Is a degree absolute requirement an actual "thing"? I don't have a degree, never went to uni. I didn't even finish high school properly. But I've been in very good work coding for over 20 years now. Almost every position or contract I took had some sort of a degree "clause" in it, but not once was it ever asked, raised or inquired about anywhere. Ever.
Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
231–240 of 336 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole point of my comment is to encourage people to who don't exactly meet the requirements to apply. I might attempt to make that more explicit next time but it's a slow process.
Why would I waste my time applying if it specifically states a CS degree is required? If you don't REQUIRE it, state that. It's not encouraging at all. Last time I was applying for work, I sent out 150 applications/resumes, every single one I look at the list of requirements, if I don't meet one of them, I don't apply because it's a waste of my time.
I telling you exactly why! Certainly anyone who doesn't meet the requirements might not necessarily be considered. But if you meet 90% of the requirements and that last 10% is not having a degree, so what? Why not let the company decide not to hire you instead of you deciding for them in advance?
Sending in a resume or filling out an application is pretty low risk. If a company absolutely won't hire you without a degree, you just won't hear back. Big deal.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what does it mean to “know how threads work”? Do I really need a CS degree to use Go routines or redux sagas? Tbh I wonder constantly if I should get a CS degree. I’ve been working for 4.5 years now and while I feel competent it’s hard to determine the value of things like this. I can profile my code and optimize it, I can determine if a request is blocking and I can fix it using whatever tools are provided in the…
Threads, processes and OS primitives are a big part of your foundational knowledge. In your own words, you are only limited at attacking an problem by the tools and language primitives afforded to you. What about thinking for yourself when those tools have limitations ? For example, when you have a "heisenbug" very few tools can help you fix it. However, if you understand how threads work, what data they share, you h…
Do you think I’ve never had a difficult to debug problem? Sure it might have been easier to solve with the knowledge of a CS degree but that’s hard to reason about since I lack one (aside: perhaps you should reconsider your perspective on bubbles friend, it’s not as easy as “looking” at something to escape your own limits and biases) but I was still able to solve it.
I do see validity in what you’re saying but I fail to see how it’s as important as you seem to make it out to be. Is it really worth tens of thousands of dollars of debt and 4 years of time spent just to be able to debug stuff faster than your average bear?
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#234I don't have a degree (though I do have a few years of college in the CS /engineering fields) and I'm pretty sure every programming job I've ever had required a "degree", if you were to look at their posted job requirements. If it's known that you can do the work (which is the kicker of course), I've never seen an employer hiring people to write code actually care about the degree. Even in academic environments I've…
As a hiring manager, I fully agree. All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter. It matter a lot more for juniors who lack any sort of experience. I think it make good sense for young people to get a degree but it makes less sense for seasoned professionals to go back and get one. If you don't have a degree but have experience, don't let the…
> All our job postings say "CS degree required". But if you have experience and a good resume it absolutely doesn't matter.
These days, even job descriptions at a lot of the FAANG and other big tech companies phrase it as "CS degree or equivalent experience required". Hopefully that's a practice that will trickle down to smaller companies over time.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#235I don't have a degree (though I do have a few years of college in the CS /engineering fields) and I'm pretty sure every programming job I've ever had required a "degree", if you were to look at their posted job requirements. If it's known that you can do the work (which is the kicker of course), I've never seen an employer hiring people to write code actually care about the degree. Even in academic environments I've…
"Now, you should definitely get a CS degree or similar if you want to be a programmer. I would have done a lot better having one even though I got by without it. Also, my career path was ridiculous and is entirely non-replicable."
I'm wondering for how long Americans are going to be exploited like that. I mean getting a degree is never a bad idea but in my country (Poland) unis are FREE yet I never went to one and roughly 80% of my programming friends never did or they studied something entirely different. And we're working everywhere from big banks in London through Swiss pharma companies, European Commission in Belgium, to Opera or Google. I never got asked if I have any formal education after my first 2 years in IT. The best programmers I know are mostly all self-taught. Almost all the successful ones are. The "educated" ones often become corporate slaves making pennies in places like Samsung's R&D. I know American unis are top-notch but I suppose it's still better to start learning on your own than to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for something else than TOP5 or TOP10 unis. And most likely it's even not worth (money-wise) paying that much for those. I suppose we will need not thousands but millions of coders in next decades, right now I'm getting like 50 messages from headhunters any given day, I don't think even if we tried it will be virtually impossible to push so many people through education system at that pace.
Also, especially programming is virtually impossible to learn in any other way than coding for years. It's really handy to have some strong technical background but once you put the time and work in it will work out regardless. Of course again it's better to have the education, but hey, if costs as much as a house maybe it's not the best idea after all. Furthermore ot everyone has to be an architect or CTO (BTW I still know extremely good architects and CTOs without degrees).
tl;dr there are possibly millions of degreeless programmers in Europe, can't wrap my mind around the US education situation, could someone clarify why are things the way they are?
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the huge chip on people's shoulders about "not having a degree" Glad to see I’m not the only one who winces at this. As bad as intellectual snobbery is, reverse/anti-intellectual snobbery is worse: “we don’t take to all yer fancy book learnin’ in these here parts!” It often seems to be lost that the difference isn’t between somebody with a four-year-degree and somebody with 10 years of experience, but between someb…
It's interesting that you think you need to attend college to be an "intellectual", and that people who didn't attend or chose not to continue must hold "anti-intellectual" views, that should definitely tell you something about your own narcissism. It sounds like you went to college and I think that's great, I hope you learned a lot and got a lot of value out of it, but try not to disparage the people who decided not…
> but try not to disparage the people who decided not to stick around and are working in the same jobs as you
Theory matters, classic example here[1], and if pointing out that people are making well understood mistakes because they haven't studied it is disparaging, so be it.
[1]: https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#237Not entirely on-topic, but the cover image on your homepage is scary — it looks like the exact type of workplace I wouldn't want anyone to end up, degree or not. Noisy open office where people are like cattle, essentially the same as cubicle era, except no cubicles.
Oh gosh. Change that to something else PLEASE!
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is probability. The probability of someone having these gaps from a top 50 school is way lower than one without a degree.
I'd like to see the statistics that demonstrate the probability you claim.
What do you need the statistics for? The people doing a degree studied the material under the guidance of an expert and had to demonstrate their mastery of the subject.
Self-learners aren't doing that.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#239I'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…
The opposite is also true, for example, highly educated but still directly concatenating query parameters into SQL... "Oh yeah, the IDE provided warning was annoying, so I turned it off"
Yeah, I mean our field is so immensely broad (and deep!) that pretty much everyone you work with will have "funny holes" in their knowledge regardless of experience level.
Re: Show HN: I made a jobs board for developers without degrees
#240Is 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…
I dropped out of my computer science degree program in 1993.
> Every single place except for one asked me about college or why I dropped out.
In the 26 years and 8 companies I've worked at since, along with hundreds of interviews, I've never been asked that question. In fact, my educational background has never come up.
Granted, 26 years is a lot longer than 8 years, but I'm quite surprised to hear your report. 8 years is, objectively, a good bit of experience.