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?
It is odd that jobs which don't require this knowledge test for it.
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
For most people this routing when they are 10 (or so) decides what routes are open to them later in life. There are exceptions to this (my host sister went to Realschule, and later took the Abiture, the the test that got her into college), but they are pretty rare.
I have always been a bit leery of choices made so early in life, but it works pretty well in Germany.
In somewhere like Iran you may see very high graduation rates in part because you may need to be selected as best student (a former employer I interviewed with, the owner got into college because he was best math student in a class of something like 1000 children.)
Dropout rate because of failure to adapt, of course, would be a good thing. Those who aren't fit for a career in engineering for instance were rapidly ejected into a different program from my public college I went to (like 25+% ejected first year, memory says it was more like 50%), which meant very few people wasted lots of money on a dead career path.
Another factor is that people take life more seriously in Iran (based on my very limited data on non-urban Iranians, and the US). There is virtually no social bubble that does not think degrees are important. “Engineer” is used as a general title of prestige, used as an umbrella term for anyone rich who is not a medical doctor.
Somewhat relatedly, college in Germany is more focused on the theoretical than it is in the US. A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
I very much appreciated the way my public college worked. Very few who started electrical engineering finished. But they would accept damn near anyone. The few that survived had the world in their pocket.
>A lot of engineering college programs in the US would be closer to a German technical school than a German college.
Must depend on the college. My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics. There was so much math, I only use a small fraction of it today. Maybe 10% of the engineering degree was practical labs. The engineering technology programs are maybe what you're thinking of? They flip those numbers on their head. It's hard for me to imagine any 4 year degree except mathematics and physics having more math than engineering programs I'm familiar with.
Sure, but if you're trying to avoid false negatives the German system is already poor. In the US work is the goal and there's a lot of talk about finding a job you love. The German system is mainly focused on minimizing the number of people who can't find work. In Germany there's also less of an income gap between professions than in the US (a German doctor or highly paid computer scientist only makes 2x what a tradesperson or retail worker makes https://www.iamexpat.de/career/working-in-germany/salary-pay...).
> My experience, as well as most my peers, was that engineering was about 60% raw mathematics.
Was the mathematics mainly proofs? My US university required a minimum of 2 classes with a significant programming project for a Computer Science degree, and many students took 6 or more courses with significant programming projects. My semester studying abroad in Germany, there was only 1 course offered that even had a serious project component. There was a heavy focus on proofs, and all the hardware architecture courses offered were entirely structured around formal verification of hardware.
Computer Science and Computer Engineering are typically significantly different curricula. Engineering is generally part of a school of engineering. Computer science is generally in college of science. This is a generalization of course. This is purely pedantic, but most ABET engineers consider a CS major a scientist while a computer engineer as an engineer. My comments were limited to engineering programs.
In Germany, the equivalent major is Informatik, which literally translates to English as Information Science but is basically Computer Science. There are some colleges that offer technische Informatik, which would be Computer Engineering, and a degree in engineering, but as far as I can tell that's rarer.
Computer Science isn't officially an engineering degree, but I definitely wouldn't consider it a science degree. The only scientific experiments were in gen ed physics courses.
There is also the Gesamtschule, which combines the three tracks (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) into a single school.
This is in North Rhine-Westphalia.
If for whatever reason the demographics at each track are not the same as those of the nation it will get called racist and shut down quick.
In Germany, our system is far more inclusive at all levels which means we don't have that much of a problem with early stage ethnic discrimination. Not to say we don't have any problems at all (far from it, in fact!) but it's nowhere near as bad as in the US, and additionally for once we Germans don't have historical baggage that's keeping us down.
It's only the pseudo-social scientists who can't do proper data analysis (finding out the real confounding variable) that push the college propaganda