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Comment by oh_sigh | Hacker News Reader

I was hired at one of the FAANG companies, and it turns out there was an issue with my college diploma where my college wouldn't release the records. My HR person hounded me for like 2 months until I got it sorted out(most of the time spent waiting on hearing back from my college administrators). I'd imagine I would have been fired if it appeared I couldn't prove I graduated the college I claimed - even though I've been in the work force for 15 years and assumed my college experience was largely irrelevant to getting hired.

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If your college degree was described in your resume and was a differentiable factor in your hiring they may have been forced to confirm it's accuracy or be open to fair hiring lawsuits - for instance if you are white and another candidate black with him having a 2 year degree against your 4 year degree and all other things equal - if you lied about your 4 year degree then the black candidate would be more qualified for the position and, if preference absent any factual difference is given to white candidates often enough that can violate the equal employment opportunity act - if that happens often enough, the government can come down on the company hard.

Additionally, a four year degree might qualify your employment for grant subsidies for research while a lack there of might make it harder for the company to justify - I've worked in a few places now where my employment has been government subsidized since I've worked on novel research.

Basically, HR is stupid complicated and I'm sorry the experience was negative, but they were probably compelled to make sure they got that information to insulate the company from various legal exposures.

It almost certainly wasn't - I went to a no-name tiny state school with a crappy CS program and had a mediocre GPA. The most relevant thing which probably got me an interview was merely being employed at another FAANG company when the other FAANG company contacted me.

right, because they wouldn't have been able to show that they were under the impression that the liar had a 4 year degree.

If you didn’t include your school on resume would this have occurred?

After 15 years really? That is annoying...

It was annoying because it felt like my employment could be terminated rightfully at any time due to no fault of my own - but I'm happy that the company forced me to deal with it.

What happened was, while I had more than enough credits to graduate, I had an "incomplete" for a course in my last semester. I had dropped the course before the semester begam with the approval of my professor, but he marked me as incomplete instead of dropped, and apparently you can't get a diploma with an incomplete on your record(despite them letting me walk in graduation, and sending me a diploma a few weeks later).

Thankfully I had the whole email chain(because I bulk forwarded all of my college emails to my personal gmail address) at the time between my professor, the college administrator, and myself. If I didn't have that, theoretically I would have had to go back to college for a single class to finish out my degree.

If you did not include graduation on your application would this not have been a problem?

Do you think the company would have let you continue to work while completing the course? Especially if it was like a foreign language or something?

Doubly-annoying because in my experience FAANG companies don't care if someone has a degree, at least for technical roles. It's "old tech" companies like Microsoft et al. that still care.

They don't care, but they do care if you lie. I don't care about someone's degree either, but I care about ethics. Imagine someone that can't be trusted working at any of the FAANG, what sort of damage can they do?

Do you want someone reading your Facebook message because they can, or your gmail, or accessing your AWS resources? Granted these should all be locked and have strong audit trails from a system perspective, but there's always someone with "access" and you need to trust them.

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