Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.

I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.

e: You can probably guess how that went.

So, how long ago did you leave?

College degrees demonstrate you can complete a long-term project with disparate, often competing priorities handed down from separate departments while meeting deadlines and milestones.

10 years ago I had a senior director at a large fortune 50 corporation tell me that because of the dire state of US education, the only way to ensure a candidate could read, write, and do basic math was if they went to college. As someone who now does lots of corporate hiring, it’s only gotten worse. It’s especially bad in technical fields where about half the CS grads I interview can’t even answer basic questions like “What’s an IDE?”

15 years ago. Unfortunately not of my own volition (I became unable to work due to disability).

e: I can’t write right

Yup, you often get very little real world experience in your field from them. I got my bachelor's degree in information technology and all I really learned that was relevant to my career was a few new Linux commands.

My associates degree in computer information systems gave me way more usable skills than my bachelor's. At least there the textbooks for the IT classes were official certification books.

It's funny, but a good college isn't as much about teaching knowledge but about teaching how to think, so ironically this might still make some sense.

Though if employer is saying "forgot what you learned in college" probably will follow with something illegal.

I'd say the majority of the population can do that, mostly it's a class filter. Need money to go to school or massive debt.

You can probably guess how that went.

So how did it turn out? You ended up hiring nobody?

No, I ended up hiring under qualified people who had skills on paper but had no talent for the job, because I had to look at candidates who had ‘book’ qualifications in adjacent fields but not passion or any qualifications that actually meant anything to the specialty itself.
This was a design and engineering job.

e: and to be clear, our company president was famous for saying ‘specialisation is for insects’. Like that was his catchphrase.

I’d rather teach someone with passion and interest on the job vs someone who has neither of those but with a certificate any day, and I’ve done both.

I have a bs in mathematics and I had never even heard of SQL until after I'd graduated and started seeing it as a requirement for every job that a person with a bs in mathematics might apply for

Fun fact: I had a career in which I was in charge of hiring other people to fill the expanding roles in my department, and was tasked with hiring ‘more of myself’, but I was not allowed to even consider people with my own qualifications.

I had a similar problem. Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.

Finally HR called me and explained that for what the job entailed we couldn't possibly pay the market price for it.

I was like but that's the job. Shit I thought I had even made the JDs pretty succinct and austere already.

Nup, apparently we'd be paying upward for $100k for a job the guys in team were only getting $60k.

As you can imagine we got a lot of applications but 90% weren't even close to what we needed.

I was mostly self-taught, and was only allowed to consider people with at least a bachelor’s degree in a field that didn’t even really exist yet.

Same.

I personally don't like hiring uni graduates. Their utterly lost and difficult to motivate. And almost always what they learned in university does not help whatsoever in the role. Especially dev roles.

For the work I'm involved in there a lot of exception handling. Solving the bugs and looking at the relationship between the stacks. It's more of a puzzle.

There was a viral post from Twitter or linkedin years ago of someone posting saying they wanted to hire someone with "10 years of experience using ruby", a person replied, was told they didn't meet the requirements, they said something like "look at my profile" ...if you looked at the person's profile they were the creator of ruby, they literally wrote the language. The language was only 7 years old.

I don't even remember if it was ruby but the story is basically the same. Impossible requirements written by people who don't even know what they need.

Also fun fact Tim berners Lee used the job title "web developer". He is THE web developer... He write http and html. He literally created the world wide web. Yet he only claims "web developer".

Thanks. It sounds like our backgrounds are similar.

Writing JDs for new roles I had to fill I was constantly getting them knocked back by HR.

That’s awful. It feels really bad when you feel you’re standing in the way of people getting jobs. When you would normally feel like you might be a leftist, this sort of point can be easily exploited to make you feel bad, right?

I don’t even want to address the rest of your points until we go over this one because it feels so important.

The execs think they're hiring someone to churn out code, and some people are better at that, like everything else. They don't understand that they need someone that can figure out what code needs to be written, and why, and that they need someone that gets what the difference is and that there's always someone that writes better code.

E: Also why I'm not worried about LLMs replacing devs. It ain't just code.

Well, this shows that the people in charge have no idea what they’re running, and are not adding any value. We’ve been brainwashed (by them buying our eyeballs and brains) to think they do.

They do not.

I cannot stress this enough:

THEY. DO. NOT.

Sorry, but this is kinda separate:

we couldn't possibly pay the market price for it.

&

I was like but that's the job.

This is literally what labour unions are for?

