Hiring Based on Skills Instead of College Degrees is Vital for the Future, IBM CEO Says (gizmodo.com) 319
What does the future of getting a job in the tech industry look like? According to the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, it's important that tech companies focus on hiring people with valuable skills, not just people with college degrees. From a report: Rometty made the comments yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The CEO said that technology's fast-moving pace here in the 21st century makes it harder for people to find jobs and has led to disillusionment with the future. "With the new technologies that are out there, I think there is a huge inclusion problem, meaning there's a large part of society that does not feel this is going to be good for their future," Rometty said. "Forget about whether it is or it isn't or what we believe. Therefore they feel very disenfranchised."
[...] "So when it comes to education and skills, I think the government can't solve it alone," Rometty said. "I think businesses have to believe I'll hire for skills, not just their degrees or their diplomas. Because otherwise we'll never bridge this gap." "All of us are full of companies with university degrees, PhDs, you've got to make room for everyone in society in these jobs," Rometty said as other business leaders on the panel nodded their heads. She added, "We have a very serious duty about this. Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis. [...] We have to have a new paradigm. You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."
[...] "So when it comes to education and skills, I think the government can't solve it alone," Rometty said. "I think businesses have to believe I'll hire for skills, not just their degrees or their diplomas. Because otherwise we'll never bridge this gap." "All of us are full of companies with university degrees, PhDs, you've got to make room for everyone in society in these jobs," Rometty said as other business leaders on the panel nodded their heads. She added, "We have a very serious duty about this. Because these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change. So it is causing this skill crisis. [...] We have to have a new paradigm. You would have to have new pathways that don't all include college education and you would have to have respect for that job -- not blue collar or white collar, I call it new collar."
HR will screen you out (Score:4, Insightful)
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Universities perhaps but community or junior colleges or tech schools or whatever you want to call them DO focus on teaching the skills in various AS degree programs, like nursing, radiology or nuke med tech, respiratory therapy, and even IT stuff. here is a sample degree audit [sfcollege.edu] for a AS degree in "Programming and Analysis". Could use technical writing vs. a second term of college composition (aka writing about literature) but otherwise not bad.
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Knowing what I know about IBM (I used to work there), I'd imagine that this is more about having an excuse to have lower starting salaries for new workers than actually being concerned about skill gaps.
IBM's HR department knows that people without a college diploma tend to make $30,000 a year less over their lifetimes, and that benefits the companies bottom line.
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Without degree HR will screen you out and you will never get a chance to demonstrate your skills. With a few exceptions of world-class experts that are already known, you need a degree. Degree is also necessary if you are mediocre, as at that point you are just a replaceable cog.
It's damn hard to break into software development without a degree, to be sure. But once you have a few years experience, almost no one cares.
What appeals on a resume is a history of difficult or interesting problems that you've solved, or having worked at the big-name companies where it will just be assumed that you were solving hard problems. The ideal candidate is always someone who has already solved the problem you're faced with, or more realistically someone with a track record in the same problem d
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I work with an engineer who has 20 years of EE experience and he is the most incompetent person in the company. He's barely done anything in four years.
Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's too expensive, both in time and money, for HR or hiring managers to test every single applicant to assess their skill level. Much easier and quicker to use education as a proxy or filter, then, if testing is necessary, you are only testing the skills of a few people.
Versus the expense of spending 4+ years at a college?
The simple answer would be to create an independent skills testing service that can tell hiring managers what they need to know. Even if it was very expensive, it would cost applicants a tiny, tiny fraction of what college costs.
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The key here is cost applicants. The companies don't want to front any of the costs.
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It is very difficult to develop a test that accurately measures a person's ability to think and to solve problems. If you've ever worked at a large corporation, you'd quickly recognize that they are largely incapable of discerning who the most capable person is from a stack of resumes after doing phone screens and personal interviews.
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I sometimes thing the whole 'reduce the pile' thing should just be handed over to dice.
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You aren't reading this correctly. This is IBM saying they want to concentrate on "skills" rather than degrees. First off, IBM wouldn't know any skills were they to walk in naked through the door. Second, what they are really saying is "we really like low pay employees which we get when they cannot point to a degree." Other companies might be different, but we've seen too many of IBM's tactics to believe anything they say at face value.
