential to learn and fit in.

Who Cares

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone in the world care what an IBM executive has to say, unless you're also looking to destroy your once-venerable business. If that's the case, then by all means, follow that pied piper.

This is about lowering pay

[omfglearntoplay]

Don't be fooled... they are trying to make it so they can pay less for technically skilled jobs. Keep college requirements for high end jobs!

Re:Hiring Based on Skills intead of to meet quotas

[Anonymous Coward]

This needs to be modded up super hard.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

Millennial thinking? I find it entertaining that you think you can stereotype an entire generation (which isn't even well defined) of people, but you just made an argument that you hire by skills and not by degrees. By your own admission you hire the best and most distinguished because they have the "deep experience" you want. Would you not hire those people if they didn't have degrees?

Some proof

[Anonymous Coward]

College is some proof that you can show up for a job, work, produce results and are somewhat organized.

College is proof that you at least have some understanding of the field of study which applies to the job.

No matter how much HR is sold by the test taking organizations sales people, testing will not show anything more than a very mild correlation to good on the job performance.

Lots of the IBM motivation is to:
- Hire much younger persons since IBM is stodgy and less appealing to younger workers. There's a lawsuit that IBM discriminated by constantly seeking 'digital native' persons in job ads over the last three years.

- Get older workers to retire or be laid off - like how they ended remote work and told workers that they would have to work at one of 6 locations in the US by closing other locations

- Hire interns or those without college degrees at 1/3rd the wages, promote them to 1/2 the wages and keep them on board with much lower wages throughout their career.

- For consulting, it's easier to get younger persons to do 100% travel

Re:Some proof

[Micah NC]

A certification from MongoU can show you know how to get work done.

But it's not going to give you the same mileage as a degree.

FWIW: I have both.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

Millennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever. Suggesting that millennials value skills over education as a whole is counter-intuitive. In fact, millennials make up almost 50% of the workforce. Has this "millennial mindset" changed the makeup of the white-collar workforce in spades? Why would the IBM CEO feel the need to make this statement of opinion if it has already become a fact in HR? Finally, if you were in charge of hiring for a new project that leveraged a new technology, would you rather hire someone with two year's experience in this new technology or someone with a four-year degree that they received at a university whose curriculum did not include said technology?

First you have to get rid of the morons in HR

[Anonymous Coward]

it's important that tech companies focus on hiring people with valuable skills, not just people with college degrees.

Yeah, right. Just today I sent my (single page) CV which explained my education and previous work experience in detail to a recruiter. Retard called me back immediately and asked me what I did on my last workplace. Also he was unable to comprehend that there is a difference between Android and iOS development.

How are companies supposed to focus on people with practical knowledge if HR doesn't seem to be able to understand one single word of your application letter? I am working on a masters degree right now, btw.

He said "for profit" Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

The "grandparent" post you are replying to specifically called out for-profit institutions;

I am now in a public university and the difference can be noted between private for profit colleges and public universities. [emphasis added]

What can you step in and do right now?

[Anonymous Coward]

What can you step in and do right now? That is the only question I have seen really matter in the past 5 years. Degree and field of study has not come up one single time in any interview I've been a part of, whether I was being interviewed, or was part of the interview process for a candidate. Degrees are fantastic for getting your foot in the door at companies who still offer entry level positions to new college grads.

She said hiring. Not firing.

[Anonymous Coward]

See, once they're on board for a while, they start to become expensive. Time to get rid of them and bring in another batch of naive youngsters.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of those people will end up with deep experience, some not. That comes from time spent in the field applying yourself. If only that could really come from a few short college courses.

If I were 50...

[davidwr]

I would have a college- and living-expenses fund for myself so I could get a respected degree college- or graduate-level certificate.

That way when I'm interviewed I can talk like I've been in school recently - because it will be true.

If I get lucky and stay employed until I retire, that means I'll be able to enjoy my retirement a bit more.

Note to anyone under 30: PLAN on taking 2-3 years out of your life after age 50 to get more schooling. This means setting aside money for not just tuition but your "adult level" cost of living.

The "new collar" is the dog collar.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enough said.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Bengie]

Experience has virtually no correlation with understanding or even skill. Concrete skills have a half life of about 2-3 years. At my job, the learning curve is about 1 year before you break even between salary and value. My team thrives on change. We need to master new skills constantly. We need to be fast, correct the first time, and our projects need to be easy for others to use/manage, otherwise we get stuck supporting. And ain't nobody got time for that.

Abstract skills are a must. It doesn't matter that you know all of the documented tricks to minimize Java's garbage collection. You need to be able to minimize garbage collection in all managed languages such that when you get pulled onto a project that uses a managed language that you may never use again, that you design and implement it correctly the first time.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

Experience has virtually no correlation with understanding or even skill. Concrete skills have a half life of about 2-3 years.

Citation please? Or is this based on your experience?

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[lgw]

illennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever.

No - they're the generation that spent the most time in schools. Education is related, but not the same.

Why would the IBM CEO feel the need to make this statement of opinion if it has already become a fact in HR?

Perhaps to emphasize their willingness to hire form diverse backgrounds. Diversity is all the fashion these days, after all.

Finally, if you were in charge of hiring for a new project that leveraged a new technology, would you rather hire someone with two year's experience in this new technology or someone with a four-year degree that they received at a university whose curriculum did not include said technology?

I'd rather hire someone who is "smart and gets things done", plus is not a jerk. New technologies are usually quick enough to ramp up on, and I don't care where someone picks up the tools of the trade: if they can both code and design, that's what matters. Design optional for entry-level hires.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[mckwant]

> Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.

I'm not sure they have a choice. Companies don't train any more.

