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Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

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Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#91

Post by lsc »

robomartin wrote: post #71
lsc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone is going to drop out of high school or college and launch a billion dollar company. Neither did this guy. Most of us without degrees did something similar to what this guy did; do a high dollar job for a while for a low-dollar wage, and eventually you build up enough reputation that you can get paid market rate. >As for you, the average reader, go/stay in school and get a degree. Life throws all kinds o…

Going to school later on isn't a bad idea or impossible. It could be a good idea for some. I would guess for most it is difficult, if not impossible. Throw a couple of kids and a mortgage into the equation and it's really tough to make independent (and risky) decisions. At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a de…

>At some level I am suggesting this has nothing to do with earning more money but rather being able to get a job and not loose it to someone with a degree.

Really? job security? are you telling me that they are willing to hire people without degrees, but then they take the opportunity to let us go first when they have layoffs?

This makes very little sense. The hard part is getting 'em to give you a chance. After you have the job, well, it's easy enough to compete on performance.

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#92

Post by lsc »

ikonst wrote: post #84
lsc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not everyone is going to drop out of high school or college and launch a billion dollar company. Neither did this guy. Most of us without degrees did something similar to what this guy did; do a high dollar job for a while for a low-dollar wage, and eventually you build up enough reputation that you can get paid market rate. >As for you, the average reader, go/stay in school and get a degree. Life throws all kinds o…

The common opinion is that your mental capacity for learning is at peak when you're young and gets worse with age. You might find an engineering degree more frustrating with age. Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college. Not that I recommend schooling for the sake of schooling. I'm now doing it myself at the age of 29 (nearly done), and I keep wondering whether I'm doing something wildly irrational.

>Also, you might feel out of place in a regular college.

So how is that working out for you? is it weird being the old student?

My guess is that I'd do much better socially now in my early 30s than I would have a decade ago, simply because my social skills are dramatically better. But, I dono. Being the old guy could be kinda weird, too. But my social skills were really, really poor in my early '20s.

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#93

Post by lsc »

robomartin wrote: post #76
randomdata wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American secondary/high-school education, outside of schools and communities outside the norm, is horribly bad. I'm not sure it is that simple. I recall a recent article that said Canada has one of the best education systems, but, if I recall correctly, 70% of Canadians fit a certain demographic. If you observed only that same demographic in the US, the students in the US actually did better than their Canadian cou…

I am proposing that a degree becomes more important later on in life and that this is why one should obtain it as early as practical.

>I am proposing that a degree becomes more important later on in life

Hm. Why do you believe this? Because we are expected to move into management? I think most of the middle management I've worked under have had degrees, so that seems valid. But the owners? business owners very commonly have incomplete college educations. (and I've worked under more than one middle manager who has run (and failed) a small business, and then went and got a mid-life degree from something like the university of phoenix. The experience owning a business seems to carry some respect in middle-management circles, enough to overcome the shame of going to a school advertised on daytime TV.)

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#94

Post by jcampbell1 »

> I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it.

That is one interesting question. It can be solved trivially with BFS, but there is also some crazy way of doing it without using the stack (or a queue). I am sure the MS Paint uses what I call it the smart zamboni algorithm. You basically pretend you are a zamboni driver, and paint the screen avoiding obstacles but being careful not never paint yourself in a corner. It is complex but uses no stack space. I don't imagine there are any people that could implement it on the whiteboard. I was glad to see that he didn't do some impossible feat.

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#95

Post by randomdata »

coliveira wrote: post #88
anxx wrote: post #10

My Google interviewer was a HS-educated guy. My parents couldn't believe it. I tend to think - if he is as good at the job as me, what does his education matter? Why should I be offended that a HS-educated guy is in the same room with me? Education is meant to produce a difference in job performance; it's good for the worker, not directly to the employer. If I with my college degree can't get a better job than a HS-g…

You shouldn't necessarily care about this at a personal level, but this has some deep implications, which might be a reason for concern for your parents and/or the society: 1. The company doesn't value education. It only cares if somebody can do the hard work and maybe pick up what he/she needs to perform at the same level of other people who have degrees. 2. The university program you attended did not give you any s…

As far as development jobs are concerned, the work is out in the open enough that, while education (formal or otherwise) remains important, the accreditation part has little value.

