Tim Cook explains why you don’t need a college degree to be successful

If Apple wanted to pay less for developers, they could start by getting out of California.

True, but I was making commentary on a large number of college education required positions. They are mutually exclusive assertions.

All the reasons to get Andrew Yang on the debate stage! Andrew Yang 2020! YangGang!

I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do not have a degree, as I dropped out after two years towards a math degree, and work as a "senior" software engineer (I think titles are kind of stupid but it works for my point).

I typically did well on the tests, but for various reasons too elaborate to get into in a post, I had trouble focusing on and completing a lot of the homework, leading to poor grades, and then me dropping out.

Of course a lot of dropouts don't have much curiosity, but once they get to a professional level, it's basically impossible to avoid learning a fairly diverse set of skills.

I think most people who want to work in a professional field should probably go to college and get their degree, but college is not for everyone who joins. Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges.

For example, I greatly dislike how concurrency is taught in the undergrad level. It seems like with many curriculums, the students learn a bit of some locking glue, what a semaphore is, and then they promptly forget any of the safety mechanisms that follow, at least in the people I've interviewed.

The hard problem is finding a way to filter out fresh graduates (from either college or highschool) who can't code from those that can without having to slog through reams of poorly written coding tests in the process. For people who have been in the business a while it's a bit easier because you can usually take a look at their work history and the keywords they decide to use on their CV and intuitively get a reasonably good feel for where they are career wise. It's still very important to have them go through the code test as well though because CVs can be misleading and I'm still regularly amazed at people that come through with 10+ years of experience on paper who somehow still fail at basic programming tasks.

Ultimately I think tech recruiters may need to just step up their game. It's no longer sufficient to just play buzzword bingo to try to find candidates for a position, they need to actually have some amount of technical chops themselves in order to screen potential candidates. At the moment it seems like the industry standard is that recruiters function primarily as advertisers for open positions, while all the heavy lifting of actually evaluating candidates (of all levels) is ultimately left up to the devs at the hiring company.