
Your Credentials Are Worthless Here - emmett
http://iamexec.com/blog/your-credentials-are-worthless-here
======
richardjordan
I think one of the uncomfortable truths that people don't like to talk about
in Silicon Valley is how much nepotism and old-boy-network is wrapped up in
the clothing of "hiring from top schools". Social proof sounds really good
until you start to think through that a lot of so called social proof actually
comes from relationships built through serendipity of what school your parents
could afford to send you to. It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere,
to be born on third base and think you hit a triple.

I see this even more with MBAs than comp sci and particularly in downturns
(having been in Silicon Valley a long time now) where weaker VCs invest in MBA
buddies as easy decisions in tough climates.

Credentials are great as lazy decision making tools for big co hr departments
- you don't get fired for hiring the Ivy Leaguer. But for startups make sure
you're hiring for what someone can do and has done, not for what paperwork
they've accumulated. I've made the mistake of hiring the high flying Ivy
League wunderkind straight out of college, highly recommended... it was an
absolute disaster but my own fault for taking this as proxy for being good on
a startup.

~~~
pcl
_It's not unusual, to steal a line from elsewhere, to be born on third base
and think you hit a triple._

That's a fantastic expression. I just looked it up -- the internet thinks that
it originated with Barry Switzer, a former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

<http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/23536.html>

~~~
mjn
My sense of order would've been served better if one of baseball's many famous
wisecracks had come up with that line. A football coach originating baseball
metaphors, egads!

------
_delirium
_Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder
climbing. If you’re lucky, you might learn how to create a financial model or
craft a solid argument._

If that's what you got out of college, you were definitely doing it wrong.
Maybe in a business degree, but most people who do a science, engineering, or
math degree learn some, you know, actual science, engineering, and/or math,
not merely schmoozing skills.

You could learn that elsewhere, but if you care about scientific progress, my
experience is that few people without a science degree ever get around to
developing a rigorous scientific education, whether out of disinterest, lack
of time, or whatever other reason. Lots of people _plan_ to one day work
through some textbooks, but most people don't. You see it in a lot of self-
taught programmers, many of whom have a weak grounding in computer science.
That might be okay, depending on what you're hiring for, but there are many
cases where you want some more solid foundations. For example, if you're doing
anything with machine learning, you might want people who understand
statistics. Oh, and if you're designing aircraft, you might want someone who's
studied aeronautical engineering, or at least _some_ kind of engineering,
whether at a university or through equivalent self-study. Even Google, a
canonical Disruptive Silicon Valley company, seems to prefer its technical
employees to understand computer science, rather than to hire pure
programmers.

If someone is a true autodidact, learning on their own the equivalent of what
they would've learned in a rigorous 4-year degree, that's fine, and there are
some of those, so I have no problem making sure to look out for them, or even
actively seek them out. I don't run across them very often at all, however,
especially if we're talking about people without any formal mathematical
training who are able to do solid mathematical or engineering modeling work.
When you _do_ find such a person, they're often amazing, but they're not
common. Maybe MOOCs will increase their numbers, but it's a bit early to tell.

That said, I agree in not caring about the actual credential. If someone
studied CS at CMU but left without the piece of paper for whatever reason, but
learned the kind of stuff people learn in the CMU CS program, I don't really
care about the missing document.

~~~
cookiecaper
I think this is mostly about the resources available to self-taught
programmers. I know on many occasions I've sought to strengthen my
mathematical and theoretical background without a lot of tangible progress
because the resources online don't really approach things comprehensibly or
accessibly. I have a friend getting advanced physics degrees and even he says
the usual suspects like Wikipedia are uselessly over-technical for him. I've
bought a couple of textbooks without much progress in penetration, and Khan
Academy and/or Open Courseware is kinda OK for specific issues but they're too
tight and "locked up" in video format to really constitute a generally useful
guide, and I think they lose some relevance without the greater context.
Better Explained is also selectively useful, but most of his analogies don't
click with me and the site tends to ramble.

What I really need is a decent tutor who is willing to help me specifically
with the issues I have but I've sought in vain for one who is willing to free-
wheel it with me instead of just copying out of a textbook. I tried one
briefly and he came up with a cop-out shortly after our first lesson, because
I don't think he liked the unconventional questions I was asking, like "Why
and/or how are sine waves relevant to non-geometric data? The only definition
I can find of a sine casts it in strictly trigonometric terms, so how is it
applicable to non-trigonometric data? Is everything encoded into a
representation of a triangle before these calculations are applied?" Heh, that
one made him pretty annoyed and he didn't really have a good answer.

I would love to increase my background in statistics and comp sci theory
(which is basic but imo sufficient, and I seem to have a better grounding than
most of the CS grads I've worked with), but I don't really know of a good
option to receive that training. If someone wrote tutorials for graduate-level
math from the bottom principles up like they write out tutorials on PHP or
whatever, I'd be all over it. I really want to increase my formal mathematical
literacy.

