
The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees - nsedlet
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/ernest-young-degree-recruitment-hiring-credentialism/406576/?single_page=true
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sirtastic
No degree. Founder and UI/UX Dev (now in Sacramento be previous Bay Area). Six
figs. No connections, just hard work.

I'm definitely an outlier. I've yet to meet someone holding it down in the Bay
Area with a developers title who didn't have a degree. It's always a look of
surprise when asked where I went to college and I respond "I didn't.". Part of
me wishes I had, the other part wishes I was less lazy. The ladder in me knows
there isn't a thing I can learn in college I couldn't teach myself on my own.

I once asked a genius colleague of mine (also founder and now millionaire at
29) who went to school for biology and wound up a developer if he felt he
wasted his time pursuing biology. His response "No, it taught me how to
learn.". I really liked that response, obviously it's stuck with me. For many
things you need a degree (health fields etc) but for most everything else you
need the ability to learn and learn well.

~~~
Futurebot
It can be done, but it's much harder, at least in my experience. You're 100%
right about being an outlier. People who go this route are going to work much
harder as their similarly skilled, but degreed colleagues at everything
(proving themselves, earning respect, getting raises, having people even
listen to them.) Anyone who can go without accruing a mountain of debt
_should_ do so unless you're naturally incredibly talented or have Zuck-level
support.

My personal experience: [https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-
developers-should...](https://medium.com/@opirmusic/why-software-developers-
should-still-choose-to-go-to-university-if-someone-else-is-
paying-45091d22acc1)

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jsnk
The Best Job Candidates Don't Always Have College Degrees

Is there anything surprising or interesting about this truism? There are
millions of jobs and millions of people without college degrees with infinite
combinations of skill sets. Of course you are going to have some jobs that are
best executed by some people who don't have a college degree.

~~~
ryanmarsh
I'm pretty sure there's an entire generation (or two) of parents who beat into
their children's heads that if they didn't get a degree they wouldn't amount
to anything. Also, see: credentialism.

So yes, for many people there is a belief that the only jobs for the un-
universitied are garbage collection and scrubbing toilets.

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hoodoof
"great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a
zero correlation"

[http://steveblank.com/2009/04/07/the-good-
student/](http://steveblank.com/2009/04/07/the-good-student/)

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tcdent
Maybe it's just me, but in discussions like this, I consistently interpret an
expectation of naivety in non-college graduates. In practice, I find it's the
exact opposite.

If your mentality is to follow Gates' advice of a “much surer path to success”
you've already demonstrated weakness.

Many graduates I know did not have a job before college. You don't learn
practical job experience in school, so they're left having to figure it out.
For example, a lot of my peers aren't comfortable solving problems in their
workplace. After they vent and I recommend making changes, most are unwilling
to act; they'll make excuses or expect to be fired. Having experiencing a
_wide_ variety of "professional" environments myself, I know where to draw the
line, and how to stand up for myself.

I also find that expectations of employment differ. That MS title was hard
earned, and gets them into interviews at companies with those requirements, so
that's where they go. It's expected that you want a salaried job and will ride
it (or similar positions in similar companies) to retirement.

Sure, I may one day be the "old dude without a degree who says he can code",
but I'm actually preparing to be the dude who no longer codes because he has
skills that apply to many industries. Try diversifying your skillset in your
cubicle, or exclusively on weekends; from experience, I can say I'm better off
without. In the 4+ years you were socializing and studying, I was already
living life (actually, I've been working since I was 15-1/2).

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tedmiston
I think we'll start seeing a trend where students, especially at STEM schools,
can come out of high school, do a coding bootcamp, and work as a junior
startup dev without college.

That said, the challenge of when they hit the point that algorithms and data
structures are important to their software is creation is I think unsolved so
far. edX/Coursera/etc. could be a big help.

~~~
_delirium
That was pretty common in the '90s dot-com boom, quite easy to get a web-dev
or Perl job out of high school (or even while still in high school). However
the people who skipped college for those jobs were also (on average) the
hardest hit in the downturn, so many went back to college in the early 2000s.
Excluding those who cashed out, of course.

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theshadowmonkey
This sums up pretty much nicely. You don't always need a college degree is a
fact. But, getting a college degree is useless is an over statement. I have
interviewed/spoken to a bunch of bootcamp camp grads who are good at what they
do. But, they fail to catch up with other people when anything new is thrown
at them(eg., devops stuff to a front end guy). But, if you are a hacker at
heart, you dont need any bootcamp or any degree to excel at a job. The best
developer I know is a high school dropout who started out as a kernel hacker.

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wdmeldon
More importantly for a business, you can get a lot more bang for your buck.
High School grads have much lower pay expectations.

