There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people".
Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way. One method that's not completely illogical is to only look at candidates who have degrees.
You can get degrees for <15K. For a BSCS you can do WGU for 5/10K. For a MSCS you can do GaTech OMSCS for 7K. Those numbers are small enough that they're almost definitely worth it. But those also cost time, which you will have to decide for yourself if you want to spend.
> They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way
And this is how Apple/Google end up rejecting candidates to work on open source libraries...despite the candidates being the very authors they are wed out as they haven't spent months preparing for the interview.
Is this referring to homebrew?
On the one hand i get it, but on the other hand reversing a binary tree isn’t some crazy leetcode grind. Most people can figure it out in a few mins and i think its fair to reject someone who can’t
I disagree with it being fair to reject someone who can’t reverse a binary tree. I’ve never had to do it in my 16 year career and it’s easily learned. You could literally teach someone in a few minutes.
It's not one instance. Most people who have this happen to them don't tweet about it. Every instance could have a "well, you should have ______ better" stapled to it.
I don't think is apple/google. This sounds like the kind of thing small companies do. I would be very surprised if that was FAANG
I am not a fan of leetcode interviews myself, but I don't think the FAANG process is that bad. I am interested in any specific examples of authors of projects being rejected from big-tech companies for a role where they would work on their own thing
> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.
oh, for L3 or entry level, I'm sure they do. But they didn't even ask me about a degree, in fact my boss didn't ask until a year after i'd been working for him.
So yes, there isn't a degree requirement, and for senior+ people, they don't care at all. For lower then that, I can't say, i'm sure it matters more the lower the level.
but do you have a degree? and if so, was it on your resume. The place where I always got stuck was getting that first call. In the few interviews that I've had, I've done okay. I've moved past the technical interview in every case, although besides my internship, I wasn't given an offer. I was wondering if they use degrees to rank applications.
No degree. I left any mention of college off my resume, and only included the last 12+ years of relevant experience and was able to get an interview. I have also done extensive open source work though, as well.
This is exactly the category that I'm in. A couple of years ago I applied to a large company, with a referral. 0-2 years experience and a non-specific bachelor's required. I got my rejection in 15 minutes, after business hours. My resume didn't even see human eyes. Did I mention I had a referral?
This is exactly it - I have been thrown out 3x with a referral because no degree. Almost all of these were Java shops doing absolutely fuck all in terms of innovation while having an engineering team of hundreds - it seems like the majority of coding roles are these design pattern and degree checkboxes with the slowest, most “enterprise” apps imaginable.
I have an unrelated question. I'm not a Java dev, so I don't really get this, but I keep hearing it. I've heard, and maybe this is an exaggeration, that "scrappy innovative startup types" avoid candidates with only long term Java experience, because that tends to show a dispassion for programming. Is there truth to that? Do Java devs learn Java in college, and just do Java from then on without expanding their knowledge outside of that ecosystem?
Lots of enterprise Java gigs are basically cobol 2.0. One client I had… the code was literally cobol that was translated to Java.
Very inflexible and formulaic coding that doesn’t tend to build up the person. If you stay a long time at a Java shop, make it clear you weren’t in that type of role.
I think a lot of the “steady, boring” software jobs are in .net and Java, and people tend to spend a long time in those roles, so they get used to the structures of their codebase and the company they work at. They get used to “this is the way things are done” even if there are hundreds of ways with different tradeoffs.
That sounds hard. I got my bsc and msc in cs in 2015 exactly because I was afraid of this.
I know maybe a couple of guys who've had successful careers in cs despite having no degree. Those guys are especially talented and industrious. Real rock stars. I'm an average slob in comparison and I feel lucky to have my papers, as I have a decent track record of getting interviews. Small local companies seem to respond the best to my resume. Big places and remote jobs seem to have a much higher bar to clear.
Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science in Computer Science (GA Tech OMSCS) is really good about letting you go as fast or as slow as you want. If you are sufficiently motivated (and life circumstances permitting, granted), it's very doable as a nights and weekends type of thing.
I did it over 5 years and it would consume all my free time during crunch periods. Definitely make sure your family is supportive - it’s like having a second part time job with occasional overtime.
Having said that - I believe many companies view OMSCS as a strong signal. It’s a difficult degree with high drop out rate.
I think you had to use the proctoring software. Some people had a dedicated USB stick and would just boot onto that for exams specifically. TAs have to review any flagged exams.
I'm pretty sure it's required for the degree's accreditation. Unfortunately, there is always a small percentage of people who will cheat if they can get away with it.
Yes in this world of AI in everything, hiring tooling that is dog shit is the reason someone should go to college? I'm not commentating in where you're right or wrong, just want to point out what an utterly horrid reality.
I mean, we live in a day and age where an entry level administrative job requires a degree. Gotta make sure to keep us trashy blue collar guys in our place.
So he went on to hire lucky people. They all left after a year. 6 had won the lottery, 10 had got rich betting on crypto and the other 12 had set up a business on the side and make more money from that.
He had learned his lesson: next time he would discard the other half of the applicant pile.
I’ve known managers who automatically throw out resumes where candidates graduated from Devry or WGU unless they have really impressive work histories.
And this is coming from someone who graduated from a no name state college.
I am 50 and don’t have anything to prove. I’ve done my time at a “FAANG” and the only reason I’m not at another one right now is that they insisted on RTO.
Also I rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever work for any large company again.
I hear that. My 3 months with Akamai felt like the absolute best case scenario for big corporations. It was pretty good, but I am just not wired up for the corporate cringe that comes with any organization like this.
(yes I’m throwing up in my mouth while responding)
From the thousand-foot view, I actually saw a dynamic environment where operating within a matrixed organization and aligning cross-functional stakeholders were essential levers for driving scalable outcomes. While enterprise-level ecosystems inevitably present change management challenges, I found that viewing the experience through a lens of strategic growth and operational optimization made it incredibly rewarding.
been more than once in such bigcos that used it, heard the talk, e.g."we gotta get our messaging right", "don't rock the boat", "our culture / mission / vision / values", brainwashing-type promotional videos created by the corporate communications department being played, while everyone nods and beams fixed plastic smiles, as though it's a national anthem being played.
The time sink is real, but (at least for me personally), there is a sense of accomplishment when I get a a credential that is rarely felt when completing a "project".
(I control how I learn and absent a professor being a dick and purposely setting up an exam that 3/4 of the class bombs, learning is a joy compared to the politics, power games and sometimes even incompetence encountered at "work").
I tried to apply to wgu but got stuck in some bureaucratic hell. Have a degree in an unrelated field. Also have ap credits from 20 years ago. Wgu demands I send them the ap credits but at this point there is basically no way to get them from the college board.
Didn't the AP credits go towards the unrelated degree already? I doubt you can use them twice. If anything you should be able to use whatever course credit they gave you the first time as evidence of completing the course using your transcript from the first degree.
True enough, and given that no company under 1000 headcount bothers to verify bachelor's degrees, OP should just lie to get through the initial filter.
Funnily enough, I tried wording my Berkeley Bootcamp a little differently on my resume to be a little more ambiguous at one point in time. I got called out on that pretty quick. Not my a company, but by someone I had review it.
Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways to eliminate chunks of the applications. Illogical ways of eliminating candidates are acceptable because they are better than having no way. One method that's not completely illogical is to only look at candidates who have degrees.
You can get degrees for <15K. For a BSCS you can do WGU for 5/10K. For a MSCS you can do GaTech OMSCS for 7K. Those numbers are small enough that they're almost definitely worth it. But those also cost time, which you will have to decide for yourself if you want to spend.