Around ~22 months ago, I had a cold call from someone in HR asking me, "Did you finish your degree?" It was unusual. I'm not sure where they got the idea that I was "working on it" in the first place. This was happening around the same time that we had been acquired, so I imagine that it was related.
More recently, around the end of last summer, a mid-level on my team had apparently heard from someone else that I didn't have a degree and was probing me about my experience, etc.
It also came up in conversation during the Christmas holiday, with some friends, while playing an online game. This group of friends is also in tech, though they're a little younger than I am. In that conversation, they were surprised to learn that I didn't have a degree but held patents in the CV space (work done on a bootstrapped start-up that myself and a friend/co-founder worked on in the early/mid 2010s).
There are other examples from the past but I don't really hang onto these sorts of things.
I would add that I don't think any of these were bias or malicious or anything like that.
Sure, it may rarely come up in discussions but it doesn't imply someone is inferior to someone else.
The kind of people who believes formal education trumps everything are not in touch with the reality of education.
You probably did way more learning in your professional career than most graduates do during their degree.
I took my degree in CS while I was working (lots of sleepless nights and ill prepared exams) and just because I didn't want to preclude myself from the opportunity of working for some big company with antiquated requirements.
Meanwhile Running Start gets you your 2 year degree by the time you graduate, so 2 years less debt, and 2 years ahead of everybody else. The trade school had game programming classes, automotive, electronics classes... which were things I was actually interested in learning at the time and were not remotely available at the HS itself.
But if you do either of those two things, the high school loses and FTE count, and the money gets diverted to the other school. So the HS tends to hardly tell anybody about them. Not to mention, they made the trade school seem like a place where delinquents go who can't handle high school and get into college. Looking back, I wish I had known more about the trade school, because there were so many more interesting classes there!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2017/01/17/obama...
Take this anecdata with a grain of salt; it's nearly 20 years old.
The European governments didn't distort the market to make universities as grand and expensive as the American ones (where the price raised 1500% since the 80s).
European universities are sad places which get the job done for relatively little money. You're still spending 3-5+ years of your life though, and that's a currency you can't earn more of.
People have been saying this for decades, but is it still really a thing? Perhaps on the coasts? If you're in a small or mid-sized city in the midwest or the south, it's almost exactly the opposite...
> We also continue to interview in ways that are more accommodating for college graduates and attendees, regardless of whether it's needed or not.
Wouldn't Leetcode-style interviewing be more egalitarian? Assuming self-taught people know their stuff, I guess? The alternative in other engineering disciplines is to just check the degree and do some soft interviews, right?
Or do you mean something else?
More than anything that’s why students go to college (source: college students).
That doesn't ring true for my case. I'm sure it's incredibly anecdotal but college level networking lasted 2 years top for me - and it was all ex-coworkers from there on.
Everything from bonding (or not) with your roommate, to going out late at night with your hallmates, to meeting boys/girls and dealing with the strange dramas that ensue, your first off campus party, cramming in the libraries at 4am for exams, hanging out in the [insert major] lounge and complaining about your professors, tailgating at football games... just all the little incidental things that are part of college life. People who went through college can automatically bond over their separate experiences of these things.
I think at some point we'll all be screwed by automation (including teachers, developers, baristas and doctors) and too poor people won't have a reason to exist.
Better to get rich and independent from society before we can print human-like workers in a factory.
But, many (most?) people are status-conscious and equal pay != equal prestige. College is primarily about opening doors to higher prestige.
While you don't have to have a degree to get into tech, having one certainly makes things easier
