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.
A degree used to be a class distinction, a signal that someone belonged to the affluent in-group. The same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society. We were never supposed to be invited to the club, but we snuck in because they were desperate for skilled labor.
> same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society
Strongly disagree. I say this as someone who went to a state school and didn’t start reading literature until well after college.
The classics are classics for good reason. Even if one can’t learn to appreciate them, they’re critical for understanding entire epochs of political thought and history. It would be like trying to navigate modern retail politics while ignoring memes.
For another perspective, club members must be interested in forming a club for the benefit of the club. Increasingly we get people interested in putting themselves first and screwing over others.
On the other hand, I know plenty of devs with a degree who are not very good. So should we conclude that have a degree is not very correlated with dev skill?
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.
They key context is the sentence just before your quote. I guess they think it's a downstream reason that lack of degree requirements is concerning, since it might result in more AI usage. Which, yeah, is quite a reach and maybe genuinely insane.
Or possibly just written at an AI level of self-awareness. The irony of an AI written article injecting AI alarmism so hamfistedly would be quite something... but not impossible I guess.
If it is AI, this is the easiest type of AI content to generate: a summary of a small, delimited text corpus, with some generic filler added.
If it isn't AI, it's still nevertheless low-effort and (IMHO) doesn't belong on HN. The primary journalistic source (Fortune) should replace it.
Look at this before/after comparison, how lazily they (or it) paraphrased the source material:
> [Primary] "Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute."
> [Derivative] "Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%."
Or this:
> [Primary] "And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring."
> [Derivative] "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."
So many classics, and of course it birthed the "How is babby formed" meme. Guess it got too hard to justify the use of resources when the rest of the platform was basically in flames though.
The article's bent was that it's the un-pedigreed using AI to allow them to compete with formally trained grads, and not, you know, the Mk1 unit everyone shipped with.
>artificial intelligence tools got better at performing tasks that once required formal training.
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.
I have a few friends either without degrees or degrees in unrelated areas working as engineers for Google. In my experience, most tech companies were always a bit flexible for that. Google at their beginning, was a bit anal about wanting only PhDs from Stanford, but this was really during their initial years.
It is like Facebook that once wanted only young people and now have their share of greybeards.
It is traditional economy companies and consultancies like Accenture that usually don't have exceptions for people without formal credentials.
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.
Big Tech can afford to be selective, so if you don't have a degree, the basic answer is that you need to stand out in some other way. This can be several years of interesting industry experience or other publicly-visible work (open source code, winning some competition, or even having a good blog). It also helps to know someone who works there and can help you get the first interview.
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.
When I went to school, all the non-CS engineering tracks involved two years of bootcamp. Harsh weeding out of underperforming students, not always in a responsible way.
In my fourth year I was in a CS OS class (my own pedigree was EE/CE). A group behind me was talking, and someone openly expressed concern that they really liked CS, but they were unsure about their ability to program. Oh, ... man.
I think the fact that any real CS talent had an easy time getting great employment for a long time, left some schools with less than the most ambitious grads as professors. Talent just self taught themselves past that, or had already done so before enrolling.
One thing that I always observed is that there is a huge difference between people who enrolled in a CS program to learn programming, and people who learned programming years before enrolling in CS.
I wouldn't say it's a recent phenomenon. Hackers have been making unflattering jokes about mediocrity in corporate programmers at least as far back as the 1970s.
I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post.
Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.
> I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic.
The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.
Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.
I taught myself how to program as a teenager by… programming. While I didn’t have an academic background, I was perfectly capable of contributing to OSS and working. Rarely ever did I think “I wish I had a degree to do this.” The little bit of academics I did need I also self taught, like time complexity. The only case really where the degree may be helpful is leetcode type interview questions where you need to know the algorithm.
So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.
There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.
The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
A lot of our industry was built by people without CS degrees. Actually, I doubt that there are too many newly minted CS graduates able to code anything using an assembler.
The best developer I've ever worked with had a degree in Philosophy. He leveraged React in a way that was elegant back when React was still fairly new. It was super hard to scaffold back then, but we got it done and completed a pretty important project with it. It was shipped, hosted, and delivered into production for the company to use on time (it was somewhat of an internal tool, with a public-facing side for data collection).