~~~
hexonexxon
where I live all the Mathematics professors hang out every month doing a
public round table discussion which is free, completely informal and held at a
local cafe. anybody can go in and ask questions about anything there is no
discussion agenda

you can also show up to public lectures given by visiting math profs and
afterwards ask them whatever theoretical background questions you want so long
as it's not total spoon feeding

campus walls are also covered in tutor posters for hire and many of them
graduate level

~~~
impendia
This is awesome.

I am a mathematics professor. Where do you live, how is this advertised, what
kind of audience does this attract, and what sort of questions get asked?

~~~
hexonexxon
I live in Europe now, but before when I was in Canada UBC and SFU would do
'Community roundtable cafe philosophy' and there was often Math and Physics
professors there. Here it's all Math professors in the cafes with their own
roundtable and it's advertised on the University events page. I believe all
these events are sponsored through the University.

Here they mainly talk philosophy and crazy advanced, graduate level
mathematics that are way beyond my comprehension and often there are industry
programmers, visiting professors on vacation, math self taught geniuses who
smoke a pipe with huge unkept beards that look insane, students and even this
anarchist group that shows up sometimes to talk game theory.

A few Math dept profs hang out on Sundays here too where all the public chess
boards are set up and are fully approachable to answer questions as long as
they aren't engrossed in a game.

Clicking on the Events page for the UBC Math dept they always have visiting
Math profs give free seminars to anybody who wants to show up, and it's easy
to get to the university. Every month at least 5 seminars there's one coming
up by a visiting prof from UC Berkeley on Lattice Poisson AKSZ Theory, a bunch
of discrete math seminars, and 2 seminars today on chemical distances and
shape theorems in percolation models with long-range correlations, and
retractions of representation varieties of nilpotent groups.

These guys stick around afterwards and are fully approachable I would talk to
them all the time about offtopic theory and went to the student bar with a few
of them and other students for a few hours.

------
jhuckestein
I fully agree with this post and this is exactly what I keep telling people
that do things for their resume.

The one notion that always irks me though is _talent_. It seems to measure
some combination of confidence and the amount of praise a person happens to
have received in their life (i.e. how often someone told them they're
talented) and is for the most part not well-defined. Yet, this article uses
_talent_ just like another credential.

I don't think talent is a _thing_ that you either have or don't have. There's
certainly some people that I'd like to hire that wouldn't with certainty say
that they have talent. Vetting for confidence is a bit more interesting, but I
also know plenty of confident people (i.e. that think they're _talented_ )
that can't get the job done.

The best way I've come up with to characterize what we're all looking for is
_people who can solve our problems/get the job done_. That makes it mostly
about what the applicant thinks they can do and less about the amount of
praise they've received previously in live. This reminds me of how Kyle Neath
posted yesterday that he thought he was not a great coder or designer but he
could get the job done. When he was twenty, perhaps he didn't consider himself
talented but I'm pretty sure nobody would have regretted hiring him.

~~~
incision
Talent is one of those words with a thousand pet definitions.

Personally, I see the word used most often a kind of negative rationalization.
A way to disregard success as lacking in effort, to say it's inborn,
incidental.

I'd generally prefer to be described and to describe people as passionate,
dedicated, capable or plain smart rather than talented.

I think those traits, often in combination with a lot of thought/practice, but
not necessarily direct experience are the things that add up to what's often
described as talent.

------
michael_miller
> "[Top schools] don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer."

I've found this statement to be false, at least at my alma mater(UT Austin).
My Honors OS class unquestionably made me a better programmer, teaching me
about how programs I wrote interacted with the OS to a very deep level. My
algorithms class gave me an extremely deep understanding of how
algorithms+data structures worked, giving me a better intuition as to what
tools to use when confronted with a problem. My HCI class made me acutely
aware of how users interact with software.

I'll agree that the purpose of universities is not vocational. Without a
doubt, a lot of classes I've taken will have absolutely no impact on my career
(unless Buddhist Art becomes an in-demand field!). But a good school gives
students the opportunity to gain applicable skills that are needed in the
world.

If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate
to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer. You can't do
well in the class unless you truly understand code. Using a coarse grained
filter of "Harvard University" is bad, but using a "Passed CS50 with an 'A'"
filter is a very good metric to use.

~~~
tptacek
What kind of intuition did you get from algorithms class? What's an example of
the kind of intuition you feel like you got that you wouldn't have gotten on-
the-job?

~~~
michael_miller
I don't believe there's any intuition I got from my algorithms class that
couldn't be gained on the job. However, the class does provide intuition in an
accelerated manner, and it proves to employers that I have the intuition. Some
examples off the top of my head:

\- Memoization / DP

\- Divide and conquer

\- Using a bounded approximate algorithm in place of an exponential one for NP
complete problems

I feel like it would have taken me a lot of time to internalize those types of
algorithms on the job, but seeing them presented in my algorithms class made
it easy.

~~~
chii
i would not hire anyone who does not know about these sorts of basic algorithm
and how/what they are used for - whether they learnt it themselves, or via
tiertiary education is irrelevant. Unfortuantely, its common to use a good
school as a proxy for such knowledge, but finding out later that the employee
lack such knowledge could be costly. Learning what i would consider "basic"
things on the job is both wrong and bad for business!

