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Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

And this is why tech companies stopped giving a shit about undergraduate degrees back in the 90s at the latest. There’s literally no signal to be had.

None of the above is meant to deny the benefits of getting into the ivy league self-dealing club.

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Stopped giving <a shit> about undergrad degrees? No signal to be had?! Somehow I'm not getting that read from the tech industry... what I am getting is a willingness to hire non-traditional candidates. That does not translate to not giving a shit.

If you have more information on the source of your confidence, please do share.

Happy to. I’ve done well into the hundreds of interviews at FAANG or whatever the acronym du jour is. We didn’t even look at resumes except to see if they were obviously self-disqualifying. Google SteveY’s rants on the subject if you want more corroboration. Also it’s obvious to anyone that isn’t stupid that “daddy bought me into Stanford” doesn’t indicate an ability to do top tier engineering work.

The Steve Yegge rants were well known... over a decade ago. Does he continue to speak for Google management perspectives today?

Google isn't turning up anything - mind linking SteveY?

Probably one of these blog posts:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightl...

Stevey is his handle. He’s notable enough to have a Wikipedia page[1]. I don’t know if that page will directly get you to his posts on interviewing, but with some cleverness that should be enough to go on.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Yegge

Probably Steve Yegge?

Is it possible there was a resume filtering stage before you saw them?

When I was interviewing at Google virtually all the candidates were sourced or referrals, not selected from submitted CVs. I never even looked at the education section. There are was too many universities or there to know if they're meant to be good or bad and education never told you anything useful anyway.

Back then recruiting did a very basic resume screen and then they’d go to an SDE or SDM’s inbox for final screening. I imagine that’s no longer the case.

I dunno about the 90s, but it definitely feels to me like the industry largely stopped giving a shit about undergrad degrees at some point

Yeah, some bootcamps will hesitate to even admit you without a college degree. And I got offered to skip a technical interview just because I had a fancy degree on my resume that has nothing to do with cs.

Also when I was teaching pre-covid I always assumed my undergraduates would cheat if I gave them anything cheatable. Even if they're cheating though some small percentage gets through and sticks with some small percentage of students.

My mentors always said thats who you should teach to, and to assume good intentions with the rest. It takes a long time to settle into an adult brain.

Since we're converting purely anecdotal data into blanket generalizations, I am happy to provide a counter point. Graduated in 2004, and most of the companies that I looked into listed a bachelors degree in computer science for entry level software engineering positions.

In several interviews we even went over some of the actual subject matter from some of the more interesting courses, and I was able to leverage algorithms from my genetic engineering undergrad work during some whiteboarding.

This is false, 99% of engineers at top software companies have a degree and a lot have masters or Phds (especially those doing more specialized work)

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