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.
They cull resumes in the pile by degree - you can get in with a reference nowadays but most places the front door is closed unless you have a pedigree.
Maybe things are different now, but I'm on my third year with my current employer, and I found them organically, sending my resume out on Indeed. Admittedly the MS stuff was largely kicked off by contacts, but that's the only instance throughout my career. And those connections were gained through other work, of course.
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.
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 think just because you've studied something for years doesn't mean you're good at it. I've interviewed plenty curious hackers with no degree who are miles ahead of CS people with degrees.
Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives.
I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.
If you already have the necessary skills and knowledge, and connections, then wasting years of your youth (when you have the most productive potential) in extended schooling is going to be a disadvantage. If.
Here in UK it's "well known" that going to a prestigious school like Eton is about being in one class with kids of prime ministers, presidents and oil sheikhs, so you have those connections for life and you can always call up on those. In that context going to university and studying almost anything could be a waste of time if you have someone who can help you get into places straight away.
On the whole, there's a difference between 'got accepted to Harvard and dropped out after 2 years to start MegaCorp', and 'never went in the first place'
As someone who never went in the first place: that difference is rather small for many (definitely not all) industries, with software engineering being one of them.
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.
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?
It's somewhat relevant in the context of Google only because the mythos behind the early part of the company (two Stanford PhDs, etc) and also because the general vibe at least in the early part of the company was really like it was kind of a big university of its own. Boatloads of Masters and PhD students, lots of talk about which school you came from, blah blah blah. Complete with a form "publish or perish" and "poster board sessions" and stuff that all felt very foreign to me when I joined (as someone not coming from academia).
It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place.
I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result.
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.
Yea, this seems like a submarine article. You won’t even get a human to look at your resume before the ATS trashes it if you don’t have the credentials they’re looking for and they still have those.
I checked at random on their careers page for non entry level roles, ones you’d expect that you don’t need to rely on education as a signal like for entry level, and they are still having minimum qualifications of a bachelors, and preferred qualifications of a masters
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.
We are taught that schooling level is related to intelligence, then we internalise that concept, then we make silly assumptions based on that concept.
Plenty of highly intelligent people don't get educated because they see through the farce, or they decide that being submissive to the system is bad, or they test poorly (e.g. dyslexic), or their intelligence has found better opportunities.
Higher education does not make you more intelligent. Nor is it a good filter/measure of intelligence. Too many people chase it for status.
I always remember one very smart lady skiting to me about aiming for B grades and manipulating lecturers since she only needed a degree to pass HR requirements. I wasn't that smart.
I try to understand my successful friends that left school at 15. Unfortunately that is a biased sample of people without higher education: they are very intelligent, effective and hard-working.
I am not aware of studies, but my experience agrees with this and I see nothing surprising in it.
In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades.
The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
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.
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.
So take it off the resume. The only time they need to know your address is when HR adds you to onboarding so they can pay taxes. There’s more nuance than this but ultimately it’s not really that important. Some states require the employer to post salaries or do this or that to do business in the state. For those companies that refuse to hire from your state, refuse to do business with those companies. Easy.
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.
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.
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, 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”?
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.
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.
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.
This isn't true and hasn't been true for 20 years, if ever.
Maybe in the very beginning they had such a bar, I wasn't there. As late as 2007 they were still recruiting on-campus at non-T20 schools like Michigan State. Much of my team are from various Big Ten/similar universities that aren't top 20 but are solid (plenty are also from more prestigious universities, but unless you explicitly ask someone at lunch about their education no one ever talks about it). I've been involved in hiring and interviewing for 7+ years there and have done interviews with people from all caliber of school - top 10, middle of the pack US, HBCU, international - so there's no such requirement for that now either.
"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.
I'm a senior engineer and have no degree. I never get offended by people making comments like this. If we're both in similar roles, making quality contributions, and are progressing in our careers, the only difference between us is, I didn't spending 50k-100k on a degree.
Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.
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.
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