> 47 percent of the technology jobs in New York City no longer require any college education at all.
I've done a lot of hiring over the years and recently in NYC. I can say in general I've always hired for Attitude and Aptitude. I can teach you anything if you have the right Attitude. I can't teach you to have a good Attitude and I can't make you have a better Aptitude.
One very real challenge in NYC is that big players are soaking up most of tech talent and there is a ground war between financial technology companies and other start-ups. That pressure has caused companies to go back to the drawing board on how they qualify candidates. For a while recruiters wouldn’t even look at a person without seeing some lofty education background in a resume. Now they’re looking for the scrappy problem solver that might be savvy based on their recent work experience.
I find this interesting because when I started in technology 30 years ago I had a hard time hiring for my companies and developed this “Attitude+Aptitude” concept with my teams. Over time it seemed like it was getting harder for people to get into technology jobs because it became accepted principle that you had to hire people with CS degrees to ensure success. Of course that was BS when it happened and I’ve always fought against it over the years. One of the best things for me about hiring in NYC was being able to tell the recruiting team what I was looking for and to tell them to stop looking for just CS degrees.
Recently I took a position as CTO in a San Francisco HQ’d start-up. I’ve been talking to my engineering team on how we filter candidates, again I’m preaching A+A but its clear they’ve been taught to look for CS degrees and Math majors. I’m working with them to broaden their thinking. I think this is an example that in general people are lazy about hiring and they’ll use anything they can as an excuse to not invest in finding out if a candidate is the right person. It’s tough, we’re all busy and have yet another meeting to run to or another customer call to deal with. It’s easy to think hiring is a pain and distraction from what you’re doing today. But, let’s be clear, the single most important thing you can do is scale your teams and if you don’t hire they’ll never scale and you’ll fail. To me the most important thing you can do in a company is hire well. The second most important thing is fire well, let people go if they’re not working out. You’re not doing them any favors and in the end their life will be better if they can find a place they fit in and can be successful and your world will be more successful if you focus on building a team that is a well oiled machine that smashes through problems like a hot knife through butter.