This article outlines an opinion that organizations either tried skills based hiring and reverted to degree required hiring because it was warranted, or they didn’t adapt their process in spite of executive vision.
Since this article is non industry specific, what are your observations or opinions of the technology sector? What about the general business sector?
Should first world employees of businesses be required to obtain degrees if they reasonably expect a business related job?
Do college experiences and academic rigor reveal higher achieving employees?
Is undergraduate education a minimum standard for a more enlightened society? Or a way to hold separation between classes of people and status?
Is a masters degree the new way to differentiate yourself where the undergrad degree was before?
Edit: multiple typos, I guess that’s proof that I should have done more college 😄
I spent the last 4 years working on this at a state-wide level at my last job, so I’ve seen a lot in this space. Skills based hiring is extremely effective when done right. The problem is that most employers don’t know how. They take the degree requirement off the listing and then go through the same interview processes as if nothing changed. In tech specifically, there is a huge highly skilled talent pool whose potential is going untapped because of a glass ceiling keeping them from senior positions. If employers were effective at identifying what applicants, and even existing employees, are capable of they’d have a much easier time filling roles and the ‘talent gap’ wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is.
I’ve been in management for about 15 years and have hired many people. My take-away is that standard HR interview practices (“Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker…”) are basically a popularity contest that strongly favors extroverts and people with good story-telling and language skills. I suppose these techniques are good if that’s primarily what you are looking for. However, if you are hiring for actual technical skills, these interview techniques are worse than useless, they are discriminatory.
Also, HR people, in my experience, are quite under-educated when it comes to interview techniques. I’ve worked with about dozen different HR people over the years and none of them had any kind of imagination or technical expertise when it came to interviewing. In my organization and in other similar organizations where I have peers, any deviation from the standard HR interview is entirely driven by managers who are sick of the usual HR crap.
Most of HR processes are pure ideological bullshit. “Personality tests” that are nothing else but “we search for obedient drones and here is our tarot to help” and “intelligence tests” that are based on some racial science bullshit made to prove the inferiority of Jews that might be useful only if you work in a factory of math patterns.
They are not there to ensure efficient production, after all they don’t know shit about the product or internal processes of the teams. They’re a caste of priests whose role is ensuring compliance with the feudal-corporate system.
A friend was just turned down from a job at a japanese software factory because “he talked too much” during his interview, but the one doing the interview is also my friend and said the guy was good but the CTO puts extreme importance on “cultural match”.
Started working for my current company as tech support. No degree, in a homeless shelter, just good with tech and helping people. It bothered me not understanding how things I supported worked, so I started to teach myself to code and offer ideas for potential fixes when submitting tickets. Ended up being approached and hired by the head of development who allowed me to continue learning on my own. I’ve been with them for 12 years now, and in the first few years hobbled together the product/feature which became their flagship. Find people who are eager and excited to learn and they’ll thrive.
Find people who are eager and excited to learn and they’ll thrive
Yours is an awesome story, thanks.
In my mind, if a company wants to set a generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans. Otherwise it’s using the education system as a subsidized training program.
Note I said generalized. Engineers, doctors, etc who desire to ever be employed can’t stop at a bachelor’s anyways. Even still, their employees should have to pick up their training tab.
Business has gotten a free pass for 40 years and look at the society they’ve created with it. Maybe civilization needs more than a love of money to sustain it. Crazy huh.
This would make getting a job out of college SO MUCH HARDER. Companies would do everything the could to get existing employees in the workforce, for whom someone else has already paid off their loan.
Much like cell phone carriers locking you into a contract, companies would try to force you to work for them for X number of years because they paid your loans. I suppose this could work similar to vesting, so it wouldn’t be impossible. But companies would still try very hard not to hire anyone with student loans. It would just benefit the wealthy people who don’t need them.
Much easier to just raise business taxes by enough to pay for free education at all levels.
Tax based upon the average education level required for the job in the industry. This would change them all to a skills based hiring system overnight.
