undefined | Better HN

0 pointsnoonespecial13y ago0 comments

Hmm. I didn't specifically mention college education, but you've got something at the end there.

I am a college trained programmer, but I do identify strongly as the second type. When I really think about it, I'm forced to admit that if I was in charge of a large company's HR policy, that policy would probably prevent hiring someone like me for all but the most junior of positions.

A smaller company might have a lot more freedom in this regard. "You'll never hire one of the second kind" might better have been said as "big companies never hire the second kind".

0 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

orangethirty13y ago· 1 in thread

Doesn't it make you think? Given the ratio of bad programmers vs good ones, should we even bother with degrees? From my experience, there are more bad programmers with degrees than there are without them. Like this project I just took over. It involves fixing the whole stack of a company, because some guys who had Masters degrees and had worked in IBM and NASA (two guys) managed to build a system so bad, that SQL injection is the worst of my worries (they never sanitize or check the contents of the GET or POST array (PHP)). But I, who lack a degree, much less a master's, am going in to get them set up with nginx, Python/Django and Mongo. Plus write re-write some custom systems because the geniuses used global variables everywhere.

But any big company HR dept. would hire them in a heartbeat.

Disclosure: I don't have a college degree. But I don't want to work on your big company either. (:

DigitalSea13y ago

Self-taught programmer here and wholeheartedly agree. I've seen a lot of bad code from developers with high-level degrees and supposedly aeons worth of experience over me and yet it is I who goes out my way to write decent code and fix the professionals mistakes, I'm not exactly the first choice for a lot of companies because I wouldn't look as good as Tommy G with a masters degree would on a proposal document tendering for a big project as opposed to I who hasn't got any sort of showy trophy degree for a company to parade around.

Too many companies place emphasis on degrees instead of capabilities. I might not have a degree but that's because I thrive and learn a lot easier when I'm teaching myself as opposed to absorbing and listening to someone else drone on about things that might not interest me. At least when you're self-taught you only learn the parts that matter to you and so, you're more likely to learn them correctly.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse