A couple of months ago at the Go London User Group a young guy came up to me and told me he didn't have a degree, was totally self taught, and wanted to know if it was even worth him applying to CloudFlare.

I told him to apply.

He started last Monday.

I can only speak for CloudFlare, but educational background is _a component_ of a candidate. But it's only _a component_, it's not everything. We're interested in what people know and what they can do. I honestly look more at people's personalities, employment history and Github than what college degree they have.

It usually comes out conversationally months down the line, and we therefore are mathematicians, school & college drop-outs, physicists, chemists, geographers, and marine biologists - and all developers.

In no small part this stance comes from my own experiences when I first set out into the world as a naïf graduate, thinking that a masters (Desmond - didn't let my degree get in the way of my education) in Physics from [redacted] was somehow valuable. Turns out that a first in urban forestry management counts for more with most employers, because HR witches don't actually understand the skills they're supposed to be assessing, and therefore just get told "throw everything that's not a 1st in the bin". Which is a despicable waste of talent, and why I therefore do not give two hoots what you studied or where, if at all.

But you clearly believe that your 2:2 in Physics (for Americans, a 3.0 GPA) is worth more than someone else's 1 in Urban Forestry Management (for Americans, a 3.7 GPA) so presumably you think that there is some variation in difficulty among degrees, and presumably you believe that smarter people will be able to get better degrees?

Nope, I believed that. I now realise it's total bunkum, as while one degree may be more challenging than another, from a hiring manager's perspective it's the GPA/class that counts, and little else, and value is in the eye of the beholder.

When your own situation is comfortable it's easy to lose sight of how being unable to get work makes you feel totally worthless and life hardly worth living. It is not right to throw people away and deny them the chance to contribute because they are imperfect in some irrelevant way.

It would make me happier (because what's fun about just living comfortably!), and it might help others. Win-win.

But doing this from within an existing company is perhaps even better

Also from the potential hire himself. It's not that he sucks, his college didn't prepare him for this new role. It's not his lack of passion and really any deep interest in the craft, it's just that he had wrong lecturers, also most of them even weren't there to lecture most of the time, so what can you expect?

So now we can hire him and train him for a year or more, because without it he's completely useless, but that's ok, because he's just like we expect him to be. On the other hand, this one here who was willing to take all the responsibility for himself, who's eager to prove his actual skill doing useful things, he's too dangerous, because... What? Because he could actually end up doing something, and then we'd feel bad?

I'm not saying what you say is wrong, like in untrue, but I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.

> a school continuously assessed the individual abilities over the course of several years

Yeah. Some abilities. That differs from person to person and from college to college, but these abilities may or may not be the ones you want to optimize for.

For large companies, predictability beats quality. Keep in mind strict business processes exist to defend organizations from incompetent workers, even at the cost of limiting competent ones. Incompetent workers are cheaper. Since the processes prevent competent ones from achieving outstanding results, there is an obvious incentive to hire only incompetent ones.

> I can't help but feel it's somehow unfair.

Not sure about fairness. I certainly don't like it.

> Yeah. Some abilities.

Those are the abilities large banks and insurance companies want. For the average non-technical manager, being able to consider developers as interchangeable cogs beats developers that are impossible for managers to characterize or predict.

Yeah, do this, it really works, at least worked for me and apparently a couple of other commenters here.

The general advice is to lie^Wdisplay social skills, ie. present your facts in a way which makes them look like they are what the other person is looking for, and hide everything which would interfere with your lie... I mean, story or narrative.

People don't want to really know who you are, even if they tell you otherwise - especially in the professional setting. They want to read an interesting story and resume is the ultimate literary short form. For me writing a resume is very similar to writing a short story or novel, it's just even harder, because you're the main character. But the creation process and reception mechanisms are essentially the same.

The only specific advice I could give is the same I'd give other aspiring writers: get yourself a competent editor (a human, not software!) and let your imagination run wild.