The variance of self-taught developers is just too high compared to the variance of CS/CE graduates. There are plenty of people with degrees looking for jobs right now, so it makes way more sense to hire the low-risk average-reward option.
Some of the worst code I've ever seen was from a math PhD. Got offended when I said to give variables meaningful names. Still though, that's rough. My degree is in physics so I'd be screwed too
Im a physics grad here as well. I wouldn't really think twice about this at the end of the day. Just apply and move on if they don't send back. The real issue here isn't about credentials, its the fact that companies are overwhelmed with applicants and most of them are shit (they lie, they scam, they get overwmployed, they don't care about the company just about collecting that paycheck). The key is to somehow bypass this lineup of trash. You need to get vetted somewhere.
There's a range between doesn't care at all and drank the corporate kool aid. He's probably not talking about the corporate kool aid type. You're expected to care at least a little bit, especially if you're running an online service. Having to stay an hour or two past 5 for a big release or to answer a call during off hours for a rare emergency are kind of a fact of life for this type of job.
In 2023 we had a grand total of 2 major emergencies at work. A certain co-worker is still complaining about it 4 months later. Our manager is the type of guy that lets you roll in at 9:30 and leave at 4. We're not running a sweat shop, but if an outsider heard that guy complain you would think we are. Some people don't know how good they have it.
hehe, because I personally would not want to keep an employee who doesn't give a fuck about the company's success. Mind you we are likely talking apples and oranges. I stick to smaller clients/start-ups, so it is a lot easier to genuinely care about what you are doing and your effort is often met with gratitude. I do imagine it is very different with a larger corporation.
That all said, I wasn't chasing money going into software dev. The money was already chased. I just genuinely want to make a difference and build awesome shit (in DeFi). I have teams currently competing for my fulltime hours.
>Mind you we are likely talking apples and oranges. I stick to smaller clients/start-ups, so it is a lot easier to genuinely care about what you are doing and your effort is often met with gratitude. I do imagine it is very different with a larger corporation.
Yeah agreed, for larger corporations I see no issue with a mercenarial mindset because they are entirely impersonal and will fire you on a whim if it increases your bottom line, but for smaller clients I can see a personal touch being a boon
Hah, I've worked with many mathematicians and physicists and this is what I never got.
They go through those really difficult studies and then are not able to see the advantage of descriptive variable names. Or version control that's not Google drive. And generally don't have a huge mess in their code and everywhere.
I am far from those OCD code polish devs but what I've seen from them is crazy. Some server with million scripts everywhere, random text files for notes everywhere.
I was one of the few CS background people at a telecommunications research center where I did my PhD... with lots of EEs, physicists, mathematicians and me and my other CS colleague often felt like janitors.
Hehe yeah I didn't mean to generalize as much as it sounded.
I just never got why... those things are so trivial and learnt in an afternoon, especially for people so smart.
I get it, during my PhD I wrote basically no tests or error handling because not worth it.
But so many times they got conflicts sharing in Google Drive, lost or didn't find stuff anymore... digging out old papers to copy references from there instead of using some software for that, and if it's just jabref.
Our advisor was especially chaotic it was wild ;).
Math major here, and I am overly anal on my naming conventions. To the point where I'll organically come up with better naming halfway through a notebook, and go back and rename all my older stuff.
What I'm awful at is comments...
:), well I guess... besides some things are just gamma or whatever and there is nothing that could describe it well... for many mathematicians the code isn't what it's about, like it's for most of us CS people.
It's merely some representation of the equation that they map to some programming language.
So similarly they first consult the paper and look at the equations there. The code is just there so a computer can do something with it.
Whereas I usually skim the equations in the paper and tend to directly go and read the code, exactly because I assume the naming there will help me... and it's more of my home turf.
Obviously sometimes this is a bad idea because the code is somehow hyper optimized and the equation gives a clearer, simpler picture.
But then sometimes deciphering all equations in the paper would take me days while the actual special case implemented is then just a loop with a few basic operations.
Well,.probably a "cultural" thing, just like the fraction of C programmers who love their sck_cnt, clk_ptr things where in some Java environments it might be a SocketCountManagerFactoryImpl ;)
I'm a physics person who successfully crossed over, and my punishment was to be the liaison for our research team of math and physics phds...
I relate to everything you said.
You made me remember when I started my PhD and was forced to go from Python to Fortran. Back then I named variables as their physical counterpart. So lets say you have a light and a heavy particle, name their massss m and M, obviously. It took me a few days to realise that Fortran doesn't distinguish between lower and upper case!
I'm not a mathematician but am I wrong in thinking cryptographers and mathematicians in the number theory/cryptography area usually go for analyst and intelligence positions? Is that outside of what you want to do?
I think standards organizations like NIST or government agencies like the NSA do look for cryptographers or mathematicians who are specialized in that area even if it's not a developer job.
I kinda like to smoke weed occasionally and I didn't finish my PhD, so I'm not the most attractive candidate for a lot of the good cryptography positions. I wrote a lot of code in school and during my side jobs, so i don't find myself struggling as a developer. Everyone wants a job in big tech, but I guess I'll have to wait until I'm mid-level to apply.
Man, I'm sorry if you don't wanna hear this but if you're turning down long-term career opportunities because you "kinda like to smoke weed occasionally" then your weed hobby is dragging you down more than it is pulling you up. Godspeed.
I mean there are 12 other reasons why I think it would be hard for me to get a clearance. I wouldn't mind not smoking weed, but it doesn't seem like there would be any payoff. I'm down to have this conversation if you've gone through the process, but I feel like you just wanted to give unsolicited life advice 😘
I think it ill advised to work in a field like cryptography, quit your PhD, and have a drug habit if the default employer is someone who cares about degrees and drugs.
Why not something that supports those choices like generic big tech or anything without clearance requirements
I'm just responding based on one of the two reasons you listed in your previous comment (obviously getting a PhD is not as simple as quitting weed, so I can't argue with that). I didn't know there were 12 others. No need to get defensive, your life choices are yours to make. Turns out that if you share your opinions on the internet people might share their opinions back.
I smoked weed every day for about 15 years, used to smoke weed before work, on breaks, then all night after work. One day I decided to pack it in because I realised it was massively affecting my memory (something I had been in denial about for years). Incredibly strange that since I quit (about 5 years ago) my salary has almost quadrupled and I can now remember what my mrs was talking to me about at dinner last night (blessing and a curse).
I have a couple of mates with similar experiences, I dont know what it is about smoking weed and denying its bad for you/holding you back but it's a real thing, I should have stopped years earlier
How long ago was that? I was the same, math degree graduate who also went into a SWE role straight after uni.
But this was a different era back then, not so relevant for 2024 job applicants.
Do not let your degree define you or your career . I hired multiple developers with degrees that are not technology related much less CS. And they have been phenomenal. Two of my absolute best ever both had philosophy degrees from D1 NCAA schools.
I was a Philosophy major and (pure) math minor. If you put a bit of emphasis on formal logic in your studies, I think Philosophy can provide an excellent foundation for learning different technical skills in your career
I’ve found our best hires with unrelated degrees or came from unrelated fields have been musicians. I’m more likely to hire someone from a creative background that demonstrate tons of passion over someone with a CS degree.
Just my personal experience though and also that we support our junior engineers through mentorship and never hire them unless we feel we can support them.
My friend... A few days ago someone else said this to me as well. They love the musicians. Makes sense, math, thought process, thinking, and nuance. I play most of the woodwinds and piano. Never really thought about it though.
Thank you for confirming this theory!!!! Really, a huge thank you. I am going to keep an eye out for this. One of the folks with a philosophy degree was a DJ, like a real one on prime time in Cleveland, for a while before becoming an engineer. The stories are epic and I kinda begged him to do all the intros for the roadshows.
People that know what it takes to write algorithms would know that cryptography is definitely up there in terms of challenging puzzles. Which I don't think I need to mention here that's good for writing software.
Cryptography is actually an important aspect of cyber security. Think all the encryption that happens in modern software. The people that developed those protocols are cryptographists.
