
Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees - frostmatthew
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/03/30/dropouts-need-not-apply-silicon-valley-asks-mostly-for-developers-with-degrees/
======
argonaut
Let me summarize what I believe to be mostly uncontroversial.

1\. All else equal, and looking at the industry as a whole, having a college
degree in CS is an advantage in getting hired over being self-taught. Things
get more fuzzy if your degree is in math/physics/etc., but those still confer
some advantage.

2\. The advantage is very large for entry-level roles but diminishes greatly
with experience. The advantage is even larger if you went to an elite school.
The advantage is small if the school is mediocre, and negative if it's a
diploma mill.

3\. The advantage varies _greatly_ with the company. Google definitely cares
more than most startups.

4\. The advantage virtually goes to 0 within a decade but never completely
goes away, simply because of effects like your-interviewer-went-to-the-same-
school, alumni networks, and the fact that more people irrationally care about
CS degrees in senior devs than are irrationally biased against them.

5\. Whether the advantage is _worth the cost_ is a _very complicated_ issue.
This advantage is almost certainly not worth it if you have to go 100-250k in
debt (private schools). The opportunity cost is also quite large, but this is
complicated because what self-taught job you get depends on your own
background. Coding bootcamps also complicate things. At a certain point
depending on scholarships / parents paying / going to an in-state school, it
makes sense.

~~~
danellis
> Google definitely cares more than a startup

According to whom? Multiple Google recruiters have quite explicitly told me
that they don't care that I don't have a degree.

~~~
1a2a3a4a5a
There was definitely special treatment for MIT grads when I was interviewing
at FB/Google. At FB, all of the MIT students were split off to go to the paid
sushi restaurant on campus, while everyone else went to the general cafeteria.
At Google, I was told that MIT grads generally skip the phone interview and go
straight to onsite (and this was the case for my interview with them too). I'm
not sure how big the difference is, but they weren't school-blind.

~~~
hga
MIT (and even more so for CalTech, but they don't have a world class CS
program) has substantial math and science requirements that are not part of
the required ABET CS curriculum. Per e.g. [http://www.abet.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CA...](http://www.abet.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/05/C001-15-16-CAC-Criteria-03-10-15.pdf)

 _One year of science and mathematics: 1\. Mathematics: At least one half year
that must include discrete mathematics. The additional mathematics might
consist of courses in areas such as calculus, linear algebra, numerical
methods, probability, statistics, number theory, geometry, or symbolic logic.
[CS]

2\. Science: A science component that develops an understanding of the
scientific method and provides students with an opportunity to experience this
mode of inquiry in courses for science or engineering majors that provide some
exposure to laboratory work. [CS]_

The General Institute Requirements for all MIT undergrads include 1 term of
the calculus beyond the AP Calculus BC sequence, 1 term each of calculus based
mechanics and E&M, and 1 term each of biology and wet or solid state
chemistry. There's also a laboratory requirement that's satisfied by the new
EECS introductory courses that replaced 6.001-3 (SICP plus EE fundamentals,
now it's robotics and communications).

So a MIT (and CalTech) graduate is _guaranteed_ to have more scientific and
mathematical maturity than _the generic_ CS degree holder from another school.
It's also a degree that grew from its EE department like UC Berkeley and
unlike (I think) CMU and Stanford, so there's some required low level EE
learning (and last time I checked most in the department get a degree with
lots of both).

It's all done at a very fast pace as well, about 13 weeks of learning per se
for a term (vs. e.g. the 2-3 terms that seems to be common for covering the AP
Calculus sequence), so being able to learn hard stuff fast is an implicit
requirement, and officially stated as a virtue, seeing as how quickly so much
in so many fields including most especially computers changes so quickly.

NOTE TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS: if you want to attend MIT, don't despair. In
addition to a new model financial aid system which disdains loans, _the raw
odds if MIT judges you can do the work_ are 1 in 3. Best thing you can do
besides the usual things is to demonstrate in your application that you can do
projects. E.g. do a significant block of programming (FOSS nowadays) work and
do a good jobs of writing it up, as I did, in addition to a serious biology
project at a NSSF Summer Science Training Program that would have been
published if not for later realized reagent contamination.

Disclaimer: I was a MIT undergraduate pursuing a science degree, and
interacted a lot with the EECS department (e.g. I lead the infrastructure part
of their forced move from Multics to UNIX(TM) when MIT-MULTICS was shutting
down due to Honeywell Brain Damage(TM)), and still have ties to the
department.

~~~
humanrebar
You say all those things like other CS degrees skip university-level
mathematics and the scientific method. Even if they did (they don't),
individuals can certainly take courses, minors, or majors to add those
qualifications.

In other words, why fast pass MIT grads but not applicants with MS degrees and
published papers?

Maybe Google has some metrics to back up their decision, but I'm skeptical
that they can explain why the numbers are what they are.

~~~
pc86
I think it's much more likely that Google has data to back up this decision as
opposed to doing it because MIT looks neat on a resume.

~~~
humanrebar
You misunderstand me. I'll grant that Google has data to back it up. I also
think not being able to explain the underlying mechanism (IQ? curriculum?
selectivity? exposure to Atlantic seafood?) leads to shallow thinking, false
negatives, and possibly false positives.

I can't think of much about MIT that can't be replicated by a dedicated
individual. And I think the industry as a whole agrees with that. There seems
to be consensus that where a degree is from matters much less as industry
experience increases.