Agreed. I think a lot of the people talking about how they are self taught are working in tech and software and they were hire twenty years ago or more. (Can't wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).

Most other technical jobs are in far more mature fields. College may expose you to ideal situations that overconstrain your ability to get the job done in a corporate setting, but it still exposed you to a set of problems you don't have access to otherwise. Mainly because these industries are in communication with the deans of these colleges and giving them feedback on what they need to see more of.

Agreed, sorta. The one caveat is that people hiring are typically hr, not technical people. In large companies they are there to fill out paperwork and limit company legal liability. They don't need to know the difference between a unsigned char and a long variable in c.

The people is charge should have hired better people to have those roles. Also whoever wrote those requirements messed up. I learned a long time ago there are basically 2paths forward professionally, technical and management. issues arise when then the needs of those two mix and the person doing so is not up to the challenge.

People can design a 120 to 12 volt power supply on graph paper. Others can talk to 5 stake holders on a new product about what color the plastic container should be and have 1 answer and everyone happy that they won at the end. Both skill sets are valuable. The main issue is we, society, put so much value on the second group and severely limited the potential of the first.

Also the correct color is blue 😋

Pretty sure that was dhh, the creator of rails being told he didn't have enough experience in rails. I tried to find it, I found references to it, but the original was in Twitter.

Well if he did literally develop the web, that would indeed make him the web developer.

Thanks. I guess it was rails and not ruby but still same idea. Rediculous that a creator doesn't have enough experience. As I said I understand it's probably hr and "people persons" writing stuff for "tech people". Not an excuse just fact. It's a sad, horrible fact. Anyways thanks for confirming my memory from years ago.

He did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee and was knighted for it. Just funny that my understanding is his most recent resume claims he's a "web developer" just like someone fresh out of a boot camp. No, you are THE web developer.

And it sounds like everyone doing the role for $60k should have been looking elsewhere.

The whole system's bullshit

I went to college to learn to code and barely did

Oh my God, I'm a CS Dropout who now works as a janitor yet I'm more qualified than half the people applying for your job.

The fact that college degrees are required for jobs that hey we're all completely distorts hiring and the entire education system. College can't possibly be anything other than a means to an end as long as that's the case. No one's going to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt they can't discharge and bankruptcy to learn how to think

An ide is obviously an "intentional dog emoji". You see someone showing their cat pictures and you tell them this is a dog environment.

BTW yes I know it's an integrated development environment which means basically a text editor, compiler, linker, debugger and in many cases linter. I'm also unemployed and looking for a job so...

Controversial opinion: The point of college is NOT to prepare students to be "work ready" if that makes sense. The point of college is to give you the critical thinking skills necessary to be able to learn, grow, and make decisions on your own as an adult professional. Whatever technical knowledge carries over to your job is just a bonus.

Gradeschool is supposed to do that. That's 12-14 years of a person's life. If you're not ready to be an adult by highschool graduation, then the system failed you.

(oh look at the system failing over and over and over again)

(Can't wait till someone sounds off about how they got hired nine years ago).

I mean I did become a ATE tech at a solar ESU startup 4 years ago.

(That is after 9 years as an mfg eng tech at a server CM and just living in the SF Bay area with countless tech jobs of all levels)

Writing left is better anyway

Laudable goal, but whatever they're doing isn't working based on some of the graduates I've known.

Friend of mine applied for a job where they asked for at least 5 years of experience with Angular version x.y.z (can't remember the exact version). The friend responded that he had 10 years of experience with versions x-3 to x+1.

The HR person doing the hiring asked back "But do you have 5 years of experience with the exact version x.y.z?" to which he answered "Version x.y.z has only been out for 3 years so it's impossible to have 5 years of experience with it." HR wrote back saying that he was rejected because he didn't have 5 years of experience of experience with that exact version.

The "Qualification" is to be shackled to college debt so that you're a more compliant worker, unwilling to risk your income by asserting your rights and seeking a livable wage.

If you're debt free, you're liable to grovel a whole lot less just for the honour of being able to work there and might instead just quit.

I think the Amish finish school at 13 or so.

Also having attended college and actually successfully passed its knowledge tests and graduated proves that you have both the discipline and mental capability for certain jobs.

I'm in software development and have been part of the process of hiring people and from the point of view of an employer, for a candidate to an entry level position that college diploma is an indicator that the person in question has the knowledge and capabilities to do that kind of job.

