Why More Tech Companies Are Hiring People Without Degrees (fastcompany.com) 329
An anonymous reader writes: According to a recent article on Fast Company, tech companies are looking to hire people without degrees. From the report: "For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace. As a result, tech continues to stumble when it comes to diversity. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on 'new-collar jobs.' The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. 'We consider them based on their skills,' he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. 'We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps,' says Ladah. Intel has also been looking to find talent from other educational avenues. One program gave people either enrolled in or recently graduated from community colleges internships with the company. Similarly, the company has been trying to get a foothold in high schools by funding initiatives to boost computer science curricula for both the Oakland Unified School District and an Arizona-based high-school oriented program called Next Generation of Native American Coders. Intel, for example, invests in the program CODE 2040, which aims to build pathways for underrepresented minority youth to enter the technology space. Likewise, GitHub has partnered with coding-focused enrichment programs like Operation Code, Hackbright, and Code Tenderloin."
I think someone without a degree wrote that summar (Score:5, Insightful)
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They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
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They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
This and there is a strong belief by many in management that the actual performance of the employee isn't as important as cutting costs. It's driven by short term gains.
Short Term Cost Savings = Ruby on Rails Disasters (Score:5, Interesting)
Many Ruby on Rails projects are a great example of how focusing on short term cost savings ends up resulting in long term cost overruns.
Lots of not-so-bright managers heard the hype about Ruby on Rails. They heard how it could supposedly let web apps be created really quickly, often by cheap programmers who had dropped out of high school. There were also all sorts of acronyms like "ORM", "DRY", "CoC", and "RESTful" that these managers could use to convince their managers that Ruby on Rails was the way to go. So whenever a new software development project came up, they chose Ruby on Rails.
What was the actual result? Disaster. Many of these projects were huge failures, far beyond the typical failures we see for complex projects. It turns out that Ruby on Rails is often extremely slow on its own. Combine that with high school dropout programmers who don't know what runtime complexity analysis is, and you get even slower software. The main way of dealing with this slowness was just to throw more hardware, and usually more expensive hardware, at the problem until the slowness was mitigated sufficiently. Even then the software was often pretty much unusable because it didn't actually do what the users needed it to do, because high school dropouts aren't capable of properly analyzing the needs of the users. After many delays, performance problems, and usability problems, much of this software was just thrown away.
With Ruby on Rail's reputation quite tainted within the industry, these managers and high school dropout programmers had to find new technologies to push. As hard as it may be to believe, they actually chose to go with a worse language, JavaScript, and a worse framework than Ruby on Rails, Node.js! Now we're getting to witness all sorts of Node.js projects ending up just like how the Ruby on Rails ones did: disasters.
What projects have been successful? The ones that ignore the most hyped technologies, and stick with proven technologies used by experienced and costlier professional software developers. Many of these projects use "un-sexy" technologies like Java and C#/.NET. They don't have much hype surrounding them, but they can be used to get real work done. The upfront cost might be slightly higher, but in the end the ongoing hardware costs are minimal, and the software can actually be used for years to come, instead of rapidly thrown away.
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I can learn new techniques and tools. And I use them, when I can gain an advantage. However, I'm also quite happy to use the old well-worn stuff when it's appropriate.
Not everything new and shiny is gold. Some of it - a LOT of it - is just tinfoil. RoR was a case in point. Used well, it could make you productive (or at least apparently so). But the problem was that it was not in and of itself designed for performance or security and that too much of its attraction to management was that untrained monkeys co
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Who's the superstar here? Are you really going to base that on a degree? My experience is that being a "superstar" has to do with passion and not education. Granted, you can't really get a serious feel for that in an interviewing process that is still sane and legal but in the end who's going to do what it takes shouldn't be based with too much weight on formal education. I know a lot of dopes with and without degrees.
As an adjunct professor at a local college, I can confirm that there are a lot of idiots in college. I have had several students who were close to getting their degrees that I would be embarrassed to say they received their "education" from my school. They barely passed my classes with a C or a C-, but that's good enough to count towards their degree.
