One of our co-founders doesn't have a college degree, so that's clearly not a barrier to joining the team. I'm sorry to say I don't remember the details of your interview, but I can guarantee it wasn't the degree. That just doesn't come up in discussions or thought behind the interview.
What do I consider? Basically I use three things to try to decide if someone is going to work out at JTV:
1. Codes fluently and happily. I don't care what syntax or language you use, or if you use pseudo-code, but you should be able to do basic things without much thought and you shouldn't be offended or unhappy to spend time coding in an interview.
2. Grasps algorithms. Recursion, trees, lists, big-o notation, etc. I don't care if you can recite the Master Theorem, but you should be able to estimate runtime for a recursive algorithm. I don't care if you know Dijkstra's algorithm, but you should be able to find a shortest path in a graph.
3. Excited to work on the kinds of problems we have at JTV. This is the hardest to judge, obviously. If you don't have any ideas, before or during or after the interview, about something you'd like to do or change at JTV, that's a bad sign. If you don't have any interest in working on our website or on video or on chat, that's a bad sign. If it just doesn't seem like you genuinely want to work at JTV, that's a bad sign. None of these are disqualifying, but they lose a few points. I try not to weight this too highly because it's so easy to read too much into someone's surface personality, but this is the thing I think we've made the most mistakes on in the past.
That's what I go by in hiring, and that's the kind of thing I see discussed when we email about the candidate. So I'm reasonably sure that's what everyone else goes by as well.
What do I consider? Basically I use three things to try to decide if someone is going to work out at JTV:
1. Codes fluently and happily. I don't care what syntax or language you use, or if you use pseudo-code, but you should be able to do basic things without much thought and you shouldn't be offended or unhappy to spend time coding in an interview.
2. Grasps algorithms. Recursion, trees, lists, big-o notation, etc. I don't care if you can recite the Master Theorem, but you should be able to estimate runtime for a recursive algorithm. I don't care if you know Dijkstra's algorithm, but you should be able to find a shortest path in a graph.
3. Excited to work on the kinds of problems we have at JTV. This is the hardest to judge, obviously. If you don't have any ideas, before or during or after the interview, about something you'd like to do or change at JTV, that's a bad sign. If you don't have any interest in working on our website or on video or on chat, that's a bad sign. If it just doesn't seem like you genuinely want to work at JTV, that's a bad sign. None of these are disqualifying, but they lose a few points. I try not to weight this too highly because it's so easy to read too much into someone's surface personality, but this is the thing I think we've made the most mistakes on in the past.
That's what I go by in hiring, and that's the kind of thing I see discussed when we email about the candidate. So I'm reasonably sure that's what everyone else goes by as well.