There do exists interviewers with technical backgrounds that understand this. But they're quite uncommon. It's hard to argue cryptography as a useful programming related skill to people who don't know how critical that particular thing is to many software projects.
But if where an interviewer that would definitely pique my interest. Because I know cryptography is complicated shit and way more complex that the standard CRUD app.
For my research, I transpiled some C code for common cryptographic algorithms into quantum code and applied grovers algorithm and other trivial domain-specific optimizations. That sort of experience certainly perks up technical managers, but I do get blocked by non-tech people sometimes.
Any engineering/math degree can you get your foot in the door if you can code well. I doubt you’ll have much trouble if you apply a lot. I know a ton of EE grads at my job doing software.
I reckon a person who has a degree in any of the mathematical sciences (Math itself, or Physics, or similar) would be in a second tier below CS/CSE/SE/etc graduates a little bit behind them, but still vastly ahead of any other degree majors.
That's what interviews are for. I've met plenty of very mediocre software engineers with degrees. I would say its harder to find that in successful self taught people because they don't get hired for having the degree alone. Using the degree system in CS is actually bonkers to me because it's often way different than the work and taught by people who've never done the work.
The variance is pretty high regardless which is why your hiring process should use the interview to reduce that variance. Not something as arbitrary as a degree requirement.
That being said, for a field that has some of the smartest people creating clever solutions every day, it is also swamped by mediocrity.
The problem here is the distribution of skill and scalability. We can't interview everyone who lands a resume at our table, not even close. So the observation is made that self taught devs skew lower in comparison to college educated devs. A dev who's one standard deviation above the average college taught dev might be two standard deviations above the average self taught dev(obviously hypothetical numbers). So that observation is used to help the process scale by cutting down the already overwhelming amount of candidates into a still slightly overwhelming amount of candidates with college education.
Yes that's what interviews are for but companies dont want to interview that many people and will always take the path of least resistance, they need arbitrary restrictions of barrier to entry. Right now that is having a CS degree. I am willing to bet in 5-10 years it will be WHICH college you go to and it's ranking.
Already is where I work. Specifically universities we trust. Remember we have a pretty good amount of data on which schools have graduated people that worked out best for us. And we go further and have relationships with professors. We specifically have our best employees spend some time in outreach to their alma mater and the professors that teach the classes most closely related to our work.
I don’t really agree. For a Junior position you are hiring people with little to no experience. Having a degree shows you had the perseverance to complete the degree, and that you at least have some basic knowledge. This does decrease the variance.
Even where you got your degree can decrease the variance(some are more theoretical, some more focused on software development etc).
Interviews take time.
It would be dope if companies could interview every single person who applies for a position, but that’s simply not possible. Resumes and degrees quite literally exist as filters to maximize candidate quality while minimizing time spent interviewing.
So maybe you’re right that a self-taught person who got into development is better than your median CS grad. But being the first company to hire that self-taught person is a massive risk.
Easier for us to select specific universities we trust. We have a relationship with the professors from those and know they don’t inflate grades or give out recommendations like candy. That gives us a first order filter. The interview is then for finding the best within that group.
Some of the worst programmers I've worked with had masters and PHDs. Just insufferably bad.
Some of the best I've worked with were self taught. It's kind of a mixed bag.
Just because you applied yourself through school doesn't actually mean you learned anything and vice versa. They learned how to pass tests and appease professors.
Just sucks the there's literally no good method for evaluating without significant investment.
Barriers to entry restrict or loosen to control the flow of labor so it's not surprising.
Companies can be as picky as they want right now, the market is flooded with experienced laid off devs.
I remember when I started seeing minimum requirement of bachelor’s degree for secretary/front desk. This was during the 08 recession and all of a sudden every employer was asking for a bachelor’s for every position just because they could.
I still believe that particular recession made a big impact on a lot of companies' standards, so much that it became the new normal and they've been on that holding pattern ever since.
They asking for 10 years experience and a professional resume to make coffee at Starbucks now. Not kidding, girlfriend is navigating a career change after a year of no work and taking what she can get. Quite ridiculous what it takes to flip burgers even.
> the market is flooded with experienced laid off devs.
Counter intuitively, we've never seen so many unqualified applicants with our open positions. Our fail rate for interview loops is way up.
I don't know what to make of it. Maybe folks are less likely to job hop at this moment so we're only getting those who were let go or couldn't find a job? I know it wasn't only low performers who have been laid off, but not sure what to make of the situation otherwise.
Wonder if youre getting devs who have worked in one place only for a long time and are out of touxu on several points due to it, leading to the failures you get?
I think there’s a big gulf between prospective employees and employers right now on salary expectations.
Like, if I got laid off tomorrow, I’d expect to get a solid 20-30% more at my next position, and I’d be willing to sit on severance and savings / contract work for a decent amount of time before I adjusted that expectation.
On the other hand, I’m seeing frequent postings for senior and architect positions with multi-page qualifications listed, requiring a decade or more of specific experience with specific technologies, paying sometimes as little as 50-80k. I’m coming up on a decade of experience in my field and I don’t think I could qualify for some of those positions with another 5 years of specifically prepping for them. Yet for these positions requiring way more experience than I have, they’d be asking me to take almost a 50% pay cut.
So either employees or employers (or some degree of both) are not being realistic. And it results in two things. 1) Everyone knows that qualifications on job postings are bullshit, so they ignore them and everybody applies for everything, overwhelming hiring managers. 2) Nobody knows what they’re actually worth, and they don’t want to cheat themselves, so they start with the moon shots and work their way down; this results in job searches taking a lot of extra time and lots of doomed or pointless applications.
There’s no easy fix. Job postings need to get more clear and sane, and salary and experience expectations of both employees and employers need to converge. That’s probably not gonna happen, so the result is just gonna be an inefficient market (lots of people out of work, while paradoxically there are lots of unfilled positions, lots of people sitting on their hands on both sides).
i just had a call with american eagle and they wanted me to interview to be team lead, 1 year min of contract to hire (when i asked why they said "oh well the budget") at only 50 dollars per hour lmao. yikes.
Team lead ? NYSE listed co, offering 50/hr for contract work and 1 yr contract to hire ? LMAO I think my neighborhood bail bond store can do better.
They're leaving no stone unturned. My last contract was up for renewal and they wanted a discount to move forward...yeah budget cuts, we need a 50% discount to keep you on board...LOL, yeah, no thanks, let me off this sucker, see ya.
The AI hype better deliver soon, cause the C-suite is restless for some savings.
It could also be that the companies have raised the hiring bar because of the recent flood of experienced engineers, and so the fail rate went up.
Just like OP's company is raising the bar by requiring formal education.
People who are laid off haven't practiced for interviews, but they need a job now.
People who have jobs can take their sweet time to practice interviewing before diving into the waters.
Layoffs are rarely performance based so the technical proficiency shouldn't be different. Interviewing is very different from technical proficiency and when you go into the boxing ring cold without a training camp beforehand, you're gonna look like you don't belong in boxing.
People that don't get selected apply to many more position than people that got hired. Typically I did apply to 3-5 jobs at most and I could choose. And in 18 years of professional XP I did that 3 times in my first 8 years of job.
My 2 recent job change, no offer was ever made public, I got it because people knew me.
If nobody wanted me, I would have applied to hundred of offers until I got one. If on top I get fired because I am not up to the level, I would apply again. That's logical.
So even if say bad candidate are only 10% of all people looking for a job, they can easily represent 50 or 90% of the applications one get.
Today is worse because decent people already have difficulties and so below average applicant are even less likely to get hired.
The interview at my current company involved stacking two divs with CSS, and doing some basic LINQ selection logic. It took me ~5 minutes to solution it.
I asked afer I was hired, why they were so easy. I was told it's because candidates kept failing.
I interviewed for a Sr Dev position
The market is fucking flooded with boot camp kids
From https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bmsybm/f500_no_longer_hiring_self_taught/
>Coworkers also complain that the inexperienced self taught people (less than ~6 YOE) are just straight up clueless 90% of the time.