Re:I think someone without a degree wrote that sum (Score:5, Insightful)
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
There is plenty of skilled labor, they just don't want to pay what it's worth.
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There is a shortage of skilled labor but there are plenty of idiots who think they're skilled labor.
Anyone who down voted this comment has never had to hire a significant number of IT workers.
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I think these two comments (parent and grandparent) hit the nail on the head. There are plenty of idiots who think they are skilled labor - both with and without degrees. And there are plenty of people with skills - both with and without degrees, some of whom have a very hard time finding a position. The problem seems to be that companies have a hard time figuring out how to tell who is skilled, and who isn't.
In general, a college degree should be a good indicator of whether someone can stick to a task
Re:I think someone without a degree wrote that sum (Score:4, Insightful)
They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, at the price they want to pay!
FTFY
so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some "SJWs" criticised them? No, it's because they expect a return on that investment.
In the form of lower salaries. Expanding the pool is not about getting more workers, it's about getting cheaper workers. Those big companeis care about the bottom line, and having a larger pool is secondary to having cheaper workers.
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Hmm, let's see. Looking at Intel engineer salaries, $100k seems like a reasonable average for a quick sanity check. So $300m invested, let's say that due to their diversity programme they can hire engineers who are just as productive but only cost $60k/year. $40k/year saved, $300m invested = 7,500 engineer-years to recover their costs.
(source: http://www.payscale.com/resear... [payscale.com])
How many $100k engineers does Intel employ? What are the overheads of firing thousands of them and replacing them with brand new div
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Especially since a plan to break the law by hiring diverse candidates at lower rates, and then publicly announcing it so that you get maximum scrutiny by social justice organizations probably isn't the most sensible way to pull off such a diabolical scheme.
Jeez, if that's all they want to do, they can just hire women at 77 cents on the dollar for the same type and level of education and the same amount of job experience, and save a hundred million right off the bat.
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The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need
Then why are these companies - who are so desperate to get skilled staff - laying off so many of the skilled people they already have?
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They care precisely because they exist to make money. The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
I could understand the H1B and extra education programs, but I was under the impression that "diversity" in many US colleges didn't expand the graduate numbers, merely replaced some applicants with other applicants to be accepted instead. Of course they could just accept more people...but I guess that's too simple to work. ;)
Re:I think someone without a degree wrote that sum (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolute Fucking Bullshit.
What do un-degree'd and H-1B people have in common? They are cheap labor.
What is happening is that these companies (Ironically run by all those SJWs) saying to all the people who did things the right way, stay in school, get a degree, etc, "Fuck You, we can get cheaper labor elsewhere."
And yes, Intel sure as fuck would respond to SJWs. Have you fucking read the news lately?
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"Do you really think Intel would invest £300m into improving diversity just because some 'SJWs' criticised them? "
Something along those lines, absolutely! Intel has been an extremely successful company with its predominately white, predominately male workforce. This "diversity" bullshit is nothing but a collective mental illness which permeates contemporary culture & Intel is trying to capitalize on it. The whole effort is a big public image campaign.
It's not just "some SJWs" criticizing
Diversity is a chimera (Score:2)
The pool of skilled labour is limited to the point that is making it hard for them to get the staff they need, so the obvious solution is to expand the pool. Diversity, H1B, education programmes...
. . . Tech hiring's job is to assemble the most competent team possible. When you have sufficient solid coders, architects, and engineers, then, MAYBE, you can worry about 'diversity". I'd put the money into education and training. And ignore H-1B entirely. . .
A post about piss (Score:2)
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Perhaps they write like you.
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Perhaps they write like you.
Your comment need to be more positive. The AC strung two sentences' together. Not bad for a millennial.
Re:I think someone without a degree wrote that sum (Score:4, Interesting)
[...] it's how much the companies have to pay them vs untrained workers.
