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Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

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Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#41

Post by codesushi42 »

mnm1 wrote: post #5

This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.

Maybe.

I have worked at both startups and FAANGs.

There are developers with CS degrees who are clearly worse than those without. But I could always tell who did not have a CS degree, based on poor understanding of things like running time analysis, good systems design, more complex algorithms etc.

The best developers always had at least a CS undergrad. Though there are clearly diminishing returns with going above that, unless you are a researcher.

Still, the goal of this site is commendable. There are tons of folks who don't have degrees because they could not afford it.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#42

Post by busterarm »

helpPeople wrote: post #39
jedberg wrote: post #31

I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that…

I'm wondering where I'll be. I did Chem engineering in college, but have been programming since I was 17. Now I've moved to electrical design Engineering since it seems to be a hybrid of engineering and programming. So far my job is understanding everything that goes into my complex system. I'm not sure if this or embedded programming is my future. What is more valuable?

I think there's also a large gap for people who only have a CS education and those with a traditional engineering background.

Traditional engineering skills are very undervalued in this industry and I've met very few "engineers" in this field who understand engineering basics like control systems. IMO that's very valuable for building the systems we build -- I can't tell you how many half-baked implementations of some of the parts of PID I've seen kicking around.

And I say that as a completely self-taught, college dropout senior developer.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#43

Post by Pete-Codes »

firefoxd wrote: post #23

This is good, myself being a no CS degree who worked as a lead in a high performance company, I appreciate if more of those can surface. But I made a comment on another job board show hn that's relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20973309 > What's the relationship with the employers? I find the main issue with job website that are posted here is that there is usually zero relationship. Meaning it's mo…

hey, yeah that's a fair comment! So I've actually gotten to know some senior devs and CTOs from interviewing them for my other blog - https://www.nocsdegree.com - so for things like pricing I have input from them. I'll definitely prioritise talking to companies and building relationships. I've also been in contact with some bootcamps.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#44

Post by Pete-Codes »

BWStearns wrote: post #22

Pete, just a heads up your copy in the about says $50 for a post and the button says $99. I don't have particularly good input on which price point makes more sense but you probably want it consistent to avoid confusion. That said, slick looking site. Best of luck.

Thanks! Oh, I thought that had been changed. Thanks for catching that!

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#45

Post by Pete-Codes »

machbio wrote: post #35
Pete-Codes wrote: post #2

Hey, author here. You might remember me from posts such as "No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers". I've made a job board for people without CS degrees. Since I am going to be applying for jobs soon and I am career-changer I figured I would make a solution for myself. It's really annoying to get to the end of a great looking job ad only to find they insist on a CS degree. All of the job positions are…

little feedback - there is lot of whitespace between the email subscriber form and the actual listing of the jobs.. you might want to move the listing to the top over the email subscriber form.

Ok, thanks for the tip!

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#47

Post by joshvm »

helpPeople wrote: post #39
jedberg wrote: post #31

I've worked with a bunch of people who don't have degrees. At the more junior level, you can tell the difference, because while they tend to be really smart and can pick things up quickly, they have funny holes in their knowledge -- CS theory that you'd only pick up from a CS textbook, stuff like Big O notation or A* search (ok maybe that one is a bit more common now, but in the early 00s you didn't really learn that…

I'm wondering where I'll be. I did Chem engineering in college, but have been programming since I was 17. Now I've moved to electrical design Engineering since it seems to be a hybrid of engineering and programming. So far my job is understanding everything that goes into my complex system. I'm not sure if this or embedded programming is my future. What is more valuable?

My experience of embedded is that it encapsulates needing to know everything about more complex systems. You can't make any assumptions about anything, which makes life fun. And often it's something totally unexpected which causes you grief.

I do a lot of embedded work without a CS degree. Every board and chip is different, so you learn by doing. But,at the same time a lot of hardware is basically the same. You have some low power cpu and a bunch of standard peripherals. Once you know how most of them work, it's just engineering to figure out what libraries you need.

There's lots of work in embedded that's for sure. There's also a huge amount of variety depending how close to the metal you want to be.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#48

Post by mnm1 »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #33
mnm1 wrote: post #5

This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.

At a lot of places, yes. However, try getting even a "no thank you" form letter in response to a job post at a desirable company without a degree. First step in the hiring funnel: no 4-year degree --> /dev/nul. I live nearby Netflix, Space X, Hulu, JPL, etc with twenty years experience in what they do and have never even spoken to a single person at any of them despite applying for years. I'm good at what I do, now I…

I have had no issues getting interviews with Microsoft (and a position), Google, Netflix, FB (turned down), etc. No CS degree. I doubt it's because of my philosophy degree. Marketing is very important however.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#49

Post by mnm1 »

codesushi42 wrote: post #41
mnm1 wrote: post #5

This only matters for one's first job, if that. Afterwards it's irrelevant. Regardless of what the job description says, it's never mattered in my experience working at well over a dozen companies in the last twelve years or so.

Maybe. I have worked at both startups and FAANGs. There are developers with CS degrees who are clearly worse than those without. But I could always tell who did not have a CS degree, based on poor understanding of things like running time analysis, good systems design, more complex algorithms etc. The best developers always had at least a CS undergrad. Though there are clearly diminishing returns with going above tha…

Many people with CS degrees don't understand those topics and many people without a CS degree do. So I don't buy this.

Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees

#50

Post by SonOfKyuss »

danielvinson wrote: post #38
rezz wrote: post #21

Is this actually a problem still? I haven’t hopped around as much as most SWEs I suppose, but I’ve never faced an issue not having a degree in any of my previous hiring processes. I work at a large bank and we don’t screen candidates for degrees.

I’m a college dropout and have about 8 years of experience as a developer. I’ve been interviewing a lot lately at mostly startups (7 onsites in the last month). Every single place except for one asked me about college or why I dropped out. One place asked me incredibly difficult whiteboard problems which appeared to be to filter out people without CS degrees (very specific algorithms to implement which I’ve never hea…

> One place had me reverse a linked list on a whiteboard, and was rude and standoffish when I commented that I’d never thought about doing that before so I didn’t have the algorithm memorized.

A good interviewer prefers it if the candidate does not have the algorithm memorized. The whole point is to gauge their problem solving skills. Reciting something from a textbook doesn't tell the interviewer much. The reason you didn't get a favorable reaction in that situation could be because not knowing the algorithm was perfectly acceptable in that situation. It's expected that you figure it out instead of challenging the validity of the question.

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