I know its naive but I find it really hard to understand why people value the piece of paper more than the knowledge.
The good news is that you can't cheat as a software developer. Or maybe you can? Depressing thought.
The good news is that you can't cheat as a software developer. Or maybe you can? Depressing thought.
Even the relevant classes are largely bullshit. I took a marketing class where the textbook was seemingly written by a group of people who sit in a room all day making up labels for common sense concepts. As a student, I have to memorize those labels. I have to memorize the meaningless systems and charts and diagrams those people came up with. I have to memorize the names of people who did things in the field of marketing.
You get my point. It was a waste of time. There was definitely useful stuff in my degree, stuff that was helpful in my actual jobs, but it was maybe 1-2% of my total undergraduate career, and I could have learned that information on my own with a few books and about a month of studying.
Could you elaborate, maybe point me to the program? I've never heard of anything like this.
(although I do know other ridiculous examples, don't laugh but I know people who had PE in a uni business degree. team building competencies and all that crap haha)
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/01/16/verizon-finds-de...
http://art.mt.gov/artists/IRS_20pt_Checklist_%20Independent_... "Services rendered personally."
(Couldn't find the same simple checklist on irs.gov).
So it seems quite within his rights to outsource, no? Unless there's some clearance restriction or I'm just misunderstanding these guidelines?
I imagine the company could press some heavy charges if it wanted to.
Seems to be that there's at least some commercial pressure to value the "piece of paper" less. Of course it could also be that a degree is now the de facto baseline, & the wheels just keep turning.
Where is it illegal to require a degree in Marketing for a job in Marketing?
There's legal notions that state you can't create arbitrary requirements. i.e. take a job where employees are on the phone with customers all day, it turns out that entrepreneurs would rather want your name to be John than Juan, Kwame or Mohammed. And given racial differences in socioeconomic standing, which create differences in educational attainment, it's easy to say a college degree is a requirement for the job, when you're really just using it as a proxy to hire a certain ethnic profile.
This is just an example, I'm not claiming here it's widespread (although it wouldn't surprise me in some industries, and many blind tests have shown preferences, but that's besides the point.)
Now this isn't new, so there have been court cases in the past. And they shaped a precedent which loosely states that you can't just say you need a degree for the job. You need to back that up with real data. This isn't common practice, but it's the law. So for a job where you need to do rudimentary work, there's technically quite a high burden of proof on the employer to require a degree for that.
The famous case is Griggs vs Duke Power Co[0][1]
There've been more cases since, it's not that hard to find. In any case, no it's not broadly illegal to ask for a degree at all. But there is precedent that unnecessary tests, e.g. a degree requirement for a telemarketing job, are indeed illegal.
I wouldn't know for certain how a judge would rule on the examples given by the person you replied to, like system admin or marketing, but I suspect the notion a degree would be required would be found entirely reasonable by a judge, like syst admin or marketing. But I get his point. I've got friends who work e.g. as a credit analyst, which is a job they say they and their peers could've done at age 16 without even finishing HS, yet it's a typical job that requires a degree and that a judge would probably be convinced of that it requires a degree.
[0] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/401/424.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.
I think you're right in that software is a field where it's hard to fake it 'til you make it. Not sure how it is in the US, but where I live it's typically students in business, accounting, marketing, and management that do the majority of the cheating. Whether that's because how those subjects are assessed makes them inherently more suitable for cheating or because language problems make essays, but not software, harder to write is difficult to say.
Grad school admissions cares about your GPA.
Incidentally I found it freeing to know I wasn't going to grad school. Didn't have to run the grades/stats rat race anymore, and could do the work for the right reasons.
Doing undergrad knowing you are trying to get into competitive PhD programs and doing undergrad knowing it's the end of your education are very different beasts.
In a small company it's pretty easy to avoid the automatic filters of large companies, the ones that screen out applicants without degrees, or from "wrong" universities, or who have low GPAs. Most of these metrics don't seem to matter in the long run (but they are easy for HR types to apply, so they do).
GPAs and such probably matter in government orgs, or places that are very strict and hierarchical. You probably want to avoid places like these anyway.
Additionally, the farther out from a candidate's graduation the interview takes place, the less their GPA matters compared the work they have done since they left. If you have a great resume and come highly recommended I'm not very concerned with how well you did in your calc 2 or operating systems courses.
Or are you referring to something other than the standard coding interview?
Candidate B dropped out after three years. But they've done some quite interesting side projects, they know a bunch of languages, and stuff outside the coursework, and the courses they took were the harder ones.
Generally, and for openers, 'A' is gonna struggle explaining what the heck an XOR is, while 'B' is going to toss off the answer in a couple of seconds. And their skills just keep diverging from there. I'll have confidence that 'B' will keep growing and learning, and they're going to be a handful, while 'A' is going to need to be told what to do, and that will be tiresome.
This ^^^ is kind of a parody, but you can tell what I'm looking for, early on. (People with more experience, I look for significant contributions to hard problems, and I'm really interested in how people decide what to work on).
People need information to judge and trust others by. Information about ones capabilities should be verifiable by your accomplishments. At the start of a career though you have no accomplishments.
Companies, especially larger more established companies with higher head counts, are often risk averse in their hiring so hey use prestigious degree programs to filter out other potential candidates.
What problem do you mean?
It's used as a filter. On paper, you look good, so you get an interview.
When many applicants are "fake" degrees, industries get the impression that there simply isn't good talent out there. Employers don't have a reliable means of knowing the likelihood someone is a good engineer. Employers could try to filter based on Asian-sounding last names, but that would be illegal and cheating themselves out of candidates who actually did work hard in school.
I have interviewed candidates on the strength of a resume only to find out that someone in the building at a previous position was working with a technology.
Once on the job, I have seen people pass off code from Java tutorial sites and StackOverflow as their own. Eventually, they find someone who will protect them and then they can collect pay while generating excuses and blame storming.