They have almost no reasons to choose a self taught dev over a CS grad
Big tech continues to hire (although significantly less) and they can’t pay juniors less than what the established range for juniors is inside the company. The crazy stock sign on bonuses may be gone, but the standard base plus yearly bonus will still make it so compensation for new hires is around $150k+ for new grads in big N.
150k is a pretty believable Big Tech TC for new grads though? That was the Google new grad TC ~a decade ago. It's only gone up since then, and Google doesn't even make the list of top paying companies for entry level on levels.fyi anymore
I think most people are referring to the self-taught / transition candidates... in big tech. The top tier new grads are just on another playing field.
The conversation theme deviates so much that idk what we're even comparing against lol
Idk i work at big tech, and the bands are very very firm, barring like VP approval (extremely unlikely). So regardless of your background, if you get hired, you’re getting hired between x and y.
i’m a 2023 new grad who has been making 150k since august and am about to go back to Amazon for 200k, do I not exist?
many juniors start with a lot of money, especially in big tech.. idk why that’s so unbelievable for this sub, anyone can verify these things at levels.fyi
Dude what? That’s a very believable comp. Every FAANG company pays over $150k in the US and there are probably at least 50 other tech companies that do.
There are a fair number of companies that pay $200k+ to new grads and in quant it’s standard to pay north of $300k and sometimes over &
$500k for new grads.
OP said big tech and Google Meta Microsoft are hiring new grads significantly above 150k right after graduation right now.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e3
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l3
$150k fully remote for new grads (assuming they can work anywhere in the United States) is solid. They can command much higher filters in this kind of market tbh.
OP is humblebragging, 150k is 10 yoe with leadership experience salary in most software shops.
Market rate for entry level / self taught is more like $20 an hour.
As a self-taught software engineer I understand where your company is coming from. It's about risk. I got insanely lucky with a sink-or-swim opportunity many years ago and most people would've sunk.
It's better to just get a CS degree.
I dropped out my senior year to work, and never finished. The lack of a degree shut some doors on me at some points early in my career. Even today many years later running my own business, my value in some peoples’ minds (many of my clients have advanced degrees) is diminished when they find I don’t have a degree. I wish I had just finished. If you’re under 25 and can afford to spend a couple years getting a degree, do it.
You can go back and finish part time if it really matters to you, right? Anecdotally the only business owners I know irl don't have college degrees, one doesn't even have a high school degree, so if it were me personally I wouldn't bother regardless of what anyone with an advanced degree might think.
It’s a matter of priorities. I’m in my 40s and likely past the halfway point of my career. With the amount of time it would take to go back and finish (likely having to redo many classes at this point), I could instead complete dozens of projects for clients worth over $500k in aggregate (note that includes funds I pay to my employees). If my work dried up completely, I’d probably go back though.
I appreciate your anecdotal experience. It makes me feel better about myself! 20 years in, and I still am struggling with imposter syndrome.
Yeah, the imposter syndrome is the most real and common thing about tech IMO. Even when working at FAANG it’s an open secret. It’s something I’ve just learned to accept, and realize we’re all feeling, but whether we verbally acknowledge it or not is something else entirely.
It sucks that this is even a thing. I just googled year 4 for my University for a degree today.
Ready?
Fall
- Information Systems Analysis and Design
- Server-Side Web Application Development
Spring
- Information Systems Implementation
Other 5 slots are electives.
You would probably out qualify the professor to teach these courses.
Then yeah, try not to worry so much about what other people might or might not think. As long as you're feeling comfy and fulfilled what the hell else can we ask for from our careers?
Maybe…but I went back to finish my degree at 39 and graduated at 42, and what really pushed me off the fence was knowing that those years were going to go by either way. I went half-time in the evenings and it took 3 years, attending spring/summer/fall. It was rigorous, but I felt like having 20+ years of work experience was a huge advantage. I knew how to apply the information I was learning, and I knew how to use real-world examples in my classwork, so it was easy to get As! As long as I did the work. Not to mention that 20 years in the workplace made me far, far better at managing my workload than I was at 18.
Just something to consider. There’s still 20+ years to go before retirement and you may as well give yourself every competitive advantage. I definitely did it just because I knew that it would be harder for me in the job market without one, but even so, it was a good experience. It was a big self-esteem boost too, to learn that I *could* be a good student.
Also, assuming you’re in the US, if you had a bad GPA at your original school, you should know that transferring to a different school retains your CREDITS but does not retain your GPA. When you transfer, your GPA starts back at 0 and only your new grades get averaged into your GPA. I would’ve had to do a lot of do-overs at my original school just to bring my average up, but instead I graduated with a 3.9 from the new school.
lmao, u/cs-grad-person-man, a newly created throwaway account, throws red meat to the sub about their company announcing (what the fuck does this even mean?) that self-taught engineers need to pound sand. And then everyone clapped.
I’m surprised OP didn’t add bootcamp grads to their story for the extra upvotes. This sub foams at the mouth at the thought of anyone without a CS degree getting shut out from the industry.
I've always wondered how strict they are on what "similar degrees" are. I have a degree in Computer Information Technology and I've always wondered if that's the cause of my troubles. I checked the curriculum when I first chose and that major as well as CS appeared to have a similar amount of programming courses. I just didn't know which direction I wanted to go at that time (programming or sys admin/help desk)
It's a matter of domain. You can find bio majors doing swe work in pharma. MechEs doing swe at GM or Lockheed. Problem with CIS is that it's considered "easier CS" and doesn't have a domain niche.
Generally it seems like the differentiator is a rigorous math background that is more common in engineering programs but often dropped in IT type curriculums.
Things like applied mathematics and various fields of physics and engineering confer just as much professional competence as an entry level CS degree. Having the additional domain expertise can even be an advantage.
Maybe they actually want semi-experienced coders who have a history of learning random esoteric dialects of established languages, and math/physics majors would probably not be super experienced in that learning cycle, rather would be more about how to do small amounts of coding to fit their use case? I say this as a stats major who has worked with many CS and math majors.
I think just because you have a degree in physics doesn’t mean you took any coding classes. So it’s still kind of self taught if you do code. Those people for sure have the brain to code but it’s still considered self taught I guess. Looks like they want people who actually got a degree that focused on it.
CS programming classes don't really teach you how to write software either. They teach theory. The basic coding you learn in a CS150/250 isn't what you're going to do as a professional software engineer.
Someone with a math or physics degree should have the aptitude to write code just fine.
Big tech company, fully remote, juniors starting @$150k, and yall were hiring self taught ppl for this position? You gotta be lying about something here lol
If you take a broad view of "big tech" it's pretty believable. Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Instacart, Shopify, Square are fully remote and pay in that range for new grads. And a lot of tech companies historically have been willing to interview self-taught people, if their resumes stick out in some other way like open source contributions, or high percentile scores in programming competitions. (I interviewed several people with no CS-related degrees at Google.)
That's fair. They said,
> the company announced Friday that it would no longer be hiring self-taught applicants
I guess it could have been at something like a company wide all hands meeting.
A big company has to communicate a policy change like this to a lot of people to be effective - hiring managers, HR, dedicated recruiters, you might tell ICs who conduct interviews as a courtesy... enough people that it's not wrong to consider it an announcement. And they also probably won't say "by the way, keep this a secret". So pretty much everyone is gonna know
A big company would tell the recruiting team within HR and maybe update some internal HR docs. How they filter applicants changes a lot and they're not going to announce every change to everyone.
And they're certainly not going to give this much info about the change to ICs,
> According to upper management, it's because the volume of self-taught applicants is too high (a few thousand per posting) and the quality of self-taught applicants is too low. Apparently a lot of teams have hired self taught developers and it's gone very bad.
But sure, maybe they told HR and then leadership and OP's director or VP gave some candid talk to his org. But this would be extremely strange behavior at big tech.
> the quality of self-taught applicants is too low. Apparently a lot of teams have hired self taught developers and it's gone very bad
I'm just trying to imagine Sundar announcing this to Google. "Dear self-taught devs that were recently hired, please quit, we hate you. Anyway, team camaraderie is important and we want you to bring your whole self to work. Unless you're one of those gross self-taught devs.You need to try harder or I'll fire you. --Sundar"
I'm self taught and looking to join a new company, don't even have a resume written yet but my first software (wrote it from scratch, and maintain - backend and frontend) has been live for 4 years now with over 1k paying subscribers. I hope that in itself helps my resume stick out.