------
lkb2k
At one time I was a hiring manager at a largish global tech company. Not
having a degree myself, and noticing that a large number of the top devs in
the company also either had no degree or had degrees that were not in any way
related to CS I pushed back on HR to pull the 'relevant degree' requirement
from our job postings. I was told that I was welcome to recruit, interview and
hire people without a college degree, but if we posted the job publicly
without the requirement, we would not be able to hire any non-American
programmers. The government would see the lack of a degree requirement, even
for a sr dev or specialized tech position, to mean it was an entry-level
position that any American could do and would deny our visa request if the
person we liked best happened to be a foreigner.

I don't know how real the risk is, but it is a perception in HR at big
companies.

~~~
refurb
Interesting! I hadn't considered this, but it makes sense.

Many of the US work visas, such as TN, H1-B and even the employment-based
green card either require a college degree or give preference to a position
that requires a college degree.

------
PhilWright
A degree is very useful when trying to get your first job in the industry. It
provides some comfort for the hiring company that you have some level of
training and understanding. It makes you stand out from those without a degree
that are also trying to get a start.

Once you have several years experience the degree becomes less important
because you will be judged on your actual experience. An employers looks at
the languages/platforms you have used and can then easily test you based on
those.

After 5 or more years the degree is pretty much irrelevant. Especially when
there is a shortage of talent.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Some employers do not care much at all about your experience. For example,
Google interviews really don't consider this at all beyond the initial screen
whether you will get your interview or not. After that it's all hours of
testing your responses to problems, etc.

And in reality most industry experience is of little use at Google anyways.

Google does care about school and GPAs, etc. tho. More than most.

~~~
theGimp
I believe that has changed.

 _Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s
are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no
correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight
correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and
G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years
out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything._

Source: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-
hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-
data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=all)

Also, I doubt that external industry experience means little to Google -- for
two reasons:

1\. Good engineering practices are good engineering practices. You can pick
those up by working at a good firm

2\. Though they hold God-like stature, Google is like any other company. They
mostly use the same technology and a lot of the same tools as everybody else.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
I'm pretty sure that our local hiring committee at my site definitely
considers your level of degree and what school.

I don't know anybody else in my office without a degree. A very high % have
masters or phds.

~~~
komali2
That's probably a different sort of correlation than a Google-caused one.

------
danso
I don't see the big surprise...a degree doesn't mean that you're automatically
more competent, but competence -- the kind that is valuable to a company with
many moving parts -- can't be measured on a single scale. Pure mastery of C
and assembly may not outweigh your ability to work within and communicate in a
team. A degree implicitly confers a few social milestones:

\- You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford
putting you through college. Or, you know what it's like to be responsible for
paying off a large loan.

\- You've been thrown into a melting pot for ~4 years and have managed not to
freak out and/or commit a felony.

\- You've been able to commit to and meet arbitrary deadlines (i.e. finals
week) and goals.

No, having a college degree doesn't guarantee that you're a fine upstanding
person...it's just one useful metric for an employer to have when they have
little else to go on.

~~~
Chinjut
> You come from a family well-off/integrated enough in society to afford
> putting you through college.

This is really a metric we want to keep significant? "We'd just feel more
comfortable giving our good jobs to people from already well-off families; if
you're not from one of those, tough luck..."?

~~~
danso
Consciously? No. But a lot of it is related to the concept of culture fit. If
a company's CEO loves golfing, chances are they are going to find more kinship
with someone else who also lived a life that allowed for recreational golfing,
whether that manifests itself in the way that the CEO and employee can make
easy small talk or even spend time out on the course together. To varying
degrees, I think the same applies to other social rites and shared
experiences, whether it's going to college, joining the Greek system, playing
sports, etc. etc. Hell I admit that I have an instinctive affinity to people
who come from my home state of Iowa, even though logically I know that it's
not true that people from Iowa are just "better" than those who didn't happen
to be born within its borders...but a huge proportion of my best friends in
New York were strongly connected to Iowa, whether it was because we grew up
together or because " _Oh, you 're from Iowa?_" led to the kind of
conversation that help to upgrade a normal big city acquaintanceship into a
real friendship. In the same way, I don't think a college degree is
necessarily a binary switch/litmus test...it just opens up a lot more
possibilities of shared/common experiences. And as CEOs/managers tend to be
reside in the higher classes of society, college experience highly correlates
with the kinds of things they've lived through.

~~~
davisclark
Why doesn't Iowa fall off the map?

~~~
spacemanmatt
Same reason Florida doesn't break off and float away.

------
victorhugo31337
Having worked my way through college working as a full-time Software Engineer
in Silicon Valley, many people look down on others who don't have a Computer
Science degree.

Pragmatically, after more than a decade I've seen people with PhDs from top
schools who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. I've also seen
"uneducated" software craftsmen who could write the most elegant and clear
code.

There is no silver-bullet in the tech industry--yes, having a Computer Science
degree helps, but it doesn't guarantee the person will be a good Software
Engineer.

~~~
zzalpha
So I'm going to ask you a basic question: do you believe there is no
correlation, a positive correlation, or a negative correlation, between a
candidate having a degree from a good quality institution (I'm deliberately
ruling out degree mills) and candidate quality?

That is the only question worth asking.

The rest of your post is just useless anecdote. Yeah of course there's
candidates with degrees that suck, and candidates without degrees that are
amazing. You've said basically nothing of substance by pointing that out.

