[cweagans]

You can be a terrible engineer with a degree. You can also be an excellent engineer without one. To me, that pretty clearly makes the case that a CS degree is not an indicator of future success in a given role.

IMO, CS degrees don't prove anything other than a) you had the means to attend a university, b) you learn best by having somebody else guide your learning, and c) you can survive the classes designed to "weed people out". Personally, I'm a lot more interested in interviewing people who may have come from more humble backgrounds, who learn really well on their own, and who don't entertain artificial barriers to entry.

[908B64B197]

> You can be a terrible engineer with a degree. You can also be an excellent engineer without one. To me, that pretty clearly makes the case that a CS degree is not an indicator of future success in a given role.

Sure there are exceptions, but what about looking at the signal to noise ratio?

Having one candidate clearly not employable out of 20 from an engineering school/CS program is much better than interviewing 19 unemployable people from a bootcamp to finally get to the one that's actually a good hire.

[cweagans]

I don’t think those are exceptions. The signal to noise ratio is about the same (at least in my admittedly anecdotal experience of being a hiring manager off and on since 2013 or so). Nobody is truly unemployable. Filtering through 19 candidates to get to the 1 who really shines is just part of the job. Filtering to just CS grads or whatever doesn’t change that.

I just need somebody who can do the job. New CS grads usually can’t - not without a ton of handholding. If I’m going to hire somebody and I’m going to have to provide a ton of guidance and mentoring up front, what difference does it make if I’m mentoring a CS grad or a self taught programmer?

A caveat: CS theory is useful. Given a choice between two otherwise equal bootcamp grads, I’m probably going to pick the one that has some deeper understanding of CS foundations (or potentially even better, an enthusiastic interest in learning that material). I truly do not care about the credential though.

[908B64B197]

Curious what's the location/comp like for your hiring pipeline.

That goes against my observations, but perhaps we're not hiring from the same bracket.

[cweagans]

One was a small tech company in Sacramento (hiring local or remote) at ~$80k for junior - $150k+ senior. One was a multinational corporation (not a tech company) paying $75k-$300k (junior - senior) for US based people. One was a different multinational corp (web agency) paying $50k-$130k (junior - senior; this was 2013 or so).

Idk. My conclusion is that hiring a software engineer is like hiring an artist: without a portfolio, the requisite skills are barely quantifiable and rely mostly on the word of the applicant. There’s really no way to determine the quality of an engineers work without actually seeing that work. Therefore, the most useful interview is to actually pay them to do something. I’ve had a lot of success with this approach and it eliminates the need to consider credentials at all.

[908B64B197]

For junior positions that's 2-3x lower than what I'm talking about. Especially that close to the Bay.

Different hiring pipelines. I suppose the pool of CS grads has already been thinned.