I guess the real answer is government subsidized college.
Free college.
An investment in the future through rigorous and accessible education.
And/or lower the costs of education. A lot of college seems tribal or even wasteful for the cost currently
This is how it has to start in the US. Subsidizing free college in other countries is much easier because colleges there keep their costs under control, focusing on education and research over the “college experience”, so the costs per student of running said colleges is much lower. There is SO much wasteful spending, brought about by the greed of many US colleges for the near unlimited flow of student loan money coming from lenders especially prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, that can be thrown out to cut those costs.
Not to mention that fewer people in free college countries actually attend a university, with education systems in those countries designed to steer many students towards places like trade/ag/other schools if they show aptitude in areas they really don’t need a 4-year degree for or really just don’t meet the academic standard to get into those universities. Millennials and Gen Z were all told in the US that we HAD to go to college to get anywhere in the world and we were all pushed in that direction whether it was a good direction for us or not. Now there’s a big labor shortage here in the trades and other blue collar jobs because so few younger people have the proper skills, which aren’t really taught in four-year institutions, or the desire to take on the training or effort to gain those skills. Fewer students spending four years in an expensive university and more in two-year schools or trade schools has the advantage of both lowering overall education costs and providing a workforce with more diverse skills, regardless of the time needed to train them.
You know, when the concept of publicly funded education was proposed, it was considered revolutionary and not well supported by some, who didn’t like the idea of the costs.
We currently have K-12 in US that’s publicly funded education. This idea would essentially just make that K-16.
This video regarding education has always been one of my favorites: https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms
Companies would do everything the could to get existing employees in the workforce
I’m not disagreeing with you. I would submit that this is already true for other reasons. Speaking specifically of IT or INFOSEC fields, companies currently have extremely high expectations or experience requirements/desires.
This has been a problem for the INFOSEC field where there’s a shortage, but companies don’t want to hire entry level candidates with little to no experience. They want reasoned, veteran INFOSEC practitioners, which there isn’t enough of.
generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans
Much like cell phone carriers locking you into a contract, companies would try to force you to work for them for X number of years because they paid your loans
I like that you both brought this up. There’s a real life example of this in the US military. It’s a well known benefit/incentive for military service that they would fund your college education if you work for them long enough. You signed your service contract, but if you met that, you got your education for ‘free’ if you want to call it that. It’s a little different in you might be killed in a stupid political war along the way, but it shows that the idea is practical and can work.
I guess if I had the choice of being hired at a really decent company and they would fund some highly sought after training as long as I gave them a reasonable number or years of employment with reasonable compensation, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
On the other had, the SyFi fan that I am, I could see a bit of a dystopian future where you have to belong to companies for a while to start off in life. If you consider that people now start off in massive student loan dept, the dystopian ownership is currently banks while people take up to 20+ years to repay student loans.
Personally, I think education should be free to all, rich or poor, as its the summation of the human experience thus far.
Or in other words, it’s our birthright
No one should have the right or ability to paygate it, and that includes the state. The labs necessary should be publically funded because society would suffer more for having less physicists and chemists than an abundance of them, for reasons I hope are obvious.
True. Even though many will argue against this citing the ‘practicalities’ involved, this is just another instance of long vs. short term investment (in general, not just financial terms). Long term investment (like free education and state funded science) is supposed to be harder and more costly in the short term, because the payoff comes later, but it is much higher and leads to a healthier system, making things easier, incuding more investment. Whereas short term is usually damaging to the system and makes things harder long term.
I really like the saying that an idealist is a realist (or pragmatist) just using a longer timeline.
Engineers in the US regularly stop at the bachelor’s level.
Yup, in the office we regularly hire engineers and scientists with a bachelor’s, I’ve never seen anyone even care what tier of bachelor’s. Some people go on to get licensed or a master’s on the company dime but we also have lots of unlicensed never going back to school people in very technical demanding and high ranking positions.