I work in IT support (think virtual ditch diggers). I have no high school diploma and two associate degrees (General Ed and Computer Programming). Except for two years after the Great Recession, I never had problems looking for work. I'm connected to 800+ recruiters through LinkedIn and get 20 emails or phone calls per day from recruiters. As a W2 contractor assigned to projects, I'm typically paid more than people with four-year degrees doing the same work.
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By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
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By Slashdot logic that makes you one of the unskilled scum driving down wages in the industry.
Wages for virtual ditch digging is going up in Silicon Valley. Top rate was $25 per hour. I've seen positions going for $40 per hour. Most millennials don't want to drive more than 30 minutes away from San Francisco (i.e., Menlo Park, Palo Alto or Mountain View). Southern Silicon Valley is 45 to 90 minutes away from San Francisco.
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So you're boasting having 800+ recruiter connections on LinkedIn.
That's 800+ recruiter connections from a 20+ years. When I do an active job search, I typically communicate with 32 recruiters and track 20 to 50 positions per day.
Isn't that like having a 20 page resume? Too much noise. I'd think twice about hiring you.
A recruiter was having trouble to figure what a company wanted in a candidate because the hire manager kept turning them all down. She asked me to go in for an interview to figure out what the hiring manager wanted. I went in with my two-page resume with last three positions in detail and ten years of positions in bullet points. Hiring manager co
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Diversity is a mandate now, so HR departments have to pay homage to the idea. None dare call it quotas.
"For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace."
That's odd. I thought that if your college application included a bio about being a minority abused child who evacuated refugees from Syria using your own homemade soapbox racer, the Ivy League schools would be fighting over you.
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I know someone without a degree wrote that summary. Take this section, and read it carefully (emphasis mine):
The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic
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I happen to know it was written by someone with a Masters who is working on his PhD.
Well, no, not really. I have no clue who wrote it. But I don't believe making cut-and-paste errors and failing to proof read your writing is limited to that part of the population that doesn't have (at least) a four year degree.
I usually proof read the things I write, and still I manage to send emails and post things that have glaring errors that I somehow overlooked. It's an unfortunate side effect of the email culture we h
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I know someone without a degree wrote that summary.
I submitted that article as an AC. I don't have a high school diploma but I have two associate degrees (General Education and Computer Programming). The section of the summary you quoted was from the article. You can't blame for the content or the editor adding more from the article than fair use allows.
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Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
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Read it again. It repeats itself, verbatim.
Re-read my comment. That quote is from the article itself, not the person (me!) who submitted the article to Slashdot. I know tech writers with master degrees who can write worse than that.
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I think it's like when my son has a toolbox with only a hammer in it. He attempts to resolve all problems with the hammer instead of considering other possibilities. In a business having employees who all have a common background and education is great when the focus is very narrow and all of your projects are suited well to your hammer. If you want to expand your list of prospective lines of business you would be well advised to add more tools. This doesn't mean you throw out the hammer and abandon all the
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I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues. They exist to make money, period. Nothing else matters, except as it relates to that.
In the USA it's federal law. Federal law prohibits discrimination on a pretty wide variety of reasons. How do you not know this?
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Companies with more diverse workplaces make money money, because you don't have 50 people with the same background that think mostly the same way. Companies voluntarily adopt diversity initiatives *precisely* because they're sold on the data that shows that becoming more diverse is better for their bottom line.
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While in general I agree with your sentiments, I have no illusions that hiring managers or bean counters can think that far ahead.
More likely, companies are getting hammered about diversity, and lowing costs they can flog to investors. Why not put the two together, hire diverse people without degrees and play them less. Two birds, one stone, both dead.
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I don't know about you, but I know a lot of people who work in HR, and no, it's not about paying people less.
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I don't understand why companies would even give a shit about cultural or demographic homogeneity issues.
Usually because they've made the foolish decision to locate their company in Silicon Valley. Refusing the fully embrace the SJW agenda there will get you harassed by professional protestors and politicians alike.
