[doctorless]

> Autodidact people are nearly always terrible programmers because they haven’t learned how to think.

Going off of the StackOverflow 2018 survey, only ~48% of professional developers have a CS, computer engineering or software engineering degree. If you’re willing to write off over half of potential applicants because your interviewing process clearly didn’t work well enough to verify the applicant can code, then sure, help inflate the degree bloat, but just understand, that even in countries where education is “free”, it comes at a cost that has to be picked up somewhere.

[eksemplar]

It’s a cost benefit sort of thing, the most expensive mistake i can make is hiring the wrong person. By requiring a degree I minimize the risk and I also save a lot of money by not having to test for technical aptitude.

If you’ve completed a CS candidate degre at a Danish university, it tells me you would be able to write a quick search on our white board if I asked you to. Not because you’ve memorized it but because you’ve been taught problem solving. I’ll sometimes ask what candidates think if test-first or something like SOLID, but I don’t really care about their technical knowledge on it, what I’m evaluating is whether they give me an honest answer or if they’re telling me what they think I want to hear.

Sure I could test people, but that would require 2-4 employees who planned, executed and evaluated the tests, which is expensive, and the university’s or the academy you graduated from has already done that. So what’s the point of it?

A typical Danish job interview is 30 minutes of trying to learn your personality, because you’ve already given us your credentials. For important jobs, we’ll even test your personality and use that as a basis for the interview talks.

I haven’t made a bad hire for more than a decade so I’m really not worried about missing out. Because hiring isn’t really about finding the right match, it’s about finding a good match.