
Companies dropping college degree as hiring requirement - Liron
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/16/15-companies-that-no-longer-require-employees-to-have-a-college-degree.html?__source=facebook%7Cmain
======
kaizendad
This is great! A college degree can really help in a lot of careers (and I say
this as someone with both a college and a grad degree), but rarely is it
actually essential. It's not often even a good proxy for knowing that someone
can do something. Direct measures of ability, such as reviewing past work, or
even tests of certain types, are going to be much better at actually assessing
whether or not someone can do the job, and also make jobs accessible to people
from backgrounds that might make getting a college degree hard, but have no
effect on whether or not a given individual can do a given job.

------
sanityvampire
Article title's kind of disingenuous, isn't it? Name-drops Google and Apple,
and then the rest of the positions are, like... "You can be a barista at
Starbucks, a cashier at Whole Foods, or even a housekeeper at a Hilton!"

~~~
randomdata
The whole concept of 'requiring' a degree to get a job, aside from legal
requirements, is silly to begin with. No company in existence has ever
required a degree. Companies may reject someone they never planned on hiring
in the first place on the basis of not having a degree to evade a
discrimination lawsuit, but that's quite a different thing.

~~~
sgslo
In a professional setting - outside of software engineering - the degree
_requirement_ is absolutely common.

No young person has ever been hired as a structural engineer, mechanical
engineer, water resources, etc, etc without at least a bachelors. The extreme
minority that might be employed as such without a degree might have been
originally hired at a lower position (as a draftsperson, for example) then
trained and promoted from within.

~~~
randomdata
_> No young person has ever been hired as a structural engineer, mechanical
engineer, water resources, etc, etc without at least a bachelors._

But that's not a degree requirement (aside from legal requirements), that's
excess in the labour pool. Once an employer has so many people to choose from,
then they have to figure out some methodology to reject people. No degree is
one of the only legally acceptable forms of doing so, so it is the most
common.

It's a subtle difference, but an important one if you are the one joining the
labour pool. Even with a degree, you're going to be competing against a whole
lot of other people for the same work. Not an ideal situation.

In constrast, you see a lot of tech companies on this list because tech
companies don't have much choice in hiring right now. They're lucky to get one
person to apply. They don't need an arbitrary filter, nor can they expect to
have one.

------
xenihn
The most successful engineers I know don't have a degree. One is an
engineering lead at Netflix, two of them started their own companies after
spending about five years working for other big names.

------
account2
Is this why these companies have such intensive leet coding interview
processes? In other professions a degree + exams alone is enough.

I can't imagine an interview where a doctor has to perform surgery "as a take
home interview" without pay or be able to solve obscure problems from
chemistry, biology, etc.

~~~
twblalock
I've interviewed a lot of people at this point and I just can't rely on a CS
degree as a guarantee of competence. I've interviewed (and worked with) people
with degrees from excellent CS programs who were bad engineers. Some of them
must have cheated in their CS courses because they were outright incompetent
-- but they were able to get degrees.

It's a serious problem that we don't have a good way to tell if someone is
good at software engineering. Unfortunately degrees don't guarantee anything.
So we use whiteboarding, which isn't great either.

I'm not really sure we should want degrees to be a guarantee of competence
anyway. If the industry relied on them it could lead to a culture of
credentialism that would make it more difficult for good engineers without CS
degrees to get jobs. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have degrees
in other subjects.

~~~
expertentipp
One can say this about any other profession, can't one?

The notary I met while buying my last apartment was a sham, he probably
cheated while studying. Guess what? My acquaintance rubber-stamps papers like
no one else, one of the best paper rubber-stamping guys I know.

------
clay_the_ripper
I personally couldn’t care less if the people I’m hiring went to college. When
I interview someone, I’m interested to see if they know enough about the thing
I’m hiring them to do to solve a specific problem, if they seem like a hard
worker and if they are able to learn new skills. I’m sure college degrees are
good for some companies hiring practices, but I don’t even ask to see a
resume. All I want is work samples and or a good interview.

------
aestetix
Can a mod remove the trailing "__source=facebook%7Cmain" from the url?

------
PopeDotNinja
Good.

------
bena
iPhone buyer. Seems simple enough