Mind you, in my area fortunatelly there are other ways to indicate that - for example, having participated in Open Source projects or, even better, having your own Open Source project with actual users that you've had to support (which in my view can put somebody above somebody else who merelly has a college diploma) - though that's generally only for smaller companies since large ones will have HR filter candidates before the ever reach the actual domain experts and HR can't judge skill like that and instead will go for "formal stamp of approval" shit such as college diplomas.

That said, the college diploma stops being important after junior level, unless it's one from a handful of very prestigious institutions and even then it won't work on domain experts, only non-expert manager types - if a company is hiring people for mid and above expertise levels based on which college they've attended, that place is going to be a political shithole of incompetence better avoided by those who aren't skilled at or interested in progressing their career through social games.

Sorry, but this is kinda separate: This is literally what labour unions are for?

I would love it if unions entered my workplace but we're far to complex and technical. Not to mention in my industry we go through a good 2-3 restructures a year (yeah I know it's bat shit insane)

In lieu of a union I made it my personal aim to get all my under paid employee bumped to much higher pays. Which was a problem because my team generally only took on existing employees who showed aptitude for technical and complex stuff.

In returned they got a detailed and complex training on everything from sql, to parsecing very large amounts of data, to building complex mappings and results.

Under older management they were often left on their previous pay. I found that really fucking disgusting so I made sure to build a rating system that fairly rated them but made sure that rated/scored/reviewed work automatically ended up on their end of year statement. It was all built using MS stuff. It was cool. I could go in, score their work, it graded them, weighed for complex vs simplex (and different roles) generating a single score. I could do it all year around so if something flag I could easily raise it in our catch ups. I had 3 teams across the entire country (I did a lot of travelling so I could meet my guys and hang, coffee, beers, lunch etc)

It basically meant that everything was documented and very fucking detailed, and because they were meeting the straight forward no sneaky lawyer trick KPIs it meant they were able to smash it.

So at EOY where we did peer review the other managers tried to shoot down my ratings for my guys (which gave them 10% bumps and hit their STI (approx $2-4k bonus) however kept coming up against the documentation.

It should be the number one goal for any manager to make it realistic and possible for their guys to get their bonus and pay raises.

Coz a happy team is a good fucking team. As a direct result of this effort we solved over 99% of all the work on our ledger by EOY.

If anything we were a little too successful. But that's story for another day.

Access to entry level positions is pretty fucked up in this because whilst experts will recognized expertise, for anything but smaller companies candidates get filtered out by HR and those people have no fucking clue what expertise outside their domain looks like, so they use proxies for it such as "stamp of approval from higher education institution" so in big companies the candidates without such stamps of approval (or a pre-existing insider contact) never actually get to be evaluated by the domain experts who can recognize that expertise.

That said, if a candidate doesn't have at least some domain expertise (so, neither formal study nor having done anything in that area in their free time), sorry but somebody who has actually had the discipline to attend a learning institution and enough capability and domain knowledge to actually pass their exams and graduate, is way more likely to be at least decent at it (no guarantee, but the odds are much better) than a random person who never did either. It's only fair that if you haven't invested in learning it in some way or other (not necessarily college) you're not going be seen at the same level as somebody who has actually invested in learning that domain.

It's only naturally that some kind of expertise validation system for candidates emerges for any kind of domain were some level of expertise is required and as things stand now in most such domains at the entry level that's colleges (which, IMHO, are better than cronyism-heavy "know somebody who knows somebody" systems), though in many domains something lighter and cheaper (some kind of cheaper test-only option) would probably be better (or, alternativelly, do as it's done in civilized countries and have higher education be Public, thus cheaper or even free).

Oh yeah, absolutely agree. But I was utterly maliciously compliant in getting my guys their pay increases and bonuses.

I replied in this thread to another person raising a similar concern. Check it out.

Letting HR make such decisions is already ridiculous, because they would have no clue what even working with version x.y.z means. For them it might sound like that you have experience working with win11, but they need somebody that knows win98.

You’d at least get points for being funny.

The qualification is social proof, that you’re from at least middle class background. Meaning you have a little manners and know social codes.

These days, being a janitor might be the safer bet. But yeah, we’re finally at the point where a CS grad could have done their entire degree with ChatGPT.

They don't seem to teach much critical thinking these days beyond a few elite institutions. The focus at the state schools I went to was churning out as many engineering grads as efficiently as possible.

I quit college to start my own successful outsourced IT business but HR doesn't give a shit.

You spelled a lifelong experience of bending forward without complaining wrong.

Valid. Employers want people they hire to do as they are told.