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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

As it should be.

We don't have people calling themselves engineers just because can type a few lines of code.

I don't have a degree (just 35 years of experience shipping products at companies you have definitely heard of). Some of the best engineers I've worked with haven't had degrees. One guy I know (who will never have to work again) didn't even bother to graduate from high school. A few of them have written papers published in academic journals. There is definitely more than "a few lines of code" involved in their careers.

I guess if you're a bureaucrat designing a visa, requiring a degree makes sense. But saying that people lacking degrees aren't good engineers is crazy.

I always feel like the guy in this meme when someone suggests I should interview for some hot new opportunity http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/i-know-mor...

It's a different language. Similar words have different meanings in different parts of the world, simple as that. The American "software engineer" translates to "software developer" in much of continental Europe, even if the locals are sometimes using English words fot that. In Germany, for example, even getting all the fancy certifications will not make you an "Ingenieur“, the term just isn't used for computer science at all. ("Ingenieur“ is shared between disciplines as different as architecture and electrical engineering, but computer science will make you an "Informatiker“)

Btw, when English is borrowing words from other languages they also tend to undergo a significant semantic shift. It's a two way street.

The best developper I know didn't even finished school. I train every month plenty of terrible devs for a living. They all have better formal education than I, yet I'm paid 5 times their salary to teach them how to do their job.

The education system should be giving you clues on who you should hire. But it doesn't fulfill its mission at all.

And Europe wonders why it doesn't have any serious Facebook/Google competitors.

An engineer is anyone who uses technology to solve a problem. Now there's a massive spectrum of quality there, but a piece of paper or two and some classwork doesn't make you an engineer. Or even a particularly good engineer. Just the other day I explained how Hash Tables work to someone with a Masters.

Was it a masters in CS?

I've known quite a few people with "conversion course" UK MSc degrees who probably wouldn't know what a hashtable is let along how they work.

Yep.

Lots of American tech in Facebook and Google has been created by Europeans with degrees that decided to work in US.

Should I make a list?

Sure, but by this program's criteria a lot of those people probably wouldn't be considered "Engineers" in their home countries, all because they don't have a piece of paper from some meaningless authority.

From my admittedly limited exposure to the continent and knowing my sister's experience with Swiss Bureaucracy, I can only imagine European government workers get high off the ink from all the rubber stamps required.

I'm a self taught dev with 15+ years' experience. I only got a degree a few years ago (did it while working). Honestly, I learned exactly nothing useful that I didn't already know.

I do a lot of hiring and, in my experience, having a degree (or indeed the class/score of said degree) has no relation to the real-world abilities of candidates.

"engineer" in France is a regulated title you can only get through a degree (like Germany?). Actually I'm not even sure most foreign schools degrees would be accepted as engineers in France.

That is slightly inacurate, "Engineer" is not a regulated title in France. What is though is the "graduated engineer" (Ingénieur diplômé) title.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_des_titres_d%27ing%...

You are discussing about the university degree (as the parent did), but there are other usages of the word "ingénieur" in France beside diplomas.

In France "Ingénieur" is also a civil servant title, or a title given to someone who did that job and is now retired (I am "Ingénieur honoraire" and have a master but no "Ingénieur" diploma).

99% of the time I never even look at the education history of a candidate. At least once it's turned out that someone I've interviewed (and who was hired) turned out not to have a degree. Honestly, not a big deal.

Oh, it's fun if they went to the school I dropped out of [I don't mention that I don't have a degree]. "Is professor Xyztmxl still teaching the OS course, and can any students understand him at all?" Good times, at the end of an interview, when things went well.

But education is almost always irrelevant. I prefer seeing wide-and-deep experience in someone from a no-name school to someone from MIT/Caltech/whatever who's just been pootering around on some narrow Java project for years.

I'm thinking of getting a degree while working too. Do you think it's worth it? Perhaps if only to make life easier...

I dropped out of uni in my last year due to family/personal issues but I've been working in tech for over 12 years now. I've never needed to show a degree here in the UK but back home (Spain) it used to be an issue. Recently the opportunity to relocate to the USA came up with my employer but I sort of rejected the offer since I assumed that getting a visa might be a bit of a hassle without a degree.

Like it or not, a lot of employers won't even look at your CV if you don't have a degree. Also, if you do want to work outside of the EU, it is very likely that not having a degree will be an impediment to getting a visa (and not just for the USA).

So yes, as silly as I think it is, I do think overall it's worth it.

If you want to do it while working, I can highly recommend the Open University. While I didn't really learn anything I didn't already know with a Computing degree, there is a large choice of courses, the course materials were really good, and the remote tutoring system works well.

Embedded project lead here. I'll take a BSEE/BSCE/BSCS with 3 years of experience over an MS+0 any day of the week.

When I got my job at NeXT computer I remember Steve Jobs saying to me that there were only two people there without degrees, and he was one of them (and I was the other.)

I heard a story about him where he fired someone in an elevator because he found out they didn't have a degree.

Wouldn't surprise me...Steve fired me more than once. He was volatile. I learned to mostly ignore him, and just do the right thing.

Lol. Having a master's is negatively correlated with developer quality in many people's experience.

I know it's not always accurate. But when I am looking at a resume of someone who has a master's in CS, I think either programming was an afterthought for them or, if they had been learning to code all this time, why didn't they go out and get a job long before they had time to finish a masters?

I've never been comfortable with the widespread use of the term "engineer" in software design and development contexts, but that doesn't change the fact that it's kind of a joke to try requiring a master's degree for what's ostensibly a startup/tech oriented visa program. I certainly have the impression that many founders and developers have only bachelor's degrees, or are self taught.

I know a CPU designer that avoids the term "software engineering" and instead calls the profession "software arts & crafts." :)

I have a bachelor's degree in EE but do software now and am mostly self taught in that department. I have met my fair share of incompetent programmers with masters degrees though. I like the idea of moving to Europe and working there for a while, but I get the distinct impression they are far more concerned with degrees and credentials over there and I am not sure I would fit in.

Yes, I think the term has been abused and overused, but it's equally wrong in the other direction to dismiss all tech talent simply for lacking a graduate degree.

I'd like to see you tell John Carmack that he's not an "engineer" or any other accomplished engineer that didn't graduate with a degree.

Yes we do? "software engineer" is a very common job title.

So are sales engineer/HVAC engineer/stationary engineer/chief engineer/critical facilities engineer/etc...seems like the word, and required training associated with it, is slowly getting cheapened by throwing the title "engineer" on everything.

You can be a professional engineer (the bridge designing kind) with a four-year undergraduate degree in all of Canada and the US as far as I know.

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