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Comment by StandardFuture | Hacker News Reader

Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system.

We are seeing the big tech companies more than ever use algorithmic puzzle questions, and startups using "culture fit" as easy go-to filtration systems.

But, I imagine education might be an even simpler filter if labor supply keeps growing. It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.

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> Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system.

Education is a shitty filtration system. Work-examples and/or skill-demonstration based interviews like the ones used for programmers are much better. The only reason that so many other industries rely on education is that they don't have as good ways of testing the actual skills of job applicants (and/or because testing doesn't scale that well - e.g. you can give a coding test to every programmer, but can't give a "surgery test" to every doctor).

> It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.

That seems like a very weak hiring strategy.

I'd imagine the top 10% of CS majors at a mid-tier school might be better than the bottom 10% at a top-tier school.

Also, college rankings can include all sorts of factors like endowments that might only be weakly correlated with the quality of the education, which itself is probably very difficult to measure.

Plus you're going to have a hiring bias against self-learners or those that can't afford a top 20 school.

A quick quiz or sample of prior work is a much better filter than a college name.

If there’s a real downturn we’ll see the big boys cut jobs—maybe a lot. Or even just some regulatory changes (especially reigning in spying and fruits-of-spying monetization) without a broader downturn. Wages downmarket would suffer a ton with all those top-comp folks with (by definition) above-average résumés and work history suddenly looking for a job. Probably upward mobility (into lead/senior/et c.) will suffer a lot. Doesn’t take more supply, lower demand is something we will see again.

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