There is a line to be drawn somewhere tho - what is considered basic isn't
basic to some. I would draw it where 'basic' means you could have learnt it in
a 3 year undergrad CS course - essentially what is covered in the text
<http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/> would be all i need from a grad, and domain
specific stuff can be trained on the job.

------
mathetic
That is a noble yet unfortunate decision.

The reason some firms hire only top school kids is (apart from ego) they know
that whatever test/puzzle/interview they give their decision in hiring
candidates will still be fairly inaccurate.

However, good credentials (I'd normally include internships but it wasn't
mentioned in the original article.) simply means that there's a higher chance
of the kid having a better understanding of programming than another candidate
coming from a less competitive pool. What the author does in order to suppress
this statistical strategy is giving anecdotal evidence. Problem with that is
for every example the author might come up, this community can produce 100
nontrivial counterexamples.

One other issue is most founders who do not come from top schools have a
tendency to think that kids in these schools are simply giving so much money
to have a cheesy-easy undergraduate life and are terribly spoiled (and that
might be partly true). Yet the fact is those are the top schools because
students have to produce work that is quantitatively and qualitatively
superior to their counterparts in other schools. This is not because of
everybody are geniuses in these schools but because the average student starts
at a higher level so the academics can push the students further without
overestimating their capacity from day 1.

~~~
tptacek
Cheers for being brave enough to challenge the prevailing sentiment on HN
about credentialism.

But, strong disagree.

In my experience as a hiring manager (which stretches back quite a ways), I've
noticed no correlation between school and on-the-job performance. I'm sure MIT
does indeed present more challenging CS/EE curricula, but the inference I draw
after stipulating that is that CS/EE curricula quality just doesn't matter
much in the real world. Perhaps we just do our most important learning in our
first jobs, or, even better, throughout our career? Maybe memorizing MESI
cache coherence in school is just less important than, say, having to learn on
the job how to do a u/k copy in an ioctl handler because that's the only way
to accomplish what your next dev task is?

And, you suggest that tests/puzzles/interviews are "fairly inaccurate". Well,
all of technology hiring is inaccurate. Compared to other professions, the
recruiting/onboarding process in the tech industry is amateurish across the
board whether you ask people to design manhole covers or review Github pages.
The answer to this is to improve the tests, and, I think, to evacuate as much
of the subjective stuff (school and GPA, yes, but also "interviews" as much as
possible) so you can make apples-apples comparisons to candidates and discover
what factors really correlate to good performance.

~~~
strlen
I think if school attended influences on the job performance, that's a failure
of the hiring/interview process. It is fine if school attended influences
interview performance, but if it influences it too strongly that may allude to
a failure of recruitment/screening process (failing to look at other
indicators of performance, e.g., open source contributors, code samples,
etc...)

I think when hiring (or vice-versa, making a choice of people I will work
with) I look for some evidence that they've done something they're "not
supposed to" have done. Growing up in a slum and yet attending
Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/IIT Madras is such evidence -- higher education _is_ an
equalizer -- but growing up in a wealthy suburb, going to a great prep school,
and then and attending a top-tier school is insufficient.

Real open source contributions, serious undergrad research (even if done at an
obscure liberal arts college), writing your own screen replacement "just
because", building and open-sourcing an impressive piece of infrastructure at
a previous job, are other examples of such evidence.

------
larsberg
Having been involved in quite a bit of college recruiting in my former life as
a hiring manager for a development/test org, I learned a couple of very
important lessons:

\- Every real school, no matter how low in the ranking, produces at least one
competitive graduate each year and rarely an amazing candidate.

\- The top schools produce not only a large number of competitive graduates,
but also at least one amazing candidate each year.

For companies searching for a large number of candidates, hitting the top
schools makes a lot of sense. Further, you also start to get data on your
hiring so you can know if your yield was low in a given year; if some bad
attrition means the manager is likely poor or if that school's candidates are
just larger flight risks; etc. Sourcing candidates from small schools, at
least for us, usually meant that they had either done something noteworthy or
an alum already at the company was contacted by a professor at their alma
mater, who passed along a resume and asked us to interview them.

That said, the amazing candidates from top schools are usually funneled off to
graduate school without ever touching the recruiting process, whereas at non-
top-tier schools they are much more recruitable for either a startup or
software development shop.

------
MatthewPhillips
> I want to hire hungry creative kids that want to step up.

So Kan's companies are ageist, gotcha.

~~~
abstractbill
Justin.TV certainly wasn't, and I'd be very surprised if Exec is. I was the
first engineering hire at Justin.TV, aged 33 at the time (a full decade older
than one of the founders!). Nobody cared about that, they cared that I'm a
good hacker who gets things done.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
That's good to hear, the article's tone made it sound like he's only
interested in hiring young inexperienced engineers (code for cheap).

~~~
timr
I'm late to the party, but can +1 Bill. I started at JTV when I was 32.

Bill made me look young, though. ;-)

------
gesman
"...I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented."

But of course.