If you train on your own, up to and including a new, verifiable, cert/degree/whatever, your employer has no obligation to recognize that, let alone give you a raise. Frankly, your employer would rather have your cheaper replacement, so why bust your ass to get the training?

Let's say you get the training anyway. Your current gig (probably) won't value it, so your only viable option is to tout your new skills at a different employer, hopefully getting enough cash to justify the loss of stability. Lather, rinse, repeat until you find some position/situation/lifestyle you actually want to be.

Then start praying it lasts. In many modern situations, it won't. I don't know whether companies are going bust at historically high rates, but it sorta smells that way to me.

Anyway, I'm not convinced that the next generation eschews stability, so much as lacks a path to it.

Apprenticeship and on the job training

[Anonymous Coward]

This is crazy so hear me out.

My dad worked for this American company back in the 70's. They needed skilled trades and didnt have any so they did this crazy thing - they took existing employees and paid for the training, had senior staff from other locations apprentice these people. They did this for many if not most / all of the trades and skilled workers required to run the plant. Funny how this kind of thing generated a lot of goodwill between the employees and the company. Even was a strike where the managers ended up sitting with the striking men in their shack watching hockey playoffs; as I recall the managers brought the beer ... Years after that plant closed they had reunions for crying out loud.

Weird thing; I am working for a Canadian company in (not bleeding edge) tech company. We have been able to attract some very bright people because they are explicitly looking to close their skill gap or because they are sick of being treated like meat. Average retention in tech is what? 2 years? All the people we have hired in the last 15 years that could do the job either still work for us, work at a couple spin off companies, or left because they wanted to relocate to a different city (fair).

Translation....

[Anonymous Coward]

Translation: As more and more people who are unfit for college are pushed that direction by well-intentioned, but misguided policy, the value of a college degree in predicting a person's ability to succeed is diminishing. Much to the surprise of people who don't understand fundamental economics, a college degree turned out to have been correlated with the income disparity but it was not the CAUSE of it. The reason for the correlation was that more motivated and capable people tended to go on to college. Surprise of surprises that we're finding out pushing the less able and willing into college doesn't magically transform them into valuable workers, it just diminishes the value of a college degree. Supply and demand people. Learn it or suffer it.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[lgw]

Experience has virtually no correlation with understanding or even skill. Concrete skills have a half life of about 2-3 years.

A senior engineer is someone who has that 2-3 years of depth, multiple times, and thus can generalize and form best practices that aren't specific to a given tech stack (and thus may be useful for the latest thing).

. We need to be fast, correct the first time, and our projects need to be easy for others to use/manage

Uh huh. Good, fast, and cheap: pick at most 2, and you're probably getting 1. But it's easy to deceive yourself about quality.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Opportunist]

Millennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever.

Citation needed. I give you that millennials have the best access to education ever, with the internet and its near endless supply of information at their fingertips and their experience with the medium paralleled by no generation before them. But, and that's a big but, you can only lead the donkey to the well, you can't force him to drink.

What millennials (along with many people that came before them) sorely lack is a bullshit filter. Not everything that you read is true and valid information. And I'm not even talking about political fake news and right and left wing propaganda. I'm talking about the bullshit pseudoscience being promoted on various YouTube channels and the rise of snake oil peddling that hasn't been seen since the traveling patent medicine salesmen of the old west.

In other words, just because you CAN be better educated than ever before in the history of mankind doesn't mean that you ARE. The internet is a tool, you can use it to promote wisdom or idiocy.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

Citation provided with a single Google search providing a link to a reputable research center. Please consider my statement in context to the story - The IBM CEO is urging employers to consider skills over degrees, what is traditionally consider a formal education. Inb4 this boils down to a "young people are soo st00pid" thread.

Because muh feelings

[Anonymous Coward]

You just need to see this remark to know what this is all about "Therefore they feel very disenfranchised."

Feelings, feelings, feelings.

Maybe getting a degree is what demonstrates that you can get shit done. I took 12 years to get mine at night while working full time and raising a family. Nobody gives a shit about your feelings except virtue signaling female CEOs. Some can and some can't. It''s natural selection. In this society where dreaming means deserving it makes sense. In reality, results matter. Getting a degree, a hard degree in science or engineering is results. Get r done!

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

Inb4 this boils down to a "millennials are such jerks and diversity is st00pid" thread. The context of the story is that the IBM CEO is urging companies to consider skills training ("informal education") to be as important as degrees ("formal education"). Surely my context was clear in this case - when I speak of "education", I specifically mean "formal education". I apologize if that was not abundantly clear and am happy to disambiguate that for you.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[jellomizer]

The problem with hiring all the best and brightest for the company, is I would expect a high turnover.
The pawn in chess is not a useless piece, they can get the job done in places where the more "valuable" pieces can stay safe.
The same thing with hiring the low end entry worker. There is a lot of grunt work, which they are rather happy to do, because they are happy to just be working, and learning, they may not be as ambitious the the most distinguished person, so they are find doing the grunt work and going home after 8 hours of work.

While the distinguished employee, can focus on what they are really strong at, and not get board to tears from doing the grunt work that needs to be done, and frustrated because they could do so much more, and become more distinguished as their ego demands of them.

Millennial's like the generations before them. Are in a stage of their lives where they are trying to find a mate. This means they instinctively want to stay mobile and keep their options open. Having a job for the next 40 years with a vague hope of climbing the ladder isn't as appealing as it is for those who are now in their 40's or 50's where job stability is important as their family is dependent on the money and your place in society is rather set.