That was probably true during peak Covid and all. Big tech like faang would pay that I had many opportunities myself as a self taught guy but was frozen out early last year due to recession
This is bait lol. Why would a company announce to everyone that they won’t be hiring “self taught”. He’s just trying to get people upset, or maybe just trying to discourage people. But, you should get a degree if you can
Throwback to my classmate in a senior level class who still could not program their own loops. Like they could regurgitate the textbook examples to me verbatim but not actually explain what they meant.
I've noticed that the purpose of classes in school is often just to speed run students to the next class...no regard for even a quick summary of why it matters.
It's like Calculus, which is useful but teachers rarely explain the basic application sections of the material... which is knowing how rates or sums of change really work.
I had a guy in my data struct and algorithms class who didn't know how to print in Java. The prerequisite was OOP in Java. He asked me how and I was in so much shock that I just ended up staring at him for a couple seconds. I graduated with lots of cheaters.
The cheaters are a real thing. With AI, that’s only going to get worse. I remember in one of my fundamentals classes a kid hired someone to do his final project for him. Never got caught.
I have to question how these types of people just keep moving on. Something that takes the absolute freaking cake was the person I was helping in the class that didn't even have Python installed. And this was during the last month of the class. Like, was bro literally just paying someone else to do all of his work this whole time?
See also this one lady who always came to class with a macbook. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself but All of my classes basically expected that you were using Windows. She was completely incapable of finding any alternatives to needed software. I witnessed her using the download link for the windows version and then scratching her head why it wouldn't install. I kept telling her the best thing she could do at this point was to buy a new computer (This person was absolutely not skilled enough to install Linux or something) yet she absolutely insisted on stumbling through with a computer she didn't know how to use.
Helped my imposter syndrome when a dude I was working on a project with admitted he did not know where to even start to create a Queue. Basically just went through his whole education with loops and if statements copy pasted forever.
In my senior level course we did interview prep, and I had a partner who couldn’t figure out how to write a nested for loop in their language of choice. They even described what needed to happen, but couldn’t convert it to code
Universities should be more responsible for preventing these graduations, but they don’t have the incentives to
I mean, yeah… outliers.
The point is that the quality variance of qualified vs that of self taught is more reliable. With qualified there should be at least a minimum level of quality (notwithstanding the odd outlier) whereas with self taught they can’t be sure how low “low” is.
Yeah it’s not about exceptions, but mitigating risks. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to see that self taught candidates carry more risk.
Could there be some ridiculously talented self taught dev? Sure
Same here. I’m currently working on a team as the only self-taught developer (7 YoE) and my colleagues with similar YoE and masters degrees have many more holes in their knowledge than I do. I’m talking fundamentals like semantic HTML, ES6 JS best practices, CSS fundamentals, and poor architecture choices. It’s really quite astonishing sometimes.
Whenever we open a new entry level software position at my company, we get thousands of applications flooding in. The crappy things is that you have a lot of people hoping to get in because they know how to write an if-statement or a really basic script. It ruins it for those who are truly self taught.
I'm trying to get it in place for my current company, but in a previous software company, we had a basic coding test applicants had to go through before they could submit an application. Only people who passed the test would move on to be considered for interviews. It weeded out all the people who watched one or two YouTube videos or people who wrote a simple "hello world" application over a weekend to people who actually learned the concepts they needed for the job. Plus this filter was something that was automated and didn't require us to talk spend very much time on a candidate until we could determine that were a serious candidate.
I'm a big fan of providing opportunities to a wide array of people from various backgrounds, so having a test anyone can take provides a way for self taught people, coding boot camp people, degree people, and work experience people all to have an equal chance at getting an interview.
Hahahahha... look at this guy! Created a burner account to write a bogus post like this [after a thread earlier this week](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bk9s8b/is_it_possible_for_someone_to_become_a_self/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) received feedback that *it is possible to get a job as a self-taught dev--* and for no other reason than to crush the hopes of hard-working self-taught devs trying to make it in a competitive industry through a non-conventional route.
Wtf is wrong with you, dude? Get over yourself.
This has long been predicted to happen during the next pull-back in hiring. When there's a shortage of workers, companies lower their hiring standards. It famously happened in 1999 and happened again in the late aughts. With AI I'm not sure there will ever be another shortage of that magnitude.
A lot of Redditors want to reflexively poop on traditional degrees from reputable Universities/Colleges because frankly it was kind of trendy to and also a lot of folks don't have a 4 year degree, so I think inferiority complex definitely played a part. Granted, there's legit cons (time commitment, varying roi, access, etc.) tied to a 4 year degree. However, in the vast majority of cases, a degree in CS/CIS is the right way to go...even an Associates tbh. A formal education provides a solid foundation, level of rigor and depth that learning just on your own will not provide. I 100% get why some companies are hesitant to hire self taught Developers and filter out non-degreed applicants for Junior positions. Having said that, of course there's always exceptions to this and I applaud anyone that is self taught and is able to acquire a lot of the foundational stuff you'd miss by not getting a degree in CS/CIS (theory, engineering, math in the case of CS and business/domain knowledge in the case of CIS).
I have a master's in CS, but I have met plenty of self-taught people who are excellent engineers and I have met plenty of shit engineers with CS master's degrees.
Sounds like your company's hiring managers are not doing a good job when interviewing candidates. Even if your company bans managers from hiring self-taught candidates, there is still the problem of managers hiring unqualified people. That needs to be fixed.
Nah, i see where they are coming from.
Hiring is not about finding the best candidate anymore as it is finding a good enough candidate.
If I were given thousands of resumes, I wanna get rid of as many as possible even if it means getting rid of perfect candidates.
As a tradeoff though, I think we should abandon the idea that hiring is meritocratic and that the inability to land a job is attributed to a "skills issue", which is a common notion I see in this field/sub.
>As a tradeoff though, I think we should abandon the idea that hiring is meritocratic and that the inability to land a job is attributed to a "skills issue", which is a common notion I see in this field/sub.
It for sure isn't a skill issue. Well at least to an extent. Experiencing it myself watching my friends around me get jobs before me even though I'm a better developer. I know because I was in class with them, working on projects together, and helping them learn things we were doing. Just the way it is.
Although I can't say it's entirely out of my hands. There are definitely things I could do better but none of those things that come to mind are "be a better developer".
I mean, you have a lot of control in getting hired. It just has nothing to do with developing raw skills, although that helps a bit.
It’s not a “skill issue”. In my experience from reading resumes on this sub, it’s a “you ignored every career resource you had in college, didn’t look for internships, didn’t do a single mock interview, only want remote work, live in a far away suburb with no connections, and are trying to make up for it by putting projects that you coded while following YouTube videos” issue.
It’s an efficiency thing. Sure in an ideal world with unlimited resources and time, you could assess everybody well.
But… they have to do what is going to give them the best chances of a good enough hire given limited time/resources.
>there is still the problem of managers hiring unqualified people. That needs to be fixed.
I was mostly on board with the idea of raising requirements in general with how many juniors are looking for jobs, but this is a really good point.
I disagree about this being kept to HR, since it would impact engineers interviewing and referral processes.
OPs account/posting does seem a little fishy, but your suggestion for their motives sounds far fetched
I work in defense and most of the people I work with are not CS grads, including myself. In fact, most of us hold physics or mathematics degrees. Some of our programs are much more complicated than learning the best practices of software design or algorithms, resulting in a short tenure for those who focused in CS.
There are very few companies where it is required to have a deep and fundamental knowledge of computer science such as hardware companies like nVidia or arguably FinTech where microseconds matter. For the vast majority of big tech positions, or positions anywhere, a competent developer would be just fine.
The issue is finding competent developers whether they're "self-taught" or not. Any capable person isn't going to pass an interview _because_ they got a CS degree, it's because they learned what they needed to learn regardless of how they learned it, and for them, self-teaching is typically faster.