What are the averages? It I'm sifting through dozens of resumes for an initial
cull, guess what? I'm using heuristics. "Has a degree" is one (of many) of
them.

~~~
gnaritas
> What are the averages? It I'm sifting through dozens of resumes for an
> initial cull, guess what? I'm using heuristics. "Has a degree" is one (of
> many) of them.

You'd have a much better experience if you threw out that heuristic, and also
stopped looking at resumes. Resumes are generally packed full of bullshit and
lies anyway, ignore them. Create a simple test problem and require candidates
to submit code solutions to the problem. That immediately filters out all the
bullshitters who can't code because they won't bother applying for a job that
demands code as a resume. What you'll be left with is just a few submissions
from people who can actually code, and most of the them will be shitty but
functional solutions to the problem. A small few will submit great code to
your sample problem, you'll see it right away, you hire those people.

A computer science degree doesn't tell you anything at all about how well a
person can program; computer science and software engineering are quite
frankly vastly different things and little if any actual computer science is
needed by most software engineers. Filtering by it as a heuristic does nothing
positive for you, you're just filtering out a bunch of great programmers; it's
a terrible heuristic.

------
Gratsby
The reason isn't because everybody wants a college degree, it's because having
it in the job ad opens it up to H1 visa holders, which make up a significant
part of the silicon valley workforce (not just from one country, there is a
crazy international contingent in the SF Bay Area).

Many companies have entire departments that are made up of an H1 workforce and
will favor them in hiring - which is a little odd considering that you are
supposed to pay over market rate for an H1, but we all know there are ways
around that (either changing the job title to a lesser paying job, using a job
title that has a below market rate for the same set of duties as another
title, paying the "contracting company" the higher rate, but the actual worker
gets paid less, etc.).

I've seen a handful of companies actually require a degree, but almost all
will waive the requirement based on experience - especially for someone who is
the right fit. I've seen some (or some departments) that will only hire high
profile school graduates, but that kind of a thing is usually specific to a
particular market.

~~~
theparanoid
It's not odd to favor H1B's. I was talking to a fellow from India yesterday.
He's in Minnesota. Why? Because Symantec recently split into two, and one part
went to Minnesota. He'd leave tomorrow for another job back in California but
won't because he's on an H1B.

------
fiatmoney
You do have to get off the ground first, but at a certain point the
countersignaling value of a lack of degree starts to kick in.

It's sad when the most impressive thing about a candidate is that they went to
School X.

It's impressive when a candidate has done interesting / difficult things
despite a lack of degree.

~~~
13of40
As someone with no degree who's done OK in the software industry, I would
hands-down go back and get one if I could turn back the clock. Not because it
would necessarily translate to more money, but because I've been giving myself
ulcers worrying about it for the last 20 years. YMMV

~~~
aantix
If you've done well, why are you worrying about it?

You've bet on yourself to pull through these past 20 years and you've won.
You're going to be fine without it.

~~~
Futurebot
There are lots of reasons, some of which never go away (peer acceptance,
additional scrutiny / skepticism, raise availability and amount.) There's also
the specialization problem: you can "be fine" but essentially be limited to
what I like to term "survival tech" jobs (CRUD and some other less-than-
glamorous roles.) Not going to school, especially one that gives you
opportunities to work on really interesting stuff (elite/research schools),
means you'll likely never break into things like robotics or Socher-level DL.
There are exceptions, but most people will not.

You may also never be fully accepted culturally, since one of the major
advantages of going is that you're the "right" sort of person (meaning that
you have the correct socio-economic background and understand/speak corporate-
derived "elite meritocratic culture") / you're able to build a high-quality
network of well-connected peers who themselves are part of the socio-economic
elite.

~~~
aantix
In 2015, I had a half million dollar contract.

I went to the University of Nebraska (not an Ivy league). I dropped out.

My clothes are usually wrinkled, my hair is never combed. Some may mistake me
for a homeless person on the right day.

But I've done open source work. I've spoken at RailsConf twice. I have a good
tract record.

I have no idea who this "socio-economic elite" is that you refer to, but in
general, if you want to make money as a software engineer, you don't need a
fancy degree.

If you want to make money, you need to learn how to sell yourself and
constantly put yourself out there. No university is ever going to teach you
this.

------
porter
Just because a job ad asks for a degree doesn't mean the person hired actually
has one.

~~~
andersen1488
Yep. I don't think this study really took that into account. I'm a software
engineer in SV with no degree and it has literally never even been brought up
by interviewers.

------
sokoloff
I have a degree in Mechanical Engineering and am self-taught programmer from
an early age. No one has ever balked at hiring me for a software position
without a CompSci degree. (at least not that I know of; I've never been
unemployed for longer than a Saturday and Sunday between jobs)