We can see people complain about how whatever generation who is their ages of 20s-30s seem unfocused and are not doing thing the best way.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Marxist Hacker 42]

We used to call it On The Job Training. But of course, companies don't want to pay for that anymore.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[lgw]

Yeah, in this recurring Slashdot topic, distinguishing between formal education and useful knowledge is critical, as that's the actual topic of debate most of the time.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[jellomizer]

For a company like IBM Diversity isn't just the fashion but necessary for such a company to continue.
We see established companies die, because they just don't seem to be able to adjust to the customers demands. Why is that? One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product, it will be improved and better then before, but it probably will not be different enough to attract new customers or return customers.
Diversity brings in a new way of looking at the problem. The new guy when learning the current software you see them struggling to figure out what does that silly icon means, or failing to understand why the documents ask you to do Step 1 then Step 2 and Step 3 all the time for a common workflow, and not just make it one option.
As we gain experience we also gain bad habits and we don't stop to realize how annoying they are because we do them so much it just common.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Opportunist]

Oh, education is only supposed to mean how many are holding a degree. Ok. I was under the impression that the whole article we're discussing here is going exactly the opposite direction, but if that's all it means...

Well, of course they are. But I can tell you from experience that a degree doesn't mean that someone is actually educated. I have seen what's been cranked out by some colleges these days and I honestly question whether a college degree still means what it used to mean. Mostly that the person holding it actually knows a thing or two about what the degree supposedly certifies. Because an increasing number of people who have a degree don't know jack shit about the field they allegedly have a degree in.

Response to affirmative action degrees?

[hsthompson69]

Not a troll, but yeah, this is going to be seen that way.

Once you've corrupted academia, and given degrees to people based on the color of their skin, or their SJW credentials, can you use degrees as a reasonable proxy for skills anymore?

Sounds like the meritocracy is going to work its way around attempts to thwart it.

Re:Response to affirmative action degrees?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a troll, but yeah, this is going to be seen that way.

Once you've corrupted academia, and given degrees to people based on the color of their skin, or their SJW credentials, can you use degrees as a reasonable proxy for skills anymore?

Sounds like the meritocracy is going to work its way around attempts to thwart it.

It's nice to come from a position of privilege isn't it?

Re:Response to affirmative action degrees?

[hsthompson69]

It's nice to come from a position of privilege isn't it?

Well, affirmative action privilege is great, right up until it hits the wall of meritocracy and skill :)

Now, if privilege == skill, well, that's a great position to be in. Skills don't care about your feelings :)

Skills?

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked at IBM for many years. I was a technical team leader for part of that time. One of the employees on my team had the "skill" of daisy-chaining power strips! Instead of pulling the raised floor tiles in the lab to find another power drop (and there were plenty of those), she came up with the bright idea of just chaining power strips together. After these test computers started randomly powering down, she then blamed the contractor on the team. By that time I was no longer her team leader. But I had previously tried to get rid of her after it was clear that she had lied about test results, but our idiotic manager instead promoted her.

After I quit and most of my co-workers were laid off, this person with "skills" like lying about work and daisy-chaining power strips, was still there! IBM no longer allows the public to search employees by name, but the last time I checked (around 2016), she was still employed there after about 10-12 years of shitty, shitty work.

Re:Skills?

[Anonymous Coward]

If she was doing this in IBM, then it was completely against corporate policy.

Walk the plank

[thunderclees]

Smells like an attempt to rationalize outsourced labor, again.
If IBM was hiring based on real skills (and competency) it would not have the current crop of executives.
Notice only degrees and not cronyism were mentioned, so nothing changes.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Bengie]

Every tech company that has to deal with hiring. There are a lot of blogs from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc where the whomever is responsible for overseeing hiring has experimented with all kinds of hiring strategies and trying to link future performance with experience, and every company has the same issue. The programmer with 10 years of experience has just as much chance of being great at their job as someone with 6 months experience and a recent graduate.

Some people go as far as to say that they even experimented with hiring from people with other degrees that are associated with critical thinking and zero programming experience. And with on the job training, were up and as productive within 6 months as pretty much anyone with a CS degree.

It's quite telling when explicitly hiring people with no programming degrees or experience as just as good "on average". It's universally described as a crap shot. Unless someone has exactly the skill that you need right now, like COBOL, when it comes to predicting performance, random is just as good and probably less biased to poor performers. The main reason for interviewing is to get to know the person to figure out if they're a good fit. The biggest benefit of experience is dealing with people, not technical skills. Technology cannot solve people issues and the biggest bottleneck to most projects are humans and their self-destructive irrational quirks.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

Yes, context is key. I learned that in college, often when a professor would yell "You knew what I meant!" at me. Believe it or not, one can develop a skill without any kind of education whatsoever, formal or informal. One does not have to read the documentation to start hacking the code, poor choice though it may be. Even worse, someone with a formal education may assume that they don't need to read the documentation because they think they already understand everything about the topic. But yes, when an employer asks you if you what level of education you have achieved, they are talking about what degree you have, and it's imperative that one distinguishes that to have a product conversation on this topic.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

Formal education should easily be implied when discussing this topic. When a hiring manager asks what level of education one has achieved, they are asking what degrees one possesses. I do however appreciate your passion for semantics.

Lying AC. You employers want CHEAP.

[shanen]

Second or third attempt to find an interesting entry point to the potentially meaningful discussion. At this point I can't pretend to remember why I should have such expectations for Slashdot. So let me try to formulate a cohesive response so I'll have better ideas what to search for on the last attempt...

What IBM is actually doing is trying to find and leverage the best solutions so the work of the top employees (which could be defined in terms of the highest productivity and maximum profitability) can be leveraged over entire industries. I do NOT believe that IBM is worried about all the less-than-very-best employees with less-than-very-top skills who become unemployed as a result. IBM just wants to sell the best results, and the REAL business problem (as IBM sees it) is that not enough corporate cancers are buying what IBM is selling.