Good news though if you have a vagina or dark skin and don't mind taking a job where you do fake make-work while your white male and Asian co-workers have to shoulder all the load. "Better bring in some more H1B's so we can afford more fake women and minority workers," said the virtue-signalling CEO
VocTech 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
Congratulations companies. You have now figured out that 4 year degrees are not on the job training seminars.
My local high school has an "IT" track that is very hands on approach to a sysadmin style job without the college. There are multiple job positions across all industries that are better served with a hands on approach to learning just like plumbing, electrical, pipe fitting, etc.
When you build a house you don't need 50 architects and engineers. You need a handful and then another handful of people that know how to put hammer to wood. I don't know why people think that IT, coding, etc is any different.
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Programmers need to be able to solve discrete problems, but they don't necessarily need to be high-level software architects. They do need to be engineers.
Also these are H1-C Visas: instead of a $50k IIT graduate, we have a $30k high school graduate. Once you OJT them, they're just as good; and you can give them slow raises, 2% or so, instead of bumping them by $30k. Since they don't have degrees, you can hire somebody else's trained monkey for peanuts, too.
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Real engineers carry actual professional certifications to that effect.
So, James Watt wasn't an engineer?
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"As a result, tech continues to stumble when it comes to diversity. The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues....build pathways for underrepresented minority youth to enter the technology space"
Be absolutely clear on this: This is a way to hire more melanin- and vaginally-equipped people.
This is NOT about 'recognizing a college degree isn't always needed' (which I personally agree is something all businesses need to start recognizing)
Byebye college bubble (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:VocTech 2.0 (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the opposite, just like with building houses. It's easier to outsource architecture and engineering than it is to outsource the guy hammering the nails.
I'm not sure if trade electricians have specialized track for low voltage applications but you're not going to be able to outsource the guy punching down the ethernet ends. There is a lot of work that needs to be done that requires specialized training before a higher level person can take over.
As soon as you get a machine's IPMI online and pingable someone else sitting anywhere in the world can take over.
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Youre 100% correct. They insource that shit. bring cheap, normally less than legal labor in to do most of the wiring in homes, atleast tract homes. but i can attest that you never want somebody that doesnt know the importance of your PoT doing your punches and crimps..
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Erh... no.
Self-taught programmers that then go and get a college degree to refine their skill. Those are the ones that you really want. You neither want the self taught person who found out a way that works without knowing why or, worse, why his approach is not really a good one when it comes to efficiency or security, and you neither want the theoretical ivory-tower dweller that knows what the best practices would be in theory ... if it never had to encounter reality.
You want the guy that has a degree and
About 20-30 years too late on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech workers have been saying the best talent is self trained for decades. No university can teach someone how to be a passionate nerd. As for their motives.... I think it's much simpler. People with degrees want more money, so they can pay off the loans.
Re:About 20-30 years too late on this one (Score:4, Insightful)
No university can teach someone how to be a passionate nerd.
On the other hand a good degree will introduce you to concepts and rigor that you would otherwise not encounter if you were self taught.
Just yesterday I was mapping out a solution to a small software task that involves sampling analog data. My EE degree of 30 years ago (oh shit that long!) kicked in and I knew that I would have to implement a low pass filter at some point in the data stream and knew why I had to do it. At which point I looked up some digital filtering code and knew the sorts of filters I wanted to implement and what their characteristics were. And I haven't seriously touched this stuff since I graduated.
Given my career path, digital filtering is something that would never have crossed my horizon if I had of been self taught. Yet here I am with a complete understanding of what I need to do.
On the third hand I am now wishing I did that elective on compiler construction as I have a task that really needs me to build a compiler for a specific language so that I can mine the analysis phase for some code metrics. I know that I will get there eventually .. but it is going to take a lot of preliminary reading just to get to the productive point.
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On the other hand a good degree will introduce you to concepts and rigor that you would otherwise not encounter if you were self taught.
Yes!
