Why You Need a Degree to Work for BigCo (2013)

I&#x27;ve worked for BigCo and startups, and don&#x27;t have a degree. It has never been an issue, anywhere I&#x27;ve worked, ever. I&#x27;ve asked. They don&#x27;t care. The only time it would matter is if it was a legal requirement for professional engineering (anything involving safety).<p>Yes, BigCo wants to hire middle of the spectrum folks who live in the suburbs and do a decent job for a fair wage. But they also want to (and do) hire hackers.

Lame.<p>What happens when you&#x27;re over thirty and want to marry and have kids? Are you then not cool because you need&#x2F;want to have a stable home? Are you not enough of a hacker, not 1337 enough, because you want to work for a company that might be around in 3 months?<p>It never ceases to amaze me how many people, who consider themselves very smart no less, by default consider anyone even five to ten years older than them complete fools for making choices that would be irrational to a 20 year old. Got news for you, you&#x27;ll grow up one day, if you&#x27;re lucky.

This reminds me a lot of a book I read a while ago called &quot;Disciplined Minds&quot; by Jeff Schmidt. It focuses on the sociological aspects of hiring practices &amp; performance evaluation measures in the knowledge economy. It&#x27;s a rather obscure book but I found it fascinating.<p>Basically, one of the central conclusions is that many of the metrics by which knowledge workers are evaluated are really less about measuring actual technical competence or domain knowledge and much more about detecting the propensity for conformity and obedience.<p>Maybe that&#x27;s not too surprising for some, but what&#x27;s even more interesting is that this can often be the case <i>without the evaluators&#x2F;managers&#x2F;people in power even being aware of it</i>. In many cases they genuinely believe they are evaluating for domain mastery &#x2F; technical skill, but are fooled by the hidden signal that correlates to what they see as &quot;desirable&quot; outcomes.

Author here. This originally appeared in 2005, when I blogged on a different platform.

&gt; Because quite honestly? I’d read your business plan any day. Your résumé would look better on top of a funding proposal, than under a cover letter.<p>Wow, what a way to sum up such an topic! Thanks.

I think the reason big companies will ask more often for a degree is that they are more risk averse. More exactly the people working there are more risk averse and hiring someone without a degree would require some explanation since it&#x27;s not common practice. Also people sometimes need to hire for roles they don&#x27;t know much about and having a degree provides some kind of assurance about the candidate&#x27;s knowledge. It&#x27;s true you can be better at doing your work without a degree but the article makes it sound like it&#x27;s a bonus, which is not, at least to my eyes. BigCo doesn&#x27;t care that you are going to stay there for years, most probably it would prefer higher rotation rates.

Well, I sometimes wonder about this. I have a Master&#x27;s Degree in Computer Science from RIT, and I despise working at BigCos. I spent a decade doing &quot;cog development&quot; and I learned I hated it. It was boring, stifling, draining, and unfulfilling. Perhaps the 2 most exciting times in my career were when I was working for 2 startups, when we were building news systems, putting in our own processes, and solving interesting problems.<p>I will admit I could do more on the side in terms of blogging, working on open source projects, and learning new skills, but I do have a family I need to raise and house to repair and improve. It&#x27;s something I am working on.

This really makes you ask &#x27;What on earth am I doing with my life?&#x27;. The article is well said ,they want you to be too scared to leave,much like a well cared for house slave would. They even trick you into believing &quot;benefits&quot; are a valid form of compensation.<p>That being said,not all corps are like that. Some take in people like me with no college education(hah!) And give us opportunities to prove ourselves.

What college proves is that you have the ability to think and execute on at least a 4-year horizon. Modern day devs where a &quot;framework&quot; is obsolete in 2 years when a new fashion comes along, will obviously not see the value.

Some businesses are based primarily on credentials, others on performance.<p>With a broad spectrum in between, this can make it difficult for an outsider to know where they would stand or even if they could be allowed into the organization.<p>The bigger the business, the more it can get by on credentials alone, or sometimes on the parasitic action of the credentialed on the true domain performers.<p>Especially &quot;institutions&quot; which became &quot;too big to fail&quot; before anybody living was even born.

Very well said!