What employers REALLY want is NOT degrees NOR experience. What the employers want is the cheapest employees who can accomplish the work to produce the maximum profit. Transient employment? Perfect. If IBM can deliver the necessary skills for the 37 minutes it takes to get the job done, then that's great. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.

Disclaimer called for? Or should I just AC it? Long story there, but Slashdot isn't worth the time. And why am I even wasting the keystrokes on an AC branch?

Re:Lying AC. You employers want CHEAP.

[shanen]

Found a few of the keywords, but none of the associated posts were actually moderated favorably. Perhaps even worse, if I ever had a mode point I didn't think that any of those posts really deserved positive moderation...

Re:Lying AC. You employers want CHEAP.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect this is over-reaction on IBM's part. They have a history of preferring 4.0 GPA and Masters or PHd. Backing off to bachelors who are eager to create products instead of theorize and write papers would be a better start.

Re:Lying AC. You employers want CHEAP.

[HornWumpus]

NOT(X NOR Y)? So X OR Y?

Then hire what we have here and build it inhouse.

[edgedmurasame]

Instead of asking for perfection or H1-b, perhaps it might be better to build such inhouse.

Article translation

[Anonymous Coward]

The labor market doesn't have enough people in it with degrees. We don't want to engage in a bidding-war for people with degrees. We want to hire people without degrees who can work just as well as people with degrees. So we want to find some way, some magical way, to just make the labor-market have what we want without being expensive and without involving degrees.

On the flip side.....

People with degrees have demonstrated their capacity to endure a tremendous amount of distraction, tedium, injustice, and utter bullshit and still succeed. That is a tremendously valuable trait in a potential employee. The fact that one must accept lifelong crippling debt to prove that they have this trait is a significant problem that is screwing up the labor market.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

"But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills"

I think you are adding a level of specialization above and beyond this concept. There is no requirement that you hire a "Chef expert" or someone with a masters to work on Chef. Hiring someone who has automation skills with any framework and experience is still hiring someone for their skills.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Bengie]

I never said cheap. I will agree that "fast" is a subjective word, but I use it in the practical form of keeping up with the customer. It takes time for customers to change their processes as you make tools for them. If you can make tools faster than they can change their processes, you're "fast" in my opinion. There is also looking to the future. I already spend a lot of time abstracting the projects into my head in order to understand the fundamental issues and I constantly think of new ways for a current project to be used in novel ways. It's always fun when someone wants something new and you tell them you already thought about that general issue years ago and will only be a few days of work to implement it because you already designed another project to facilitate that use case.

I've got many projects under my belt where I was given a compressed timeline because the original team had been working on it for months and the deadline was fast approaching with the team projecting the project getting pushed due to unforseen complexities. I jumped in, quickly read the high level description, looked at what had been worked on, threw everything out, started fresh, and had everything done in a few weeks, plus my own personal improvements. These projects all were originally designed as one-offs, but I changed them to be modular and reusable and the projects have almost all been reused many times with virtually zero changes and bug fixes for many years. What generally starts as a 6 month throw away tool turns into a 5+ year tool that becomes central to many new services that few envisioned the tool to be useful for.

needful doers

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "skill" they're looking for is needful doing at poverty rates.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[lgw]

One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product,

When did we start talking about Google?

Diversity brings in a new way of looking at the problem.

Absolutely. At least, if you're talking about diversity of technical background, instead of diversity of physical appearance (of all things).

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, of course they are. But I can tell you from experience that a degree doesn't mean that someone is actually educated. I have seen what's been cranked out by some colleges these days and I honestly question whether a college degree still means what it used to mean. Mostly that the person holding it actually knows a thing or two about what the degree supposedly certifies. Because an increasing number of people who have a degree don't know jack shit about the field they allegedly have a degree in.

Most two-year and four-year degrees consist of approximately 50% courses unrelated to the field of study. The general education courses were covered in high school so why are students required to take general education courses if the arts and humanities? Even a BA degree has too many filler courses. After four years of study a graduate should be an well on the path to expert status in their field. A shift in focus from examinations to practical application would go a long way toward balancing book educated and real life ability to apply that book learning.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

A proven track record working in the field with success at at least a handful of different locations over time (not decaying in the same seat the whole time) is worth more than a degree any day. A fresh college graduate doesn't really seem to do better than any reasonably intelligent individual hired from anywhere.

We proved it at one of our workplaces. Instead of the college grads we normally hired for entry level we hired the guy who did our water deliveries. In six months he was one of the best entry level people we had and while I'm not there anymore I know he has gone on to have a solid career. He just needed to get experience under his belt to edge through hiring processes.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

Actually in some cases there is a shadow middle ground. Formalized courses and training that aren't connected to universities are also often listed alongside schooling in the education column of a resume these days.

Neither is the same as on the job experience but the vendor supplied courses still tend to be a bit more meaningful than college courses. HR considers education, experience, and then training. In the real world what counts is experience, training, "formal" education.

There are areas of science and computing around it that are exceptions but that is a tiny sliver of a massive industry. Actually in some sense "scientist" is becoming the new "engineer." You hardly need someone with a masters or PhD working on "data science" you can teach pretty much anyone with a solid IQ the skillset in a few months.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[HornWumpus]

There have always been 'certificate of attendance' degrees.

As the % with college degrees goes up, the % of those that got useless degrees also goes up. Diminishing returns never sleeps.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got many projects under my belt where I was given a compressed timeline because the original team had been working on it for months and the deadline was fast approaching with the team projecting the project getting pushed due to unforeseen complexities. I jumped in, quickly read the high level description, looked at what had been worked on, threw everything out, started fresh, and had everything done in a few weeks, plus my own personal improvements.