~~~
danans
The article refers to people with _no_ degree.

~~~
komali2
I wonder how this applies in my case - self taught with a degree... in
Literature. I haven't had a hard time finding a job but that's a pretty big
selection bias.

------
aswanson
I remember thinking when I graduated high school the college doesn't matter
because knowledge is knowledge, so unless it's MIT who cares? How
idealistically wrong. Your college affects initial conditions, and life being
the chaotic system that it is, has tremendous integral effects over the
trajectory. Networking, who you know, peer group...all that stuff I heard from
my dad and thought was bullshit and peripheral turns out to be of ultimate
consequence. Get into and associate with the most elite groups as early as
your ability allows.

------
awalton
I experienced this one first hand, which is why I went to the cheapest school
in my state and coasted through a bachelor's, knowing that I could easily pay
it off once I got a job in the Valley.

Wasn't quite as easily as I hoped as it turns out, but I still managed to pay
it off in the same time it took to earn it, so on the overall, it worked out.
Honestly can't say my degree is worth much more than the certainty my resume
won't get band-rejected by recruiters, but hey.

------
twphonebillsoon
Tech hiring is a such a cluster____. Why are they screening for degrees
anyway? They clearly don't respect what a CS/SE/etc degree represents because
at the end of the day, regardless of your experience or your credentials,
you're going to be subjected to the programming interview nonsense that won't
reflect your day to day anyway

Its like requiring a degree in mechanical engineering to be a racecar driver,
and being told to assemble an engine during your interview.

------
louprado
I wonder what percentage of the employees in the HR departments have a college
degree. My guess it is close to 100% at 100% of top companies.

Even if you do get hired, HR might undermine your career and prospects for
promotion if you don't have a college degree. I don't have data but I
reluctantly suspect it is true. Hopefully I'll get down votes by someone who
knows this isn't the case.

------
memememememe
I've earned no less than $180k/yr in the past 6 years, as a remote developer
without a degree. The only thing that matters in life is what you decide to
believe is true.

~~~
georgefrick
Are you a stand alone contractor, or do you work for someone? How much
experience? You'll have to excuse me for bugging you; but I have 10 years
experience and I make half that.

~~~
memememememe
I'm a contractor. I started learning front end coding in late 2007, and
backend software development in late 2008. I didn't get a full time backend
software dev contract until 2010 and I read a LOT and started working on my
own pet project to learn during that year before, etc. I negotiated hard, and
even played hard to get (but also was very humble and nice - hard to get
doesn't necessarily mean "you can't afford me!", etc., more like "I'm sorry. I
love the team I I think I'm a great fit, but I just can't afford to accept an
offer below X"), and that first contract ended up being full-time at $90/hr.
That set the precedent in my mind. Once you decide something very solidly, you
will find a way to make it happen.

Ask for what you want, and remember, even if it's a pain in the neck and takes
a long time, if you can earn double, every year is like 2 years.

------
ThrustVectoring
There's a huge elephant in the room for this: IQ testing. Companies get sued
if they test for IQ and consider it in their hiring process. On the flip side,
IQ is a very good predictor for job performance, especially for programming.
This is a good chunk of why companies do whiteboarding - it's not going to get
them sued, and it selects for cleverer people.

You know what else selects for cleverer people? SAT scores. Now, companies
aren't allowed to ask for SAT scores, but they are allowed to look at what
college you went to. So if you know that someone attended MIT or Stanford, you
get a pretty gigantic hint about what their IQ is.

~~~
el_benhameen
I think an assertion that large (that IQ test scores correlate strongly with
better job performance) needs some sources to back it up. I'm not saying
they're not there, but I'd like to see them. There's a lot more to overall job
performance than ability to reason about complex programming problems.

As a counterpoint, a Google HR SVP says in an article referenced elsewhere in
the comments [0] that they don't ask for G.P.A's and test scores anymore
because they're "worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new
college grads, where there’s a slight correlation".

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-
hunting-b...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-
data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html)

~~~
ThrustVectoring
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_perf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Job_performance)

I don't have access to the works that Wikipedia cites, but the correlation is
positive and between 0.2 and 0.6 for every job studied.

And I agree, there are a lot more things that influence job performance. IQ
probably isn't the most important thing - a malicious programmer can cause
millions of dollars worth of damage, so probably the most important thing is
trustworthiness. That said, learning about someone's IQ helps you predict
their future job performance, basically regardless of what job you are talking
about.

~~~
el_benhameen
Very interesting, thanks for the cite. I think it's important to note that
those figures are for "hiring employees without previous experience in the
job" because "It is largely through the quicker acquisition of job-relevant
knowledge that higher IQ mediates job performance." So you'll acquire new
skills more quickly if you have a higher IQ, which makes sense, but if you
have two people at the same apparent skill level applying for a non-entry-
level position, IQ may well not be (or may well be) a valid means of deciding
between the two. This jives fairly well with the quote from Google.

------
Randgalt
B.S. I've never worked for a place that cared. I'm self taught. Req's always
say degree or _equivalent_.

~~~
cbhl
At some places, x years of experience can be considered equivalent, but
bootstrapping to the equivalency is non-trivial without a degree (chicken-and-
egg).

~~~
karmicthreat
This is where fake it till you make can really come into effect. My first
paying programming gig was a gambling system for a really cheap
dominican/canadian outfit. Pulled it off, made some really good design
decision and then bailed when it was obvious the owners were trying to rip off
their investors.

It still gave me experience and I used that experience and stories for the
next 2 jobs. Hopefully it keeps working because I am way better than I was on
that casino job.

I don't think you can become a great programmer until you overcome The Fear.
And you won't be able to do that until you have the stress of doing it
professionally for someone else. And being able to successfully come out the
other side of the project.

------
BWStearns
I wonder how they're counting ads that say "BS or MS in Compsci or Equivalent
Experience" or something to that effect. I understand that this could deter
some applicants, but I think that it's pretty clearly a go-ahead for
applicants who don't have the degrees but think they could do the job (though
presumably applicants with the relevant degrees would in aggregate fare better
etc). I wonder this explicitly because last time I looked I did not see many
mentions of degrees that weren't explicitly accompanied by the OR.

~~~
13of40
Supposedly there's actually an industry standard translation of work
experience to years of college. I think it's 4:1, so 16 years of experience is
worth a bachelors degree.