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> It's too expensive, both in time and money, for HR or hiring managers to test every single applicant to assess their skill level
Ill say it, this shows that you or your company has poor people skills.
This is based on the idea that every employee or potential employee is trying to lie to you or rip you off. Which is not the case.
Is it really that expensive to read a persons resume and spend 10 to 15 min talking to the ones that appear qualified on their resume? A good interviewer can easily assess a pers
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Not for us, it is not.
Then again, if you have the requirements that we have (and no, they're not some sham to say "look, we can't find anyone domestic, give us cheap code monkeys from abroad!"), the number of qualifying applicants is usually in the single digits. You can actually invite them all to an interview and even pay their travel expenses...
In other words, it depends on what your skill actually is. If it's rare and sought after, you can rest assured that HR will get their ass kicked if they dump you
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As someone who has been on the programmer hiring side for a small company (about 600 employees), I totally agree about H.R. being useless. But testing our applicants for the knowledge we needed (it was C++ at the time) was fairly easy. I created a simple 12-question questionnaire to assess their C++ knowledge. It became readily apparent who was completely useless versus who knew their stuff.
At the end of the process, there was one applicant who stood head and shoulders above the rest. In the two years h
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Has anyone experienced an HR person that actually understood what the IT department really did?
Has anyone experienced an HR person that did not believe they were inherently and deeply superior to the IT person, and superior to the entire IT department?
If so, perhaps you are the lucky one.
When that person with a BA in literature is assessing your 'abilities' don't be surprise if someone with another BA in literature gets the job instead of someone with 20+ years of successful experience and references from s
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More importantly, at least in the US, generalized skills and aptitude testing were effectively rendered almost impossible to implement by Griggs v. Duke Power Co. [wikipedia.org], because testing was found to have had a disparate racial impact. The Griggs case was the one in which SCOTUS first recognized the concept of "disparate impact", meaning that a practice or policy is prohibited if it has a disparate impact on a suspect class even if the overt intent wasn't to discriminate.
You can still do skills-based testing but
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I dare to disagree, I still prefer our system over here where unemployed are qualified with courses and education to fill those jobs where there is an actual shortage. That way a government can steer people to jobs where there is an actual shortage of labor, even if these fields cannot (easily) perform the relevant education themselves, while avoiding a surplus of workers vying for jobs in a market where employers can afford to hire cheap labor with the pretense of training on the job because it doesn't mat
What is old is new again (Score:2)
So, respect for a person who can get shit done.
The 1890's is calling. That's not a bad thing.
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"I call it new collar."
. . . but what she really wants is a dog collar and the ability to put down the dog, when the skills are now longer in fashion.
Someone with a solid CS degree should be able to acquire new skills as they march in and out of fashion.
A simple single skill person is disposable.
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Ok - come up with another system (Score:5, Insightful)
...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree. Is there a better merit-based system out there? Or do we start going by IQ test results? Why not go to our genetic profiles (Gattaca-style)?
The problem isn't with the current system of looking at college degrees to judge someone's abilities. It's the devaluation of the college degree itself. People that aren't college capable are being pushed through the system for all the wrong reasons (universities are marketing to students harder than ever, student loans are being shoved down the throats of students that shouldn't ever be going to college, etc.).
Those students need to be given/shown another path to success, and the cheapest solution is to make high school diplomas matter again in real life - not just the college preparation, STEM world. High schools shouldn't just be a farm system for college recruiters; They should have more vocational skills introduced again - or at least make better connections with vocational schools to diversify what they have to offer. (My childrens' public high school - which is allegedly a "Grade A" school in a strong school district - has ZERO hands-on work classes like autos, shop, etc. The closest thing you can get is an Art class. You have to bus over to a vocational school for most of the day to get the hands-on work.
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If I had points, I'd mod this up.
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...that employers can take a glance at and as easily quantify as a stamp of approval on a topic as a college degree.