It is difficult to evaluate, say, a doctor - possibly not the best example, but the first that came to mind - based on his past surgeries because much of that data is never recorded, and what is recorded is impossible to access for a variety of reasons. Therefore you need some kind of system to say that, yes, this doctor is capable of doing the job.

Programmers do not really have that problem. Everything you do is recorded, and in many cases that data is accessible for any prospective employers. Worst-case, if you really have nothing else to show, is that you have to spend a few weeks writing some software to publish to GitHub. With that data, you can prove some level of competency, which is already everything a degree can do and more.

So it is not that education is not valued. It certainly is: You would never be able to do the job without some kind of education. It is that your work speaks for itself, so the degree does not need to be valued.

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#96

Post by randomdata »

robomartin wrote: post #74
randomdata wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't be a moron. Get a degree. According to the stats for my region, 56% of women and 45% of men start into a degree program, yet the degree attainment rate is only 25%. I find this attitude a little bit troubling when such a large percentage of the population are already trying and failing. Given the costs – actual and opportunity – involved, unless you are certain you are in the top ~25% of students and can deri…

So long as you are willing to work way down the pay scale, sure. I am merely describing what I think is important in technical fields based on what I have seen around me over the years. I know a guy with enough college credit for four degrees. Never completed the requirements for any one degree. It was incredibly difficult for him to get a job as he got older. A degree would have opened a lot of doors. You go from ha…

> I know a guy with enough college credit for four degrees. It was incredibly difficult for him to get a job as he got older.

There has been a lot of research gone into what makes someone financially successful and the current line of thinking seems to be that soft-skills, like stick-to-itiveness, are the primary factors. Someone who matches the description of your acquaintance doesn't exactly remind me of someone who is has a predisposition for success. Perhaps that has been his failing in the job marketplace and not the lack of a degree at all?

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#97

Post by flatline »

lsc wrote: post #89
flatline wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back in my mid-30s, with one kid. I had flirted with a variety of work/school balances up until that point, but working full time and doing school part time was going to require about 8 more years of sustained effort to finish a B.S. With a kid, full time school pretty much precluded me working, as my spouse works full time, so I ended up taking on much more debt than most undergrads, which brings up the next…

>I left a $100k/yr job to do school, so that loss of income on top of paying for things like daycare and a mortgage made it a much more expensive proposition than when I was in my early 20s Why did you decide to go back to school if your income was already that high? did you change careers? or was this just a social status/personal enrichment project?

Mostly the latter, though I was tired of writing business applications and looking to move into something, broadly, in the domain of scientific research. Which is not terribly straightforward with only a B.S., but seems to be pretty much impossible without one. So for the moment, I'm still on the job hunt in this area.

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#99

Post by coyotebush »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #94

> I made mention of a Paint Bucket and the interviewer asked me to implement it. That is one interesting question. It can be solved trivially with BFS, but there is also some crazy way of doing it without using the stack (or a queue). I am sure the MS Paint uses what I call it the smart zamboni algorithm. You basically pretend you are a zamboni driver, and paint the screen avoiding obstacles but being careful not nev…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_fill#Fixed_memory_method...

Re: Four Steps to Google, Without a Degree

#100

Post by lawnchair_larry »

munin wrote: post #61
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a team of about 10 that had at least one of each: HS dropout, HS diploma, bachelor CS, masters CS, Ph.D. CS. Most people weren't really aware - many came from other teams, so they didn't interview each other, and it just never came up. Everyone is just known by their title/responsibilities. There were two people in particular that were carrying a lot of that team. Not only did they do the most work, they fix…

I was a Sam in one of these stories once. Now I'm back in school, finishing my degree. In my version, the next few weeks were not happy ones for Sam. You can ask yourself "how can it possibly matter" all day long but it doesn't matter. Just get the degree. You'll thank yourself later.

Funny you say that, Sam just had his second successful "exit" since then (the first he wasn't quite a founder, but this one he was). Even if he didn't get "lucky", he was doing fine at ~150k/year salaried at BigCorp. I think if you had trouble in this market, the problem was probably not your lack of a degree.

Honestly, if I were you, I would have considered companies or managers discriminating over that (in the face of evidence of skill/talent) someone you wouldn't want to work for anyway.

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