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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the big surprise...a degree doesn't mean that you're automatically more competent, but competence -- the kind that is valuable to a company with many moving parts -- can't be measured on a single scale. Pure mastery of C and assembly may not outweigh your ability to work within and communicate in a team. A degree implicitly confers a few social milestones:

- You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college. Or, you know what it's like to be responsible for paying off a large loan.

- You've been thrown into a melting pot for ~4 years and have managed not to freak out and/or commit a felony.

- You've been able to commit to and meet arbitrary deadlines (i.e. finals week) and goals.

No, having a college degree doesn't guarantee that you're a fine upstanding person...it's just one useful metric for an employer to have when they have little else to go on.

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Formally uneducated developer here. Due to the circumstances of my youth (foster homes, boys homes), I did the usual service level jobs (construction, restaurants) until I stumbled into a data entry job back in the day and managed to leverage myself as a unix sysadmin, then C, perl, Java dev with some fairly prestigious companies. Pretty much all self taught. Despite my adverse origins, I managed to not freak out or commit a felony. That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education, and I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.

I'd have to think from an employer's perspective that someone without a degree who has made their way through gainful employment has proven themselves to be as reliable as any college graduate. However, the fact that college graduates are more frequently hired may be a result of the fact that there's way more of them than there are the people who worked their way through life, at least in the white-collar sector.

I think it depends a lot on the employer.

Some employers believe they have the competence to directly evaluate job-relevant skills. They will lean heavily on practical interviews and discussion of actual work experience.

Other employers are much more credential oriented because they can't tell a good developer from a bad one. Sometimes that's because there aren't many technical people in the company. More often, it seems, it's because hiring is done by people who are not working developers themselves. (E.g., HR screens resumes, interviews mainly done by non-techincal hiring managers.)

Since I'm of the former sort, I look especially hard for developers who don't have the "right" credentials. Not only are they more likely to have certain valuable characteristics than people who take the prescribed path, they're also likely to be overlooked by organizations that value credentials, and so easier to hire.

> That being said, I do think I would be a better developer if I had access to some formal education

That might be true, but there's a very limited number of courses on a typical computer science degree which actually do help. I think on mine it was mostly just data structures, theory of databases and concurrency. Possibly math.

Many others were interesting but I wouldn't say that I ever used them.

> I think that the bar is higher today and it's not as easy to sneak your way in like I did.

I think this is a significant factor in the skew from 'experience is king' to 'you need a degree'. The industry is much less of a 'wild west' now than it was even 15 years ago, so people with more than 15 years experience have a much higher chance of being self taught than people with 1-5 years.

> You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford putting you through college.

This is really a metric we want to keep significant? "We'd just feel more comfortable giving our good jobs to people from already well-off families; if you're not from one of those, tough luck..."?

Consciously? No. But a lot of it is related to the concept of culture fit. If a company's CEO loves golfing, chances are they are going to find more kinship with someone else who also lived a life that allowed for recreational golfing, whether that manifests itself in the way that the CEO and employee can make easy small talk or even spend time out on the course together. To varying degrees, I think the same applies to other social rites and shared experiences, whether it's going to college, joining the Greek system, playing sports, etc. etc. Hell I admit that I have an instinctive affinity to people who come from my home state of Iowa, even though logically I know that it's not true that people from Iowa are just "better" than those who didn't happen to be born within its borders...but a huge proportion of my best friends in New York were strongly connected to Iowa, whether it was because we grew up together or because "Oh, you're from Iowa?" led to the kind of conversation that help to upgrade a normal big city acquaintanceship into a real friendship. In the same way, I don't think a college degree is necessarily a binary switch/litmus test...it just opens up a lot more possibilities of shared/common experiences. And as CEOs/managers tend to be reside in the higher classes of society, college experience highly correlates with the kinds of things they've lived through.

Why doesn't Iowa fall off the map?

Same reason Florida doesn't break off and float away.

Like it or not, it's actually a pretty good proxy for "someone with decent education and a stable upbringing, plus has is likely to have the genetic potential to consistently perform well in employment" which is in turn a proxy for "likely to be a good hire."

If you're running a welfare program, that's an unfair criterion. If you're running a business and need competent employees, then it's not a bad screening measure.

When I was about to graduate from Uni, I did a string of practice interviews for places who were interviewing new graduates )or otherwise). I applied to all kinds of places (including in blue-collar industries) just to feel comfortable with people asking you questions all sorts of questions.

I recall the blue collar employers questioning me about my choice to interview as they saw me a s "flight risk" that I'd find it beneath me or something --having been going thru Uni, or that I might not fit in with the rest of the shop workers.

Basically, interviewers want some assurance of some type you will fit in, whether you'll be able to blend in with the rest of the employees -in the blue collar places, that I might fit in with a less polished crowd and whether one might find it fulfilling.

You're intentionally ignoring the second sentence of that bullet point, which completes his thought.

Completes it only by reinforcing how much easier things are for those from already well-off families/the extra burden placed on those who aren't...

It should come as no surprise to you that on average, people tutored in math/writing/etc. as kids are actually better at math/writing/etc. than those who did not have tutoring.

Yeah, life isn't fair. Sometimes you have to work harder than others.

Officially? Of course not.

If we're talking about programming having a college degree helps better ensure that the candidate has had good exposure to relevant theory (e.g. automata, graph, ...) and math. While understanding this stuff isn't essential for most CRUD apps, it's crucial if you're building something big like a new kind of datastore, a better search engine, an operating system, and so on. Yes someone without a degree can theoretically have an understanding of subjects that most people only have exposure to in a university, however if you're a company that plays things safe you're going to go for the better bet

That's all useless. A person in my school had her husband do the work for her. She probably has a degree by now.

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