Stop right there. A college degree does not prove that an applicant can do the job. So arguably, a college degree is actually worthless to recruiters, except that it shows that you are willing to jump through hoops, and it reduces the total number of applications they have to look at. Unfortunately, the non-degreed applications may contain the best candidates, and they're not even going to look at them. It's just another way to get out of actually doing the job for which HR employees were hired. They seem
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Unfortunately, the non-degreed applications may contain the best candidates, and they're not even going to look at them. It's just another way to get out of actually doing the job for which HR employees were hired. They seem to have loads of them.
True, with an important exception: female coders. The big companies are so eager to hire women in tech that they'll consider anyone with the slightest plausibility to her resume. It's how it should work for everyone, really, being accepting to unusual paths to being good at software development. It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.
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It's how it did work until the mid-90s or so, before colleges started churning out CS degrees like crazy. CS degrees weren't even the norm in the early years - it was mostly math degrees.
Its really odd that you put the date at which that happened in the mid-90s. The very first class of undergraduates to have a CS degree in the US graduated at CMU in 1998 (I should know, I was in that class). So really that can't be true. What you saw in the mid-90s was folks who liked programming but often had degrees in other things plus the occasional CS PhD. The pure CS major undergrads didn't appear in mass for about 10 years (say 2008 or so).
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College degrees were never offering the kind of value people think they were. Graduates would not go straight into a job and know how to do it, they would go straight into training and the company would be reasonably sure of getting a decent employee at the end of it.
Employers don't want to spend money on training so they ask universities to teach students skills directly applicable for their jobs. That was always a terrible idea and just doesn't work.
People complain about useless degrees. My mum has a degr
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The hands-on vocational programs were always expensive by certain measures, but not necessarily in how they showed up in the short term budget. They could run on a shoestring budget as long as the old man who had been there for decades and knew how to keep the equipment running for near nothing was around. When he retired in the 80s or 90s the principal & superintendent were faced with two choices: (1) find a replacement with the right skills, but that new person is only likely to sign on if given a r
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Re:Ok - come up with another system (Score:4, Informative)
HVAC work involves crawling in very tight attics and crawl spaces. Often they are very hot and/or full of brown recluses.
It's shit work, mostly done by kids. They have to pay well because the working conditions SUCK so badly.
Credit to IBM (Score:5, Interesting)
I know it's hard to imagine, but it appears at first blush they're actually walking the talk: I checked a couple of entry level posted jobs at IBM:
Entry Level HW Computer Technician/System Services Rep- Palatine, IL
https://careers.ibm.com/ShowJo... [ibm.com]
and ..and BOTH required only High School Diploma/GED.
(Cyber) Security Services Specialist - Intern
https://careers.ibm.com/ShowJo... [ibm.com]
That's great and refreshing.
New collar? (Score:2)
She keeps talking about skills and then calls this new class of employe
Degrees are vital for the legacies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Back in 1000s a bunch of aristocrats joined together and bargained for their rights and made John The Great sign Magna Carta. Its significance is limiting the power of the Monarch. Then the aristocrats ruled the country with their fiefdoms. Only they would get to be inducted into the Officer Corps of the army and all the teeming masses were consigned to "Other ranks" aka cannon fodder.
Renaissance, industrial revolution, the rise of mercantilism, colonialism all gave rise to new classes of wealthy people and they were inducted into the power structure by doling out aristocratic titles etc.
But the teeming masses, unseemly ungrateful bunch, made a power play and grabbed the hard won rights of the aristocrats for every one, suddenly the Old Money is on the back foot. They removed the power of the House of Lords, and The Commons had all the power, the Monarch a mere titular head, hereditary aristocratic titles have no meaning, the Heir to the Holy Roman Empire, Her Most Serene Princess someononeortheother is working for a wage in Economist or Tribune, ...
The remnants of inducting only the aristocrats for the Officer Corps of the armed forces, merchant marine, and Civil Service morphed into "Degrees from Top Universities". Eton and such schools in Britain, Ivy League in USA, where there is a significant quota for the Old Money in the form of Legacies. About 50% on merit, 25% for the minorities, 25% of the Old Money Legacies seems to be the current quota system. Once these degrees are awarded, the graduates with connections get on to the fast track and get very rewarding very light duty sinecures, risk free jobs sitting on boards and VP of Beer Analysis or Executive Vice President of Trivial things. The graduates with merit end up with ulcer creating tense difficult, but well rewarded careers. The token minorities with degrees from top school, their prospects depend on cultivating/developing connections with the other groups. The degree alone does nothing for the minority graduates.