Is a degree absolutely required? No. It's possible, in rare cases with exceptional people, to end up in a similar place while being self taught. However I do think that is rare. Most non-degree programmers I've seen fall into the "talented hack" category. Which to be fair, many or most programmers with degrees also do. But on the balance, the people with degrees are exposed to things like you are talking about: sampling theory, compiler theory, Fourier transforms, advanced calculus... and we need
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Sometimes. We've got well respected universities around here pumping out master's degrees in CS that amount to two years of introductory courses in different languages.
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Tech workers have been saying the best talent is self trained for decades. No university can teach someone how to be a passionate nerd. As for their motives.... I think it's much simpler. People with degrees want more money, so they can pay off the loans.
Just because someone attends college doesn't mean they can't be top talent, but being passionate and involved in their personal lives as well is the mark of the most capable and talented people.
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Tech workers have been saying the best talent is self trained
That definitely is the slashdot mantra, anyway...
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Sooner or later, everything old is new again.
Educational theory of apprenticeship [wikipedia.org]
The apprentice perspective is an educational theory of apprenticeship concerning the process of learning through physical integration into the practices associated with the subject, such as workplace training. By developing similar performance to other practitioners, an apprentice will come to understand the tacit (informally taught) duties of the position. In the process of creating this awareness, the learner also affect their environment; as they are accepted by master practitioners, their specific talents and contributions within the field are taken into account and integrated into the overall practice.
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I don't see the relevance. You can't educate somebody to be highly intelligent either.
Re:About 20-30 years too late on this one (Score:5, Insightful)
Some of what you say seems correct, but some seems like unwarranted bias. There are exceptional programmers out there that are exceptional because there was no school capable of teaching them - they are the ones that create the study material that others follow.
And good programmers tend to love reading, no matter what their education level is. And not just reading, but questioning.
If anything, I'd say that those who only soak up what they're being taught by teachers and books, and never have an original thought are mere robotniks. Good enough to repeatedly crank bolts on an assembly line, but they will never become more than mediocre, no matter what the degree says.
Yes, there are good people with degrees. And not so good ones. Just like with educated people. There may be a correlation between education and value, but it's not super strong.
The ability to continue to educate themselves without schools, training classes or mentoring is something I value in employees. But having a degree doesn't guarantee that. Some just stagnate, and have no drive to always learn, always discover, always improve.
Re:About 20-30 years too late on this one (Score:5, Interesting)
Some of what you say seems correct, but some seems like unwarranted bias. There are exceptional programmers out there that are exceptional because there was no school capable of teaching them - they are the ones that create the study material that others follow.
And good programmers tend to love reading, no matter what their education level is. And not just reading, but questioning.
If anything, I'd say that those who only soak up what they're being taught by teachers and books, and never have an original thought are mere robotniks. Good enough to repeatedly crank bolts on an assembly line, but they will never become more than mediocre, no matter what the degree says.
Yes, there are good people with degrees. And not so good ones. Just like with educated people. There may be a correlation between education and value, but it's not super strong. The ability to continue to educate themselves without schools, training classes or mentoring is something I value in employees. But having a degree doesn't guarantee that. Some just stagnate, and have no drive to always learn, always discover, always improve.
To take a car analogy, you can learn to drive by teaching yourself how a car's controls work until you can drive around the block reasonably smoothly and consider that more than adequate to qualify somebody as a driver and let them loose to drive at a 130 km/hour down the autobahn. If you are the conscientious type you can even read a drivers ed textbook before burning rubber and speeding into live traffic. However, I think we can all agree that the streets and highways are considerably safer and there are fewer accidents precisely because every driver has not only been given driving training in actual traffic by an instructor but also because that instructor gave his student driver a thorough grounding in the traffic rules and laws followed by a written and practical test to confirm that person was paying attention. Degrees are not an expensive license your daddy pays for at an 'elite university' so that you can be an 'elite' ass hole who lords it over all those scrappy self taught guys by rubbing a diploma in their faces. You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
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You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
You gain more knowledge by doing the work and not always by sitting in a classroom with 30 - 100 people all trying to pay attention to an instructor that may or may not be more than 1 page ahead of the class in the (outdated by the time it's printed) textbook.