I’m just a geologist with a bachelor’s and am regularly supervising and training people with engineering PhDs. My work place quickly becomes task specific and degrees are worth less than years in the field a lot of the time, your mileage may vary.
Or, you know, get some state-funded free college education like most other civilized countries other than the US, so you actually do not end up with $100k student loans like a dumbass.
I’m with ya man, if cost weren’t a deterrent I’d hold multiple doctorates right now.
I think that just makes new grads (with loans) unemployable
Just because I got A++ in college doesn’t mean I wanna go the extra mile for your stupid ass company or believe my coworkers are a second family, you corporate wastes of space. I’ll do the bare minimum as long as I get paid enough to enjoy life and have a family. College was fun, working is not.
Removed by mod
In technology, what about software for an aircraft written and tested by skilled developers, but ones without degrees?
Hiring devs with degrees does not guarantee anything quality about the software they write.
A degree for developer just means that they know how to learn.
I’ve seen some straight a solid developers come straight out of college enter the enterprise sector and bomb right out.
Why aren’t you using Python, why aren’t you using inheritance. They’re walking into these places with 20-year-old code bases and nowhere near enough money to rewrite any of it.
And the problem is, even if they get the opportunity to rewrite it, they try so hard to optimize it and put so many little smart decisions in there that becomes very difficult to maintain.
As someone currently getting a degree (and therefore surrounded by soon-to-be devs with degrees), I couldn’t agree more. The requirements to pass are so low that it means nothing.
The control system and sensors algorithms would be developed by engineers (not software engineers). Then implemented by the software engineers. That is subsequently tested again by the non software engineers. It often auto coded from simulink models, requiring less input from software teams.
Most of the software development done by software engineers or developers in aircraft is scheduling, connecting pipes, data recording, networking etc. Keeping the aircraft flying is done by other engineers. These algorithms are more related to aircraft dynamics, electrical systems and sensor physics than algorithms used in software. Most control systems implemented are represented as analogue electronics, even when the engineers have only ever used digital systems for their control. In these cases knowledge of non-software topics are more important.
So it would still be people with degrees keeping the aircraft in the air. However, many of these roles could be accomplished by people who have non university qualifications or 4-5 year apprenticeships. But it’s hard to teach the background maths involved during an apprenticeship as it’s not being applied day to day and the other engineers skills may have atrophied compared to a university course. Degree apprenticeships do work well for this sort of thing.
to be fair, software engineers are a lot more design heavy than implementation. software developers are the “implementers” where software engineers generally focus on the bigger picture as well
many of these roles could be accomplished by people who have non university qualifications or 4-5 year apprenticeships. But it’s hard to teach the background maths involved during an apprenticeship
This was a very interesting example. Personally, I don’t use any of the higher math that degree programs wanted. For people in the field you’re talking about, it would be needed. So in that sense, a dev working for one company would be fine, until they wanted to dev for a company that needs those maths.
I counter my own point though and say that most people who don’t use those higher level maths forget it. I am a very good use or lose example.
@cole@cole@lemdro.id I agree there can be separation of role types. This is annoyingly inconsistent across industry. Lead/architect/principle/engineer terms get thrown around for all kinds of roles. Sometimes companies just use them as title changes for promotion and talent retention. It would be nice if companies considered adapting a standardize framework for some uniformity. The NICE model comes to mind, but I’ve had people tell me they think it’s too academic and not pragmatic in the real word. I don’t think I agree with them.
Removed by mod
Why do you need a degree just to be told by the accountant and c suite employees that you’re codes safety festures are taking to long so shelf them?
require skills
Does this mean skills learn on the job or from a higher education institution?
Would people accept a highrise Disney by a team of self taught engineers?
Would we allow a surgeon to practice without a medical degree?
What about if that surgeon went to a vocational school and then did the normal years of internship, fellowship, supervision, etc?
As much as I hate the higher education requirement, if I get another “boot camp” developer application I’m gonna puke.