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made John The Great sign Magna Carta
John "The Great"? Hardly. He was known as "John Lackland", because he lost so much land to the French!
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In fact the Jews' lunch is being eaten away by the Indians. Old Money in USA was WASPs, Jews were the merit candidates, getting a degree and a ticket to ulcer inducing tense long hour financial industry jobs. The Indian immigrants since 1990s are giving a good run for the money for the Jews. Have you seen any spelling bees lately? Indians in Ivy Leagues typically sc
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I guess you didn't go to an Ivy League school or never worked with someone who went to one. I didn't go to one but nearly every person I've worked with who has gone to one has been extremely bright and hard working
I am an IIT grad myself. The Ivy Leaguers I work with admire me. Of course, the respect is mutual, because the legacy quota Ivy Leaguers would not deign to rub shoulders with working stiff
I'm confused (Score:3)
The title says we must hire based on skills. The summary quotes Rometty as saying "...these technologies are changing faster with times than their skills are going to change". Said another way, technology is changing faster than the workforce can adapt, therefore we cannot hire based on experience or education -- we have to hire for the skills we need. Where do these skills come from? If the workforce is not learning the new skills fast enough and education is not providing the skills, then how are people obtaining these valuable skills?
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She's saying she wants code monkeys who can be contracted to work on a project for one of their clients, then let go when the project is over.
Want another gig? Update your resume to whatever the new hotness is this month and learn enough jargon to bluff your way in the door again.
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She wants single-purpose contractors. You have something you need done, you put out a contract, it's fulfilled, and then you move on. No need to worry about budgeting for your staff to acquire new skills.
Trying to obscure that with business doublespeak makes for a confusing article.
So then why the age discrimination? (Score:5, Insightful)
"We want skilled employees!"
later...
*lays off skilled older employees*
Re:So then why the age discrimination? (Score:5, Insightful)
*lays off skilled older employees*
IBM considers being young as a important skill.
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SPOILER ALERT!
It's not about skills. It's about lower pay.
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IBM is never going to fix it's skills gap until they value their entire workforce.
Who would want to work there when you are just a cog until you get older or the "hot technology of the day" changes and then they "resource action" you (IBM's term for layoffs).
This is coming from an ex-IBMer
Lost opportunity? (Score:2)
Back when I was in the 'front line' teaching before a class, ABET, SACS and other Certs were pushing for competency-based education and assessment, where you would grade the 'victim' on what they could demostrably do with tangible results. From what I'm reading either that pathway went bust or Rometty is full of it and looking for yet another profiteering scam.
Never Again (Score:2)
I worked at IBM a few years back. You were a cog in the machine and replaceable with little notice. A guy across from me was told on a Monday to not return Wednesday. When they offshored my Unix Admin job to India, I was given the opportunity to be a Web Developer, Data Center creator, Backup Admin, or out. I did spend my own money to qualify for Backup Admin, a telecommute position. That was toxic enough that turnover was pretty high but also the random selection of our Customer Interface to be removed fro
Skills vs Degree (Score:2)
Heck, back in the 80's when I was starting out, IBM refused to even acknowledge my resume as I didn't have a college degree. My how times have changed.
[John]
Here be dragons ... (Score:3)
That said, I've dealt with the job market a few times in the past ~5 years. I can tell you that most jobs with salaries > $75k (in the job markets where I work where this is well above the median and easily a comfortable existence for a single person) are posted in ways that are intended to filter our applicants as quickly as possible. One very quick and easy filter for HR to select is education. While it is not always a great way to find who is qualified it is probably the best that they can easily use and verify.
If an applicant says they have a college degree, it is pretty easy for the employer to verify this. But if they say they have worked on model ABC123 advanced frobulators for 7 years, that is more difficult to verify. Now if the applicant can point to something they have done - say a patent or a published article - relating to the ABC123 advanced frobulator, that becomes something that the employer can verify more easily again. Unfortunately the application processes at most large (and many medium or small) employers are behind the curve on doing this type of verification. At the same time it doesn't seem that companies want to put more than the minimum amount of human activity into human resources, so we're left with what we can do to either fit into the system or attempt to circumvent it. Tragically the latter works less and less well with many companies as time goes on.
