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Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

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Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#171

Post by scarface_74 »

jader201 wrote: post #97
snihalani wrote: post #93

I think getting a degree ensures your answers are similar to what your interviewer is trained on. Being untraditional in your education means you have to figure out how to package and sell your ideas. Getting a degree ensures its harder to reject you. Instead of finding an offer after 500 interviews, now you may have to do 400. For me, getting a master's degree was more useful than getting a bachelor's. since you are…

> Instead of finding an offer after 500 interviews, now you may have to do 400. Holy cow, is that really how many interviews it takes to get hired these days? It’s been about 10 years since I changed jobs, and then it took less than maybe 10 interviews. > For me, getting a master's degree was more useful than getting a bachelor's. I’m not sure this is the norm. I know very few people that I’ve worked with or have int…

> Holy cow, is that really how many interviews it takes to get hired these days?

I’m 50 and have been working as a software developer or closely adjacent for almost 30 years. I’ve never seen a job market like this.

Even back in 2000-2001 as a regular old enterprise dev with 3 years of experience, jobs were plentiful in Atlanta doing corporate dev. I got my third job late 2008 in the midst of the financial crisis relatively quickly and had two offers.

Fast forward to 2023. I was looking for regular old enterprise dev jobs where they wanted C# developers with AWS experience as a Plan B. I had 15+ years of C# experience, 7 leading projects and 6 years of AWS experience including 3.5 working at AWS (Professional Services).

I heard crickets sending out hundreds of resumes looking for remote opportunities. Every single opening had hundreds of applicants (LinkedIn shows you).

The same happened in 2024 when I was looking again.

I was able to get offers quickly both times for my “Plan A” jobs based on my network and in 2023, I found a couple of companies where the “nice to have” was implementing and modifying an open source “AWS Solution” for which I was a major contributor.

My “Plan A” was a full time job at a third party AWS consulting company where I would be leading cloud + app dev projects.

But, most people don’t have my share of “unfair advantages”.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#172

Post by john-h-k »

epolanski wrote: post #112
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #12

There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…

> They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way And this is how Apple/Google end up rejecting candidates to work on open source libraries...despite the candidates being the very authors they are wed out as they haven't spent months preparing for the interview.

Is this referring to homebrew? On the one hand i get it, but on the other hand reversing a binary tree isn’t some crazy leetcode grind. Most people can figure it out in a few mins and i think its fair to reject someone who can’t

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#173

Post by scarface_74 »

epolanski wrote: post #112
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #12

There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…

> They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way And this is how Apple/Google end up rejecting candidates to work on open source libraries...despite the candidates being the very authors they are wed out as they haven't spent months preparing for the interview.

If you are referring to the author of HomeBrew

https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-logic-behind-Google-rejectin...

He admitted later that Google was probably right for not hiring him.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#174

Post by mmmlinux »

RainyDayTmrw wrote: post #77

It's complicated. I work at a "target" software company (competes with FAANG on prestige, but not literally FAANG). I interview candidates for senior+ roles, approximately one per week. By the time a candidate gets to me, I read their resume only for icebreakers/small-talk, and I couldn't care less what their resume says otherwise. But, I also happen to know that our internal recruiters, who are the first line of scr…

OK well what did the person that whittled down the selection before you saw the one person left do. Of course you don't care when the vetting and choosing has already been done.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#175

Post by epolanski »

john-h-k wrote: post #172
epolanski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way And this is how Apple/Google end up rejecting candidates to work on open source libraries...despite the candidates being the very authors they are wed out as they haven't spent months preparing for the interview.

Is this referring to homebrew? On the one hand i get it, but on the other hand reversing a binary tree isn’t some crazy leetcode grind. Most people can figure it out in a few mins and i think its fair to reject someone who can’t

No there's nothing fair into rejecting the author of homebrew (but he wasn't alone) to work on homebrew. It's beyond silly.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#176

Post by platevoltage »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #170
epolanski wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way And this is how Apple/Google end up rejecting candidates to work on open source libraries...despite the candidates being the very authors they are wed out as they haven't spent months preparing for the interview.

Google and Apple don't have degree requirements, there are many of us working there as engineers without any college, much less a CS degree.

Can you confidently say that they don't use degrees to rank candidates in any way?

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#177

Post by platevoltage »

osigurdson wrote: post #130
platevoltage wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we live in a day and age where an entry level administrative job requires a degree. Gotta make sure to keep us trashy blue collar guys in our place.

Except that trades probably make more money.

I was an autobody technician, and later. diesel mechanic. I make more now averaging 20 hours a week on Upwork.

Unless you are a business owner or a union member, you're probably not doing particularly well.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#178

Post by platevoltage »

scarface_74 wrote: post #161
platevoltage wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I hope you're not in charge of hiring people.

I’ve known managers who automatically throw out resumes where candidates graduated from Devry or WGU unless they have really impressive work histories. And this is coming from someone who graduated from a no name state college.

That doesn't surprise me.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#179

Post by taurath »

platevoltage wrote: post #21
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #12

There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…

Most relevant response yet. Thank you. This is exactly the category that I'm in. A couple of years ago I applied to a large company, with a referral. 0-2 years experience and a non-specific bachelor's required. I got my rejection in 15 minutes, after business hours. My resume didn't even see human eyes. Did I mention I had a referral?

This is exactly it - I have been thrown out 3x with a referral because no degree. Almost all of these were Java shops doing absolutely fuck all in terms of innovation while having an engineering team of hundreds - it seems like the majority of coding roles are these design pattern and degree checkboxes with the slowest, most “enterprise” apps imaginable.

Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

#180

Post by taurath »

2rsf wrote: post #108
dcreater wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes in this world of AI in everything, hiring tooling that is dog shit is the reason someone should go to college? I'm not commentating in where you're right or wrong, just want to point out what an utterly horrid reality.

Come up with a better system and you will be rich. "Better" should be scalable, measurable, objective etc.

How about “just as good, without the human misery?”. Many shops are doing that, and have no problems hiring and retaining people.
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