It was your years of experience not your academic degree which enabled you to achieve these outcomes. Today, a 4-year degree is the new high school diploma as far as employers are concerned. Do you need a degree to work at Starbucks? Management seems to think you do.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

College is backwards in my opinion. A bit of University learning is an excellent thing to provide for a proven resource with 5-20yrs of proven experience in multiple seats (not sitting in one position at one company). They will get far more out of the material because they'll know what matters and why and care.

Instead we dump reams of information on a bunch of people who are just going through the motions and have no concept of any of it actually being useful beyond advancing to the next grade.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[HornWumpus]

Citation needed. I call bullshit. I've seen many 'coders' quit the industry after a year or two, they were very rarely the 'good ones'.

The best metric for coders I've found remains 'number of languages proficient'. Not perfect, but posers are quickly found out.

Six months to be up to speed, no programming experience. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[sexconker]

Millennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever.

Most millennials can't change a tire.
Most millennials can't cobble together a few sentences of basic, grammatically-correct English.
Most millennials can't plan and stick to a budget.
Most millennials can't understand basic algebra or geometry.

They may be spending more time in school. They're not coming out "well-educated".
I see college students at major universities struggling with shit they should have learned in middle school.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

There are skills which translate. Hiring someone new is a crap shot and my experience correlates with the findings above however experience ranging from 3-6yrs in different seats with successful performance definitely increases the odds of someone performing well.

Actual specific skills and degrees aren't particularly helpful except accessory skills. I've got a wide array of different platforms, languages, and experience under my belt. The entries on that list aren't what I'd say matters. Instead the list itself matters, it is a proven track record of learning and achieving with new skills.

The problem with the current hiring practice is everybody is looking for someone to already have the skills they need plus a degree. It takes a good year to learn the lay of the land and become genuinely productive at a new company, someone can learn the skills you need. Hire and pay people based on their record of learning and mastering material. Stop using the old coined phrase of "jack of all trades, master of none" there are no shortage of renaissance men who can achieve mastery in just about anything they do if properly supported. If you pay attention you'll see those "jacks" tend to be the ones who perform not the so called specialists.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

^ This.

Not all experience is equal. But if you find 2-6yrs experience rinse and repeated for 10-15yrs hire it and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with a sure thing. Anyone who thinks a degree is a significant factor in that is delusional. If the degree is so important to you then pay his way to one. And as for any given tech stack, keep in mind that is mostly luck of the draw, these kind of people can learn your stack and more and more they just need the pockets of your company to get the access in order to have a chance at doing so.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

Bam

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

"The problem with hiring all the best and brightest for the company, is I would expect a high turnover."

You should. When I had FIOS under verizon at one point they increased their speed offerings and gave everyone already on the service free upgrades. That was a brilliant move, they kept a fanatic base. That's exactly what companies should be doing with their staff in position as the market rates increase. If the market goes up 50% in 5 years you should pay your existing people 50% more over the course of that time. Instead companies hire at these new market rates and give 2-3% increases.

Degrees: the foundation on which skills are laid

[Anonymous Coward]

I've hired a LOT of people over the years, and here's what I've learned about degrees vs skills: You can find lots of people who are experts in one or two things. You can find a few people who have a degree (or equivalent broad experience).

Given a choice, I'll always go for the person with a degree. Why? Because the skills I'm going to need that person for are going to change. I might need a Widget Wacker today, but tomorrow I'll need a Widget Wranger. If I have the choice between a guy who's an expert Widget Wacker but only has a HS diploma and a guy who has a BS in Widget Engineering, I'm going to go for the latter guy. Because when Widget Wrangling becomes the next big thing, that guy will have the depth of understanding to make the transition. Whereas the other guy is going to stand around wondering the "Whack Widget" button is in the software package he knows so much about but is no longer supported by the vendor.

Unfortunately, in today's employment world, PEOPLE are the widgets. And big employers don't care about experience or expertise. They only care about fitting the widget into a socket and throwing it away when it wears out.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[cordovaCon83]

I stopped fact-checking after your first assertion. It's not that your assertion was wrong, it's that your assertion applied as easily to "most people regardless of age" as it did "Most millennials". We get it, you hate people that are younger than you, and people that are stupider than you, and enjoy distracting people from the topic at hand.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

It is well defined dumbass. As well defined as any generation is anyway. Millennials is the nickname of Generation Y. Only people confused about that are Millennials themselves for some reason.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[RhettLivingston]

I had a similar experience, but came to a different conclusion.

I was at my first employer (a Dow 20 company) for 13 years. During that time I received the maximum raise corporate policy allowed (1.5x the average) almost every year and was promoted 4 times. I also led some awesome projects, always on time and budget, but more importantly, that exposed me to a tremendous range of knowledge in my field. At the end of those 13 years, a local company offered me 50% to leave, and I finally took it. I went on from there a few years later to another company that offered me a bit more.

It was that second move that was my big mistake. It turned out to be a bait and switch in which they stuck me in management and started raising my salary even more. I'm great at business and management, but it isn't my passion, and I'm honest to a fault. Turned out honesty is not the best policy when getting negotiating government contracts. An ex-marine heading up a government facility tried to get me to make a promise I couldn't while attending our corporate Christmas party and asked me to go outside with him when I wouldn't mouth the lie he wanted.

In short, moving ended up souring me to the whole career which I abandoned.

A friend that I started with in '86 is still at that original employer though he was as talented as I was and could easily have asked for a similar raise to leave. I wish I'd stayed with him. He's much happier and more relaxed, and, he hasn't done so bad. His 401K and investments are in the multi-million level now since he saved 25% from day one in '86. But, he still lives in the same apartment. I now understand that.