~~~
jqm
That seems a little high. In the real world it seems that 4 years of hands on
experience is often worth more than 4 years of school. For certain things
anyway. I have a degree. I'm not sure the education was really worth the money
but it has opened some doors.

------
HaloZero
For people who don't have a degree, have you ever been rejected from not
having a degree? The requirement might say it but I doubt it matters
practically.

I imagine for junior positions this matters more.

Anecdotally, I know at least one friend without a degree who gets the same
amount or more recruiter emails sans any degree on his profile

~~~
busterarm
I get a lot of recruiter and founder interest but I often do not make it past
an HR screener's eye into a candidate pool due to lack of degree.

If I can bypass that step and talk to a dev or experienced manager I get at
least one interview every time. For companies using software like Greenhouse
in their recruiting pipeline, I _never_ make it through to even a phone screen
without an internal shove by someone.

Almost everywhere I've ever worked, I've been considered a strong hire. Mid-
level dev.

~~~
monk_e_boy
We looked at a degree as an indicator that this person can stick at something
for 3-4 years.

For some jobs this was a good thing, for other jobs it didn't matter.

I've had jobs where my manager didn't have a CS degree, one of them I had to
sit him down and explain why his ad-hoc database made out of .txt files and
thousands of lines of C# code wasn't a good idea. A CS degree forces you to
know about a broad range of ideas and tools (e.g. databases). This is useful.
Employing someone with out that means they may have holes in their knowledge
that you aren't expecting to be there. But give this person some motivation
and a week and they'll get up to speed.

~~~
busterarm
I had another skilled tech career with 15 years experience before switching to
software and all of my employment has been in the 1-5 year range, more towards
the latter.

Despite my lack of degree, I tend to be one of the more CS-oriented people on
the teams I join. I put this upfront in my portfolio & github with the
projects I show off, namely that I've written an ORM, a Web Server, games with
AI using game trees and behavior trees, contributed to some popular OSS,
etc...even some random odd stuff like emulators, disassembler scripts, pentest
tools, etc.,

I guess I do have some gaps but I'm constantly trying to fill them and I'm not
satisfied to rest on that knowledge.

------
dj_doh
My undergrad advisor gave one of the best advices about why diploma is
important. A college education is a social institution where you work with
dozens of students, teachers and staffs across disciplines. Ideally,
culminating with a diploma. That diploma doesn't tell others how good you are
or you can be. It tells others that you can be part of a social institution
and get some things done.

Greatness is independent of school or diploma. Some of the best minds of the
world never set foot in a school campus.

~~~
dhimes
This is excellent. I'm stealing it.

------
Bjorkbat
It's worth pointing out that they came to this conclusion by looking at job
postings.

If a company is large enough to have some HR person creating job postings,
then they're going to come from this mindset that education acts as a
convenient filter for separating "the wheat from the chaff". It can sound dumb
as all hell, but it's the best broken solution they can come up with because
it's easy to glance at a resume, see the letters "MIT" and put it in a
different pile from the people who came from New Mexico State (or some other
generic university in a predominantly rural area).

I don't agree a degree, and I've done pretty well for myself, but it's worth
pointing out that I've never applied for a formal job ad. I've relied on
friends and I've relied on networking events where I showed off some cool
thing I made and found out after the fact that the person I showed it off to
was an influencer when it came to hiring at their company.

So to sum things up, I think it's safe to say that companies hire by degrees
because that process scales pretty well, whereas hiring by portfolio really
doesn't. Nonetheless, if a dropout can prove themselves even modestly well,
then they've got a job.

------
nocarrier
The best hackers I've worked with didn't have degrees. The best software
engineers did. You need both.

On the hacker front, I noticed a lot of patterns--they had a lot of drive,
were self-taught (obviously), and had other things about them that were
remarkable. One can play any song on the piano that he's heard just once
before. Another is a multiple-time CTF champion. Another is the best
performance engineer I've ever met, and who can diagnose and fix site outages
10x faster than anyone else.

There's a difference between hackers and engineers though. I found that the
engineers were good at breaking projects into milestones and driving their
teams toward them, e.g. steady state development when conditions are good. And
I found that the hackers excelled at exceptional or emergency situations like
debugging complicated multithreaded code on the fly or figuring out which
switch in a datacenter was corrupting packets for production traffic. There
were exceptions in both directions (hackers who were great technical leads and
engineers who were great detectives), but this was a pretty general rule I saw
over the years.

I also worked with a number of people without degrees that weren't very good,
so it's not like the lack of a degree makes you a hacker or makes you good at
your job. You have to be very driven when you're self-taught and sometimes
have to work harder than your peers who have a more evenly balanced education.

I ended up being a bit of a wildcard myself--I'm a self-taught hacker and did
lots of cool debugging and detective work for 14 years, and then I was a
manager for 5 years. I think hackers can make interesting managers since they
are willing to upend traditions and try new things with their teams. I did a
lot of that.

------
alexc05
I've been developing professionally for nearly 20 years now. Though, since
some of that time was as a high school teacher, it isn't all, super high end
stuff, but even there was value in learning how non-programmers think about
computers... (One darling example was "what do you mean by file->menu? Menus
are for food"

With that 20 years experience (and two non-cs bachelor's degrees) I've now
managed to fail interviews at both Facebook and Amazon.

While the Facebook one was (in my opinion) pretty deeply flawed, the Amazon
one, the 4 hour version, gave me virtually every opportunity "get it right"
and I felt like interviewers were all "on my side"

In the end though, I really felt like if I'd had the full CS experience in
university, I'd have had the edge I needed.

