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Ask YC: Why the degree?

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Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#71

Post by aseever »

When you were 16 did you know that employers use a college degree as a coarse filter when trying to get a manageable applicant pool? It would seem that your answer was most likely one of two. You were either ignorant of reality when making a huge decision, or you were the type to want to fight reality because it felt like injustice and you 'knew better'. Of course at 16 we all 'knew better' and if that's how it went down I'm sorry you didn't get better advice... but it's a personality trait that some folks don't grow out of, and if you've ever managed a team you know they aren't the ones you want to have around.

Anyway, this is not to make any sort of judgment on you personally, you have probably done more awesome things than most 24 year olds and may be nothing like what I described, but you asked: when an employer sees a resume without a degree that's a snap decision thought process they might go through.

The situation actually isn't that bad... most of the best jobs aren't "resume" jobs, they're "hey I know a guy" jobs. Networking is much more important than resume to getting a good job - especially at startups!

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#72

Post by Goladus »

LPTS wrote: post #33
yummyfajitas wrote: post #10

>For all the company knows, I (and countless others) could be the best developers they'd ever meet. And yet we're automatically excluded from even applying. The game is about probability, not possibility. The assumption is: P(qualified | degree) > P(qualified | no degree) That's probably reasonable, since schools do filter out at least some idiots. To find a candidate, one must interview roughly 1/P candidates. If in…

The assumption does not hold with more information. First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach. P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))

For those following along at home, the unpretentious word for "autodidact" is "self-taught"

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#73

Post by gnaritas »

maxklein wrote: post #67
gnaritas wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a false assumption that not going to college means a person can't finish something. Fact is, MOST people don't go to college and many of them don't do it for financial or family reasons. College isn't like high school, it's not available to everyone for free. Many many smart people skip college and that's not going to change any time soon.

Of course I don't think that people who don't go to college can't finish something. I ABSOLUTELY would hire a person who did not go to college if he was qualified. But a person who drops out of college because he felt the classes where holding him back is for me a person who cannot complete stuff. If he dropped out to execute something (like start a business), then it is a major plus point. If he dropped out to go wo…

Then you don't like people who can't finish things, stop equating that with college, they are unrelated. Successfully completing college does not mean you are good at finishing things. It may be an indicator, it's certainly not a qualifier.

Many jocks finish college while barely being able to read, many students cheat their way through, or barely make it through with low grades. Going to college is much more an indicator of your social values rather than your skills.

Most people tend to go to college because they're expected to, it has a lot to do with the values your parent instill. Many people skip college because it never occurred to them they should go, their families simply didn't instill those values in them.

College is nothing more than a place where one can learn, it does not mean one does learn. People who enjoy learning don't ever stop learning and self learning eventually becomes a requirement for all who want to continue to grow. College is nothing more than a kick start for a minority of society, there are many other paths that are just as successful.

Many of the most successful companies in the world were started by college dropouts who realized school was getting in their way. Classrooms are good for teaching the masses, people who learn faster than average will absolutely feel like they're being held back and turn to self directed learning as the superior method it is.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#74

Post by joiningdots »

The degree is seen as a benchmark, an easy early filter - you know someone with a degree has had the focus to knuckle down and study a subject in depth for a period of time. Frustrating for those who don't have a degree but have done the same amount of studying, if not more. But that's the way it goes.

You're only 24. If it's bothering you, go get a degree. Otherwise, make sure you produce work that demonstrates your abilities. Check out this article - 'How I got hired by Amazon' http://www.brunozzi.com/en/2008/05/22/how-i-got-hired-by-ama... - a great example of not needing to care whether the person has a degree or not.

I don't have a degree and I ended up working at Microsoft. But it would never have happened if I had tried applying through their recruitment channel, due to the degree filter. I was headhunted based on performance.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#75

Post by Tichy »

matthewking wrote: post #49
Tichy wrote: post #36

Just curious, how did you teach yourself programming? To me a degree would not so much signal skill in any programming language, as a general skill in learning new stuff, which to me seems to be the most important skill of a programmer. A university degree seems to indicate that ability of learning stuff to some extent. Sure, if you taught yourself programming, you have learned something by yourself, too. But I think…

I "caught the bug" when I was 14 and messing around with mirc scripting with some IRC buddies. I scripted a bunch of stuff for controlling mp3's, and a few socket bots to protect from channel takeovers. Then I wanted a mp3 player more like itunes is today, and so I set about making one in VB. From there I progressed to games, in VB and Java, such as space invaders etc, dabbled a bit with 3d programming. Moved to the…

And what is the reason you did not want to study? Just trying to understand... Obviously, it is a money issue (earning 3 years vs paying 3 years). But if you enjoy the stuff, wouldn't it be natural to study it?

