On a somewhat-related tangent, I have a friend who swears by someone who is a self-taught doctor / nurse-practioner. This "doctor" cannot prescribe medicine obviously but is able to do checkups, etc. with self-purchased equipment and interprets OTC blood tests on his own. He apparently knows his limits and has sent people to the hospital when a situation exceeded his knowledge. He is completely self-taught from material online and books from the library
Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#22Higher education is what you make of it. I spent every moment I wasn't working on class work working on side-projects. So I killed two birds with one stone. If you do college right (go above and beyond class work, absorb everything) you can come out with the equivalent of ten years experience in four but if you do it wrong (coast by) you can come out with negative return. College also exposed me to a lot I wouldn't h…
> In fact, a doctorate is almost always a negative signal. I have never hired someone straight out of a doctorate. In my case they have always spectacularly fail the coding part of the interview.
A doctorate is a research degree. Hiring a newly minted doctorate just to be a code monkey would indeed be a mistake. Frankly, both parties would probably be unhappy with the job requirements (I certainly would have been).
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#23I had far better results hiring people with experience and no formal education than with people with formal education and same experience in terms of time. This is specially true to some people with a degree that feel some kind of entitlement, while on the actual results of the job they lacked significantly. People can cheat in their formal education and still get the degree. It is a little harder to cheat their way…
> It is a little harder to cheat their way through a job.
I have not found this to be true. Not that it is harder to cheat through a formal eduction, just that its about the same difficulty to cheat through a job. They are both trivially easy to do.
There are lots of people with long years on their resume that can't program their way out of a bag.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#24[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#25Higher education is what you make of it. I spent every moment I wasn't working on class work working on side-projects. So I killed two birds with one stone. If you do college right (go above and beyond class work, absorb everything) you can come out with the equivalent of ten years experience in four but if you do it wrong (coast by) you can come out with negative return. College also exposed me to a lot I wouldn't h…
> In fact, a doctorate is almost always a negative signal. I have never hired someone straight out of a doctorate. In my case they have always spectacularly fail the coding part of the interview. A doctorate is a research degree. Hiring a newly minted doctorate just to be a code monkey would indeed be a mistake. Frankly, both parties would probably be unhappy with the job requirements (I certainly would have been).
You're probably right, although they had to get through at least a B.S. and research jobs can be hard to find depending on where in the world/country you are.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#26[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#27When I've been involved in hiring, neither of these mattered as much as if the person could show their knowledge of the relevant subjects we were hiring for in the application/resume/letter & then in the interview.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#28Do you want breadth, or depth?
Experience is good for depth of technical skills and office collaboration skills. Education provides introduction and breadth of topics.
Employers generally want to minimize the amount of on the job learning a new hire has to do. That means depth in the skill sets they want. And that doesn't even include employers who run an website/app assembly line and don't want to hire cogs, not engineers.
----
Allow me to make the case for breadth, because your personal goals should be broader than focusing on what employers want and being a really really really good fit for small percentage of jobs.
Sacrificing your education to "focus on gaining experience" is a con. You want to be hire-able long term. To the extent that experience proves you can build something, have a project to show for yourself. Not a senior project, something you care about, with utility to yourself, something that by the time you get to an undergrad project, you just want to work on your thing for credit.
I can't even count the number of times I've benefited professionally from a few kernels of knowledge something outside my main work focus but knew because of a "topics" course I once took. Having an idea what already exists out there in the world, even if the skills aren't strong is a huge boon to solving problems as the come up, or approaching a new design. Otherwise you're often re-inventing the wheel, or feeling around in the dark until you stumble upon a professional domain you didn't know existed and can start reading their literature. The upsides of depth are just much more visible than the downsides of lacking breadth.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#29Beware the educated idiot. I was working with an old carpenter friend of my father's last weekend, and he was telling me a story about a guy he apprenticed with. The man didn't complete 8th grade, and could barely do arithmetic, but was a master mason and carpenter. He was once tasked with taking apart a good-sized sawmill and reassembling it on another site; he spent a day walking through the existing plant, looking…
Why is he an idiot? Not completing 8th grade doesn't make someone an idiot.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#30Beware the educated idiot. I was working with an old carpenter friend of my father's last weekend, and he was telling me a story about a guy he apprenticed with. The man didn't complete 8th grade, and could barely do arithmetic, but was a master mason and carpenter. He was once tasked with taking apart a good-sized sawmill and reassembling it on another site; he spent a day walking through the existing plant, looking…
Why is he an idiot? Not completing 8th grade doesn't make someone an idiot.
He is the opposite. The story is an anecdote of someone who is not well-educated, but is incredibly skilled (as opposed to someone who is very well-educated but not as skilled).