Specifically there were portions of technical nomenclature that I fell short
on in the object oriented design portion. "What is the word for that thing
you're doing there?"

and the dozens of hours spent discussing various efficiencies of search and
sort algorithms would have made the extra steps in the optimization portion
feel more like second nature.

With all that said, I have recently been doing my research into how and where
I might be able to go back to school for the stuff I've missed out on.

U of T or a Waterloo masters? Perhaps Harvard extension schools? (the online
version of the school which apparently real Harvard grads sneer at but still
has Harvard in the name)... Or maybe there is enough in iTunes U to get what I
need.

Whatever I go with, after 20 years programming, I've decided that I may as
well take this programming thing seriously. I suspect there is a future in it.

------
tombert
I don't live in Silicon Valley, but I've found that the "requirement" for a
degree is more of a suggestion than law. I don't have a degree, and I still
usually apply to jobs that have that requirement.

I don't always get an interview, of course, but I get them often enough to
where I kind of feel like they're on the description as a formality more than
anything.

------
mattzito
So, I'm a college dropout, and for me not having a degree was an issue until I
hit the 10-15 years of experience mark and was up for executive positions.
Then not only was it not an issue, no one ever asked.

~~~
creativityhurts
It's weird because a couple of answers here say that it's harder getting into
higher positions without a degree.

~~~
mattzito
Yeah, I think there's probably a middle management trap in a lot of
organizations where they want you to have an MBA for a director of product
management role, but for a vp of product or cpo job they're actively
recruiting the exact people they want usually based on job experience or prior
success.

I think I skipped over that because I got acquired into the middle management
role, no resume or job spec required.

------
aburan28
Articles like this throw fuel onto those suffering from imposter syndrome

------
WalterBright
I've regularly seen just about every method used to pick candidates bashed
here and denigrated as unfair, useless, etc.: degrees, GPAs, SATs, IQs, phone
interviews, in person interviews, whiteboarding, tests, puzzles, experience,
etc.

Reminds me of the hoary cliché that democracy is the worst form of government
except for all the others.

------
gozur88
Employers use degrees as a proxy for intelligence now that it's legally
perilous to give IQ tests. They don't want you because they think MIT taught
you something people can't learn on their own. They want you because you were
smart enough to get accepted at MIT.

------
mgirdley
If you dig in with employers to understand those job listings, there's a big
difference between what they ask for and what they settle for in terms of
qualifications.

Another significant percentage of those job listings are designed to game the
H1B system as well. So, are basically fictitious.

------
bootload
_" Self-taught developers dominate technology: 69% of the developers who
responded to the survey are at least partly self-taught, and fewer than half
hold a formal degree in computer science."_

It's fascinating to read this article on SV wanting devs with degrees, then
compare it to this article [0] on the annual StackOverflow developer survey.
SV requires a very narrow skill set compared to the rest of the world.

[0] _" Two out of three developers are self-taught, and other trends from a
survey of 56,033 coders"_ ~
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11395207)

------
kayoone
Depends on what you want to work on. Computer Science != Software Engineering

~~~
busterarm
How many Valley startups are doing Computer Science!?

..or even Software Engineering!

~~~
jonesb6
We should really just start calling it software implementing..

~~~
bottled_poe
We already have two terms for that - coder and programmer.

~~~
Kurtz79
Really ? I always thought them as synonyms and "Software Engineer" as a more
"upscale" title (which is kind of stupid, IMHO).

From Wikipedia:

"The term programmer has often been used as a pejorative term to refer to
those without the tools, skills, education, or ethics to write good quality
software. In response, many practitioners called themselves software engineers
to escape the stigma attached to the word programmer. In many companies, the
titles programmer and software developer were changed to software engineer,
for many categories of programmers."

------
zanethomas
I haven't needed a degree, in my 40 years of programming.

------
a0ede18d1e
I recently got thrust back into the job market here in Austin, and I've not
gotten the response I was hoping for. I've only gotten two on site interviews,
both of which ended with a No from the company in question. Even if I do get
through the recruiter phase and get brought in, I'll get thrown algorithmic
questions I haven't had to deal with since I left school. Even though I'm a
capable dev with some team lead experience I can't help but think I am being
passed over (in part) because I never finished college.

I've even considered going back, but due to the length of time I've been out
it seems my credits have expired (even though I'm still paying the student
loans). On top of that, I left school for a reason and it hasn't changed - I
hated every waking second of my life while I was there.

But now I have no income and a wife and house to support. Maybe I'm just
looking for a scapegoat. Everyone I talk to (outside the industry, I have only
a few contacts within it) just say "Don't worry, everyone wants to hire smart
nerds like you!".

~~~
bitshepherd
You're competing with UT grads and everyone else who moved to the area for
tech.

Not having a degree in Austin puts you at a significant disadvantage when it
comes to getting recruited. I had the same problem when I lived there and I,
too, do not have a degree.

~~~
a0ede18d1e
I hadn't thought of that, what with UT being right here. I was able to get
hired with relocation 5 years ago. Since then I figured it'd be a good town to
put down roots so I bought a house. And now here I am seemingly unable to find
work.

