A couple of months ago at the Go London User Group a young guy came up to me and told me he didn't have a degree, was totally self taught, and wanted to know if it was even worth him applying to CloudFlare.
I told him to apply.
He started last Monday.
I can only speak for CloudFlare, but educational background is _a component_ of a candidate. But it's only _a component_, it's not everything. We're interested in what people know and what they can do. I honestly look more at people's personalities, employment history and Github than what college degree they have.
Ditto. I actually actively don't look at peoples qualifications when it comes to hiring, as I fervently believe that the ability to get a degree does not correlate to, well, anything in real life, other than what your tolerance to debt is, or how rich your parents are, or how compliant you are. None of those are really endearing qualities in a potential employee.
It usually comes out conversationally months down the line, and we therefore are mathematicians, school & college drop-outs, physicists, chemists, geographers, and marine biologists - and all developers.
In no small part this stance comes from my own experiences when I first set out into the world as a naïf graduate, thinking that a masters (Desmond - didn't let my degree get in the way of my education) in Physics from [redacted] was somehow valuable. Turns out that a first in urban forestry management counts for more with most employers, because HR witches don't actually understand the skills they're supposed to be assessing, and therefore just get told "throw everything that's not a 1st in the bin". Which is a despicable waste of talent, and why I therefore do not give two hoots what you studied or where, if at all.
You say you believe that your ability to get a degree doesn't correlate to anything other than your tolerance to debt or how rich your parents are.
But you clearly believe that your 2:2 in Physics (for Americans, a 3.0 GPA) is worth more than someone else's 1 in Urban Forestry Management (for Americans, a 3.7 GPA) so presumably you think that there is some variation in difficulty among degrees, and presumably you believe that smarter people will be able to get better degrees?
Nope, I believed that. I now realise it's total bunkum, as while one degree may be more challenging than another, from a hiring manager's perspective it's the GPA/class that counts, and little else, and value is in the eye of the beholder.
Thank you so much for what you did. And for saying this publicly.
When your own situation is comfortable it's easy to lose sight of how being unable to get work makes you feel totally worthless and life hardly worth living. It is not right to throw people away and deny them the chance to contribute because they are imperfect in some irrelevant way.
Agreed! I've recently made the decision to try and move beyond my comfortable freelance existence, and instead try and enable 1) those who have trouble functioning in a 'normal' work environment, and 2) those who are starting with no portfolio or degree.
It would make me happier (because what's fun about just living comfortably!), and it might help others. Win-win.
But doing this from within an existing company is perhaps even better
As a degreeless, high school drop out who works for a very large corporation that's not the case. In a time where many are screaming about shortages in skilled IT people, mandating a degree is only going to narrow the already small pool of possible candidates down even further for no explicable gain. Many job advertisements I've seen will say "degree or relative experience", the latter being the key part here.
A degree is a proxy. A recruiter without specific knowledge cannot assess a developer's technical abilities in any meaningful way (even an extremely experienced developer can't reliably do so). The degree implies a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years and found them acceptable enough to issue the degree. A degree offsets responsibility from the recruiter to the school/institution.
Also from the potential hire himself. It's not that he sucks, his college didn't prepare him for this new role. It's not his lack of passion and really any deep interest in the craft, it's just that he had wrong lecturers, also most of them even weren't there to lecture most of the time, so what can you expect?
So now we can hire him and train him for a year or more, because without it he's completely useless, but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be. On the other hand, this one here who was willing to take all the responsibility for himself, who's eager to prove his actual skill doing useful things, he's too dangerous, because... What? Because he could actually end up doing something, and then we'd feel bad?
I'm not saying what you say is wrong, like in untrue, but I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
> a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years
Yeah. Some abilities. That differs from person to person and from college to college, but these abilities may or may not be the ones you want to optimize for.
> but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be.
For large companies, predictability beats quality. Keep in mind strict business processes exist to defend organizations from incompetent workers, even at the cost of limiting competent ones. Incompetent workers are cheaper. Since the processes prevent competent ones from achieving outstanding results, there is an obvious incentive to hire only incompetent ones.
> I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.
Not sure about fairness. I certainly don't like it.
> Yeah. Some abilities.
Those are the abilities large banks and insurance companies want. For the average non-technical manager, being able to consider developers as interchangeable cogs beats developers that are impossible for managers to characterize or predict.
A couple of months ago at the Go London User Group a young guy came up to me and told me he didn't have a degree, was totally self taught, and wanted to know if it was even worth him applying to CloudFlare.
I told him to apply.
He started last Monday.
I can only speak for CloudFlare, but educational background is _a component_ of a candidate. But it's only _a component_, it's not everything. We're interested in what people know and what they can do. I honestly look more at people's personalities, employment history and Github than what college degree they have.