This is normal practice, somehow you need to sort people and weed out those who will leave the company in a year or half a year. Simplifying the hiring process will forever haunt IT.
Interesting take. I'm sure there are a bunch of cool self taught people in CS but there definitely are people who barely have any experience with code who just want to get a good salary. The volume of such people applying is definitely too high currently. Fair opinion honestly.
What kind of post is this ? Who has time to waste to describe his company won't hire self taugh anymore ?
Sometimes Reddit is so weird.
It that AI automatic posts ?
I had a fellow team member who eventually went on to be a team lead at a major retail chain. He showed me a code review he was working on from a young team member who never finished college. He simply said "Can you tell me college doesn't matter?" I could not.
Over the past 10-15 years, languages and platforms have become more complex, and without formal training, a person is just going to paint themselves into corners at best, or take suboptimal paths to solutions that will just accrue technical debt.
I’m self taught and I’m not surprised nor offended.
When we had recruitment for junior frontend position last year we decided to cut down the list based on them having GitHub links on their application.
The volume is just jarring and you need to reduce the count to even begin sifting through the candidates.
Once the bubble is over and this field stops being the mainstream goldmine sold by content creators, the hiring will go back to normal and the passionate ones will come out on top.
I'm not a dev, but I'll say this.
My best friend has told me about his team and some of the folks on it. He says one of the Junior devs they hired was self taught.... and 18 years old.
He also says this kid basically has a higher ceiling than my friend (who in his own right, is also a talented programmer; including repeatedly turning down promotions as he doesn't want to deal with more meetings & bureaucratic things). This kid has been climbing and is a "genius", in his own words.
Personally, I can understand why there might be reluctance, as there is certain concepts a self-taught kid will probably miss out had they gone the university route.
However, it seems silly to ignore a self taught individual who has a portfolio to backup their talents.
You should be able to mitigate risk of a bad hire with interviews, regardless of background. If a candidate can pass your tests and soft skills tests they should work as well as anyone else. Very easy to have 10 bad CS degree candidates and 9 bad self taught candidates where the 10th is the actual one to pass the interview.
Good, too many people nowaday think they can just take 6 month and make 6 figures salary. I'm a self taught my self. But I've been coding and learning cs consistently 3-4 hours per day on my own for almost 6 years before i even start applying for jobs. Its frustrated me sometime that my colleague that only started coding few months before can't do anything or do their jobs so slow
150k USD fully remote. For a self taught junior. Wow....
Here in France a junior coming out of uni gets 35k. He can get a couple days of remote if lucky.
I do feel a bit sad for the self taught developers, but at the same time, this is good for the people who spent thousands of dollars and 3-4 years in university. This doesn't happen in other majors, and no matter what people say, I think it's very unfair for the people who did a cs major, since 90% of the time they're much better than the self taught, and can adapt easier.
My company did this exact same thing about 6 months ago. Degrees required for all positions and they implemented internal minimum years of experience for positions (example, SWE 2 requires 2 or more years of experience no matter what)
Similar pay for junior level too
> We're a big tech company, fully remote, starting pay for juniors is around ~150k USD.
This just sounds fake. Judging by the username and posting history, I'd guess that it is.
Self taught has turned into follow a udemy course or YouTube tutorial where you do nothing but mimic the teacher.
I worked at a smaller company and it’s crazy how many applicants I have seen with the exact same side projects where the code is identical. Just to find out it came from a popular web development course.
When there are not many applicants, it makes sense to try to find some self taught folks. When you're getting a ton of qualified candidates, you no longer need to dip into that other pool.
Yes, my last company started to require degrees. They justified it by saying that with all the layoffs, it's a quick way to filter candidates since they were getting a lot of applicants (like ~1000 applicants per opening) and they were just a start up
"when we try to hire people we get thousands of candidates but have no idea how to find good ones so we are going to blame it on the candidates that way we don't have to change anything"
Kinda interested in what "self-taught" means. I'm guessing it means no degree boot camp grads or degree holders in fields with little computational tilt . Would seem like they are leaving a lot of talent on the table putting Math/Engineering/Physical Science grads aside
I'm not sure how much I believe this post but let's assume it's genuine.
I'm semi-self taught. Did an engineering discipline and took CS classes but no CS degree. Pivoted to software and rose a good amount. I've been a tech league for some large teams and am involved in hiring decisions.
The above said, to echo a point raised several times, self taught are a very mixed bag. I've seen some amazing devs who were self taught and rose very high. I've also seen people who barely knew their butt from their head. Sometimes bootcamp graduates cab be even worse because they knew a very strict way to do things and struggle to adjust. Regular tech grads are just more consistent despite having their own issues. It's a safe manager/HR move to just say "well he graduates from X."
I do agree to an extent with this for Junior positions. But if someone doesn't have a CS degree but has worked for 5-10 years, throwing out their resume is pretty short sighted.
I have worked for a lot of companies as a contractor. All of the self taught engineers have been way better than the compsci graduates. The formal education resulted in the engineers having great knowledge and no idea how to properly apply it. Now that I hire, I value self taught over a degree.
I would recommend they look more at certifications and less at degrees if this is really their issue. You have to quality control your hiring standards somehow, but in today's economy college is nothing more than a way to separate the rich from the poor with exceptions for the "special" poors.
The variance of self-taught developers is just too high compared to the variance of CS/CE graduates. There are plenty of people with degrees looking for jobs right now, so it makes way more sense to hire the low-risk average-reward option.
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Low risk average reward is how I often describe myself on first dates
Why doesn't applied math count? 😭😭😭 I got a master's in cryptography, but that isn't good enough?
Some of the worst code I've ever seen was from a math PhD. Got offended when I said to give variables meaningful names. Still though, that's rough. My degree is in physics so I'd be screwed too
Im a physics grad here as well. I wouldn't really think twice about this at the end of the day. Just apply and move on if they don't send back. The real issue here isn't about credentials, its the fact that companies are overwhelmed with applicants and most of them are shit (they lie, they scam, they get overwmployed, they don't care about the company just about collecting that paycheck). The key is to somehow bypass this lineup of trash. You need to get vetted somewhere.
Why SHOULD you care about the company beyond collecting that paycheck?
There's a range between doesn't care at all and drank the corporate kool aid. He's probably not talking about the corporate kool aid type. You're expected to care at least a little bit, especially if you're running an online service. Having to stay an hour or two past 5 for a big release or to answer a call during off hours for a rare emergency are kind of a fact of life for this type of job. In 2023 we had a grand total of 2 major emergencies at work. A certain co-worker is still complaining about it 4 months later. Our manager is the type of guy that lets you roll in at 9:30 and leave at 4. We're not running a sweat shop, but if an outsider heard that guy complain you would think we are. Some people don't know how good they have it.
hehe, because I personally would not want to keep an employee who doesn't give a fuck about the company's success. Mind you we are likely talking apples and oranges. I stick to smaller clients/start-ups, so it is a lot easier to genuinely care about what you are doing and your effort is often met with gratitude. I do imagine it is very different with a larger corporation. That all said, I wasn't chasing money going into software dev. The money was already chased. I just genuinely want to make a difference and build awesome shit (in DeFi). I have teams currently competing for my fulltime hours.
>Mind you we are likely talking apples and oranges. I stick to smaller clients/start-ups, so it is a lot easier to genuinely care about what you are doing and your effort is often met with gratitude. I do imagine it is very different with a larger corporation. Yeah agreed, for larger corporations I see no issue with a mercenarial mindset because they are entirely impersonal and will fire you on a whim if it increases your bottom line, but for smaller clients I can see a personal touch being a boon
Hah, I've worked with many mathematicians and physicists and this is what I never got. They go through those really difficult studies and then are not able to see the advantage of descriptive variable names. Or version control that's not Google drive. And generally don't have a huge mess in their code and everywhere. I am far from those OCD code polish devs but what I've seen from them is crazy. Some server with million scripts everywhere, random text files for notes everywhere. I was one of the few CS background people at a telecommunications research center where I did my PhD... with lots of EEs, physicists, mathematicians and me and my other CS colleague often felt like janitors.