Damn. Maybe I'll have to look to other cities. I put my resume into the big
corps and either got nothing or had some asinine HackerRank test that lost my
progress 1:45 in and then heard nothing more.

~~~
bitshepherd
Well, you can relocate to the Bay Area, as expensive as it is. I did so, as
well as a huge mob of Texans. Californians did the opposite: moved to Texas
for cheaper housing/lower taxes.

The upside is they pay you more to offset the cost of living. The downside is
that roughly 50% of my income before rent goes to taxes, and half of that goes
to rent.

------
jpgvm
Bigger firms yeah, smaller firms care more about passion and knowledge. Both
of which are usually attained outside of your degree (if you even have one).
Degrees are good more for providing baseline mathematics and theoretical
background for jobs that need more of that.

That said I think a degree is probably the least relevant aspect of hiring for
99% of developers.

------
stillsut
There is a larger issue here than just what recruiters at the GOOG are looking
for.

Historically, the difference maker between SV and Boston was the willingness
of the former to take dropouts, divorced people, dreamers with gaps between
jobs, and for the latter to actively filter out those people.

Remember, "disruptive innovation" occurs first in the low-cost product segment
before working its way up into the the more recognized and lucrative markets.
Given the rapid progress going into both:

\- Alternative Learning Models: bootcamps, MOOC's, K-12 coding education, etc

\- Dev Tools: StackOverflow replacing book learning, github/npm creating code
of a thousand dependencies, etc

I would worry that forcing your entire company to be made of candidates of the
most traditional and elite background sets you up to miss the next trend in
how to profit from People->Software.

------
dmansen
I do lots of recruiting / hiring at my job. I use a sliding scale. If you have
no CS degree: have you written applications from scratch? Is your experience
diverse or have you spent 5 years repeatedly writing the same Rails app?

On the other side, if you do have a CS degree, have you written application
code before? If not, I want to see that you can apply your CS fundamentals to
practical business problems.

Of course there are people without a degree who are phenomenal programmers,
and people with one who can't write FizzBuzz! Is anyone arguing against this?
When we're screening people we need some way of gauging your skill level. A
degree is one indicator, practical experience is another.

------
gizi
Well, since software engineering is a field where the government is not able
to settle the matter just by slapping the obligation to have a particular
degree or certification just to be admitted to the job, employers are allowed
to choose. If you have an aptitude for programming, you will be better off
just programming for 4 years. Going to college and reading books about
programming will turn out to be only marginally useful, and actually quite
costly. Instead of learning, and making quite good money, you will be digging
yourself into a debt hole, while you will still need to pick up the real
skills afterwards, at the expense of an ever more skeptical employer.

------
pklausler
The best programmers with whom I've ever had the privilege to work have had
their degrees in mathematics, not CS, and I think that math majors have tended
to be better hires, in my experience. Physics and astronomy students can also
be great.

------
doh
This is why many companies in Silicon Valley require a degree
[http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-
Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm](http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa-
Sponsor/Facebook/189973.htm)

For every year of school a person has to have a 3 years of experience to be
considered for H1-B. FB hired 3k people in 2015
([http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-
facebook...](http://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-facebook-
employees/)) of which 900 were foreigners hired thanks to H1-B.

------
vvanders
Article is looking at job ads, not actual employment.

Every job I've applied to had a degree requirement. Ive had offers from every
place I've interviewed with no degree. Just because they ask for it doesn't
make it a hard requirement.

------
hashkb
The WSJ is often out of touch with reality and this article is no exception.
They collected the data from job postings and stopped investigating. If they'd
done any real investigation (like, polled working developers and correlated
their work history with their education) they'd realize their reporting
doesn't support their (sensationalizing) headline.

(I used to work at Hired; I have a decent sense of what gets noticed on an
engineer's resume. And I've personally interviewed hundreds of developers.)

------
spacemanmatt
Degrees are a form of legit experience. They aren't the only form, but I can't
fault a company for short-cutting their own process by requiring a degree. I
think it should be their choice, even though I disagree with it from a
effective-business perspective.

Personally, I might filter for someone with particular training or tool
experience, and I see outsourcing your decision process to a
college/university in a similar light. We can't investigate every competency,
so we use proxies.

------
Swizec
As anecdata from personal experience: It is possible to both get a job in
Silicon Valley without a degree _and_ an O-1 visa.

I'm just one data point, but I think having gone to college for a few years is
the important advantage, not the degree itself. I did the former, never ended
up having time for the latter. Too busy solving people's real world business
problems in return for cold hard cash.

But I also started coding when I was 9 and started coding for money when I was
16 and still in high school. Your mileage may vary.

------
colordrops
While likelihood of being hired and the expense of college are factors in
deciding whether to attend, they should definitely not be the only ones, and
maybe not even a major factor in your decision. To view things this way is to
take an extremely narrow view of the benefits of attending a good university.
It's not for everyone, but I personally took so much more out of the
experience than just a notch on my belt for getting a job.

------
neom
I heavily heavily avoid recent MBAs and really couldn't give two shits if you
have a comp sci degree provided you're a good engineer and a good human.