Re:Hire on aptitude and potential, not qualificati

[HornWumpus]

That's why you _always_ include the job description right back at them, in 2 point white on white text in the margin of your resume. Duh. Along with a super long list of skill keywords you might or might not actually own.

I don't know why everybody doesn't do it. Aren't you supposed to be smarter than some HR moron?

I wouldn't hire anyone that wasn't smart enough to work that stupidity for their benefit.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[RhettLivingston]

I think that is actually the root of the issue. It used to be that you had extensive theory in the university, and then you got out and learned the vocation. I like to say that I went the college to earn the right to join a company and start the real learning. The theory background made it so you could learn anything and adapting to anything that came along in the vocation was natural.

When we started changing that, we moved a lot of vocational crap into the university curriculum. Many now train for specifics in the same time we used to train for the general. They are of course sacrificing the general knowledge to make room for the specifics. Then, when they hit the job, many are less able to adapt. They actually have little choice but to find the job they were vocationally trained for in the university. The employers are correct now to demand trained employees because the ones they get are less capable of retraining than before. Later, when the company needs shift, they are correct to part ways for the same reason.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Diversity of thought process is important and what not.

But that's not what people are generally looking for. What they usually look for is superficial levels of diversity. They'll rarely bring in someone with a different thought process because 'They are the enemy'.

Or if they do bring in someone with a different thought process, it is someone so far out in left field that the stuff they do and say doesn't make any sense.

Like the last company I worked at, the newest senior level 'idea person' they brought in was all about 'UX'. And was all focused on the GUI. None of our existing clientele or anyone we were targeting gave a crap about our GUI. What we needed was a more refined development/engineering process. All the senior level people had been doing things the same way for decades and wouldn't hear of improvements. But our clientele weren't satisifed with our work overall.

They thought this guy would help them look better. He didn't, it just made them look more out of touch and the company ultimately went out of business. Reminds me of the old saying of "Put lipstick on a pig, it's still a pig."

And it's stuff like that which makes 'Diversity' such a 'joke'. People generally speaking agree with actual real diversity, when and where it makes sense, but when people are just playing random political games, people get sick of it.

Profile of a "Skills Worker"

[zarmanto]

I'm a "Skills Worker." I don't have a Bachelor's degree; rather I have an Associates degree -- and to this day, I would actually argue that I hardly even needed that level of education. This is roughly what my educational path looked like:

Junior year in high school. Pretty standard course-load... nothing unusual, except that I was doing terrible in my German II class. (Again.) I think I ended up finishing that year with a "C-", and even that was basically a gift from the teacher. I needed at least two years of a foreign language to pass at all, but I just couldn't hack it with foreign languages. Further, it was too late to go back and switch to another language... which meant that it was effectively impossible for me to graduate with the so-called "advanced" degree, (two years each of two languages or three years of one language) which the school counselors had strongly encouraged for anyone who was college bound... which I (ostensibly) was.

Fine. I didn't really care about foreign languages anyway; I was already quite familiar with my competencies; I'm a computer guy, cut-and-dry. I'd already been the "teacher's pet" for years, because I knew more about computers than most of the teachers, and of course everybody knew that I was the school nerd. (Some competencies have consequences, but I had learned to deal with that.) I also didn't much care about Algebra II, and it was only required for that advanced degree... so I had a conversation with my counselor; I told him that I wanted to switch out Algebra II for a computer programming class. He reminded me several times and in several different ways that Al-II was really, really important for... reasons. I really didn't give a crap about those reasons so I stood my ground, much to his frustration and confusion. He eventually wrote up my Senior year schedule according to my wishes.

Senior year. I breezed through that computer class; easy A. I graduated with a "standard" degree. Whatever.

Community college. I hated nearly every second of it... except for certain electives -- and of course, my programming classes. Those, I pretty much ate up. I won't bother to try to break out "Freshman" vs "Sophomore" year... because thanks to all those other classes, it took me quite a bit more than two years to obtain my Associates. Again... whatever.

Than I moved into the work force. I got a "summer hire" position while I was still taking college classes. I proved my value by fixing a problem which I was not supposed to have been capable of fixing. That's a very long story; the short version is, not having anything in particular for me to do, they just paired me up with a "programmer"... who did indeed have a Bachelor's degree, but as it turns out, knew next to nothing about programming. Management had pretty much figured that out, and had assigned him to perform a task at which he was fully expected to fail, so that they could justify firing him for misrepresenting his capabilities on his resume. I didn't know that at the time, of course... but I could easily see that he was floundering. I also didn't yet know the programming language that he and I were looking at, but I at least understood the foundational principles of the craft; as such, I pretty much shocked everyone when I solved his problem for him, effectively saving him from the chopping block. (Ummm... oops?) Oh, don't worry; they still eventually built their case for firing him -- and rightly so, as I had plenty of opportunities thereafter to observe his (ahem) capabilities with my own eyes -- but it took a lot longer than it might have otherwise. In the process, they also decided to hire me on, full-time. Fancy that... and I didn't even have that Associates degree yet.

I started "professional" programming within the context of that job, in several different programming environments, including Visual Fox Pro, JavaScript/HTML and an obscure little IDE which I'm pretty sure no longer even exists anymore. My very

Re:Poor People Not Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

The public university I attended had a large representation of minorities, was not a "black college", and costs less than most "for-profit schools". The "for-profit schools" are being closed because they are a rip-off. They are not "serving the poor"; they are taking advantage of the naivete of the poor. Improving them with public funds is not an option because they are private businesses.

