I'm a grant writing consultant (see www.seliger.com for more if you're curious) and zero clients out of 1,000+ over 20 years have asked about our education level(s). They want to know if we can write their proposals. It may be that the closer you are to the work itself, so to speak, and the further you are from the bureaucratic apparatus, the more "Can you do it?" questions matter (and can be measured) and the less "What degree do you have?" questions matter.

Some others in this thread have noted that there might be a credentials "arms race" going on—I would add, in particular, in healthcare, education in government, per Tyler Cowen's book The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will( Eventually) Feel Better. Parts of big business may have signaling / credentialing disease too.

Bryan Caplan is writing The Case Against Education, and he argues that too much of education is a signalling arms race. Here is one introduction to his thought: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_....

Yeah but you are a consultant, it is a slightly different role than trying to convince someone to make you an employee, though I understand there may be a similar sort of salesmanship going on. They may assume a consultant should have whatever qualifications or they wouldn't be in business, whatever.

Also, you should not that in many cases consultants in other professions often give full resumes including education (even pictures) in their proposals to RFPs, I would think you would be familiar with that in your work.

Anyway, as far as the "can you do it" stuff .... I think HN too often writes off university as a place one might learn "how to do it" .... Oh well. =)

It's a result of supply and demand. In other industries there is too much supply, people pile on the degrees (and go deeper into debt) to be more competitive. Employers then raise the bar for hiring and people still end up with crappy low-paying jobs.

In software, more supply = hiring people who can just get the job done and not worrying so much about credentials.

> In software, more supply = hiring people who can just get the job done and not worrying so much about credentials.

And yet, we keep hearing about the constant shortage of programmers. Hmm, I wonder why that is . . .

did you mean this? "In software, _less_ supply..."

yes. :/

Can that really be asserted for anything but standard development/architect roles? It seems to me that anyone who wants to get into serious algorithm design (or the big buzz in ML), does need more advanced technical background. If you look at the technical foundations of a BS in the US, it is actually quite shallow from a technical perspective.

This is something that's doubly frustrating for dedicated autodidacts. For some areas, once you start diving into them (and giving up all of your free time in the process to make any progress), you realize just how much more time is necessary to get to the "baseline" / "start of the art / be able to make a useful contribution (and how useful it is to be in an immersive learning environment surrounded by people you can collaborate with.)

You can easily hit a wall even with all the books and MOOCs at your disposal, due to having to do all your learning after work when you're tired or on weekends.

To have to go into debt in order to work on interesting things is unfortunate; just how many people who could have made interesting contributions in a variety of areas never do so because of that?

Studying yourself into web dev and such is eminently possible, but if you want to do, for example, deep learning work at even one-half the Richard Socher-level, you almost surely need to go for an advanced degree. It might be different if you're a superhuman autodidact rather than just a "standard" one, but there are a lot more of the latter (a set that I include myself in) than the former.

You're right that more technical areas (ML, algorithms, maybe even systems) expect more advanced degrees.

But there is far more demand for standard development/architect roles and even those roles command a generous salary.