Of course the flip side is Thiel has been so amazingly vocal about his views on higher education you'd think he would have made a his staff aware that this requirement wasn't aligned with his views.

In the end it is mostly a depiction of how having a degree is a door opener because it is a default filter for almost all hiring managers. Even hiring managers employed by a vocal advocate of skipping college.

The job requirements and qualifications for an entrepreneur and a hedge fund analyst are so different that it's not necessarily inconsistent

Has Thiel been careful to always specify that his anti-higher-education-in-the-U.S. stance only applies to entrepreneurial people?

Peter Thiel's exact words on the topic:

"The elitist view in the U.S. is that even if people concede that college is not for education, the caveat will be that, well, surely it’s for all the smart people. What we want to suggest is that there are some very smart and very talented people who don’t need college."

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/257531/back-future-pe...

"...are there 20 of those 60,000 who should perhaps not go to college--that does not seem like a terribly controversial statement. That the more talented you are, the more narrow the set of choices you should make? And that if you're a really smart person, the only thing in the world you can do is to go to Harvard?"

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20114584-281/talking-tech-...

I wholeheartedly agree. In this particular case they may be the opposite ones.

I think that's pretty correct, the entrepreneur's role is to disrupt the status quo, which is pretty much the opposite of how finance seems to operate.

Even if he personally approved of this opening. There is nothing wrong with it.

The problem is that these reporters that Peter Thiel is anti-education or at least anti-higher education. He isn't. He has a problem with the current model of education. He thinks that there are more efficient models of education that are worth trying.

It's not black and white, it's much more nuanced. Thiel cannot go back in time and change the education model in the past. In the future if Theil's model works we will see more ads looking for people who started companies.

I don't agree with everything he says but I can respect his desire to change higher.

Not to mention this is standard boilerplate: it's not even listed as a hard requirement (should have, not must have). If someone is deterred from as much as submitting a resume because they don't have one of the "Desired Skills", odds are they shouldn't be anywhere near a startup hedge-fund or any other kind of enterprise that requires taking initiative.

Heck if I wanted to work there I would apply even though it said 'must have' and I didn't.

Job ads requirements are basically a way to scare away those who are limited by artificial restrictions.

Not that I want to make every thread a "sexism in tech" discussion, but I have personally noticed more women feeling intimidated and discouraged by overblown and strangely specific bullshit requirements in job listings. So, if you're wondering why you don't get many female applicants to your job listings, maybe you should stop asking for experience in every language from Ada to ZPL.

Nah the reason you get so few applicants is that there are so few females in programming to beging with.

I don't think this true: despite all talk of elitism, CS classes at universities like Stanford are actually more diverse than technology companies.

Yes, having seen both sides of the process. The minimum requirements tend to be a lot more flexible than people think.

Doesn't this get absurdly game theory, though? Some minimum requirements aren't, so applicants ignore 80% of the minimum requirements, so employers increase the minimum requirements to get applicants that are a little more qualified, so applicants start ignoring even more...

Perhaps. But if that firm just so happens to be named "Thiel Capital", I think it's fair to assume that Thiel has some responsibility, wouldn't you agree?

In any case, the job posting has already been fixed:

www.linkedin.com/jobs/jobs-Investment-Analyst-w-2901306

  Quantitative skills in a field such as computer science, 
  mathematics, statistics, physics, or engineering; no 
  college degree required

Thiel actually believes in what he's saying.

Just curious but does it mean that having quantitative skills in those fields implies that you probably have some job experience in those fields?

I cannot imagine high schools providing substantial education to develop skills in those fields.

There aren't too many colleges which offer courses on Rails, Django, Coffeescript, or Nodejs. Smart people manage to get by with the internet, without going hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt.

Well, if he is serious about changing the system, wouldn't it be comparitively easy for him to start with his own companies and lead by example?

Thiel is, first and foremost, advancing his own interests by enouraging students to drop out and pursue startups in which he will have a stake.

He wants to hide this among otherwise valid criticisms of the system. But he really can't.

Unless he's paying you not to attend, you are foolish not to attend university because of what he says (versus your own reasons).

As if we should call out the "CABLE" News Network for having a web site. So silly.

Agreed. From the headline, I thought he was hiring a personal assistant.