The last 10 years have been hardly typical years for the job market, at least in software. I can't predict the future, but education is (or at least was) supposed to be a long term investment, and it might be a fallacy to assume the next 30-40 years will be like the previous 10.

In a 20+ year career in software engineering I've never once been told I didn't get a job because I didn't have a college degree.

Have there been any times you applied and didn't get a job?

I ask because it is very unlikely an employer will straight up tell you that this was the reason.

Amazon engineering staff told me they wanted to hire me but could not because of some college degree policy they used to have. I dodged a bullet really, now I know better than to work for a company like Amazon.

While there certainly are a lot of companies that don't care about your degree, there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one. It literally gets auto-filtered. (Especially with less than 5 years of experience.) And as much as I'd like to say that you don't want to work for those kinds of people anyway, in my experience it is at best loosely connected to how your day to day work life actually looks like.

> there are at least as many companies that won't even look at your resume without one

And it’s about to get worse. You could get a job without a degree or any relevant experience in the 90’s because there were so many to be had and so few degrees to be found. Once you were in, you could stay in by virtue of your experience. This isn’t the case any more; it’s about to be impossible to get an entry level development job without a relevant degree. I think sometimes HN commenters forget that there’s a whole generation of kids in high school today who didn’t work for .com startups throughout the 90’s…

Oddly, I find the most prestigious companies are the ones who care the least. Probably because they have the skills to assess candidates properly, whereas LOCAL STATE BANK manager doesn't know why she needs someone with Spring Boot experience, and has to rely on the much noisier degrees and years of exp.

I think the biggest problem our industry has is tying internships to 'enroled in college or university'. Eliminate that requirement, and now people have a path in. Software development is a somewhere between a trade and an amateur mathematics program.

>Oddly, I find the most prestigious companies are the ones who care the least.

Hmm, I wonder about that actually. From what I've heard (hearsay, really), for a normal application Google and Microsoft won't look at it without a degree. But maybe they don't really look at it anyway. The only big company that I've heard doesn't really care is Nvidia, so props to them I suppose, but again, I heard that from one guy who's working there who might not have been entirely honest about prior contact with them, so I really can't say for sure. It would definitely be interesting though.

After a certain amount of experienced it isn't asked about anymore. Perhaps because a lot of what you would have learned would be outdated anyway or you would have picked it up on the job. When starting out tho at some you can get by by shown competencies, software you made or contributed to, tests, etc but it can matter at a lot of places

Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system.

We are seeing the big tech companies more than ever use algorithmic puzzle questions, and startups using "culture fit" as easy go-to filtration systems.

But, I imagine education might be an even simpler filter if labor supply keeps growing. It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.

> Well it is certainly possible that the labor market becomes even more saturated in software and education falls back into being an easy go-to natural filtration system.

Education is a shitty filtration system. Work-examples and/or skill-demonstration based interviews like the ones used for programmers are much better. The only reason that so many other industries rely on education is that they don't have as good ways of testing the actual skills of job applicants (and/or because testing doesn't scale that well - e.g. you can give a coding test to every programmer, but can't give a "surgery test" to every doctor).

> It certainly makes for easy automated filtering if a person doesn't have a top-20 school listed on their resume.

That seems like a very weak hiring strategy.

I'd imagine the top 10% of CS majors at a mid-tier school might be better than the bottom 10% at a top-tier school.

Also, college rankings can include all sorts of factors like endowments that might only be weakly correlated with the quality of the education, which itself is probably very difficult to measure.

Plus you're going to have a hiring bias against self-learners or those that can't afford a top 20 school.

A quick quiz or sample of prior work is a much better filter than a college name.

If there’s a real downturn we’ll see the big boys cut jobs—maybe a lot. Or even just some regulatory changes (especially reigning in spying and fruits-of-spying monetization) without a broader downturn. Wages downmarket would suffer a ton with all those top-comp folks with (by definition) above-average résumés and work history suddenly looking for a job. Probably upward mobility (into lead/senior/et c.) will suffer a lot. Doesn’t take more supply, lower demand is something we will see again.

Hopefully there are more people like you and less HR depts looking at colleges first or asking random and irrelevant CS questions

This makes me extremely happy to hear and it seems others are following the same path! Good on you. For me, it just seems like the logical way to go. Progress comes for us all, no matter how many years we've carried a tradition. If the colleges are struggling with low enrollment, it must be time to go back to the drawing board.

I work with a number of people who are fixated and super judged about brand-name school when hiring, especially Stanford. Single anecdotal example though.