This is why I only interview barefoot candidates.
I need to see between the toes if they wanna work with me 🦶
I take a little taste, just to be sure.
only interview barefoot candidates
Would you elaborate?
That way you know they didn’t attend a boot camp …
LOL, yep, I missed that.
Can you talk about this more?
- Does it mean that a boot camp coder is not skilled enough?
- Would that have those skills if they did a degree program?
- Would any degree in computer/IT suffice?
A boot camp means you paid someone; there is no accreditation, unlike university degree programs. A relevant degree is an indicator that someone might be suitable.
you paid someone
This is true in both cases
no accreditation, unlike university degree programs
This is true. It’s an interesting destination.
- Would you say that an accreditation covers the technical rigor of a degree program?
- A boot camp only cares about the narrow scope. An accreditation cares about a well rounded, and unified education experience. Do you look for that in your candidates?
Edit: does a well rounded and accredited education provide more value to your organization than a narrowly scoped employee?
Yes, a well-rounded employee is generally more valuable than one with limited skills.
There are people who went to Boot Camps that are excellent developers. There are people who have a masters degree in computer science who are awful developers.
skilled enough.
For entry level? Honestly, not usually. They know one thing, and if they deviate from that, their quality breaks down fast.
degree program.
Well, there’s no guarantee right? But they’d have a more well rounded understanding of programming. Anyone can use a Class, but can you make one?
degrees
Any programming degree, along with an acceptable understanding of the technologies they need on day one.
For my job specifically, we need someone with PHP experience. Not just how to <?php echo $title;?>. My favorite interview question is, “explain to me your understanding of PHP magic methods and how you would use them, in a basic example.”
I get a lot of dumb looks, and wrong answers.
That being said, I hired someone who failed that test, but they had a good personality and a willingness to learn—and they have a CS degree.
I take the PHP, and I throw it in the trash.
And replace it with?
Python.
Is that because you’re more familiar with python than PHP? What framework do you use?
I built sites in PHP before I knew any Python.
All of my personal web stuff is now based on Flask. I basically just replaced the P in LAMP with Python.
The vast majority of boot camp grads are terrible candidates. A degree guarantees almost nothing but a boot camp cert guarantees even less.
Obviously, there’s a lot of ‘it depends on the person’ in this topic. At least in my mind. I think you’re right in that both things (degree/camp) create good and bad results.
I get a lot of dumb looks, and wrong answers.
-
Do you have any experience hiring a person who passed that test, who wasn’t a degree holder?
-
Do you have any experiences where someone failed that test, wasn’t a degree holder, and you hired them anyway?
-
Do you feel you could put a ratio to it in your field/employer?
I don’t have statistics for you.
I’ve never had a good experience personally, as a developer, with someone whose applicable education came only from a boot camp.
Boot camps are fine for supplemental education. For learning a new skill. But are not (usually) a good foundation, and don’t teach you enough to actually get a job.
Also, and this is more personal, it’s kind of annoying when someone thinks their 60 hour class should get them a high paying job.
-
For a lot of jobs that want bachelors degrees, people with lots of experience will do. But for jobs requiring masters and doctorates its a different story.
I work in IT. I majored I’m French and Linguistics. Yeah that degree is coming in way more handy than my experience lol
How do you write this article and not once reference I/O Psychology or the literature that examines how well various tests predict job performance? (e.g. Schmidt and Hunter, 1998)
I swear this isn’t witchcraft. You just analyze the job, determine the knowledge and skills that are important, required at entry, and can’t be obtained in a 15 minute orientation, and then hire based on those things. It takes a few hours worth of meetings. I’ve done it dozens of times.
But really what all that boils down to is get someone knowledgeable about the role and have them write any questions and design the exercises. Don’t let some dingleberry MBA ask people how to move Mt. Fuji or whatever dumb trendy thing they’re teaching in business school these days.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve interviewed with a contractor/headhunter and a few minutes in stop them to say “I’m not what you’re looking for, here, let me help you re-work those requirements so you’ll get the right people to interview”.
