by cultofmetatron
2 subcomments
- CTO of a startup. built the entire cloud backend and added features as a sole backend dev for the first 3 years. Before that I worked for several years in SF as a developer working all the way from a self taught junior to senior engineer to now a CTO with 4 engineers working with me towards out series A.
Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.
with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
by marginalia_nu
3 subcomments
- Why does the article suddenly start talking about power grids before jumping back to its topic like nothing happened?
> If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent.
> AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows.
> This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs.
> What's being done about changing hiring practices?
The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
- The type of roles w/ non-degree holders matters here. I'm sure Google offers a great career in any of its roles, but the article makes it sound like positions Stanford grads apply to (PM + eng) already have lots of non-degree holders. Pointing at company-wide stats to support that claim is weaksauce. Over a third of Google employees are not engineers/PMs (if this is true: https://www.unifygtm.com/insights-headcount/google). Who's to say the vast majority of non-degree holders aren't clustered in their sales and support org? I think the 77% stat is a great signal, love to see reduced gatekeeping in any job market. But, signaling you'll find folks without degrees in eng squads across Google doesn't seem obvious.
- As far as I know, Google never had a requirement to have a degree for any software engineering job. What they did pretty aggressively, though, is sourcing candidates from universities with top-notch engineering programs (CMU, Stanford, etc). So they ended up with a significant proportion of such hires not because they rejected everyone else, but because their intake process produced more leads of this sort and treated them preferentially. Basically, for applicants going through that funnel, they guaranteed an onsite interview.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
- I have hired many talented programmers with degrees, but those degrees were in Economics or Literature. Very few from Comp Sci background.
I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
by alphazard
4 subcomments
- CS degree is starting to become a bimodal distribution. There are enough people who thought they could buy a high-salary job by getting a CS degree, and universities advertising to that effect, that the market is now flooded with candidates who have degrees on paper, but don't have the mojo.
Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard.
Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.
by JohnLeitch
1 subcomments
- Interesting Microsoft is mentioned as recently dropping degree requirements. First time I worked there as an FTE without a degree was 2012. I don't see this as any sort of turn of events in the industry. It's always been "degree or equivalent experience" as far as I can remember.
- When your most potent competitor companies (FB, MSFT, Apple) and investments (OpenAI) were all founded by college drop-outs, it does make you wonder whether college itself was holding these individuals back. I'm sure they are exceptions rather than the rule.
- I remember when I was at the CMU Robotics institute in the graduate program (Robotics / AI) in 2003 and Google came on campus and they wouldn't even consider anyone without a PhD - the campus recruiter advised me to apply when I had completed my PhD.
Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS.
My how things have changed!
by parliament32
0 subcomment
- Anecdotal, but some of my best hires were either degree-less, or had education in an unrelated field.
I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.
- Traditional Germans in this thread going through mental breakdown
- And this is news why? Isn't this always been the case, sure CS majors were employed, but so many people in the industry have no formal degrees.
by ggnore7452
0 subcomment
- I’m fine with hires without degrees. But if Google still filters people with LeetCode style coding questions, what’s the point of that in this day and age?
- Not sure this is actually news, since it seems like Google would sometimes hire people like that from the beginning. Still a lot of PhD's though.
- There is evidence that exceptionally high intelligence can work against someone in the normal world and is linked to negative school outcomes.
- There’s a weird bias that software development is difficult. It’s mostly monkey stuff. 80-90% of the job is basically coding up things to spec. You can make an argument that being a car mechanic is far more difficult than being a front-end monkey.
- There is no way you could even get remotely looked at with out being a rock star that came to their attention through some other means. No one applying cold with no degree is getting past the trashcan.
- It's not that hard to notice this, just google "{university} {degree} syllabus" and you can see all the courses that the student will take.
In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience.
Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.
- This isn't really news... 11y ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/UNzUl30ZUe
by reactordev
1 subcomments
- This has always been true in tech. Degree’s pave way to leadership but skills opens doors.
If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.
- This was bound to happen as we freed knowledge from the monopolies of institutions conceived in the Middle Ages and made it available to everyone. Now, knowledge, even practice, is just a few clicks away from the people instead of being monopolized in gatekeeping institutions that you must get accepted and physically attend to. In a way, we are returning to the Open Science and Engineering of the late 18th and early 19th centuries that made the Scientific Revolution happen, but this time, it is for everybody instead of being monopolized in the hands of the elite.
What is more, our knowledge is increasing at an accelerating rate, and no traditional institution of education can keep up with it, even further, with teaching it. We must start teaching people how to learn and how to use the scientific method and the core of any modern methodology, instead of trying to teach them individual topics, and even less, specializations. That way, people can keep learning and keep pace with technological development.
- Why is this a thing to be surprised by? How many of the tech industry's biggest corps were started by college drop outs leaving them with no degree? The fact that they put needing a degree in the requirements for their job listings is something that has always been laughable to me. A degree pretty much just that you are more than likely in debt beyond belief and you didn't have much else to do so you kept with it long enough to finish. That's probably a bit cynical, but we all make fun of MBAs while cherishing CSE degrees??? Put someone to work that shows they can do the work regardless of having or not a sheep skin. If they can't cut it, get rid of them and do it again.
- Cool to see that doing things and outcomes are more valued than learning theory :)
by cmrdporcupine
0 subcomment
- He might be right but during my time at Google (coincidentally without a degree), I never found Brin to have much of any idea of what was actually happening inside the company.
He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.
by summerlight
1 subcomments
- This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.
- sure, but let's look at the name of most folks leading their AI efforts, 80-90% have degrees.
by lazyasciiart
1 subcomments
- Sure, for a value of “many” meaning more than 10. I doubt it means anything close to, say, 10% of new hires.
Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?
- Speaking for myself:
FITFO: Figure it the fuck out. Research and take action quickly.
FAFO: Fuck around and find out. Do shit, make mistakes and try again. You’ll at least learn something from this.
FPT: First principles thinking. Learn the basics and build from there.
80/20 Rule: 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
———
Cyberpunk thinking. You have the cyberspace to explore and do things that you find interesting. The punk is the DIY mentality.
- "Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."
Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.
- Having worked at Google, been a hiring manager, been on numerous hiring boards:
I don’t believe you.
I mean, maybe if he means the technical meaning of the word namely “more than two” and not “a noticeable percentage” which is implied.
In my time there I literally only knew two googlers without a college degree. I didn’t pry but people also aren’t shy about it. And zero people without degrees made it to offer stage in any hiring committee I was part of.
by kittikitti
0 subcomment
- I agree with the premise of this article but too often has the argument been used to discourage going to college. You don't have to have a degree but it's also not a negative factor in your career.
by josefritzishere
0 subcomment
- The grammar and structure of this is weird like soen trash AI wrote it.
- Random managed company. Used to require Stanford et al degrees (without a good reason), then basically IIT degrees, now no degrees.
OK sure
- > Google co-founder reveals that "many" of the new hires do not have a degree
That explains the lack of engineering and test in today's software products.
"If it compiles, ship it. If the user finds bugs, we can always make a new release"
- Forget not having degree, to get even an interview call, you need to be T20 alumni! Shows how execs are out of touch day to day operations of big companies.
by farceSpherule
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by 2OEH8eoCRo0
1 subcomments
- It shows
Hacker News