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Comment by TamDenholm | Hacker News Reader

From my personal perspective, me not having a degree doesnt matter in the slightest and i think that it probably helps due to my personal preference, because i dont think id want to work for a company that decides my vast amount of experience is irrelevant because i dont have a degree.

It doesnt matter as much because of a number of factors, first, im a contractor and would never take a permie job, also i sucked at school. I left school at 15 thinking i was dumb because i got bad grades. After leaving school and finding computers and learning them myself, i finally realised i wasnt dumb and after a few years in shitty jobs while learning in the off time, i eventually started making an income from my passion.

Fast forward to today and my portfolio and technical knowledge in my field speaks for itself. To me, going to university would have just delayed my career by years and im already kicking myself for not getting my act together quicker.

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It's possible that you'd miss a theoretically possible "good company with a bad HR department" although one can argue that they wouldn't remain a good company for very long...

True, but this is always why i like working for smaller companies, they generally aren't big enough to have HR departments so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting.

so usually its a technical person doing the recruiting

Which, of course, never goes wrong ;-)

(I shudder to think of some of the early hiring decisions I made as a techie... I sucked. Hiring is darn hard. Being technical doesn't magically make you good at it.)

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

Google is trying very hard to be this, for example in not hiring people without degrees.

It is my understanding that they stopped such practices years ago. There are several people around here who claim to work at Google without a degree.

I've known some folk who were approached to work for G who don't have degrees. So it doesn't seem to be a general rule.

I work for Google. My highest degree is a high school diploma.

I don't understand how such a company could be possible even in theory. Seems like an oxymoron to me.

It's company growth that causes it.

Once the overhead of managing the admin side of employees becomes sufficiently large centralisation is a common result.

Getting that up and running right is hard - especially since the hard bits are often outside of the skill set of the folk hiring the people to run that new department. Take too long to do get it right and a good company can go bad quite quickly.

My point is that a company with a bad HR department seems to me to be a "bad company" no matter how good the rest of it is.

Fair enough ;-)

Or a good team within a bad company.

I think your experience may be shaped by the area you've chosen to work in. I'm aware there are areas I'd be interested working in but are hard to enter without a PhD, it's not an insurmountable barrier but it can make things harder.

It is not that particular areas need you to have a degree or a doctorate, it's just they are a good shorthand for required knowledge or proof of competence and without them you'll need to prove that in other ways.

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