~~~
busterarm
I'd love to hear some of your reasoning, but my impression is that the writing
has been on the wall for MBAs for 10+ years and that anyone with a recent MBA
shifting into tech is someone looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue.

~~~
neom
I generally find that real world experience trumps what is being taught in MBA
programs these days unless you're going into consulting or the like. It's not
particularly hard to find someone who has built something instead of their
MBA, and I'd much rather them around a few sage folks than some fresh faced
textbook jockeys. Also: anyone with a recent MBA shifting into tech is someone
looking for a buck but doesn't have a clue. ;)

------
matheweis
I work for a university (not in SV), and the min quals for software engineers
usually go something like:

(Bachelors of Science degree AND three years of development experience) OR
(Five years systems development experience) OR (Any equivalent combination of
experience, training and/or education)

In personal experience, once I hit about 10 years of experience, whether I had
a degree seemed be only of passing interest to interviewers.

------
dclowd9901
As someone with a journalism degree I've never had a hard time getting
interviews anywhere, large, small, whatever.

I think it more matters that you have a degree at all and a decent sum of
experience than strictly a CS degree. For instance, I can now lean on my
professional experience more where before I had to have a portfolio of
projects.

------
home_boi
I don't think degrees matter that much. After the first internship/job, the
prestige of the companies on your resume basically "becomes" your degree. I go
to a mediocre school and the responses were night and day before and after
getting an internship at a trendy company.

~~~
acosmism
amen.

------
sjg007
This is Silicon Valley. Don't have a degree, can't get a unicorn job? Start
something!

------
d0m
Someone once told me that school is such bullshit that if you can though it
out for 4 whole years that means a lot about determination.. Of course real
life is more nuanced but I thought it had a little bit of truth to it.

------
Zyst
How many of those enforce their requirement?

I have previously applied and gotten job postings that mention they want a CS
degree, in fact no one has ever made a fuss about the lack of it in my
experience.

------
jgh
This seems to be about job ads. Job ads almost always list a bachelor's degree
as a requirement, but I don't think it's a hard and fast rule for most places.

------
whatgoodisaroad
Another way to look at this is that Colleges and Universities are now better-
aligned with the industry than they were before.

------
forrestthewoods
"There’s a long-lived myth that Silicon Valley and the technology industry are
meritocracies where all that matters is the caliber of your code."

Maybe because applicants with degrees are, statistically speaking, better than
those without?

I've always said that getting a job takes two things:

1) Be good

2) Prove you're good

A degree achieves neither. But it helps a lot. Not having a degree doesn't
preclude either. But it doesn't help at all.

~~~
wwweston
By a similar philosophy, all you really need to do is this:

1) Persuade people you're good. Or, in other words, get people to believe you
add value.

Being able to add value doesn't achieve this by itself. But it helps a lot.
Not being able to add value doesn't preclude you from doing this. But it
doesn't help.

(My comment is a _somewhat_ winking... but I suspect some readers will
recognize some uncomfortable truth.)

~~~
forrestthewoods
Oh sure. Some people are so good at it they can make a career out of it. Not
many though. Odds are it will catch up to you.

I don't understand downvotes on my initial comment. HN is such a fickle beast.

------
dj_doh
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. Here the keyword
Harvard dwarfs dropped out.

------
m_-_-_d
Title should be "Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees.
Mostly."

------
madengr
Surprised no one has mentioned the degrees also need to be from accredited
programs.

------
tn13
You can get a CS degree for $10k in Silicon valley. No big deal.

------
LAMike
Can someone tell me where I can get a B.S in Javascript?

------
jonesb6
It's ok I'm about to get my philosophy degree.

------
throwaway3141
I don't understand why considering degree and reputation of the university
when hiring so frowned upon ? It seems perfectly logical to me. Afterall, when
you have 1000s of resume a day to sift through (not unusual for big companies
like Google, etc), what criteria should you use to filter the candidates ?
It's easy to fill a resume with lot of crap which is often fake or
exaggerated. A degree and university reputation is a very objective measure
that can used to quickly identify a potential good set of candidates, and then
use actual interview to find bad apples from them. This approach optimizes
toward having as few False positives as possible when hiring (False negatives
on the other hand are plenty, and that's fine) - which is a stated goal of
hiring for all big companies (Google, FB, etc), who are at luxury of having
more candidates than they need, hence don't care much about False negatives.

Is it fair to people without degrees, esp, for cases where the only reason was
that they couldn't afford it (considering how damn expensive higher education
is in US) ? No, of course it is __not __, but then who said life has to be
fair ? And of all things, why should we expect for-profit (and I use that word
with respect, not derision) companies to hurt themselves to "just" try and
make it fair to everyone ?

IMHO, education (both degree, and even more importantly the selectiveness of
the university) serve as a very good proxy measure for how likely a candidate
will be good. This is similar to say work-experience at a very reputable
company, which is known for its selectivity. In both (university or top
company) the scenarios you know that candidate had been filtered among a very
large pool of candidates in past, so very likely to be bright.

As an example say, you want to select a dream team to attack the "Riemann
Hypothesis" problem. Will you consider a candidate's credential (like
education, university they are working at) as one of the big factors, or will
you be just trying to interview anyone who applies, even if they don't have
any exposure to higher math ? Say you get 100k applications, and can only
interview at most 100 of them, does your answer change ? I know, that I will
look at credentials, past work (which all correlate insanely with education &
university affiliation) as the first measure to filter things out. Of course
their will be outliers, and there will be exceptional people who are very good
at Math without any degree (like Ramanujan), but there is no scalable way to
find them in this scenario.

Similar example: What is the probability of some random dude on internet
claiming he has a proof of P != NP being right vs say it coming from a reputed
researcher (for the sake of argument say "Richard Karp") ? Whose proof are you
going to read more carefully ? I guess the answer is obvious is this case. Now
let's say it is between a random no-credential dude vs a PhD student of
Richard Karp's (at Berkley) - who are you going to take more seriously ? Is it
fair, probably not ? But statistically you will be much better with having
these conscious & unconscious biases (backed up by data of course), then
sampling uniformly from the world.

------
Myrmornis
Slow news day at the WSJ.