The problem is that talented people usually do not carry the sign "I am
talented" to make it easy for you.

It's up to you to figure that out.

And you never know who is "talented" upfront unless you give that person a
space and time and let the person express himself.

So you may not give a shit, but you have to give it a time and take a risk of
finding out that cool looking and smooth talking dropout you hired 6 months
ago is not talented at all.

~~~
doktrin
I don't think "talent" (or, the ability to produce a quality work product) is
that inconceivably difficult to ascertain in this field.

Also, while I realize you were speaking generally, I am familiar with at least
one of Exec's non-traditional hires, and I sincerely doubt he will be
regretting that decision.

------
ctide
The comments here are generally super confusing to me. Are there companies in
San Francisco who actually give a shit about where you went to college? I've
only been here for 5 years, but I spent 2 or so of those just bouncing around
from startup to startup doing consulting work. I've never worked with _anyone_
who gave a shit about what college people went to. Literally, none. The
startups I've joined have been predominantly staffed with college dropouts
(even including a high school dropout or two), and a lot of the best engineers
I know here have no degrees. Where are all these startups that are hiring
based on credentials?

~~~
ruswick
> _And a lot of the best engineers I know here have no degrees._

I think you are conflating coders with engineers. The latter entails a lot
more requisite knowledge, and generally requires formal education of some
sort.

~~~
jiggy2011
But what is the practical difference?

Plenty of jobs advertised as "software engineering" are mainly about writing
wordpress plugins.

------
zbruhnke
As a multi-time founder with an exit to my credit and about 3/4 of a college
degree from a small liberal arts college in Louisiana(Dropout) I completely
agree with the sentiment here.

That said, I also think there is nothing wrong with going after candidates
from top tier schools since most of those people have been properly vetted in
the past and will likely handle themselves well in high pressure situations.

All in all Justin's article is spot on that credentials really shouldn't
matter all that much as long as the talent is there.

However, The fact that someone has to write a blog post stating that and
calling it bold really shows the lack of direction our country has as a whole
right now unfortunately

------
rayiner
The author's Google Plus page:
<https://plus.google.com/105795650153890257976/posts>

I'm not sure if the "attended Yale University" is part of the Google+ page
layout or a conscious choice on his part, but either way it says something.

Not that I disagree with his point.

~~~
justin
I think that is the default Google+ layout to show where you went to school?
If it says anything, I think it reinforces my point that US culture by default
places too much emphasis on where you went to school.

Not that I don't value my time at Yale, but I don't feel like it is
particularly worth highlighting on my resume: tens of thousands of people
graduate every single year from top universities. Hardly something unique.

~~~
snogglethorpe
Not "unique," but certainly not meaningless either.

In particular, my experience with top schools is that, more than "average"
schools, they're often _hard_ —the people that get in are very competitive and
competent, and the material and pace reflect this.

It's useful information to know that somebody was up to dealing with all that,
because not everybody is...

~~~
justin
The hardest part about Yale was getting in. Yes, many if not most of the
people who get in are smart, but are they all competitive and competent? I
don't believe so.

Top school == a signal, but it is a weakly correlated one with being
productive in my opinion.

------
lmm
Interviewing is hard and time-consuming. So hard that any filter that's even
(say) 5% effective is worthwhile. People who went to less famous universities
are only undervalued when you don't think about the total cost of hiring.

~~~
cookiecaper
The filter is worthless. I've known lots of disinterested CS grads who coasted
through school and fight anything that requires any expenditure of effort on
their part (like using a new library, etc.). They went to school and now they
feel entitled to their seat in a bloated corporation where their lack of
contribution can't really stand out against the larger background.

The best way to hire someone is to sit down and chat with them on multiple
occasions for 1-2 hours at a time. Another programmer can generally tell when
someone is incompetent and/or BSing. It doesn't guarantee the employment will
work out, as working styles can be incompatible, employee can be/become
depressed and/or unmotivated, etc., but it at least allows you to discern the
competence to a reasonable degree of satisfaction.

When I interview programmers we're so busy talking shop that school doesn't
even cross my mind. Thus far very few mention anything related to their
schooling as a qualification while we're discussing, i.e., not a lot of "Yeah,
I did a project like that in school once...". If one is hiring for a heavily
theoretical position, academic credentials may be slightly more meaningful
(though it's still about the final output, much of the personal
research/development for that type of thing would occur at a university,
whereas "working" software engineers mostly go through school as a formality),
but for most other things, it's so irrelevant that it never comes up after
several searching technical interviews.

------
btilly
Let me summarize.

If your credentials are worthwhile, that will become obvious. If not, then
they don't matter.

For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for recent
graduates, you may have little else to point to.

~~~
cookiecaper
>For anyone other than recent graduates, I wholeheartedly agree. But for
recent graduates, you may have little else to point to.