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College degrees aren't brains. Repeat it as long as it takes until you get it.
I made no such claim. I merely said that a college degree is a really easy filter for HR to employ for automatically filtering out job applicants. I even stated it is at times not the best one. However verifying skill is much more work than verifying education, so as much as there is justification for changing the method it is not likely to happen any time too soon.
This is about lowering pay (Score:2)
Don't be fooled... they are trying to make it so they can pay less for technically skilled jobs. Keep college requirements for high end jobs!
Response to affirmative action degrees? (Score:2)
Not a troll, but yeah, this is going to be seen that way.
Once you've corrupted academia, and given degrees to people based on the color of their skin, or their SJW credentials, can you use degrees as a reasonable proxy for skills anymore?
Sounds like the meritocracy is going to work its way around attempts to thwart it.
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Well, affirmative action privilege is great, right up until it hits the wall of meritocracy and skill :)
Now, if privilege == skill, well, that's a great position to be in. Skills don't care about your feelings :)
Then hire what we have here and build it inhouse. (Score:2)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Interesting)
I attended a private school. That school is now closed because it churned out the lowest quality product it could, flooding the market with under skilled employees.
A drop in college quality right now has a lot to deal with trying to run colleges like a business which cuts into the ethos of how a college is supposed to operate.
I have some college teachers who run their classes like businesses and I do have to say that they have a proper ethos in that, class is cancelled, but assignments are still due.
Granted my professor is the exception, not the rule, but that person left the business world because education was more fulfilling.
I am now in a public university and the difference can be noted between private for profit colleges and public universities. I would be far more willing to work with public university students. Teachers are more focused on making certain the students grasp the knowledge instead of trying to pass the student to the next course because tuition is everything. I think if we are to get quality students from quality public colleges, we need to properly fund our colleges so that they are less reliant on tuition and can focus on only passing students that put forward the effort.
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In my country, public universities are the norm rather than the exception, and they are free. Yes, free.
The caveat? Well, that it feels like a million students enter every year with about 100 graduating.
This basically means that nobody, really nobody, gives a shit about you. Nobody cares, and there's also not any reason to give a shit, too, since where you come from, there's plenty more. If you're good, study hard and put yourself behind it, it's very doable. If you don't, well, move aside, there's like 500
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College (can) offer a great education - but that's not what companies want. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development. But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge. And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.
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And the concept of a throwaway employee is a big part of why companies have so much trouble finding talent at their desired price point. You just want to hire me temporarily to use my existing skills to finish your project? You'd better expect to pay contractor rates for that shit - employee rates are based on the assumption of a long-term relationship that increases my value.
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. Education offers the foundational theoretical knowledge of a domain - deep understanding of relevant principles that allow for faster and more flexible skill development.
Yes. But I don't find that in university graduates. I find that in smart people who have finished the early years of their career, and took the initiative to learn and generalize along the way.
Perhaps that's because software engineering isn't yet a mature field, but I hear the same from other engineering fields.
But companies want practical skills, not foundational knowledge.
Every place I've worked looks for both. At entry level, practical skills matter more as you won't be designing much yourself, but you won't get far in your career without the foundational stuff.
And practical skills are the domain of work experience and trade schools, not colleges.
Wh
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>Where did that line of BS get started?
As you say, it was there right from the beginning. Colleges offer a place for scientists and other intelligent experts to do research rather than causing trouble amongst the general population, and for would-be intellectuals to learn from them. If you want a more practical education, go to a different kind of school.
The real problem is that colleges have been marketed as career-training institutions, and used as proof of competency by employers, so that people wil
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I'm sure there are a couple thousand people in America entering college each year who won't need any job skills. That's not who the university system is for, nor who it should be for. It should be for people who want careers with a skill floor higher than what you can learn on the job, from engineers to doctors. That's a real, concrete benefit to society. Babysitting the scions of noble houses, not so much.
