[tombert]

In 2016 I was still a dropout and they did an interview with me. I also bombed it.

I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.

[ilc]

Maybe quite the opposite. Wall Street and Finance is can be very aggressive and learn it for yourself.

I learned math of finance from a professor I'm pretty sure was quanting on the Street at the time.

When I told him one of the constants in our little trading game was off by a factor of 10x, he said prove it. My final talk was: "How to make 2.3 million dollars in 30 days using options."

The real lesson wasn't about pricing options. It was about being ruthless when the time came.

[tombert]

Fair enough; I wasn't applying for a quant position, just a software job. Looking back, I suspect the real reason that they were even considering me was because I had professional Haskell and Scala experience on my resume, and so I looked appealing, particularly if a dropout was learning it for fun.

What I find amusing is that I'm categorically a much better functional programmer now than I was then, with professional F# experience with a lot of Clojure to boot, but they haven't responded back to any of my applications in the last three years.

[cess11]

They might want to shape developers on the job and bet that it's on average cheaper to do with functional-curious people rather than those that have professional experience in ML-languages.

[tombert]

Yeah fair, I definitely have developed pretty strong opinions on the "right" way to do things in functional languages, and those opinions likely do differ somewhat from theirs, at least in some cases.

I think if I want to work at Jane Street now, I either need to finish my PhD, or get a Masters degree from a sexy school to "cleanse" my WGU degree (despite the fact that I don't think I know much less than the average Ivy League graduate, though obviously I'm a biased audience).

[cess11]

One reason for recruiting from 'high end' unis is the kind of social networks those graduates are more likely to belong to. They are also more likely to have access to more candidates that you would like to evaluate and possibly give an offer, compared to 'lower end' unis.

I'm not saying that I think this order of things is jolly good, but from the perspective of this kind of business sector it makes sense. Personally I avoid finance related sectors, a stint at a casino operator to get some experience on the CV was enough for me.

[moneywoes]

How did you find WGU? Has it helped?

[tombert]

Sort of a difficult question to answer if I'm being honest, because I'm kind of a strange outlier case.

I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week.

I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU.

(If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research)

So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school.

I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it.

[1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.