Your mileage may vary but in my 40 years of consulting I know that my experience has taught me more than any college course ever has. This includes concepts such as operating systems, compilers, databases, parallel programming, etc.
I deal with incredib
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You actually gain things from getting a diploma that are every bit as valuable as practical experience. You can actually learn things that are worth learning by enduring theoretical courses, and you will learn it better than if you self-train. I taught myself to code C and C++, I learned a lot of stuff by myself from reading books and coding at home and at work. When I finally went and got a MSc CS degree I did not think it was a waste of time, it was an overview of an entire universe of different ideas and ways of doing things I would never have come up with on my own or thought to explore in that kind of breadth and trust me, you cannot just get away with soaking up book knowledge and regurgitating it. They make you think hard about the stuff you are learning and you don't qualify unless you demonstrate a sound working knowledge of it. Most of the robotnicks are filtered out right there and those that aren't get bad grades. Doing a degree also deepened my understanding of things like operating systems, databases and the math that makes them work and it made me a better and more flexible programmer.
You gain more knowledge by doing the work and not always by sitting in a classroom with 30 - 100 people all trying to pay attention to an instructor that may or may not be more than 1 page ahead of the class in the (outdated by the time it's printed) textbook.
Your mileage may vary but in my 40 years of consulting I know that my experience has taught me more than any college course ever has. This includes concepts such as operating systems, compilers, databases, parallel programming, etc.
I deal with incredibly incompetent "engineers" from a certain populous Asian country who arrive here on H1-B's and cannot seem to "engineer" their way out of the box they were taught to be in. They all have degrees from some hometown "prestigious" university and they all claim to have "5+ years of experience" but in truth I doubt they have half that. There are exceptions but those exception usually actually have 5+ years of experience and have learned, FROM EXPERIENCE, to be better, competent engineers.
Well, I ws talking about college courses plural, as in four years of them to get a BSc CS degree and then another two to get an MSc CS degree knowing full well the whole time that if your grade level sinks below 70% or so you're going to have a considerably harder time finding work. You gain more by getting a diploma and practical experience than you gain from either having (a) just practical experience and self-training or (b) just a diploma with limited experience. The thing is that as the diploma guy gai
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And when you hire drivers, you don't ask how many years they have studied driving, but look for experience and record.
Especially when hiring race car drivers, you don't check whether they've passed a DMV exam. There are some good ones out there that don't even have a driver's license. What they do is akin to road driving in the same way as what a master woodworker is akin to a guy with table saw and nail gun, or a programmer is to a diploma mill code monkey.
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Im an electrician, And those are the people we fire. Now there are some self-trained(no schooling, all learned through working however youwant to call it) like i am that excell. I have never spent a day in a classroom for networks/low voltage/electrical. but there are few people that can do better than i. That is why i get requested by name on projects. Than again im not cocky about it until i see somebody doing dangerous shit that needs to be ridiculed to save peoples lives in the future, obviously not tal
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C was made in the 70's and not standardised till 1989.
Not quite. I got a complier textbook I'm working my way through that was published in 1991. The C source code presented in the book is not ANSI C (C89)-compliant. While that source code might have worked on a Borland C compiler, I have modify the code to compile with GCC with the ANSI flag
Indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Because university isn't for job training! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're looking for someone trained for a task, you don't look for a university degree... that's a filter for "People willing to put 4 years and a massive amount of debt into a piece of paper to get past an HR/social hurdle".
Because university is about broadening your horizons and teaching you how to think so you have the capacity to develop the next thing other people will be going to job training for, and using it for anything else is the giant, expensive, frustrating thing that's keeping otherwise talented people out of your shop.
If you want a programmer, you don't need someone who can think up the next great programming language. You need someone who knows a current programming language and has the capacity to learn the next one, with a side order of sufficient social skills to work cooperatively and (in some cases) interact directly with clients.
