Without the "University Degree" filter, you end up with a lot more candidates that claim to be self-taught. If you're only looking at a handful of candidates, applying the filter might not make sense, but if you're looking at 1000 candidates, trimming it down by even 25% is probably pretty productive.

off topic, but i can't help but note the irony of a company that claims to not care about credentials, but under the "meet our execs" section shows a helper who is a BA graduate of claremont mckenna.

https://iamexec.com/meet_our_execs

the company may not care about credentials for hiring, but for marketing purposes at least they are creating the illusion that their menial helpers are in fact credentialed.

further off topic - it's a little depressing to me to see the "high tech" cradle of silicon valley creating a service to organize menial labor. wow, house cleaning online is sexy? i must be dreaming, is it 1999 again?

One of the biggest problems in the US right now is employment and job creation. If we can create a system by which people work for each other incrementally more because of a new hiring interface, then maybe we are doing some part to address that. Perhaps not as sexy as creating Facebook, but our customers are growing in number, like the service, and you can extrapolate how this might be used by a broader audience outside of Silicon Valley.

Regarding listing one of our Exec's degrees: credentialing clearly matters to people outside the company (customers), and there's little we can do to immediately change that. When we talk about credentialing not mattering for hiring, it's for core team employees (people who build the product), for which there are generally other metrics we can evaluate on.

appreciate you responding to my somewhat snarky comment. for the record, while i appreciate that facebook's concurrent user and database/data challenges are complex problems, the actual product itself isn't that sexy to me in terms of what the user gets for all that effort (i'm thinking about the news feed, photo storage, etc.) But i don't use much on the site so maybe i'm missing out.

i think robots picking artichokes would be cool in terms of both high tech and reducing the dependency on exploitative labor conditions. but moving robots and object recognition are tough problems, and when there's other "low hanging fruit" (excuse the pun) to be found in other startups the technically difficult stuff can get pushed off.

exec may also have longer life as a viable business than facebook. it fills a need that won't go away, whereas facebook has a major risk of having the fad end, or alienating users through ever-increasing invasion into people's personal data driven by the need to justify a ridiculous valuation.

only risk i see to exec is what happens to your quality labor pool if the job market tightened, but that doesn't seem like a big risk for a while. with 8+ million people dropping out of the labor force over the last four years, there's a lot of slack to pick up.

i agree that credentials are not necessarily indicative of on-the-job effectiveness. alternative and cheaper ways to hire people, like using programming tests (we use them at my company), are tricky and can risk running into discrimination lawsuits if they are not directly job related, esp at bigger companies. however, for some reason using tests to filter people out is considered OK if it is done through a university, and then employers hire on the back end, which leads me to think that it is partly employer laziness and partly fear of liability that keeps the credentialing system intact.

Robots picking artichokes might not be as tough as you think. I think a sufficiently motivated teenager with ROS could do it half-assed right now. That's a shorthand way of saying I reckon I could do it ;)

Generally, the hard problems with robotics are related to sensing. Stuff like inverse kinematics and gripper movement are mostly handled in ROS if you can build a model.

Recognising the artichokes is not that hard as you might think given OpenCV as a primitive, and if you could get a near-field sensor using structured light it would actually be easy. This is not possible right now but will be in the next few years (unsubstantiated prediction).

Anyway, what I am saying is that you would be surprised how fast the boundaries change between "hard" and "easy". The things people are doing now with a $200 irobot create and a $100 kinect are blowing my mind.

If I had to guess, they probably had the employees write their own biographies. I would also guess that graduating from a good school is something he's proud of (which doesn't necessarily imply tat he looks down on these who didn't), therefore, he put it in his bio.

I do agree that house cleaning online isn't very glamorous, but if it helps people and makes money, it doesn't need to be.