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Comment by codeonfire | Hacker News Reader

No, because if it turns out you don't have the skills you say you do, I will get fired because I hired someone just based on my own (wrong) preferences. If you had a degree but couldn't do the job, it is a more 'honest' mistake and I could blame your school.

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Doesn't this just make you a bad interviewer? The fact that blaming someones college is even on the table just makes it seem like you aren't doing your job as an interviewer. I've met tons of CS degrees from UC Irvine and other great schools who can't program worth a damn.

I'm under impression that parent expressed frustration with having to work in environment with so little respect for human intelligence that this kind of bureaucratic CYA is needed to stay employed there.

Now, there is the question whether one should want to stay in such a place, but it seems to be a common folk wisdom that many places are like that and there is no escape.

Like it or not, once a company has more than one manager they are competing for headcount and budget. They can't just leave to another job. cya is the nature of the job.

No, an employee might be very skilled but is difficult to work with. Imagine someone who has a habit of threatening coworkers, stalking an ex, bringing weapons to work, etc. That's not something that comes out in an interview. If the person is fired there is the expectation that these kind of behavior problems would have been found out and fixed in four years of college. It's the same with skills. Someone should have found out in four years.

Tough, but honest answer. The point that this person is trying to make that a lot of users will probably say something along the lines of "Yes I will if your side projects are good enough." But for every HN user there are 10 interviewers that look at all the resumes and just throws those out that do not come from a top tier CS school. I wish OP the best of luck.

Sounds like you work for a horrible company. I am from UK and work in Australia and I have never heard of or experienced anything like this. Sounds like the worst of the worst.

Whether or not the company is horrible or if someone would be fired for a bad hire, managers will assume the worst and do the most weasely thing. So, expected behavior is they play it safe and trash resumes without degrees. Some people don't have the same perceived social pressure because the company is small or they are the founder.

If that is true, its is an effective a cartel for the universities. Join our courses or kiss goodbye to your middle income lifestyle dreams.

This is a hilarious response because any place that would fire an interviewer for a bad hire would be one of the worst possible places to work at. Hiring engineers is hard enough without the threat of your job being attached to their success. If you need to cover your ass so much that you can't hire anyone without a good degree that indicates there's more politics in play than actual engineering.

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