Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask YC: Why the degree?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 211 posts

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#151

Post by schtog »

bluelu wrote: post #41

A degree is a proof that you were able to complete something where other have failed, and that you are willing to learn and learn fast. It also proves that you are not completely dumb, since few people fail at university. Even without degree, I think that you still have a chance to get a job if your resume and your projects you have are good enough (or if you run a business in the past). It probably get's more diffic…

"It also proves that you are not completely dumb, since few people fail at university."

doesnt add up, what exactly do you mean?

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#152

Post by erdos2 »

There are opportunity costs either way. When I was your age (I am now, on one leg), I didn't have my degree. After my father's premature death, I went to work to help support my mother and two brothers. I was working in videotex--this was before the WWW. (You might be amused to know that one of the prototypes I worked with was written in lisp.)

While I was always able to find work, it certainly was more difficult finding employment before I finished my degree. It raised questions--the rhetorical kind (interviewers would raise them but weren't interested in the answers).

Now that I have my Ph.D., it's more difficult again.

The point is that timing matters. I don't have the same choices now--and that's without having a family to support.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#153

Post by gnaritas »

pfedor wrote: post #147
gnaritas wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the programming industry, it's not really that hard to filter out bad candidates. You shouldn't waste time talking to any programmer not willing to submit to some simplistic programming test in lieu of a resume. Resumes are crap and have no place in hiring programmers. Code is all that matters, either they can do it or they can't and if they can, they'll accept your challenge. Nothing makes for a better interview…

Many good candidates could be put off by such test. More importantly, even if they agree to your test and send you some code, you need an engineer's time to evaluate the code sample, and if you're going to invest engineer's time you might as well do a full phone screen. The recruiters are by and large non-technical people. They would love to be able to ask some technical questions which could help them predict whethe…

I disagree, any candidate worth having would enjoy such a test. Any programmer who is put off by being asked to program needs to find another profession, period. You should not ask someone to program during an interview, you should review the code they've submitted and make them explain it, all if it, their design choices, their idioms, naming conventions, etc. If they can't discuss code they just wrote prior to the interview, you don't want them, but many good people don't perform well under the pressure of an interview so you won't get an accurate feel for them if they program at the interview.

No one but a programmer is qualified to evaluate another programmer, HR and recruiters have no place here and they'll just waste time and effort pretending to be useful, they aren't.

By doing the test you've already filtered out the wanna be's so you don't need phone interviews, the submitted samples should go strait to a qualified programmer, it'll take him only a few minutes to toss out any bad submissions and he'll quickly know who's worth actually interviewing and who's not.

Code is the only resume a good programmer needs.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#154

Post by randallsquared »

jrockway wrote: post #125
mroman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's IGNORANT to refer to that word as pretentious. I have seen that attitude from the room temp IQ crowd - never thought I would see it here.

What lead you to believe that posters here have high IQs? Certainly not the articles or comments ;)

Average IQs would be sufficient to make his point. In my part of the world, "room temperature" refers to somewhere in the neighborhood of 75.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#155

Post by aswanson »

mark-t wrote: post #102
sah wrote: post #58

In my experience hiring software engineers, possession of an undergrad CS degree was not a helpful filter for resumes. I did find that candidates with advanced degrees or undergrad EECS degrees tended to be a little bit stronger than the average candidate. So did candidates with unrelated undergrad degrees, and a few years of job experience. I never figured out how to look at a resume and meaningfully select for extr…

Computer programming is something that you have to do for a long time to be good at. Almost all good programmers started well before college, and a lot of them go on to study something other than CS. My BS is in Electrical Engineering, and I have an MS in Math, yet I still consider myself a desirable candidate for programming jobs.

Back in my day I didn't know CS was it's own major; I thought it was just a subset of EE and programming was just one thing you had to know, in addition to being actually able to build a computer from scratch.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#156

Post by erdos2 »

xlnt wrote: post #81
yummyfajitas wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

There are lots of other cheap filters that companies do not use. For example, "Have you read Ayn Rand?" This question may well have better predictive power than a degree. And it's not hard to verify if the person is lying about whether they've read some at all. Or, "how many blog posts do you have about programming?" Again this is easy to verify.