They should skip a few homework assignments and write a few simple yet
interesting tech demos and upload them to GitHub.

~~~
btilly
A nontrivial fraction of people go from one subject in college to a
tangentially related career upon graduating. If they had known 2 years later
what kind of work they would want to do, then sure. But if you're not willing
to give them a shot, you could be missing out on some cheap talent.

(I was an example when I came out of pure math and looked for a programming
job back in the 90s, with no programming background.)

------
dpiers
My dad's business began to decline when I was in middle school, and he had to
shut it down by the time I was in my junior year of high school. I'm the
second of seven children, and by the time I graduated my parents' savings were
wiped out and they were just barely managing to keep food on the table.

They couldn't afford to help me pay for school, but my test scores were high
enough to get a full scholarship to a public university near my home town, so
that's where I went. I lived at home, used public transit to commute, and made
due with what I had available.

It's easy for me to say that credentials are worthless, I went to a school
you've probably never even heard of, so it's nice to hear this from a
successful individual who graduated from a top school.

------
benatkin
Apparently well reasoned blog posts are worthless too. What does Steve Jobs
have to do with people Justin Kan wants to hire? He's famous not for being
hired but for starting a company. He also doesn't fill the roles on Exec's
hiring page.

~~~
TillE
That's another thing that amuses me about all these companies looking for
superstar developers. A fairly large fraction of them will be far more
interested in doing their own thing than working for you.

~~~
benatkin
Yes, but trendy startups often convince superstar developers that it's just
like doing their own thing. It might be. Personally I'm more interested in
open source than I am on working on someone else's startup.

------
pclark
The unfortunate (to this article) truth is that the odds of x person being
talented is higher if they went to a great school.

I think it's often safe to assume that if you went to a top school you have
either (or both) determination or raw intelligence. If you didn't do this
you'll spend forever screening dumb people.

------
brycehamrick
As an MBA, take this with a grain of salt, but the hiring decision is all
about managing risk. Most companies, not just American ones, are risk-averse.
As such they hire vetted candidates, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with
that.

Hiring decisions carry the same risk & reward pairing of an investment. You
can take a risk on an un-credentialed candidate that you have a good feeling
about, and in turn they won't expect the same pay as someone with a well-
respected degree. Graduates from top schools get good salaries because there's
a sense that these schools adequately vet candidates and prepare students for
the real world. You could argue this is untrue, but it all depends on what
you're looking for.

The truth is academia is less relevant to startups. MBA programs focus on case
studies on Fortune 500 companies with multinational reach and
departmentalization of business functions. Startups don't act this way, so
hiring an MBA doesn't necessarily mean that candidate is going to perform
better than someone without the same degree. What it does tell you is that
they have some ability to organize, manage priorities, and ultimately complete
a plan, which is still valuable.

As any statistician will tell you, citing anecdotal examples is misleading.
Steve Jobs may have dropped out of college, but there's millions of dropouts
that don't go on to create multi-billion dollar companies. I've worked with
plenty of amazing people who were great at what they did without credentials
behind their names. I've also worked with people I still have no idea how they
managed to completed their programs.

------
enraged_camel
Unfortunately this would never work in companies that hire foreign workers. As
part of the H1B process, the government wants to verify that the position
actually requires an "advanced degree." The way they check that is by looking
at whether the other people currently in that position have college degrees.
The company's HR department has to provide all of that as evidence (among many
other things) when it files for an H1B petition for the foreign worker.

I'm also questioning whether the article's claim could actually be proven with
data. On the one hand I want to believe that credentials do in fact make no
difference. On the other hand, it doesn't ring true when I think about my own
experiences.

I'm the founder of a local not-for-profit community service organization. When
I was still actively involved as president, we were very ambitious with our
goals and therefore sought to recruit high quality people to join the board of
directors. We interviewed many people, and the thing is, there was a stark
difference between people who had degrees from the local Cal State college and
those who graduated from the better schools in the Pacific West (University of
Washington, UCLA, Berkeley, etc.). Over the course of three years, I
interacted with both groups of people and found out that those who went to
good schools actually had a superior breadth of knowledge and a much wider
perspective in things they dealt with. They always had great ideas and often
times took the initiative to make those happen. In contrast, those who went to
the local Cal State college (Cal State Long Beach) were just lame. They were
nice people, but they were generally unmotivated, bland, and never thorough
with the things they did.

------
Irregardless
I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out
talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two
aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the
ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new
employees?

There's an upside to this, though: You can easily identify short-sighted
companies that probably aren't worth working for based on the degree
requirements stated in their job listings. If you require 3 years of
experience and a CS degree for all your 'junior' and 'entry level' developer
positions, there's a good chance you couldn't think your way out of a paper
bag. That's often code for "I expect a lot out of you, but I'm not going to
give you much in return".

Tech companies need to adapt more quickly than most others just to stay
afloat. Following the same hiring practices that have been around since the
19th century is a great way to fall flat on your face in that regard.

~~~
incision
>I've often wondered why so few companies make a concerted effort to seek out
talent rather than credentials. Have most companies not realized that the two
aren't directly related? Are they too lazy? Do they have no confidence in the
ability of their hiring managers? Do they lack the resources to train new
employees?

