Degree or equivalent experience - what's the conversion rate? | Hacker News Reader

Degree or equivalent experience - what's the conversion rate?

2 pointswoodtrail5 comments

There seem to be a decent number of programmers on here without college degrees. Most job postings I see for programming positions require a degree or equivalent experience.

What is equivalent experience defined as? Do contracting, Github projects, and personal projects count as equivalent experience? Is there a conversion rate (ie, 1 year formal education = 2 years work experience)? (That rate would seem a bit harsh to me).

Thanks for any responses.

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In a typical four year university program you will probably have spent two years learning how to think about problems to make them easier to attack and three years worth of doing projects. So figure 12 to 15 solid projects that you were a primary input on. Probably four or five of them that you started with a clean sheet of paper and a problem and produced as solution.

I've interviewed a number of people who were programmers but did not have a degree in CS, those who were just caught up in it and lived and breathed it, learned every new language that comes out to see how they are different, implement algorithms in four different languages to see how the compilers compare or design languages, or operating systems, or complex applications from scratch to under stand them better, those people it really doesn't matter. In many ways they are better than people with CS degrees.

Then there are people who got interested in the end effects, fancy web sites, or maybe video games, or breaking into things 'for the lulz' who really don't care about programming so much as it is playing with computers or technology. They read a bunch of blogs maybe, but they don't think deeply about what the underlying systems are doing. For those folks sometimes almost any amount of 'experience' isn't enough if the bit hasn't flipped to understanding as opposed to just doing.

The third category are folks who started programming accidently, they needed to do something and there was no one around to do it so they poked and prodded and got it to work. Over the weeks, months, years they have collected a bunch of 'recipes' for getting stuff done, maybe they know why a hash table differs from a binary tree maybe they don't but if told to they can use either. For them its a lot harder call. 3:1 ? May 4:1 ? Its a matter of being exposed to a lot of different problems so that they can recognize where the solution space is going to be quickly.

Certainly any time you're putting code to compiler and producing product that counts as experience, paid or not, but the quality of the experience matters a lot. No amount of experience localizing pre-existing code will train you to write a compiler.

Thanks for the reply. It seems like equivalent experience is decently variable.

Sure, the big difference is that at a University they go through a bunch of things that come up and they talk about how to avoid them and why. So everyone learns how to do a bubble sort and then you learn why that is so slow, both from an analysis point of view and an algorithmic point of view, and then you move on to quicksort or insertion sorts.

Whereas someone just picking it up as they go along might independently come up with a bubble sort, it works, and then just keep using and reusing it because hey, it works doesn't it? And then when its the bottle neck and they need something better they don't even think to look at the 'working' code they look elsewhere. It is a sort of unintentional blindness.

I am not a hiring manager, but I am a guy without a college degree who works in IT.

As mentioned elsewhere, it depends on what the equivalent experience is. But also consider this;

Employers [1] look at a college degree as an indicator that one can pick something and stick with it for a few years, see it to it's finish.

If this is valid, then you can't have a strict conversion rate. Enlisting in the military for four years is a valid a measure of 'stick to it-ivness'. So would working at 'a' employer for a dozen years [2]

Which is a roundabout way of saying 'it depends on the individual'.

[1] I was told once by a CIO during an interview. [2] While demonstrating progressive advances in responsibilities.

Employers are different. Some prefer formal education. Some only care about your ability to do work.

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