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There is this one guy I used to know who went to a state school worked at withheld as an programmer. And I used some of stuff he worked on it's software was buggy with some bad crash bugs I think about 1 year or less he got fired.
Re:Because university isn't for job training! (Score:4, Interesting)
I include those. University degrees are for training people to push knowledge forward, to research and hopefully invent, create, or develop the next new thing in their field.
Just because the degree is in mathematics or a hard science doesn't make that any more applicable to the purpose of job training.
And a decent university would never let you away with taking only courses in your major anyway. There's a requirement to broaden your horizons... which, if you're in it for job training, is a massive waste of your time and money.
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So how about (Score:2)
No Degree? no problem! (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been in the IT industry for almost 30 years and I am a college dropout, I'm guessing I have about 60 credits to my name. I got my start working full time for the University I was attending. Since then I've moved around, gone through buyouts, acquisitions, and layoffs. I've worked for some very well known large companies and received offers from others. In my almost 30 years I'm only aware of two companies that wouldn't even talk to me because I didn't have a degree, one was a financial services firm and the other was a telco. There may have been others that I never knew about but I have no way of knowing.
I have no way of knowing if a degree would have helped me, then again what I'm doing today, WAN/LAN design and implementation wasn't taught when I attended college in the mid 80's, computer engineering was programming, usually Pascal, Fortran, or C, while cisco was barely a company when I started. I do think a degree would have opened up more options to me since I focused strictly on what interested me without regard to what skills might be needed for other jobs, both in or out of the IT industry to improve my marketability.
Over the years I've had the opportunity to interview potential candidates for positions, I never paid much attention to college degrees, I probably made a mental note if they did or did not attend college but I was more interested in the experience they had listed and if they could backup what was on the resume.
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Same here. Went into consulting and hit it big when Y2K was a thing. Stuck with consulting and now my income put me in the top 4%. Which is great since I live in a very low cost area. I do a lot of on-shoring gigs these days. All the customers that did off-shoring early on are having buyers remorse that's compounded by how wages are on the rise in India.
Real reason (Score:2)
Because they can pay them less.
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And they're less mobile. Harder to move to another company w/out a degree. But I suppose this trend may reduce that advantage.
Positive Feedback Loop (Score:2)
And they exist. There is not enough properly trained people. Diversity is bullshit to hide the fact that the industry is lacking people.
In much of the industry you can find an expert developer with a masters and a twenty years of architecture experience who has mastery of several problem domains and he'll be making a third of what a new lawyer with a two-year degree is making.
This doesn't encourage people to go into tech, and outside of the 5% of people who work in the highly-competitive urban centers your
Humm.... (Score:2)
Whatever happened to fair use? (Score:5, Interesting)
Largely homogeneous workplace, heh. (Score:3)
For years, the tech pipeline has been fed mostly from the same elite universities. This has created a feedback loop of talent and a largely homogenous workplace
Many companies would love to have the problem of having a largely talented and well-educated workplace obtained by recruiting people from elite universities.
Re:Largely homogeneous workplace, heh. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's finally becoming a well know "secret"... (Score:4, Insightful)
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The very best are totally self-trained but that's maybe the top 2%. Then you have people who have a combination of self-trained and schooling which makes up maybe the next quartile, a big half who just got paper degrees and muddle through, and then there are the folks who somehow managed to get a job and not get fired but nobody can figure out why.
Anyway, 2% of the workforce is effectively zero if you have to do any significant hiring. Your best bet is to hire the next quartile to be your managers, have t
Race is not a culture (Score:3)
University Graduates can have their strengths (Score:3)
I'm a university graduate myself in Comp Sci and what I often find missing in programmers that never went to post-secondary education is the theory of why certain things are done the way they are. While there often aren't any hard rules, some topics like how to deal with multi-threading, deadlocks and linear optimization will not be things that folks are good at programming unless they've had some exposure to the theory. Or programmers come up with the wrong solutions for complex problems which sort of work but usually less optimal or somewhat flawed. I should knowx I worked on a deadlock problem in high school and came up with something that worked but not reliably.
