21–27 of 27 posts
Quality of the degree - is that a issue or do they just look at ticking a box? Reason I ask is that I'm sure there are countries out there who for a small donation will give you one. Utterly useless but does afford you to say - yes I have a degree. Still if Bill Gates applied, I guess he'd get rejected as well. Same with Zuckerman, many others as well. Guess your qualified to start a big empire yourself by not having…
Note: Google approached me after seeing my stackoverflow account and other things on the Internet. After a very nice email chat, I sent my CV and got rejected due to no CS degree ...
I do feel HR departments have too much control in hiring process's. Sadly education descrimination is one such area still fully allowed by law, despite the lesser paper educated person being more able to do the job. Bottom line if they are letting alot of talent slip thru the nets due to this rigid policey then eventualy they will create competition. One does wonder when you read all these stories of big companies fo…
It's annoying that even if you have a degree in Theoretical Linguistics or something absurd like that, you can still get a software/hardware engineering job at Google. Google really need to think harder about their approach to hiring if they want to remain a powerhouse. What happens when, in the near future, the computer science graduating pool (i.e. the "bubble") becomes flooded with losers who don't know their ass…
When I was choosing a degree I often heard that people with Classics degrees found it easy to get recruited as programmers. I have no idea how true that is but my former boss took that route. I dropped out of my CS degree and often wish I'd studied something language-related instead.
(I didn't really know what CS was before I started studying it - what I really wanted was to learn to take my programming to the next level of turning little 100-line programs into real projects, which I know now is almost unrelated to theoretical CS and really just needed a little more reading and a lot more practice. This was in the days before StackExchange and Github, or I might have worked it out in time to save myself from being yet another CS dropout.)
Note: Google approached me after seeing my stackoverflow account and other things on the Internet. After a very nice email chat, I sent my CV and got rejected due to no CS degree ...
I do feel HR departments have too much control in hiring process's. Sadly education descrimination is one such area still fully allowed by law, despite the lesser paper educated person being more able to do the job. Bottom line if they are letting alot of talent slip thru the nets due to this rigid policey then eventualy they will create competition. One does wonder when you read all these stories of big companies fo…
I am a little biased as another dropout but many technical job adverts here in the UK not only specify a degree but that it must be at least a 2:1 from (whatever HR/the manager thinks is) a "respected university"!
5 years ago I applied for a technical support job at an extremely low salary (I was relocating and applying for anything I saw) and got a phone call saying they'd got my CV but needed to know if I had a degree. I'm sure finishing my degree in formal derivations of algorithms would have been highly useful for a job crawling under desks looking to see if any cables had fallen out. Luckily in the month it took them to phone me and ask I'd found a much better job.
It's annoying that even if you have a degree in Theoretical Linguistics or something absurd like that, you can still get a software/hardware engineering job at Google. Google really need to think harder about their approach to hiring if they want to remain a powerhouse. What happens when, in the near future, the computer science graduating pool (i.e. the "bubble") becomes flooded with losers who don't know their ass…
I agree with your point but I don't know if theoretical linguistics is really such an absurd degree to show programming aptitude. It's quite an analytical subject and the structures of natural languages do have some parallels with the structures of programming languages, plus of course natural language processing is a big area of computational research. When I was choosing a degree I often heard that people with Clas…
Also, my father has told me (being more of that generation), and I have read, that many early entrants into the CS field had backgrounds in linguistics.
That said, the described Google policy of degree trumping ability, I find disappointing.
However, from a point of analysis, it's a simple filter, and after applying it, a "premier" venue like Google will still have a significant oversupply of highly qualified candidates.
But... it puts me in mind of Google's reputation for support: You only get a response if you're one of "the important people".
Don't count on your "looks", Google; they don't last forever.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Translation: Someone technical decided that they like your chops. Someone not-technical bounced you due to a checklist. If you held a degree in "Advanced Underwater Basketweaving", that would have been sufficient to tick off the "Has a degree" box.
Maybe, and that's OK. I made my choice wrt the degree. I have my ideas on if that's right or wrong, but other people's are interesting.
It's annoying that even if you have a degree in Theoretical Linguistics or something absurd like that, you can still get a software/hardware engineering job at Google. Google really need to think harder about their approach to hiring if they want to remain a powerhouse. What happens when, in the near future, the computer science graduating pool (i.e. the "bubble") becomes flooded with losers who don't know their ass…
I agree with your point but I don't know if theoretical linguistics is really such an absurd degree to show programming aptitude. It's quite an analytical subject and the structures of natural languages do have some parallels with the structures of programming languages, plus of course natural language processing is a big area of computational research. When I was choosing a degree I often heard that people with Clas…