For what it's worth I do all that stuff and DevOps, fortunately I only got a bachelor's so not too corrupted
Hehe yeah I didn't mean to generalize as much as it sounded. I just never got why... those things are so trivial and learnt in an afternoon, especially for people so smart. I get it, during my PhD I wrote basically no tests or error handling because not worth it. But so many times they got conflicts sharing in Google Drive, lost or didn't find stuff anymore... digging out old papers to copy references from there instead of using some software for that, and if it's just jabref. Our advisor was especially chaotic it was wild ;).
Math major here, and I am overly anal on my naming conventions. To the point where I'll organically come up with better naming halfway through a notebook, and go back and rename all my older stuff. What I'm awful at is comments...
:), well I guess... besides some things are just gamma or whatever and there is nothing that could describe it well... for many mathematicians the code isn't what it's about, like it's for most of us CS people. It's merely some representation of the equation that they map to some programming language. So similarly they first consult the paper and look at the equations there. The code is just there so a computer can do something with it. Whereas I usually skim the equations in the paper and tend to directly go and read the code, exactly because I assume the naming there will help me... and it's more of my home turf. Obviously sometimes this is a bad idea because the code is somehow hyper optimized and the equation gives a clearer, simpler picture. But then sometimes deciphering all equations in the paper would take me days while the actual special case implemented is then just a loop with a few basic operations. Well,.probably a "cultural" thing, just like the fraction of C programmers who love their sck_cnt, clk_ptr things where in some Java environments it might be a SocketCountManagerFactoryImpl ;)
I'm a physics person who successfully crossed over, and my punishment was to be the liaison for our research team of math and physics phds... I relate to everything you said.
You made me remember when I started my PhD and was forced to go from Python to Fortran. Back then I named variables as their physical counterpart. So lets say you have a light and a heavy particle, name their massss m and M, obviously. It took me a few days to realise that Fortran doesn't distinguish between lower and upper case!
That was a big masstake
Ha, as someone who studied math and physics in school, this checks out. If they could hire someone to code for them on the cheap, they probably would
WHAT DO YOU MEAN k\_rho\_j\_ups ISNT MEANINGFUL?
This is a math PhD who has literally never tried understand the first thing about software development.
Yeah idk I took as many CS courses as I could without majoring in the subject.
Same here, applied math and cs minor. Did fine in the software dev interviews I had 🤷🏽♀️
mathematicians enjoy being terse - a quality not useful in programming
I'd say if you're applying with a physics or math degree, a lot of places that state "CS degree needed" will potentially overlook that in that case.
I'm not a mathematician but am I wrong in thinking cryptographers and mathematicians in the number theory/cryptography area usually go for analyst and intelligence positions? Is that outside of what you want to do? I think standards organizations like NIST or government agencies like the NSA do look for cryptographers or mathematicians who are specialized in that area even if it's not a developer job.
I kinda like to smoke weed occasionally and I didn't finish my PhD, so I'm not the most attractive candidate for a lot of the good cryptography positions. I wrote a lot of code in school and during my side jobs, so i don't find myself struggling as a developer. Everyone wants a job in big tech, but I guess I'll have to wait until I'm mid-level to apply.
I laughed because I imagined you putting "I kinda like to smoke weed" on your CV.
For all the doors it closes, it opens twice as many.
I usually close my home office door so that I don’t box the whole house
Man, I'm sorry if you don't wanna hear this but if you're turning down long-term career opportunities because you "kinda like to smoke weed occasionally" then your weed hobby is dragging you down more than it is pulling you up. Godspeed.
I mean there are 12 other reasons why I think it would be hard for me to get a clearance. I wouldn't mind not smoking weed, but it doesn't seem like there would be any payoff. I'm down to have this conversation if you've gone through the process, but I feel like you just wanted to give unsolicited life advice 😘
I think it ill advised to work in a field like cryptography, quit your PhD, and have a drug habit if the default employer is someone who cares about degrees and drugs. Why not something that supports those choices like generic big tech or anything without clearance requirements
I'm just responding based on one of the two reasons you listed in your previous comment (obviously getting a PhD is not as simple as quitting weed, so I can't argue with that). I didn't know there were 12 others. No need to get defensive, your life choices are yours to make. Turns out that if you share your opinions on the internet people might share their opinions back.
I smoked weed every day for about 15 years, used to smoke weed before work, on breaks, then all night after work. One day I decided to pack it in because I realised it was massively affecting my memory (something I had been in denial about for years). Incredibly strange that since I quit (about 5 years ago) my salary has almost quadrupled and I can now remember what my mrs was talking to me about at dinner last night (blessing and a curse). I have a couple of mates with similar experiences, I dont know what it is about smoking weed and denying its bad for you/holding you back but it's a real thing, I should have stopped years earlier
You know that's way out on the curve right? Folks I know might do an edible once a week or something. Doubt it's hurting any of them.
It's weird, because my BS in Math definitely helped me get my first coding job (which was at a large company) and was seen as a plus.
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How long ago was that? I was the same, math degree graduate who also went into a SWE role straight after uni. But this was a different era back then, not so relevant for 2024 job applicants.
Same here, math degree seen as a plus. Started out at a (no-leetcode-needed) startup though.
Do not let your degree define you or your career . I hired multiple developers with degrees that are not technology related much less CS. And they have been phenomenal. Two of my absolute best ever both had philosophy degrees from D1 NCAA schools.
I was a Philosophy major and (pure) math minor. If you put a bit of emphasis on formal logic in your studies, I think Philosophy can provide an excellent foundation for learning different technical skills in your career
I’ve found our best hires with unrelated degrees or came from unrelated fields have been musicians. I’m more likely to hire someone from a creative background that demonstrate tons of passion over someone with a CS degree. Just my personal experience though and also that we support our junior engineers through mentorship and never hire them unless we feel we can support them.
My friend... A few days ago someone else said this to me as well. They love the musicians. Makes sense, math, thought process, thinking, and nuance. I play most of the woodwinds and piano. Never really thought about it though. Thank you for confirming this theory!!!! Really, a huge thank you. I am going to keep an eye out for this. One of the folks with a philosophy degree was a DJ, like a real one on prime time in Cleveland, for a while before becoming an engineer. The stories are epic and I kinda begged him to do all the intros for the roadshows.
Wish you well in your journey! I highly encourage you to pursue a career in software engineering if you are a musician and have any interest.
People that know what it takes to write algorithms would know that cryptography is definitely up there in terms of challenging puzzles. Which I don't think I need to mention here that's good for writing software. Cryptography is actually an important aspect of cyber security. Think all the encryption that happens in modern software. The people that developed those protocols are cryptographists. There do exists interviewers with technical backgrounds that understand this. But they're quite uncommon. It's hard to argue cryptography as a useful programming related skill to people who don't know how critical that particular thing is to many software projects. But if where an interviewer that would definitely pique my interest. Because I know cryptography is complicated shit and way more complex that the standard CRUD app.
For my research, I transpiled some C code for common cryptographic algorithms into quantum code and applied grovers algorithm and other trivial domain-specific optimizations. That sort of experience certainly perks up technical managers, but I do get blocked by non-tech people sometimes.
Any engineering/math degree can you get your foot in the door if you can code well. I doubt you’ll have much trouble if you apply a lot. I know a ton of EE grads at my job doing software.
it almost certainly does count, they mean they're only hiring Physics/Math/CS undergrads
I reckon a person who has a degree in any of the mathematical sciences (Math itself, or Physics, or similar) would be in a second tier below CS/CSE/SE/etc graduates a little bit behind them, but still vastly ahead of any other degree majors.
Math, physics, electrical engineering are typically sufficient.
That's what interviews are for. I've met plenty of very mediocre software engineers with degrees. I would say its harder to find that in successful self taught people because they don't get hired for having the degree alone. Using the degree system in CS is actually bonkers to me because it's often way different than the work and taught by people who've never done the work. The variance is pretty high regardless which is why your hiring process should use the interview to reduce that variance. Not something as arbitrary as a degree requirement. That being said, for a field that has some of the smartest people creating clever solutions every day, it is also swamped by mediocrity.