For example, personally I am bored by now by web programming, and university really wasn't so much about practical programming. I liked the theory, complexity of algorithms and so on. in your self-taught curriculum, did you ever come across those kinds of things? Do you/did you care? If you are truly interested in that stuff, but don't want to spend the money, why not do it in a remote learning course or something? I mean, you want to learn the stuff anyway, why not get credit for it?

Obviously it is better to create a new distributed hashing algorithm by creating something like bittorrent, rather than doing theoretical work about it at university. But university is not so bad, and some results from academia do spill over into the real world.

Just today a friend told me about a program he got to analyze that did user authentication on the client. It is amazing to me that people can be able to program such Java clients, yet be unable to understand the security issue. They can program, yet they can not program. Maybe it is because it is so easy to learn programming, and bad code actually runs, too, that employers like to see some additional verification like a CS degree (and of course the CS degree is not guarantee stuff like that won't happen).

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#76

Post by yummyfajitas »

LPTS wrote: post #33
yummyfajitas wrote: post #10

>For all the company knows, I (and countless others) could be the best developers they'd ever meet. And yet we're automatically excluded from even applying. The game is about probability, not possibility. The assumption is: P(qualified | degree) > P(qualified | no degree) That's probably reasonable, since schools do filter out at least some idiots. To find a candidate, one must interview roughly 1/P candidates. If in…

The assumption does not hold with more information. First, self teaching processes filter out idiots too, since idiots can't self teach. P(qualified | (no degree + autodidactic)) > P(qualified | (Degree + little self teaching ability))

Agreed completely. But how do you get more information cheaply?

Remember, all you know is P(qualified| resume says autodidactic)= P(qualified | autodidactic) * P(autodidactic | resume says autodidactic) . The second term can easily kill you. Do you trust everything people put on their resume?

On the other hand, P(degree | resume says degree) is probably close to 1, since a degree is so easy for an HR person to check.

Look, I've got nothing against hiring good people who have no degree, and I certainly don't think a degree proves much (my current students prove that conclusively). If you know you have such a good person, hire them, ignore the degree.

I'm just pointing out that the game is to find the good people. And that's a bit tricky to do.

[edit: by this way, in the interest of clarifying, what you want to optimize is not candidate quality, but (candidate quality - search costs). Don't ignore the search costs term.]

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#77

Post by neilc »

gnaritas wrote: post #61
Maro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, the P(A | B) notation is something you learn at a University Probability class. A good feeling for elementary probability thoery is something that makes you much better at modeling, understanding and predicting the world, and not just as a programmer. And there's lots of other classes like that in a Uni. curriculum (although the overall percentage of really useful classes is in my estimate only 25-50%).…

"normal people who want to learn such things choose to go to school" That's a load of crap. Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. Only very young people consider "going to school" a viable option. Normal people have jobs, kids, and responsibilities and don't have time to go to school every time they pick up a new interest.

Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it.

I would be very surprised to find very many "normal people" who have the drive to learn, say, probability theory or statistics to any reasonable depth by self-study. Of course such people exist, but they are neither typical nor common.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#78

Post by jamesbritt »

vaksel wrote: post #64

I can see requiring a degree if you want someone from a good university...Stanford, MIT...that way you know from the get go that you are getting a smart person. But in reality neither that, nor job experience really matters. Why? Because a person can write anything they want on their resume and you'll never know that they are BSing

" Why? Because a person can write anything they want on their resume and you'll never know that they are BSing"

Unless you pick up the phone and make a few calls. There are many things that are trivial to check, such as whether someone actually attended a given school or worked at a given company.

Certainly people can and do BS on their resume and get away with it, but its not because resumes are inherently unverifiable.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#79

Post by gnaritas »

neilc wrote: post #77
gnaritas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"normal people who want to learn such things choose to go to school" That's a load of crap. Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. Only very young people consider "going to school" a viable option. Normal people have jobs, kids, and responsibilities and don't have time to go to school every time they pick up a new interest.

Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. I would be very surprised to find very many "normal people" who have the drive to learn, say, probability theory or statistics to any reasonable depth by self-study. Of course such people exist, but they are neither typical nor common.

I said normal people who want. Now it's true that normal people don't generally want to learn probability theory, but if they do, they'll turn to books and self teaching long before school unless they're extremely young and still think of school as life.

Once you've been in the real world for a while, the idea of going back to school is generally the last option, not the first. The only thing school has to offer over self directed learning is very smart people to learn from, but if you look around, you can find those people in the real world as well. Mentors tent to show up just when you're sincerely looking for them.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#80

Post by [deleted] »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #10

>For all the company knows, I (and countless others) could be the best developers they'd ever meet. And yet we're automatically excluded from even applying. The game is about probability, not possibility. The assumption is: P(qualified | degree) > P(qualified | no degree) That's probably reasonable, since schools do filter out at least some idiots. To find a candidate, one must interview roughly 1/P candidates. If in…

[deleted]
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