A bachelors degree in CompSci, based solely on the requirements drastically reduces the number of candidates who can actually produce results, but chose not to apply because they feel their lack of qualifications will immediately disqualify them (or some will just lie). On the flip side, it might give them some outstanding candidates who have actually gone the distance and can think proactively. That's not to say people without BA's can't do the same. It's a dual-edged sword for a position like this.
Preface: I am a virtual recruiter.
Employers have found success at shrinking their candidate pool when adding even the slightest text in their copy when it comes to ability requirements. Some of my early jobs required skills and qualifications I never achieved or experienced; but I landed the job because my resume was slammed pack with solutions, and details of problem solving (as opposed to creating a resume that told the hiring manager nothing more than what my daily tasks were)
Dropbox may have plans to groom this web engineer into a larger role within the organization, and that often works well within organizations; providing the avenues for upward mobility. However they'd do themselves, and their potential job candidates a favor by indicating this up front instead of effectively discouraging great prospects the opportunity to apply simply because of a degree requirement that will lead to a career trajectory that far overshoots roles and responsibilities listed.
A four year degree in computer science for someone to be a web developer and an end-user support technician is asking for overqualified candidates who will very likely get more attractive offers later on down the road. But that's not to say Dropbox wont make their stay worthwhile, overqualified or under.
Shameless: I'd love to reach out to the DB team and talk about this.
The issue that I have is that some companies play this game where they ask for the sun, moon and stars in the requirements because they think that it will draw in only the best people, but others actually make their requirements exactly what they want.
Some people apply to job postings with the assumption that the requirements are only a rough guideline, while others apply only if they exactly meet the qualifications.
When you hear hiring managers complaining about how they put up a job posting for a Perl developer with 5 years of Perl experience, but got 100s of applications from people that are fresh out of college and haven't even heard of Perl, hiring practices like the ones you advocate are at fault. If job seekers can never know when to trust that the qualifications being asked for are really the ones that employers want, then there will always be a disconnect.
obviously if you are an amazing engineer without a degree, of course come talk to us. arash, my cofounder and the slacker that he is, does not have his bachelor's degree :)
so hope you can give us the benefit of the doubt that we didn't intend to exclude qualified people
why ask for it then - esp if your co-founder doesn't have one yet you trust his skills enough to found a company together?
asks someone who barely has the UK equivalent of a high school graduation (because he was programming for his first startup at 16), no degree, and had a very successful engineering-orientated career so far
Production quality HTML, CSS and JavaScript aren't trivial by any stretch of the imagination. A good background in computer science should help out quite a lot.
BS. I was hired as a web-dev to do front-end HTML/CSS/Javascript at the ripe age of 18... and that was to work on one of the most prestigious websites on the Internet, the BBC News Website.
I already had been doing front-end stuff for several years. I wasn't any less able to perform the job than the CS graduate peers who started in the same role the same time as me.
11 years later, I've not done badly for someone with no formal CS training.
I agree with you, which is why I didn't say "should be required", I said "should help out quite a lot". I was responding more to the original posts implication (which I may have mis-understood) that front-end engineering isn't a demanding discipline.
I found stuff I learned in my CS degree helped me understand closures in JavaScript for example, and the compilers course I did has helped out with a bunch of things.
Not necessarily. Learning to program C++, learning how to design a programming language, and learning about Big-O notation are arguably somewhat removed from web development.
I have a BS in CompSci, and I don't feel like I needed to get it to do quality web programming. Design patterns, AVC, etc were all things that I learned outside of my degree.
I think that people's definitions of "quality" web programming vary a lot. Google's Web UI Engineer interviews do ask for C++/Java knowledge, how to design a programming language, and Big-O notation, for example. And then people complain about how Google's interviews have nothing to do with reality.
The thing is - they do. Everything I was tested on in my interview was pretty analogous to something I've faced in my job. If you don't know your server's language, how will you write code that interfaces with the client-side software you're writing? If you don't know how to design programming languages, how do you evaluate various templating systems on the server side or JS libraries on the client side? If you don't know Big-O notation, what'll you choose when faced with the choice of attaching event handlers to each child in a DOM tree vs. using event bubbling and dispatching on the particular target? (Never mind that most Google interview candidates don't know about event bubbling in the first place and wouldn't be able to write a tree-walk if their job depended upon it.)
I'm a web UI engineer. My last two days at work were spent writing a JIT with LLVM for a templating language. Google Wave is all based on implementing operational transforms (a grad-level CS concept) in JavaScript. Maps has a fair share of computer-graphics concepts embedded in it.
You don't need to understand CS to do a web UI, but that limits you to the same type of web UIs that other people have already done. Pulling JQuery or Prototype snippets off the web and sticking them together. There's a whole other level of performance and flexibility you get by understanding the fundamentals, which most web developers completely ignore, and then they wonder why they don't need CS concepts.
You don't need a bachelor's degree in computer science to do any job. The employing organization choosing to make that a requirement for hiring you is another matter entirely.
Preface: I am a virtual recruiter.
Employers have found success at shrinking their candidate pool when adding even the slightest text in their copy when it comes to ability requirements. Some of my early jobs required skills and qualifications I never achieved or experienced; but I landed the job because my resume was slammed pack with solutions, and details of problem solving (as opposed to creating a resume that told the hiring manager nothing more than what my daily tasks were)
Dropbox may have plans to groom this web engineer into a larger role within the organization, and that often works well within organizations; providing the avenues for upward mobility. However they'd do themselves, and their potential job candidates a favor by indicating this up front instead of effectively discouraging great prospects the opportunity to apply simply because of a degree requirement that will lead to a career trajectory that far overshoots roles and responsibilities listed.
A four year degree in computer science for someone to be a web developer and an end-user support technician is asking for overqualified candidates who will very likely get more attractive offers later on down the road. But that's not to say Dropbox wont make their stay worthwhile, overqualified or under.
Shameless: I'd love to reach out to the DB team and talk about this.