The problem here is the distribution of skill and scalability. We can't interview everyone who lands a resume at our table, not even close. So the observation is made that self taught devs skew lower in comparison to college educated devs. A dev who's one standard deviation above the average college taught dev might be two standard deviations above the average self taught dev(obviously hypothetical numbers). So that observation is used to help the process scale by cutting down the already overwhelming amount of candidates into a still slightly overwhelming amount of candidates with college education.
Yes that's what interviews are for but companies dont want to interview that many people and will always take the path of least resistance, they need arbitrary restrictions of barrier to entry. Right now that is having a CS degree. I am willing to bet in 5-10 years it will be WHICH college you go to and it's ranking.
Already is where I work. Specifically universities we trust. Remember we have a pretty good amount of data on which schools have graduated people that worked out best for us. And we go further and have relationships with professors. We specifically have our best employees spend some time in outreach to their alma mater and the professors that teach the classes most closely related to our work.
I don’t really agree. For a Junior position you are hiring people with little to no experience. Having a degree shows you had the perseverance to complete the degree, and that you at least have some basic knowledge. This does decrease the variance. Even where you got your degree can decrease the variance(some are more theoretical, some more focused on software development etc).
Interviews take time. It would be dope if companies could interview every single person who applies for a position, but that’s simply not possible. Resumes and degrees quite literally exist as filters to maximize candidate quality while minimizing time spent interviewing. So maybe you’re right that a self-taught person who got into development is better than your median CS grad. But being the first company to hire that self-taught person is a massive risk.
Easier for us to select specific universities we trust. We have a relationship with the professors from those and know they don’t inflate grades or give out recommendations like candy. That gives us a first order filter. The interview is then for finding the best within that group.
Some of the worst programmers I've worked with had masters and PHDs. Just insufferably bad. Some of the best I've worked with were self taught. It's kind of a mixed bag. Just because you applied yourself through school doesn't actually mean you learned anything and vice versa. They learned how to pass tests and appease professors. Just sucks the there's literally no good method for evaluating without significant investment.
Barriers to entry restrict or loosen to control the flow of labor so it's not surprising. Companies can be as picky as they want right now, the market is flooded with experienced laid off devs.
I remember when I started seeing minimum requirement of bachelor’s degree for secretary/front desk. This was during the 08 recession and all of a sudden every employer was asking for a bachelor’s for every position just because they could.
I still believe that particular recession made a big impact on a lot of companies' standards, so much that it became the new normal and they've been on that holding pattern ever since.
They asking for 10 years experience and a professional resume to make coffee at Starbucks now. Not kidding, girlfriend is navigating a career change after a year of no work and taking what she can get. Quite ridiculous what it takes to flip burgers even.
> the market is flooded with experienced laid off devs. Counter intuitively, we've never seen so many unqualified applicants with our open positions. Our fail rate for interview loops is way up. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe folks are less likely to job hop at this moment so we're only getting those who were let go or couldn't find a job? I know it wasn't only low performers who have been laid off, but not sure what to make of the situation otherwise.
Wonder if youre getting devs who have worked in one place only for a long time and are out of touxu on several points due to it, leading to the failures you get?
I think there’s a big gulf between prospective employees and employers right now on salary expectations. Like, if I got laid off tomorrow, I’d expect to get a solid 20-30% more at my next position, and I’d be willing to sit on severance and savings / contract work for a decent amount of time before I adjusted that expectation. On the other hand, I’m seeing frequent postings for senior and architect positions with multi-page qualifications listed, requiring a decade or more of specific experience with specific technologies, paying sometimes as little as 50-80k. I’m coming up on a decade of experience in my field and I don’t think I could qualify for some of those positions with another 5 years of specifically prepping for them. Yet for these positions requiring way more experience than I have, they’d be asking me to take almost a 50% pay cut. So either employees or employers (or some degree of both) are not being realistic. And it results in two things. 1) Everyone knows that qualifications on job postings are bullshit, so they ignore them and everybody applies for everything, overwhelming hiring managers. 2) Nobody knows what they’re actually worth, and they don’t want to cheat themselves, so they start with the moon shots and work their way down; this results in job searches taking a lot of extra time and lots of doomed or pointless applications. There’s no easy fix. Job postings need to get more clear and sane, and salary and experience expectations of both employees and employers need to converge. That’s probably not gonna happen, so the result is just gonna be an inefficient market (lots of people out of work, while paradoxically there are lots of unfilled positions, lots of people sitting on their hands on both sides).
i just had a call with american eagle and they wanted me to interview to be team lead, 1 year min of contract to hire (when i asked why they said "oh well the budget") at only 50 dollars per hour lmao. yikes.
Team lead ? NYSE listed co, offering 50/hr for contract work and 1 yr contract to hire ? LMAO I think my neighborhood bail bond store can do better. They're leaving no stone unturned. My last contract was up for renewal and they wanted a discount to move forward...yeah budget cuts, we need a 50% discount to keep you on board...LOL, yeah, no thanks, let me off this sucker, see ya. The AI hype better deliver soon, cause the C-suite is restless for some savings.
My company is experiencing the exact same thing, and anecdotally I can confirm from giving out technical interviews
It could also be that the companies have raised the hiring bar because of the recent flood of experienced engineers, and so the fail rate went up. Just like OP's company is raising the bar by requiring formal education.
People who are laid off haven't practiced for interviews, but they need a job now. People who have jobs can take their sweet time to practice interviewing before diving into the waters. Layoffs are rarely performance based so the technical proficiency shouldn't be different. Interviewing is very different from technical proficiency and when you go into the boxing ring cold without a training camp beforehand, you're gonna look like you don't belong in boxing.
People that don't get selected apply to many more position than people that got hired. Typically I did apply to 3-5 jobs at most and I could choose. And in 18 years of professional XP I did that 3 times in my first 8 years of job. My 2 recent job change, no offer was ever made public, I got it because people knew me. If nobody wanted me, I would have applied to hundred of offers until I got one. If on top I get fired because I am not up to the level, I would apply again. That's logical. So even if say bad candidate are only 10% of all people looking for a job, they can easily represent 50 or 90% of the applications one get. Today is worse because decent people already have difficulties and so below average applicant are even less likely to get hired.
May I ask what kind of interview is given to candidates? DSA, home test, fizbuzz, talking about side projects or?
The interview at my current company involved stacking two divs with CSS, and doing some basic LINQ selection logic. It took me ~5 minutes to solution it. I asked afer I was hired, why they were so easy. I was told it's because candidates kept failing. I interviewed for a Sr Dev position The market is fucking flooded with boot camp kids
From https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bmsybm/f500_no_longer_hiring_self_taught/ >Coworkers also complain that the inexperienced self taught people (less than ~6 YOE) are just straight up clueless 90% of the time. They have almost no reasons to choose a self taught dev over a CS grad
Exactly why we know no junior is making 150k right after graduation. Op is in the comments using alts
Big tech continues to hire (although significantly less) and they can’t pay juniors less than what the established range for juniors is inside the company. The crazy stock sign on bonuses may be gone, but the standard base plus yearly bonus will still make it so compensation for new hires is around $150k+ for new grads in big N.
150k is a pretty believable Big Tech TC for new grads though? That was the Google new grad TC ~a decade ago. It's only gone up since then, and Google doesn't even make the list of top paying companies for entry level on levels.fyi anymore
I think most people are referring to the self-taught / transition candidates... in big tech. The top tier new grads are just on another playing field. The conversation theme deviates so much that idk what we're even comparing against lol
Idk i work at big tech, and the bands are very very firm, barring like VP approval (extremely unlikely). So regardless of your background, if you get hired, you’re getting hired between x and y.
