[bradleyland]

> The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do.

As long as we accept that it is one way of proving you can do something that takes a long time to do. I'm not sure that's what the author was saying when he talked about the signaling of a college degree though. It's more a matter of the acceptance of the dogma of the degree, not the signal that the application can commit to long term projects.

More directly, it's fine to look at an applicant who has a college degree and say, "this person was willing to put in the time and effort to get a college degree", so long as you're willing to evaluate other long term commitments with a similar measure. For example, if I see that a developer has a Github profile containing a handful of active libraries with commit activity dating back a year or more, I'm similarly impressed.

[vorg]

Both Github profiles and college degrees can be gamed. Many people cheat in exams, copy assignments, and send doubles along to aptitude tests. They clone the base code for their Github projects from somewhere else, only dressing it up with infrastructural differences like they would a college programming assignment.

Those who didn't put in the time for either a degree or Github history will often lie on their CV about them. An interviewer will often not check up when employing someone so they'll have something against the new hire later on if they want to get rid of them quickly.

Developers who don't do college but genuinely can code projects don't apply for jobs anyway, they apply for funds then employ people.