Who is Ayn Rand? An utterly dreadful writer and philosopher who believed that the axiom of reflexivity of identity had substantive ontological, social, moral and political consequences. It's no accident that Objectivists sought to justify their belief in the "virtue of selfishness" in the law of reflexivity; they have no use for altruism. Rand's philosophy glorifies the sociopath homo economicus, whose sole objective in life is to maximize his expected utility.

However, results in evolutionary game theory show that a society of self-seeking, self-regarding agents will generally face conditions that ultimately lead to its collapse.

Gary Cooper's goofy speech in The Fountainhead ( see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc7oZ9yWqO4 ) typifies Rand's attitudes. Among other preposterous propositions, Cooper is made to utter the nonsense that great inventions are uniformly the work of sole inventors, selfishly and reflexively seeking their own interests. This is ahistorical; see Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine ( http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm ) for the history of inventions such as the steam engine, radio, telephone, and so on. In each case, ideas were in the air, and there were a number of people who came up with similar inventions more or less at the same time.

Cooper argues the basic notions of intellectual monopoly, which are that intellectual property is essentially indistinguishable from tangible property, and that all copies of ideas "belong" to their creator. These arguments come straight from the RIAA legal playbook. I'm surprised that any culture of hackers would want to subscribe to notions more commonly associated with corporate monopolists.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#157

Post by bluelu »

schtog wrote: post #151
bluelu wrote: post #41

A degree is a proof that you were able to complete something where other have failed, and that you are willing to learn and learn fast. It also proves that you are not completely dumb, since few people fail at university. Even without degree, I think that you still have a chance to get a job if your resume and your projects you have are good enough (or if you run a business in the past). It probably get's more diffic…

"It also proves that you are not completely dumb, since few people fail at university." doesnt add up, what exactly do you mean?

Sorry.I thought that many people fail at university, so you prove that you are somehow more capable of learning. Few was not well chosen.

However, I observed in recent years (at least here in Switzerland and also other people told me about it) that it seems to get easier and easier to pass university, as there is more and more pressure from the state (which finances university) to let more and more people pass, due to the lack of engineers.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#158

Post by raganwald »

Goladus wrote: post #72
LPTS wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

You are correct, but note that just because "self taught" is unpretentious, it is not necessarily the case that "autodidact" is pretentious.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#159

Post by raganwald »

pfedor wrote: post #148
xlnt wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degree question is also silly, but has non-zero predictive capability. So do these. Certainly they rule out plenty of good programmers, but the issue is: do they leave plenty of good programmers, and a higher quality pool of remaining applicants? If good programmers read Rand or write blogs at a higher rate than bad programmers, then it works, even if it's frequently wrong about individual people.

The difference is, if companies started using the filters you suggest, then the candidates would soon catch up and everyone would have a programming blog and have read Cliff's notes for "Atlas Shrugged." So it's not, as they say, an evolutionarily stable strategy. That's why no one does it on a larger scale I guess.

For a demonstration of this principle, compare the quality of a person with a degree in Computer Science. Has the average gotten better in the last 30 years, stayed about the same, or gotten worse?

My feeling is it has gotten much worse as people have sought degrees solely for the purpose of using them to get jobs in the field, precisely as you suggest would happen to blogs and reading cliff's notes.

However, may I point out that blogging is very different from reading the cliff's notes of a book? A hiring manager can read your blog. If they simply check that you have a blog, well, whoop-de-doo. I have a blog, so that clearly proves nothing.

However, if the hiring manager reads your blog, they can deduce a great deal about what you pretend to think and how you communicate it. So it is a small example of your work, much as posting source code is a small example of your work.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#160

Post by helveticaman »

eru wrote: post #85
Goladus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Is autodidact such an unusual word in English? (I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)

Yeah, in Spanish it's not unusual or fancy.
Post reply on HN