HR provides those requirements, which just shows how bad HR usually is.
I read about a study years ago showing that hiring via interviews was no better than pulling cards out of a hat.
This is an interesting observation.
In theory, the section/department manager should be providing those requirements to HR, not allowing HR to do it for them, right? I have to agree, if companies are letting HR drive the requirements train, it’s going to be a poor experience for everyone.
Clearly HR didn’t talk to the hiring manager, so I put the blame squarely on them. They want to “own” this element of business, they get the blame.
I’ve never once taken a role that matched much of what the ad said, except for some specialized stuff that no one likes to do.
Then again, what your role becomes is determined by you/your skills and the relationships that develop at work. Even for highly specialized roles, everyone I’ve worked with brought different perspectives and approaches to the table.
Schmidt and Hunter, 1998
That’s a 74 page article, do you care to summarize it or provide a specific area?
Thanks for a reference. Interesting.
The cool thing about it is that the core of it is really just one page.
There’s a page in there with a list of types of tests and their respective r values, which is a number between zero and one that explains how well a given type of test predicts job performance based on this gigantic meta analysis the researchers ran. Zero means there’s no relationship between the test and job performance and one means the test predicts job performance perfectly.
Generally you want something better than .3 for high stakes things like jobs. Education and experience sits at … .11 or so. It’s pretty bad. By contrast, skills tests do really well. Depending on the type they can go over .4. That’s a pretty big benefit if you’re hiring lots of people.
That said it can be very hard to convince people that “just having a conversation with someone” isn’t all that predictive at scale. Industry calls that an “unstructured interview” and they’re terrible vectors for unconscious or conscious bias. “Hey, you went to the same school as me…” and now that person is viewed favorably.
Seriously this stuff is WELL STUDIED but for some reason the MBA lizards never care. It’s maddening.
Schmidt and Hunter, 1998
For anyone who’s interested, there’s a copy of the study here: https://home.ubalt.edu/tmitch/645/session 4/Schmidt & Oh validity and util 100 yrs of research Wk PPR 2016.pdf
A problen in any mericratic system is accounting for personal bias. Its very hard for some people to see someone do something different and assume they are as good or better then themselves.
THEY went to college or THEY didn’t and all of the personal reasons they assumed when making that decision get reapplied to others.
THEY didn’t get where they are by being hired off of well studied hiring mechanism so why would think it needs changed, the old system works for them.
Same issue with election reforms.
From my exp in tech has been getting to know people on projects and getting known is been 100% the way to go.
What is someone good at and how they work with a team is best seen by working with someone. Getting started though just means taking the shit work and being willing to learn more your own.
I’m a bootcamp grad and I have absolutely no business working in this field.
The very fact that you recognize this in yourself puts you head and shoulders above a good 70% of candidates.
Why?
This is a TERRIBLY written article.
Code has been skills-based for as long as I’ve been working. The few places I’ve seen that really have a hard degree requirement are not places I’d work. Most CS degrees are also mostly worthless for most app jobs because the theory is not the practice. There are degree programs that focus on shipping applications. In my own hiring, I’m looking for experience over degree and potential over buzzword bingo.
I’m looking for experience over degree
In most cases, it’s assumed you’d hire an experienced dev over one who has never held a job, and by that, I mean they have no proof of skill, if you consider a previous employment any proof of actual skill other than convicting someone to hire them :)
Assume you’re hiring a new to workforce person. No previous employment:
- Do you hire a degree or no degree candidate with no previous employment record?
- What do you look for specifically if you are looking for skills?
- If your child/family member was going to pursue a career in dev/IT/whatever, would you push them to get a degree, or just build a portfolio of code/projects/whatever shows their skills in that field?