* In general, I think there has been a strong trend away from investing in people, to treat them as interchangable cogs or simply farm out as much as possible. I've seen larger organizations which almost seem scared of having exceptional people, or more specifically allowing them to do exceptional work. It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique institutional knowledge with them.

* Assessing "talent" costs time. The time of reasonably talented people you are or will be paying, in some form another.

* Unless you find a way to turn it into an automated, repeatable process, the decisions made are subjective and subject to all manner of criticism and allegations. This might not rate in a startup, but once you're large enough to have anyone titled "hiring manager", I expect these things are going to be relevant.

* Scale is a problem. If I put out an entry-level job I'm gonna get 500+ applicants. Reduce it to something almost criminally narrow (You already know who you're going to hire, but you have to go through the motions and make the selection defensible) and I'm still looking at 100+.

* Not sure what exactly you mean by training. It's hard enough to find people who can drop into a new environment and apply their existing skills immediately. Finding people who are so smart and capable that they can drop and learn skills while applying them would be that much harder.

~~~
chii
> It's actually seen as a kind of liability, that a great person could
> generate leverage to effectively demand more money or leave and take unique
> institutional knowledge with them.

this begs the question - _just who exactly_ is the entity that is seeing this
as a liability instead of an asset? I suspect its not the owner of the
business, but a middle manager who needs to make themselves valuable, and
their only value is in managing other employees. A self directed, motivated
employee who has large leverage could pose risk to the said middle manager.

Of course, all this is just speculation.

------
Cub3
This article exactly me, graduated high school (just) and managed to get into
a very low brow university that I dropped out of within the first year it took
me awhile but i've found its your experience and body of work that makes the
difference, I finally, after working at a pizza shop at night and coding
websites during the day for 6 months, a low paying "web developer" role at a
publisher that turned out to be hell... still... every day I was there was
real experience in the industry. After two years of waiting I got headhunted
by an international brand and am currently one of the lead UX devs, when
lecturing at career nights etc. I always say the same thing, "do not worry
about university if your field is anything to do with the web, go CISCO / MSDN
or, do what I did, be self disciplined and teach yourself.

------
thirdstation
> Your Credentials Are Worthless Here

The impression I got was more along the lines of "We're willing to overlook
your lack of credentials if you can prove you're talented."

These articles always come off a little pompous to me. But, I guess if you
have the money, and you're hiring, you get to say what's important.

------
geoka9
_I don’t give a shit where you went to college as long as you’re talented._

I don't care if you're talented as long as you are good.

I think the word "talent" is getting more and more misuse in the startup
field. Talent is innate ability. While it helps, it's not a prerequisite to
being good.

------
kamaal
College credentials at most work like Interviews(Its easy to game these
things), once you get a Ivy degree stamp you can pretty use that to BS your
way to absolutely any position you want.

Every time I see a senior exec leaving the company during difficult times, I
see one thing manifest. The guy is super job hopper known to milk his Ivy
league degree and networking potential to get anything he/she wants. Beyond
that try to measure his performance or actual value he is adding to the
company and you will see nothing substantial apart from making congratulatory
noises during occasions, or blasting people when something went wrong or at
most acting as a information aggregator/distributor to the rest of the
company.

Big name schools serve as a aggregating points for good people, but many times
you also get people fit for nothing.

The best test to hire an exec(or anybody) is not look at his degree or names
on his resume. Do a good background research on the guy and try to see if he
has actually done something nice in the past, what sort of contributions he
has made to what kind of projects/businesses. Never hire people at senior
positions just because some one from his network happens to be in your
company.

Unless the guy has some good rock solid performance in his past, he is not
worth your time. No matter from which college he comes.

------
rdl
I think there may be a difference between the credentials which matter to big
dumb companies and the credentials which matter "here".

~~~
krapp
I was all hyped up until I remembered I was 35, went to a technical school no
one cares about and code in languages everyone loves to hate. Something tells
me I wouldn't make it past the lobby.

~~~
rdl
My personal biases (which I understand, and thus look at a bit more, but tend
to consider valid):

1) People who hacked on projects on their own is WAY more important than
"worked for a big successful company" or school. Even if the project fails.

2) Personality/performance traits matter a lot more than specific skills.

3) I'm generally biased toward hiring military veterans (US, Israeli, etc.);
yet, there are parts of the US military which have a higher-than-ambient
density of idiots, so it's gotta be selective.

4) Hiring mostly makes sense through network of existing people (founders,
early employees), although "soft" connections to that network matter more than
core membership.

I also probably shouldn't admit this legally (but I think it's safe) -- I
would be biased toward 25+ year olds, vs. 18-25. I don't see much difference
after mid/late 20s, but teens or early 20s, not so much. I would absolutely
hire a qualified 18 year old, but I don't really look in the 18-25 year old
range when hiring, and due to the historical accident of dotcom 1.0, people
who were at least aware of their surroundings in the tech industry (even if in
a junior role) in 1997+ would be a huge win.

~~~
taproot
Something tells me you're not going to be strung up for letting on you prefer
older techies; at least, not while most of the industry is the inverse.

------
ajaymehta
Good values aside, this is deceivingly brilliant as a hiring technique.