Historically black colleges are also a trap. I'm from MS and know that the ones there were far too easy. They are run by people who believe that giving the paper without an education is necessary because the people their serving can't deal with the education. Don't go some place that doesn't hold you to the same or higher standards as the regular public universities.

There are no shortcuts or easy-outs. Do the time in the mainstream public university. If you can't handle it, go to a college for two years and then go to university for four without transferring your credits from the college. I knew too many people in university who failed classes at university and then retook them at a college and transferred the "A" they got to the university. Don't disrespect yourself taking an easy road just to get to riches.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

Millenial here. This is dead on. You give me stability with growth and I'll take it, happily. I don't enjoy constantly keeping a resume up to date, it consumes a lot of time and transition can be stressful.

I don't like continually making sure I can implement an AVL tree from scratch in whatever language an interviewer may prefer, see if some string can prove formats last theorem after a regex, or perform some other silly puzzle circus gymnastics on-demand at interviews when the reality is, I won't do it on the job. It's stressful and irritating and makes me want to take my talents and dedication and shift them to another industry where employees are at least treated a bit better.

Sometimes I wonder if that's part of the reason technical interviews (like in SE) have grown to levels of absurdity, to discourage jumping ship for career growth instead of providing career growth in the offense, businesses go on the defense.

I suppose if you want to drive up a true shortage to try and justify visas, you're on the right track.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[painandgreed]

> Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.

I'm not sure they have a choice. Companies don't train any more.

From the Millennials I know, its much more complicated than that. They are generally being realistic about the current state of affairs. There are places that train, or at least will hire people with no or little experience. They join these, but these are not really careers. They can expect to either leave, burn out, or be fired in a couple of years at most. The idea is to jump from job to job, padding the resume with each step, vacationing between them, building up to the pay grade that they think they can be happy with, and then look for a career which will usually mean a boring job for some boring but established company that has a more long term outlook. Here is when things like location, vacations, lack of stress, family time, raising a kid, etc come into play now that they have the required experience to either trade pay for these things or demand them.

The advantage of a degree is stability

[rsilvergun]

if you've got a 4 year degree I know you're at least stable enough as a human being to make it through a 4 year degree. It's not about how good or bad you are as a worker, it's about knowing that your life is at least nominally stable. That stability is valuable because it means, for example, that you're unlikely to suddenly quit because you have to care for a sick relative or you got in trouble with the law (or a family member did), etc.

Businesses want predictability more than performance except at the top end of employees.

Companies don't give raises either

[rsilvergun]

and inflation is 4.5% for necessities (food, shelter, healthcare, education, etc). Forget getting ahead, the only way to stay ahead of rent increases is to get a new job every couple years.

Sounds good, but

[Sqreater]

You have to know that they will hire skilled and knowledgeable individuals without a degree then underpay them because the don't have a college degree. This stinks of business once again coming up with a sleazy plan to reduce human overhead.

If only this comes to pass

[Revek]

I've met many a IT 'guru' who couldn't figure out basic networking. In the mid 90's I had to go to a collage and show the computer science professor how to turn his computer on. We delivered it the day before and he called in to say it didn't work. I went out there and turned it on and it booted to windows 95. The next week they sent me back out after the machines in the lab were all failing. I get there and this rocket surgeon is running a windows 3.11 backup over the top of windows 95. He just kept cratering PC after PC. This guy had multiple degrees and he didn't have the sense to lookup the differences between the operating systems. Got really insulted by my response and called my boss to send someone who knew what they were doing. My boss called the chancellor of the collage and he told the professor to do what I say. This guy couldn't stand that I didn't have any kind of a degree. He moved on at the end of the year. I could have done his job. I'm betting that he produced some of the most useless IT graduates out there. One things for sure if they didn't learn it on their own, they didn't learn anything from that guy.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

A proven track record working in the field with success at at least a handful of different locations over time (not decaying in the same seat the whole time) is worth more than a degree any day. A fresh college graduate doesn't really seem to do better than any reasonably intelligent individual hired from anywhere.

We proved it at one of our workplaces. Instead of the college grads we normally hired for entry level we hired the guy who did our water deliveries. In six months he was one of the best entry level people we had and while I'm not there anymore I know he has gone on to have a solid career. He just needed to get experience under his belt to edge through hiring processes.

You are a pathetic liar.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[mcl630]

You forgot to add "get off my lawn, young whipper-snappers!"

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[mcl630]

Experience has virtually no correlation with understanding or even skill.

I've got many projects under my belt where I was given a compressed timeline because the original team had been working on it for months and the deadline was fast approaching with the team projecting the project getting pushed due to unforseen complexities. I jumped in, quickly read the high level description, looked at what had been worked on, threw everything out, started fresh, and had everything done in a few weeks, plus my own personal improvements. These projects all were originally designed as one-offs, but I changed them to be modular and reusable and the projects have almost all been reused many times with virtually zero changes and bug fixes for many years. What generally starts as a 6 month throw away tool turns into a 5+ year tool that becomes central to many new services that few envisioned the tool to be useful for.

So it seems you have plenty of experience, which informs your understanding and "skill"... exactly opposite of your previous statement.

Meritocracy

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, so hire the most skilled, smartest people for the job. Sounds good, but do they realize this destroys all chances women have of gaining an equal footing in tech?

Women rely on certifications and degrees to prove competence in tech and to gain positions. This policy essentially cements the role of white/Asian/(even Indian) men in tech.

Colossal backfire.

My personal problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I am very well studied, I know a lot, I am creative, I would be useful. But I never worked in such a business, I need to be trained, despite my knowledge. I didn't do internships or take classes to help me working in megacorp. Who will train me to be office boy? Train me to work with others in a production environment? Integrate me?