That said, experience and whether someone is actually good at programming can't be determined by a degree. I've met folks who are talented programmers who never went to school and folks who went to university who couldn't program if their life depended on it. About all the advice I could give to companies would be to take your best programmer (not your best HR or Manager) person who understands what they're doing and to have them pick the candidate to hire based on some actual programming tests. Talented programmers know each other and besides, you do want your programmers to work together I would assume.
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Top of the bubble, methinks (Score:2)
An optimistic view of this situation would be that these tech companies are trying to avoid the monoculture that occurs when all of your employees went to the same 10 or 15 schools, are white, Asian or Indian males, all got near-perfect SAT scores and GPAs, and all have the exact same ideas on how to approach a problem. Google used to only hire top-10 CS graduates for a while in its early history. I think what tech companies are trying to do is to get out of the mindset that no one could possibly be useful
Deja vu all over again (Score:2)
This was until Indian out-slavers figured they could replace more US workers if they passed whole classes on cert. exams based on the results of the highest grade and destroyed the value of any of certs through incompetence.
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Cowboy Neal has 42 degrees (Score:2, Interesting)
But I forgot whether that's degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit.
The odd thing ia that I have rarely encountered a software developer with a university degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, whereas ones with degrees in Electronics or Physics are quite common.
Blah blah blah (Score:4, Insightful)
Blah blah homogenity issues blah blah
Let's be realistic here. People with degrees cost more. It's as simple as that. Not only that, they're going to be older and so be more likely to be advancing to the next stages of their lives (ie: family, etc).
The younger you can get em, the less you can pay them and the more you can abuse them. It's not as good as H1Bs, but it's a great Plan B, and to the ignorant who can't extrapolate their end game, the companies even get some publicity points.
I can't wait to see the looks on the 25 year olds when 18-20 year olds start declaring that the 25-ers are "too old" to be in the business. I'd laugh if it didn't have my palm covering my face.
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I can't wait to see the looks on the 25 year olds when 18-20 year olds start declaring that the 25-ers are "too old" to be in the business.
I spent six years as a video game tester from my mid- to late-30's. Most youngsters hired out of high school don't believe me when I told them that I played the Atari 2600 in the early 1980's since no console existed before they were born. I introduce them to "grandpa," who did have grandkids and built arcade machines in the early 1980's. I then introduced them to "armourer," who was an armourer in the Army and tested pen-and-paper games in the 1970's. Their heads usually explode at that point.
Self taught isn't gonna cut it (Score:2, Informative)
You know, I'm self taught in the area of embedded development. You know what I do? Right now, write an IP stack fully in assembler. Because I know the assembler of the MC I use better than I know its C. Plus the compiler creates shit code.
Do you want that in a professional, production environment? Hell no! That code can be maintained by exactly one person: Me. If that. This is not what you want! What you want is someone who has the skill to plan his code for a team, who understands the necessity of well def
It's not about elitism. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is mostly the praddle of those that dropped out or never went. Sure, if you want to be a Systems Admin drone, and think that it's the apex of IT, fine. But if you want to be a serious software archatect who understands the global issues and actually builds the future, no, sorry, a high school dropout usually doesn't cut it.
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You're right. There's a good chance that it's going to be written by someone with a ME or EE background in controls. Most likely in Simulink. The job descriptions back this up.
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...These get old fast, people.
Now, now, don't be ageist!
(ducks)
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Actually it was the Huns that pushed into the Goths and drove them to Rome.
I didn't think that the Barbarians were that diversified.
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Others have stated it's probably more about the getting away with paying less of a salary. So instead of an Indian taking your job. It'll be a black guy... but it won't be because they like black people.
As a black person, this makes me nervous. I never want to be accused of being a "diversity hire", but all I have is an Associates. It works fine as a tech person in the construction industry in a flyover state - I'm not the only one without a 4 year degree - but if I ever want to get serious and enter a tech
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I pictured a cat with reading glasses saying that..