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Comment by jmtame | Hacker News Reader

Why are you using "college degree" as a measure of a candidate's "quality"?

You almost make this sound like a bad thing. While hiring someone based entirely on any single criterion is a bad idea, but someone's degree is not a horrible heuristic for doing some quick review of potential candidates, or when comparing the quality of candidates. Graduating with a Computer Science or Engineering degree from MIT does mean something, particularly if you're looking for more junior developers.

My thoughts exactly. Problem with a lot of inexperienced startups is their failure to look at people's potential and not their credentials. While a degree helps, people are more likely to prove their quality through great work and amazing reliability. When I start hiring--which hopefully is soon--I'm not going to give a rat's ass about people's credentials, I'll know they're good when I see their work and how they work.

I am curious as to what would count as "work". Would you consider building a financial library used for personal and academic purposes work?

Sorry, I should've defined "work". In the web world, work is the designs you've done, the projects you've developed, and the communities you've helped. I'm sure building a financial library would fit perfectly in that category.

I wasn't busting your chops. I wanted to know because next year I will be completing my MSFE. My plans are to work long enough to pay off my debt and get a nice cash cushion and then move out to SV. I haven't built anything yet, but I am starting to get a financial library laid out in planning.

We didn't actually take a college degree into consideration when hiring.

I simply thought it would be nice to include, because some people do take college education into consideration when looking to follow up with applicants.

I understand, in some cases it can be helpful. But the way you worded it, you dropped the college degree reference many times.

I don't want to sound like a cynnical person when writing on this. I think it's cool that you published your results, I just felt like pointing out that it seemed like a lot of emphasis was put on college degrees as a qualifying factor. I would really like to hear about your reasoning for why you selected the applicants in the final round.

Some possible things to consider writing about next time:

Did they contribute to open source projects? If so, which ones?

Did they write some cool apps in the past? If so, what were they?

Do they have an interesting philosophy on life, code, or hackers? If so, what was it?

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