Hire the undervalued "hungry" people who the Googles/Facebooks of the world
won't even give an interview, and they'll 1) be easier/cheaper to convince and
2) work super hard to prove themselves (especially if it's their first job out
of school). If the startup does well, it's a win-win.

~~~
thedufer
But without the filter of "top schools", how many candidates do you have to
sift through? People use that criteria because its easy and means something
(although maybe not much), not because they think it's perfect. You can only
afford to spend so much time recruiting talent.

~~~
wnight
Code or GTFO. I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them
further. First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it
customizable, etc.

I also like the idea of saying 'mention (some shibboleth) in your cover
letter' to prove people read the add. If I was writing an ad I'd ask someone,
maybe, to provide their favorite code snippet and describe why. Anything would
be okay, as long as someone has an articulate reason.

I get disappointed in an interview if the company don't want to see code.
Someone in this thread discussed how school doesn't correlate to the ability
to ship code; I'm good at having an executable answer to a problem in minutes.
If they don't want to see what I can do it usually seems like it's because
they don't know how to judge it, and thus aren't who I'd like to work with.

~~~
thedufer
> I ask trivial coding questions (fizz buzz level) but take them further.
> First write that, then change it a bit, then more, then make it
> customizable, etc.

This doesn't even come close to scaling when your applicant pool is 100 (or
more) times the size of your interviewer pool. You have to have some quick
filtering method, or you'll never get anything done.

------
tokenadult
From the end of the blog post: "I don’t give a shit where you went to college
as long as you’re talented."

It's not clear what he is doing to figure out which of his applicants are
talented. That's still something important to do, even if you disregard
schooling credentials. Disregarding schooling credentials has some warrant in
research on company hiring procedures, but as long as you are blessed with
more applicants than jobs, you still have to figure out whom to hire. I
suggest using work-sample tests to hire, and backing up those work-sample
tests with a general mental ability test whenever that is legally permitted.
The full rationale for my advice appears in a previous comment, a FAQ post I
developed for HN that appears to be my all-time most popular comment here.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543>

------
stevenameyer
Formal education in my opinion is really only good for one thing when
determining how good of a hire someone will be. Ensuring a certain level of
exposure to areas that may otherwise be overlooked in self study.

When people learn things by themselves they tend to focus on what they love
the most and have a tendency to ignore what they don't. Formal education
forces you to learn all areas that are covered and often bring things to light
that are very useful, but would often be overlooked in selfstudy.

So formal education provides a base-line level of exposure to a lot of topics,
what a student chooses to do with this level of exposure is what will
determine wether they will succeed.

------
skot9000
Top CS schools don't teach programming, they teach Computer Science. CS
students are very likely to become good programmers from side projects, but so
can liberal arts students.

~~~
jwoah12
Maybe something different happens in the "top" top CS programs , but I sure as
hell did a lot of programming during my CS curriculum. Some was for classes
meant to explicitly make you better programmers (software engineering), and
some was as a tool to learn/practice the theory. I certainly felt like I
became a good programmer in part through my classes.

~~~
randomdata
How much of your course load would you say was directly related to programming
topics, not CS? It is not so much a question of you not learning programming
skills in the program, so much as what it would take to learn the same outside
of the program. One software engineering class and a bunch of practice doesn't
seem particularly difficult to catch up on, and even surpass, in the same time
frame if you place your focus squarely on that topic.

------
paganel
> Your love of building things makes you great.

I'm a Computer Science dropout myself, but I do work with a couple of people
that graduated Ivy League schools (one of these schools is even mentioned in
the article). What I did find out is that no matter what school you graduated
or no matter what your credentials are, if you're always driven by curiosity
("hey, how does this work?") and always eager to actually build stuff that
other people use than the differences easily fade out.

------
trotsky
They may be worthless to Justin as the hiring manager but Stanford, Harvard,
MIT etc. credentials are brutally helpful in funding and running your own
startup.

------
kriro
The assumption is that you can outsource some of the evaluation to the
university (it acts as a filter). The chances of getting someone that can
solve problems and think is higher if you pick from a pool of university grads
than non-university grads. If it's worth the premium you pay is another
question (I'd say the answer is yes)

If you have some method of generating a higherEV applicant pool then by all
means do it and print the money.

------
6thSigma
As someone who started at a top-tier university and later left to a "bad"
school, I can say this post hits close to home. I was doing well at the top-
tier school and left for personal reasons, but doing so has very clearly cost
me opportunities in my career thus far.

As Peter Thiel so eloquently put it, I inadvertently gave myself a dunce cap.

~~~
gems
Great cop out.

------
npsimons
_Jacob, our designer and first hire at Justin.tv, now Twitch’s Director of
Product, hadn’t finished college in New Mexico_

I've got a good hunch what that college is. A little hint: it was one of the
top three Gates mentioned in "The Road Ahead" that MS regularly hired from,
and with good reason.

~~~
bcbrown
Saint John's?

------
ruswick
I find it somewhat ironic that this piece can get the reception it did on a
site associated with what is effectively the Harvard of startups.

(Although, honestly, a comparison to Harvard can't do the prestige of YC
justice. It is _far_ harder to get into YC then it is to most any college.)

------
barce
Great rant except for the part wanting to hire kids. That's age
discrimination.

------
kyro
Tell that to the medical field.

