40% Education, 60% Experience. These are good proportions.
Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
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Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#62Someone with no college education who's been working full time in a real world shop that follows good practices as a software developer for 2-3 years is about as qualified for an entry level job building CRUD applications in a scripting language as a brand spanking new CS grad - maybe more so.
That brand spanking new grad may need a lot more training on version control and the differences between academic projects and the real world. But I'd expect them to have an easier time picking up machine learning, designing a custom circuit board, or writing an algorithm to do groundbreaking new things.
I love hiring people who are self-taught because it demonstrates that they're motivated and know how to learn. Faced with a problem they don't yet know how to solve, they'll usually be able to find a solution. It's not that people with education can never do that. It's that being self-taught in itself demonstrates that you can.
Education, by contrast, sets you up with frameworks for understanding what makes certain hard problems hard, and a toolset for evaluating potential solutions to them.
I don't usually hire entry level anyway, and my teams are rarely solving hard computer science problems. For this kind of work, by the time you have 8 years or so of education-plus-experience under your belt (in any combination), the differences are often minimal. I've had great reports and awful reports with and without formal education. So I don't really care.
That said, you may have trouble getting your foot in the door early in your career without formal education simply due to the way many HR departments screen resumes. It may take a lot more effort to find a place that will hire you and train you up in formal engineering practices for those first few years of experience.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#63There has always been a discussion around this. Strictly speaking: no, a lack of a formal education will not disqualify you for _most_ tech jobs (although it will disqualify you from some, for example: consultancies staffing big government projects, where they have committed to consultants with minimum qualifications, anything in academia, etc). That said, it wont be regarded as an advantage either. The real question…
I couldn't agree more. What I will add is that there are loads of development jobs in non-techy companies that will treat hiring a developer like they would with any other skilled employee in the company, and these usually involve a related degree.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#64I 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.
How do you program your way out of a bag? genuinely curious
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#65A degree tells me that you can stay focused for 3-5 years without your life falling apart, while being given increasingly difficult challenges. Even better if it's a degree in the field that I'm hiring in. It's not about "no degree, no job", it's about "can't get a degree, higher risk that we're going to regret hiring you".
Does it matter if the degree is unrelated to the job? Example, a dev holding a psyc degree.
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#66the professional tech landscape is competitive: even with a degree and experience, a job offer will not just fall in your lap. and at the moment, it sounds like you don't have either. stay in school unless you have (a) a very good rationale for quitting, and (b) a detailed (in writing!) plan for how to get good enough at your craft to the point that you'll land some interviews and score a job offer. be honest with yo…
Well, it depends for the kind of job you're aiming for.
A top level job at the A-list companies requires intense interview preparation.
On the other side of the spectrum, there are companies on unattractive cities that will hire any warm body that can open an IDE. (I don't recommend working on those companies, or at least not for long though)
Re: Ask HN: Experience vs. Education?
#67For education, It depends where you got Education. For me, hands-on experience matters most. I have met people who are very well educated, but not earning enough. And then there are people who have got no formal education are much richer.