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In theory, yes. But you should probably tell the college students that leveling your 10th character in WoW is NOT what this means.
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They did what the boot camps for those certs do they pound it into their head in a short time and test them quickly before it falls out again.
Students that can read a few chapters in a book and retain the info for only a short time just long enough to pass a test isn't a new thing I did it all through high school with my History classes. Pissed my history teacher off to no end because he knew exactly what I was doing reading through the material twice the night before acing his tests and then forgetting eve
hiring based on skills is for millennial thinking (Score:4, Interesting)
At my company the party line is we hire the best and most distinguished people not the people who happen to be on hand for the job at hand.
At first this seems really dumb. A lot of jobs require some specific skills and it's hard to get people with less specialized experience to do them since they need to retrain.
But over the course of a career you see that the people who manage to stick around and succeed are the ones with a broad base and ability to shift and retrain.
THis is not exclusive from deeply experienced people who are good at one job. But the level of deep experience in new hires is nil. They have a few tricks they recently learned and maybe one great project they once did. But that's not deep expeince, it's more of a fad skill that could become the basis for getting started fast and developing, but it isn't deep experience yet.
Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.
But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills it's going to make people more disposable. It used to be the IBM was the pinnacle of developing career oriented workforces dedicated to the company. I guess not any more.
So what's so great about degreed people? Well especially for pHDs it proves they can take on a task and finish it. Postdocs show they can plan a job, and finish it on time. Undergrads show they can learn new things and if they have a masters, concisely reach for the right tools and apply them.
That's what degrees show. It's not just that you learned stuff, but you know how to learn, apply, and plan with new tools. Innovating, Planning the job and delivering on time are the real drivers and it's why senior people are actually worth their pay, at least the good ones are
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Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki (Score:4, Insightful)
illennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever.
No - they're the generation that spent the most time in schools. Education is related, but not the same.
Why would the IBM CEO feel the need to make this statement of opinion if it has already become a fact in HR?
Perhaps to emphasize their willingness to hire form diverse backgrounds. Diversity is all the fashion these days, after all.
Finally, if you were in charge of hiring for a new project that leveraged a new technology, would you rather hire someone with two year's experience in this new technology or someone with a four-year degree that they received at a university whose curriculum did not include said technology?
I'd rather hire someone who is "smart and gets things done", plus is not a jerk. New technologies are usually quick enough to ramp up on, and I don't care where someone picks up the tools of the trade: if they can both code and design, that's what matters. Design optional for entry-level hires.
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For a company like IBM Diversity isn't just the fashion but necessary for such a company to continue.
We see established companies die, because they just don't seem to be able to adjust to the customers demands. Why is that? One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product, it will be improved and better then before,
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One big thing, is they have all the people who made the last successful product still on staff, who think a particular way. So the next product will be made with the same type of thinking and basically look like and act like the older product,
When did we start talking about Google?
Diversity brings in a new way of looking at the problem.
Absolutely. At least, if you're talking about diversity of technical background, instead of diversity of physical appearance (of all things).
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Yeah, in this recurring Slashdot topic, distinguishing between formal education and useful knowledge is critical, as that's the actual topic of debate most of the time.
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Millennials make up possibly the most well-educated American generation ever.
Citation needed. I give you that millennials have the best access to education ever, with the internet and its near endless supply of information at their fingertips and their experience with the medium paralleled by no generation before them. But, and that's a big but, you can only lead the donkey to the well, you can't force him to drink.
What millennials (along with many people that came before them) sorely lack is a bullshit filter. Not everything that you read is true and valid information. And I'm not
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Oh, education is only supposed to mean how many are holding a degree. Ok. I was under the impression that the whole article we're discussing here is going exactly the opposite direction, but if that's all it means...
Well, of course they are. But I can tell you from experience that a degree doesn't mean that someone is actually educated. I have seen what's been cranked out by some colleges these days and I honestly question whether a college degree still means what it used to mean. Mostly that the person hol
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A proven track record working in the field with success at at least a handful of different locations over time (not decaying in the same seat the whole time) is worth more than a degree any day. A fresh college graduate doesn't really seem to do better than any reasonably intelligent individual hired from anywhere.