~~~
avz
It's easy to be cynical (apologies if I'm misreading intentions here) about
reduced paychecks. There is one complexity here that generally doesn't get
mentioned.

There are two mechanisms by which we get richer. One is by increasing our
income. The other is by reducing the prices of the things we buy with it. The
former is how we increase our wealth relative to other members of society. The
latter is how the society increases its overall standard of wealth.

On one hand each of us wants to get paid well. On the other, the more we get
paid the higher the costs of the business we're in and the less of its fruits
the society gets to enjoy overall.

This dilemma is particularly acute if you're lucky to be in a business you
genuinely care about (a huge and rare privilege). For example, if you work in
space industry, your salary and benefits contribute directly to the costs of
space exploration. This means that ultimately the more you earn the less space
exploration we can do per buck.

Generally, people's pay is a balancing act that should involve both fairness
and efficiency.

~~~
doki_pen
You're argument assumes that all cost is labor which is obviously not true.
The higher a percentage of cost that is labor, the better of most people are,
since they work. To put it simply, if everyone in the service sector made
double, prices wouldn't double. The only people who would suffer are people
who make most of their money through capital gains. Even many of them would
benefit to have a healthier economy, margins can be replaced by volume. You
would also see a spike in prices for limited resources that many can't afford,
but innovation usually solves that problem. If you want a good empirical data
on this, see the institution of minimum wage. Contrary to the naysayers
predictions, there was little inflation and overall, a better economy.

~~~
avz
The argument doesn't really make assumptions about _how_ you contribute to a
business. Investors fighting for higher capital gains also drive up the costs
for the business they fund.

Higher ROI is how an investor increases her wealth relative to other members
of society. Lower capital gains make the society richer overall.

If you invest your savings in a space business and genuinely care about it,
then the return you demand becomes the cost of space exploration. Identical
dilemma to that of the worker.

The class warfare between owners of capital and workers is essentially the
same mechanics but taken between two specially chosen groups. In general, each
individual and each group seeks to increase their share relative to others
(whether you call it income or capital gains). Costs going down is how we all
get richer as a society (the costs including both paychecks and capital
gains).

~~~
doki_pen
I don't think workers, in the united States at least, are fighting for their
share. Marketing efforts by the capital side have rendered the working side a
helpless lamb ready for the slaughter. But if a symbiotic relationship becomes
parasitic, sometimes the host is destroyed, taking the parasite with it.

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thebob
Alt title could read "The Best Job Candidates Sometimes Have College Degrees"

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svaha1728
Everybody loves the 'kid without a degree who can code'. 5 or 6 jobs later
that kid becomes the 'old dude without a degree who says he can code'

~~~
sbuttgereit
Unless, in fact, they can. Of course, any career progression requires more
than just one trick in your bag. Being able to communicate well, moving from
coding into managing, moving from coding to freelancing, getting domain
knowledge relevant to your customers (internal or external).

Turns out there are many important qualities that a person can posses that are
important and perhaps indispensable, but often a degree ain't one.

(And yes, I am an old guy speaking with first hand experience).

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kazinator
Hints of "sour grapes" can be detected in this article.

\- well credentialed candidates are harder to get due to the job market and
are expensive -- the grapes are high on the vine.

\- but they are not all they are cracked up to be; and besides it is elitist
to be hiring them since they are from affluent backgrounds -- the grapes are
sour!

\- hiring them for junior roles is a "terrible approach". (Why? Not explained:
probably because they are, doh, _expensive_ for junior roles) -- I didn't even
want grapes in the first place; free blackberries grow everywhere.

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PretzelFisch
Well corporate HR would disagree with you on that. So good luck getting that
job without some great network connection.