~~~
kamaal
In case of a doctor hospital is nearly indistinguishable from the college.
They are more or less the same.

A doctor wouldn't be too great if all he has done is read a lot of books, and
attended a lot of classes but hardly treated anyone.

Even when it comes to things like law and medicine, practice and experience
are vastly more important.

------
spitfire
I'll wait for tokenadult to show up and set us all straight on the matter.

------
srlake
Being brilliant doesn't disqualify someone from being brilliant.

------
dinkumthinkum
This is really hard-hitting out of the box thinking on Hacker News! .... Just
kidding. I don't want to be mean but come on; we are not only beating a dead
horse with this stuff but smashing it straight into a glue container.

~~~
SqMafia
Haha! Nice.

Yeah this is just pandering to the HN crowd. Also, come on, put some effort
into that article. Say something that hasn't been said already.

------
tnuc
And how does one prove they are talented?

~~~
cookiecaper
Survive multiple serious (but not overly specific) technical interviews, have
a decent and/or interesting body of work online, and demonstrable involvement
and working habits from contribution to open-source projects, mailing lists,
tech journals (my last hire had several Linux-specific articles carried by an
online publisher over 10 years ago), etc.

A degree is honestly one of the least useful metrics for actual talent out
there. Its value is basically limited to showing a tolerance (but not
necessarily an aptitude) for bureaucracy and corporate mind games.

------
scelerat
Moneyball.

------
criley
I keep seeing this talk about "six figures" in the valley as code for
"overpaid".

I don't live in San Francisco but everything I can tell about the cost of
living shows me that a $100,000 salary in SF is roughly equivalent to what,
$45,000 here in Atlanta, GA.
([http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667...](http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50667000&city2=51304000))

Which is certainly a good salary for a college grad but it's NO WHERE NEAR
"overpaid", in my opinion...

~~~
emmett
It's deceptive though. Making $100k/year in San Francisco means that rent is
very expensive, relatively speaking, but that consumer goods are incredibly
cheap.

Living in SF: Eating out at restaurants, buying the latest iPhone, plane
tickets, clothes shopping all relatively cheap.

Living in Atlanta: Getting a big house in a desirable neighborhood, parking
are cheap.

So if you'd prefer to consume more real estate and real estate dependent
goods, you should prefer to live outside boom zones. If you like to buy
experiences and consumer goods, you should live in the boom zone.

~~~
dpeck
Not sure I understand this.

At 100k/year eating out at restaurants, buying latest iphone, plane tickets,
clothes shopping, etc are all relatively cheap most anywhere, aren't they?

There are plenty of Atlanta people who fall into the real estate trap, and it
is a trap, but there are also plenty who live in slummy east atlanta, or get a
reasonable condo/apt in midtown. Leaving them with relatively huge amounts of
disposable income for experiences and shiny things.

~~~
emmett
Incomes are not the same in Atlanta and SF! The same person at an equivalent
job will earn MUCH more money in SF.

Let me break down the math (all approximate):

SF: $100k/year income, $24k/year rent, $45k/year taxes, $31k/year disposable

Atlanta: $50k/year income, $8k/year rent, $20k/year taxes, $22k/year
disposable

So if you live in SF, an iPhone is 1.6% of your disposable income. In Atlanta,
it's 2.3%. That makes it "cheaper".

However, $24k/year in SF probably buys you a lot less house than $8k/year does
in Atlanta. The SF real estate market is stupid.

~~~
dpeck
Interesting I could see that as a possibility, but I think we're comparing two
different fictional people. Of course if you could double your salary moving
to SF it usually makes sense, but I think its often more of a 25-50%
difference.

And also, I don't believe it scales 1:1. The developers I know well here, 5 to
7 years out of school, nearly everyone in Atlanta is making close to 100k
(almost all +/- 10k). Developers with similar positions and experience aren't
making 180-220 are they?

Perhaps I'm wrong, maybe SF really is the promised land, but the numbers have
never worked out on any positions I've looked at. YMMV of course.

~~~
rdl
I think you're more likely to get meaningfully-valued equity in Silicon Valley
$140k/yr jobs than in Atlanta $80k/yr jobs, and then there's the tax
differential there (lower rate as well as the income vs. LTCG differential).

The absolute win seems to be to work in Silicon Valley for 3-5 years,
accepting a low "house" standard of living while enjoying consumer goods and
travel, and then take your $100-150k/yr salary (and history of working at top
companies) to do one of two things:

1) work remotely for top companies from a place like Seattle for $100-120k/yr
(or, if you want to optimize even more, move to Thailand or something and work
remotely for $60k/yr)

2) Found a startup, deferring as much compensation as possible into LT capital
gains. Being much easier to raise money in Silicon Valley makes up for all the
other things. Potentially open an engineering office outside the Bay Area to
hire people who chose path #1.