We proved it at one of our workplaces. Instead of the college grads we normally hired for entry level we hired the guy who did our water deliveries. In six months he was one of the best entry leve
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There have always been 'certificate of attendance' degrees.
As the % with college degrees goes up, the % of those that got useless degrees also goes up. Diminishing returns never sleeps.
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Actually in some cases there is a shadow middle ground. Formalized courses and training that aren't connected to universities are also often listed alongside schooling in the education column of a resume these days.
Neither is the same as on the job experience but the vendor supplied courses still tend to be a bit more meaningful than college courses. HR considers education, experience, and then training. In the real world what counts is experience, training, "formal" education.
There are areas of science and
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Abstract skills are a must. It doesn't matter th
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Experience has virtually no correlation with understanding or even skill. Concrete skills have a half life of about 2-3 years.
A senior engineer is someone who has that 2-3 years of depth, multiple times, and thus can generalize and form best practices that aren't specific to a given tech stack (and thus may be useful for the latest thing).
. We need to be fast, correct the first time, and our projects need to be easy for others to use/manage
Uh huh. Good, fast, and cheap: pick at most 2, and you're probably getting 1. But it's easy to deceive yourself about quality.
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Some people go as far as to say that they e
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Citation needed. I call bullshit. I've seen many 'coders' quit the industry after a year or two, they were very rarely the 'good ones'.
The best metric for coders I've found remains 'number of languages proficient'. Not perfect, but posers are quickly found out.
Six months to be up to speed, no programming experience. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!
Re:hiring based on skills is for millennial thinki (Score:5, Interesting)
> Millenials however see jobs as more transitory in my experience. They are less career oriented. I don't know how that's going to work out for them. Maybe great.
I'm not sure they have a choice. Companies don't train any more.
If you train on your own, up to and including a new, verifiable, cert/degree/whatever, your employer has no obligation to recognize that, let alone give you a raise. Frankly, your employer would rather have your cheaper replacement, so why bust your ass to get the training?
Let's say you get the training anyway. Your current gig (probably) won't value it, so your only viable option is to tout your new skills at a different employer, hopefully getting enough cash to justify the loss of stability. Lather, rinse, repeat until you find some position/situation/lifestyle you actually want to be.
Then start praying it lasts. In many modern situations, it won't. I don't know whether companies are going bust at historically high rates, but it sorta smells that way to me.
Anyway, I'm not convinced that the next generation eschews stability, so much as lacks a path to it.
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I had a similar experience, but came to a different conclusion.
I was at my first employer (a Dow 20 company) for 13 years. During that time I received the maximum raise corporate policy allowed (1.5x the average) almost every year and was promoted 4 times. I also led some awesome projects, always on time and budget, but more importantly, that exposed me to a tremendous range of knowledge in my field. At the end of those 13 years, a local company offered me 50% to leave, and I finally took it. I went on from
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The problem with hiring all the best and brightest for the company, is I would expect a high turnover.
The pawn in chess is not a useless piece, they can get the job done in places where the more "valuable" pieces can stay safe.
The same thing with hiring the low end entry worker. There is a lot of grunt work, which they are rather happy to do, because they are happy to just be working, and learning, they may not be as ambitious the the most distinguished person, so they are find doing the grunt work and goin
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"But if you combine that with IBM hiring less degreed people and more for specific skills"
I think you are adding a level of specialization above and beyond this concept. There is no requirement that you hire a "Chef expert" or someone with a masters to work on Chef. Hiring someone who has automation skills with any framework and experience is still hiring someone for their skills.
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College is backwards in my opinion. A bit of University learning is an excellent thing to provide for a proven resource with 5-20yrs of proven experience in multiple seats (not sitting in one position at one company). They will get far more out of the material because they'll know what matters and why and care.
Instead we dump reams of information on a bunch of people who are just going through the motions and have no concept of any of it actually being useful beyond advancing to the next grade.
Re:"Instead of" (Score:4, Interesting)
A degree and experience isn't mutually exclusive. We require both for prospective employees.
