Comment by vladd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vladd | Hacker News Reader

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Today the same institutions provide education and certify skills. If nothing else, it's an obvious conflict of interests that's tolerated only because historically there was no other practical way around it. The war for talent and the online classes will soon disrupt that - you'll be able to give interviews/tests in a 2-day examination and get a paper saying what you really know (like SAT is for pupils).

And when that link fails, when you can get a certificate in 3 days as opposed to 3 years, when you can study interactive online courses with top-notch content at your own rhythm as opposed to a 4-year outdated programs, then it will happen: certification will be independent and traditional universities will have serious disruption in their tuition prices and budgets.

What will not happen is the demise of high-end education and student loans. The senate & president won't let it fall; US needs to keep itself competitive, especially versus EU where most states heavily subsidize education from taxes. The society and the police can't afford uneducated children.

> 4-year outdated programs

A good STEM program teaches you how to think, and that never gets outdated.

Colleges offer a smorgasbord of courses to take. If you select courses for the easiest route to a degree, you won't be that employable. If you select courses that will give you the best foundation for your chosen career, that'll do much better.

For example, although I got a degree in engineering, I made sure I also took a class in business accounting. (That class has paid off well for me.)

> A good STEM program teaches you how to think, and that never gets outdated.

Honest question: does one not learn to think before college? Where are the parents? What happened in high school?

What I mean by "how to think" is developing organized thought processes for solving (seemingly) hard problems. For example, breaking a large problem into smaller ones, solving the smaller ones, then assembling the solution into a larger one. When faced with a problem, determining what you know and don't know about it. An organized methodology for distinguishing facts from baloney.

All these skills are developed in the process of STEM training. I know I got an awful lot better at it after 4 years of that, and I can see the deficits in those abilities in people who have not undergone such.

For example, given someone debugging their program - I see many programmers who will just try guessing things randomly. If they get lucky with this approach, they often have little idea of why their change made it work. (Often, nor do they care.) But they do spend an awful lot of time with this method, compared with someone who sets about finding the problem in an organized fashion.

>does one not learn to think before college? Where are the parents?

Maturity plays a huge role. A lot can happen in 4 years of independence.

Everyone learns to think one way or another, and it continues well past 18. The human brain is still physically developing at 18.

So since you're going to learn to think after 18, a good college education provides the shortest cut to learning to think WELL, based on the accumulated experience of thousands of years of human history.

If you select courses for the easiest route to a degree, you won't be that employable.

I've never seen evidence that specific courses matter much for employment post college. Do you have data on this?

No, I have done no research on this. But if you went for a degree in EE, and took only the minimum of electronics courses, then you'd have a skill deficit compared with a person who took every advanced EE course he could stuff into his schedule? For example, he layered on analog electronics, and you took only digital, that you'd have a problem when faced with a job that needed a bit of analog?

And yes, I've seen EEs flummoxed when faced with a bit of noise in their digital circuit, when a guy who knew some analog had it fixed pronto. Which engineer was more employable?

I don't think Walter Bright meant that listing the courses you took on your resume is going to make you more (or less) employable. I think the point was that taking difficult classes will better prepare your for work.

I slightly disagree with this position, difficult doesn't mean better (depending on your definition of better). For example, I would have been better served to take a class on databases rather than a class on computational geometry.

I didn't mean necessarily taking hard classes. I meant taking classes that would provide a foundation for your career, rather than selecting classes based solely on how easy they are.

If you exit high school not knowing how to think, you're not going to suddenly learn in college.

Certificates are fine for IT work, but they can't replace degrees for programmers. A degree at a good school shows that you're smart, not just knowledgeable.

Google seems to be able to figure out smart folks in 5-6 hours with pretty high accuracy.

Isn't Google also notorious for being biased towards the "top" schools, caring about GPAs and turning away a ton of smart people? That's what I've heard, but I've no first-hand experience.

So many smart people apply to Google that they could (at least historically--maybe it's different now) get away with a hiring process optimized for false negatives over false positives. This is only fair, but also probably makes them a poor example as far as hiring practices go.

So yes: they can figure out if you're smart in 5-6 hours. But they can't do the converse reliably.

I guess the reason why companies with a high application volume (like Google) tend to be biased towards "top" school and using your GPA as a selection criteria, is that it is so much easier to "cut the pile in half" and still have a decent number of good candidates, only the average talent might be higher. It reduces the overhead in the HR department.

That means a lot of smart people never get the opportunity to try out for the interview. In my opinion, you have to market yourself better and differently if you want to increase the odds of getting to the interview, where you get a chance to prove yourself beyond what is on paper.

What you say makes sense for the screening rounds - resume shortlisting and a phone screen. These are centered around rejecting candidates. But face to face interviews are supposed to be the other way. As far as I know, Google asks for the GPA mostly towards the end. That doesn't save them any time. It shows they care about academics.

On a general note, is there any company that tries to extract patterns out of their employees performance track records; like a feedback loop into their interview process?

Google does not ask for your GPA in interviews.

Well, funny

I know about people with no college education being interviewed at google

You can blame google for having a broken interview process but it appears 99% of their assessment comes from the interview and it really doesn't matter if your major is in pet grooming or math

Edit 'cause I can't answer: Not "friend of a friend" account, but directly from the concerned person

'"99% of their assessment comes from the interview." Indeed, it's the very opposite since the interview is not where you show that you can |excel in multiple areas."'

I don't believe you are familiar with the Google selection process. The importance of academic achievement (for engineering positions especially) is underrated by google.

You may shine in academia, if you don't get almost a perfect score in the interview you're out.

What you said doesn't necessarily negate tikhonj's statement.

You said they were interviewed. You didn't say if they were hired. If they weren't hired then was it partially due to a bias against people without a college degree?

You also said "know of", which means this is a friend-of-a-friend account, with bearing on the usefulness of that information for this question.

Better would be a pointer to http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/04/07/so-you-want-to-... where someone who was on a Google hiring committee "acknowledges that the 3.7-or-higher-GPA myth is widespread, but she discounts it." and says "Academia is merely one way to distinguish yourself, and there are plenty of others. So if your GPA, or your school, doesn't stand out, look for additional avenues. Besides, you'll need to excel in multiple areas to get your resume selected."

I read this as saying that good grades from a good college help, because it's one of the ways to show that you excel in an area. This also implies that excelling in college is one possible indicator on success in working at Google.

That's very different than saying that "99% of their assessment comes from the interview." Indeed, it's the very opposite since the interview is not where you show that you can |excel in multiple areas."

Isn't Google also notorious for being biased towards the "top" schools

They were in the early days, but it doesn't seem to matter anymore. Some regular posters to HN are Google employees void of any college degrees. The change indicates to me that their attempts to filter by education was failing them, which is interesting in itself.

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