I know as much as a college grad, except how to do everything the normal way

Your training is on your own time

[TJHook3r]

We hire for skills... as long as you have everything we need before you step through the door of course! Seriously, companies expect the full package without any further training necessary... yet expect to survive in a fast moving technical environment...sigh

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is dumb. But part of that opinion is based on how poorly I see university grads perform in my technology (C++).

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt it. University is so off base from tech skills you could easily compress the skills you need into 6 months.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit.

There's no such thing as general techniques because you need to know the specifics of how each language works before you have a shot of doing things correctly.

If college stuff worked I wouldn't see so much crappy code written by college grads who don't understand the concept of "coding conventions" and why they matter. Then they think they are oh so smart and make assumptions they never should have.

I see incorrect code like f(i++, i++);, and then people doing invalid casts. As long as it works right? Yeah, until 5 years later and the compiler decides to reorder some operations for optimization purposes. Oops, code is broken and nobody knows why!

For most sucessful languages (C, C++), experience is more valuable than education, because nobody in college teaches you what undefined behavior, a sequence point, or what memory_order::acq_rel does, and you're gonna get fucked in the ass if you don't know. End result of having lots of degree holders will little experience in each tech? Lots of bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Which of course leads to security vulnerabilities and thus data breach and data theft.

Tech specific knowledge > general education.

It's easy to hire the right person

[jimcooncat]

You explain to your candidates honestly and exactly what the job entails. Every gory detail. Point out all the flaws with the company, your boss, the vendors, the coworkers. Tell them about all the sucky jobs they have to do because they are "other tasks as needed." Let them know they are expected to carry two extra cell phones which are programmed to notify you at random to see if you're still loyal and paying attention to the company's needs. Give them a copy of Dilbert's Cubes and Punishment and tell them it's the company policy. Clue them in on all the personal favors they'll be expected to do in order to advance. Show them the parking lot that's half a mile away through a dark tunnel, then up a steep hill. If they still want to work for you at the end of that, show them the door. You don't want anyone dumb enough to work for you.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it entertaining you think millenial is some derogatory term. Get to your safe space now!

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

Millennials has multiple definitions across multiple geographies. MetLife says it's born 1977-1994. Ernst and Young uses 1981-1996. That four year difference in start date is pretty significant when you consider that the range size is between 15 and 17 years, that's an approximately 25% swing. I've heard people argue that 1985 isn't millennial. And when you aren't a person who lived their whole life in the US, the generational boundary is much more fluid.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[dwpro]

There's a reason a well rounded education is still valued -- there's more to life, even at work, than your specific skill or trade. I was a CS major but I'm quite happy i took music, history, and particularly philosophy. Considering a teenager is most likely figuring out a path for life with little experience of the real thing, not over specializing seems obvious. Not to mention the opportunity to interact and collaborate (perhaps even procreate) with folks from other specializations

Hiring based on skills is ... for sloths

[davecb]

The engineer you need is not always the engineer you want.

The best, most successful engineers are people who can learn anything. I used to make money from a reputation as "the fastest researcher in the west". It was a blatant overstatement, but I could do literature surveys, and so started projects with a basic understanding of what they involved.

Some are less fortunate: I know several people who have learned difficult new technologies in double-quick time, but were faced with "must have 5 years experience in Java", when Java was only two years old.

My management is looking for people who have proven they could learn new things, by having done so repeatedly.

--dave
ps: if you're in Tranna, we're hriing

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Shaitan]

Not at all. Just looked him up he's going strong at Juniper now.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

Half-educated trolls sure do hate the idea that a deplorable prole might be just as smart as them, or smarter.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether companies are going bust at historically high rates, but it sorta smells that way to me.

Many go bust, but some others are acquired by larger companies who then pick over the carcass, absorbing the choice morsels and discarding the rest in layoffs, spinoffs and writeoffs. Ask just about any entrepreneur these days and they will tell you that the name of the game is exit by acquisition.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Skubman]

Companies not training anymore is due to companies inability/apathy at valuing "firm specific knowledge." PhD's are still trying to lay the theoretical groundwork for measuring it. You can make the argument that the gig economy or mercenary mindset of some employees is to blame, but it still goes down to the inability to present, as a balance sheet asset, the value of training, which is always an expense, regardless of outcome. And yet, all companies quickly figured out that software as a service can net more money. Thanks, Milton Friedman.

Firing based on age

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM means firing based on age is and hiring based on your H1B visa status is most important.

colledge essay

[Farton]

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Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether companies are going bust at historically high rates, but it sorta smells that way to me.

I don't think it's that they're going bust, it's mergers and acquisitions killing companies. Seems like so many of this going on, which while they don't eliminate all jobs in the combined entity (as compared to going out of business) but eliminate more than enough.

Re: hiring based on skills is for millennial think

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Gen X scientist, do not in any way, shape, or form mistake your participation trophy degree with inflated GPA for those who came before you.

Yeah, go ahead and bleat about walking up hill both ways in the snow and No True Scotsman fallacies, but as a physics prof I can tell you it's true. If you've graduated from a tier 1 program, good for you. If not, sit down.

No they won't

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently work for a large government contractor that values diversity of many kinds, including hiring those who acquired their skills in unconventional ways. I've worked in IT for over 30 years now. I have no college degree, no certifications, and no military experience. I'm entirely self-taught. I spend my days re-architecting on-prem systems into scalable cloud-native ones. I'm getting a six-figure salary for doing something I love to do.

It's insane and unnecessary to take on a lifetime of debt from getting a college degree.

Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki

[Bengie]

I was doing this kind of stuff strait out of college with about 2 weeks experience programming.