The problem is how many skilled people might you be excluding based on your college degree requirement. A college degree should be a crutch, it helps you acquire new skills rapidly and should offer the foundational knowledge to give insight into why the various tools and processes behind those skills exist in the first place. Essentially it should be something the student elects to get on his own accord, not because someone requires it. Thus the cost/benefit analysis of a college degree can once again fall upon the person paying it, and he doesn't feel obligated to it (and perhaps universities can finally get around to reshaping themselves to fit the needs of the world, not existing to serve themselves).
Anyone who can learn a skill should have equal chance at the job, provided he can demonstrate competence with that skill in some fashion. Doctors have to pass their licensing exam, lawyers have the bar exam. It makes sense that to declare competence with a skill should require some meaningful demonstration of that skill.
A college degree has never offered that, and I spend a lot of time interviewing people and basically administering them a final exam, when I really should be talking to them about other things. However, if they can't pass my final, the rest is worthless anyway. They may have a great attitude and really want to contribute, but if they don't have the skills... I got nothin. HR makes sure I don't see anyone without at least a Master's degree, and precious few of them seem to have the skills. So I'm not sure the status quo is really working for anyone.
Personally I think the only solution to this problem is to forbid college degrees from being considered in employment. Obviously this is a huge grenade to throw in the field, but until we can come up with some better way, the system will continue to be broken.
Re:"Instead of" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Ah yes, the 'programming challenge' final.. i.e. the 'guess what specific niche that if you have a solid base can probably look up in 10 minutes but if you don't know it off the top of your head and solve it the way I picture it, that means you don't know anything!' test.
If that's what you get, the interviewer doesn't know what they're doing. Programming tests should test your ability to solve problems and write code. They shouldn't require any knowledge beyond basic algorithms and data structures, plus, of course, a knowledge of the syntax and idioms of the language you're using.
And if the interviewer is expecting you to solve the problem in the same way they would, that's bad, too. Any correct solution should be fine. I had one candidate who created a better solution
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Re: "Instead of" (Score:2)
What they want are monkeys trained in a specific skill who will exactly as they are told and won't ask questions.
Trained monkeys are a dime a dozen and will be treated commensurately.
Google sure wishes they had trained Monkeys working on that search engine for Totalitarian regimes.
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You forgot skills.
A degree (use too) correlate to how flexible you are to change. You have been taught on how to learn new things as well being exposed to more advanced topics in such major.
Experience increases the number of tools you have in your toolbox. As opposed to the degree, you know more stuff, and have better instinct on what will work and what will not.
Skills it is how well you can do a particular job. Say for a software developer career, you may know the theory on how it works, you may have been
Lying AC. You employers want CHEAP. (Score:3)
Second or third attempt to find an interesting entry point to the potentially meaningful discussion. At this point I can't pretend to remember why I should have such expectations for Slashdot. So let me try to formulate a cohesive response so I'll have better ideas what to search for on the last attempt...
What IBM is actually doing is trying to find and leverage the best solutions so the work of the top employees (which could be defined in terms of the highest productivity and maximum profitability) can be
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Found a few of the keywords, but none of the associated posts were actually moderated favorably. Perhaps even worse, if I ever had a mode point I didn't think that any of those posts really deserved positive moderation...
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^ The reason for the alleged talent shortage in a nutshell.
Linux/Unix admin to devops is a great example of this. You have thousands of highly experienced people floating around who are perfect candidates to shift into devops but overnight all of what is essentially performing administration with some new toolchains listing are looking for software developers with the same prejudice toward high degrees the software development field is plagued with. The big problem? Administration was not plagued with this
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I've totally seen that job posting. The department head gives a basic description of the job duties for the position to a recruiter who has no idea what any of it means a places the add. We usually have the department head approve the add before placing so it usually gets caught before you see it.
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This. You have job openings for people with 10 years of experience in a field that only existed for 5, preferably not older than 25.
After you don't find any, you qualify for H1B. India seems to be from the future, considering how many insanely experienced people in technology that barely exists are coming from that place.
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That's why you _always_ include the job description right back at them, in 2 point white on white text in the margin of your resume. Duh. Along with a super long list of skill keywords you might or might not actually own.
I don't know why everybody doesn't do it. Aren't you supposed to be smarter than some HR moron?
I wouldn't hire anyone that wasn't smart enough to work that stupidity for their benefit.