For junior IT roles, you’re screening for passion more than anything else. The best candidates are usually people that play with computers and are looking for growth. There’s a mix of “I have been taking computers apart since I was a kid” and “I’m getting an associates in IT.” Totally hit or miss. Sometimes the person with nothing pans out and the degree seeker won’t. Sometimes it’s the other way around. The deciding factor here is how the candidate meshes with the team.
For junior dev roles, someone with a college degree is usually looking for more than a junior salary but has nothing I would hire at higher levels. Someone without a degree might have been coding in their spare time or done a boot camp. A good portfolio might give you a leg up. I consider a portfolio to be evidence of growth, not a bunch of perfect code. I love seeing GitHub profiles that show really shitty code that matures into really solid code (or at least the signs someone is trying). That being said, what matters is the tech screen and a quick code test. If you can do what I validate in an interview and the team likes you, rad.
For someone with no experience, I tell them to figure out something they want to learn and put it on GitHub. Then repeat a fuck ton. Always expand the things you challenge yourself with and move on when your learning or passion has ceased. Sometimes that means you build yet another todo list. Other times that means you try to figure out how to build that cool Discord bot and fail utterly but learn a bunch of shit along the way.
Honestly at the end of the day it’s all fucking luck. If you get a hiring manager like me that’s slightly biased toward self-trained over degree, you have an easier chance on skills stuff. But that’s a crapshoot. I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential. That’s just dumb luck both from me and for the people I’m able to help grow.
I was lucky when I started and people took chances on me. In return I take chances on people I think could have great potential.
We have something in common here.
While posting code on GitHub is slightly dev specific, I think the principles you’ve shared likely goes across a lot of industry. If people show initiative, are life long learners, they’ll probably land something, with or without a degree.
I could see it working for some roles, but I am an engineer and the degree is both required by my company and necessary to actually do the work.
That said, 80% of my job is not degree-specific and could be done by anyone who pays attention and asks questions, but the 20% is the kicker. Maybe I could do the job of five engineers and replace the other 4 with experienced technicians to cover the 80%s.
Yeah but also that 20% and the 80% feed each other.
It is interesting to think about if that’s more economic, and maintains the same quality of work overall.
I’m a developer working for a SaaS company and you didn’t NEED a degree to get hired but it sure was a “nice to have.”
Did your degree help you with:
- your technical job/duties?
- general business?
- general literacy and soft skills (writing/commination/problem solving)?
Ive heard from quite a few developers that people without degrees in CS program differently than with a degree. CS teaches the theoretical fundamentals that you could go your entire life without knowing and still perform well in a job, but they do help when e.g. building novel solutions, reframing problems into more general problems that were solved 40 years ago, and getting an overview of how everything works can prevent reinventing the wheel.
That’s an excellent point/observation.
Do you believe that organizations could have a mix of both types of people?
Sure. There are benefits to devs without degrees, as they usually start working earlier in their lives so they have more work experience. And hard screening for a degree is probably not helpful anyway, there are other ways to become a proficient developer. You can read about the fundamentals without ever going to a class about it!
- Kind of, I work mainly in PHP, Python & JS the only one of those that I was exposed to in school was PHP. I learnt the other two on my own after graduating. I did also get a little exposure to git in school but I learnt more about it in a month or so of being hired then I did in school. I also got a lot of, how to do documentation, how to analyse requirements, etc.
- what does this mean?
- 1000% yes.
general business
Concepts of standard American businesses,. communication, business processes, professional presentation, product production life cycles, business man/women stuff
In that case, this is also a yes.
Nepotism/cronyism will get you a lot further than a silly piece of paper.
IMO the most important thing about college is the people you meet. Build a large network of individuals who know you, and know where you want to be, and one of them might just get your foot in the door.
Skill-based hiring is more complex than “traditional” experience/education based hiring but it can work really well for orgs. that really invest in this method of hiring.
And by investing I mean they train and empower their recruiters to spot and assess the skills the business is looking for.
Many businesses talk the talk but don’t set themselves up skills-based hiring.