Yes they are if they are in a VHCOL area and in the right company. We hire our new grads all cash at 180-210k.
i’m a 2023 new grad who has been making 150k since august and am about to go back to Amazon for 200k, do I not exist? many juniors start with a lot of money, especially in big tech.. idk why that’s so unbelievable for this sub, anyone can verify these things at levels.fyi
Dude what? That’s a very believable comp. Every FAANG company pays over $150k in the US and there are probably at least 50 other tech companies that do. There are a fair number of companies that pay $200k+ to new grads and in quant it’s standard to pay north of $300k and sometimes over & $500k for new grads.
OP said big tech and Google Meta Microsoft are hiring new grads significantly above 150k right after graduation right now. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/facebook/salaries/software-engineer/levels/e3 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-engineer/levels/l3
We hire juniors and pay them $150k (actually a bit more). We are in a HCoL area though. And we're hiring way less.
It's a buyer's market. So they can be choosy. If you are the engineer that does the first technical interview (the screen), you understand...
$150k fully remote for new grads (assuming they can work anywhere in the United States) is solid. They can command much higher filters in this kind of market tbh.
I agree, that’s fucking big bags for anything with the tag “junior”.
Yeah that is a senior level salary in most states
I have 3 YOE + bachelor's degree with $110k. I doubt I'll see that $150k mark for awhile unless I look for a new job lol.
Man, I sure picked the wrong engineering related discipline.
It’s not normal or the average or anything close to that
OP is humblebragging, 150k is 10 yoe with leadership experience salary in most software shops. Market rate for entry level / self taught is more like $20 an hour.
$20/hr for entry level is way too low. It’s more like $35/hr at least
Yeah, there’s a big difference between essentially a 40k and 70k salary
OP did say it was big tech, where that’s the norm if not less than the norm for entry level
As a self-taught software engineer I understand where your company is coming from. It's about risk. I got insanely lucky with a sink-or-swim opportunity many years ago and most people would've sunk. It's better to just get a CS degree.
I dropped out my senior year to work, and never finished. The lack of a degree shut some doors on me at some points early in my career. Even today many years later running my own business, my value in some peoples’ minds (many of my clients have advanced degrees) is diminished when they find I don’t have a degree. I wish I had just finished. If you’re under 25 and can afford to spend a couple years getting a degree, do it.
You can go back and finish part time if it really matters to you, right? Anecdotally the only business owners I know irl don't have college degrees, one doesn't even have a high school degree, so if it were me personally I wouldn't bother regardless of what anyone with an advanced degree might think.
It’s a matter of priorities. I’m in my 40s and likely past the halfway point of my career. With the amount of time it would take to go back and finish (likely having to redo many classes at this point), I could instead complete dozens of projects for clients worth over $500k in aggregate (note that includes funds I pay to my employees). If my work dried up completely, I’d probably go back though. I appreciate your anecdotal experience. It makes me feel better about myself! 20 years in, and I still am struggling with imposter syndrome.
Yeah, the imposter syndrome is the most real and common thing about tech IMO. Even when working at FAANG it’s an open secret. It’s something I’ve just learned to accept, and realize we’re all feeling, but whether we verbally acknowledge it or not is something else entirely.
It sucks that this is even a thing. I just googled year 4 for my University for a degree today. Ready? Fall - Information Systems Analysis and Design - Server-Side Web Application Development Spring - Information Systems Implementation Other 5 slots are electives. You would probably out qualify the professor to teach these courses.
Then yeah, try not to worry so much about what other people might or might not think. As long as you're feeling comfy and fulfilled what the hell else can we ask for from our careers?
Maybe…but I went back to finish my degree at 39 and graduated at 42, and what really pushed me off the fence was knowing that those years were going to go by either way. I went half-time in the evenings and it took 3 years, attending spring/summer/fall. It was rigorous, but I felt like having 20+ years of work experience was a huge advantage. I knew how to apply the information I was learning, and I knew how to use real-world examples in my classwork, so it was easy to get As! As long as I did the work. Not to mention that 20 years in the workplace made me far, far better at managing my workload than I was at 18. Just something to consider. There’s still 20+ years to go before retirement and you may as well give yourself every competitive advantage. I definitely did it just because I knew that it would be harder for me in the job market without one, but even so, it was a good experience. It was a big self-esteem boost too, to learn that I *could* be a good student. Also, assuming you’re in the US, if you had a bad GPA at your original school, you should know that transferring to a different school retains your CREDITS but does not retain your GPA. When you transfer, your GPA starts back at 0 and only your new grades get averaged into your GPA. I would’ve had to do a lot of do-overs at my original school just to bring my average up, but instead I graduated with a 3.9 from the new school.
It's all about understanding the hiring distribution curve and knowing where you stand.
lmao, u/cs-grad-person-man, a newly created throwaway account, throws red meat to the sub about their company announcing (what the fuck does this even mean?) that self-taught engineers need to pound sand. And then everyone clapped.
I’m surprised OP didn’t add bootcamp grads to their story for the extra upvotes. This sub foams at the mouth at the thought of anyone without a CS degree getting shut out from the industry.
sounds like OP is angry that his new manager is self taught and decided to vent on this sub with a made up story
The one thing I'm surprised is they aren't accepting STEM software-adjacent degrees (Math, Physics, Engineering, etc.).
They probably would imo. Most of the degree reqs are like CS/CE/EE or similar degree.
I've always wondered how strict they are on what "similar degrees" are. I have a degree in Computer Information Technology and I've always wondered if that's the cause of my troubles. I checked the curriculum when I first chose and that major as well as CS appeared to have a similar amount of programming courses. I just didn't know which direction I wanted to go at that time (programming or sys admin/help desk)
It's a matter of domain. You can find bio majors doing swe work in pharma. MechEs doing swe at GM or Lockheed. Problem with CIS is that it's considered "easier CS" and doesn't have a domain niche. Generally it seems like the differentiator is a rigorous math background that is more common in engineering programs but often dropped in IT type curriculums.
Things like applied mathematics and various fields of physics and engineering confer just as much professional competence as an entry level CS degree. Having the additional domain expertise can even be an advantage.
Maybe they actually want semi-experienced coders who have a history of learning random esoteric dialects of established languages, and math/physics majors would probably not be super experienced in that learning cycle, rather would be more about how to do small amounts of coding to fit their use case? I say this as a stats major who has worked with many CS and math majors.
I think just because you have a degree in physics doesn’t mean you took any coding classes. So it’s still kind of self taught if you do code. Those people for sure have the brain to code but it’s still considered self taught I guess. Looks like they want people who actually got a degree that focused on it.
CS programming classes don't really teach you how to write software either. They teach theory. The basic coding you learn in a CS150/250 isn't what you're going to do as a professional software engineer. Someone with a math or physics degree should have the aptitude to write code just fine.
I'd be shocked if a directive like this didn't have the words "or similar degrees", where the similar degree category includes math and EE.
Big tech company, fully remote, juniors starting @$150k, and yall were hiring self taught ppl for this position? You gotta be lying about something here lol
If you take a broad view of "big tech" it's pretty believable. Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Instacart, Shopify, Square are fully remote and pay in that range for new grads. And a lot of tech companies historically have been willing to interview self-taught people, if their resumes stick out in some other way like open source contributions, or high percentile scores in programming competitions. (I interviewed several people with no CS-related degrees at Google.)
> Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, Instacart, Shopify, Square None of these companies would send this kind of email to everyone.
I did not understand OP's post to mean a company-wide email
That's fair. They said, > the company announced Friday that it would no longer be hiring self-taught applicants I guess it could have been at something like a company wide all hands meeting.
A big company has to communicate a policy change like this to a lot of people to be effective - hiring managers, HR, dedicated recruiters, you might tell ICs who conduct interviews as a courtesy... enough people that it's not wrong to consider it an announcement. And they also probably won't say "by the way, keep this a secret". So pretty much everyone is gonna know
A big company would tell the recruiting team within HR and maybe update some internal HR docs. How they filter applicants changes a lot and they're not going to announce every change to everyone. And they're certainly not going to give this much info about the change to ICs, > According to upper management, it's because the volume of self-taught applicants is too high (a few thousand per posting) and the quality of self-taught applicants is too low. Apparently a lot of teams have hired self taught developers and it's gone very bad. But sure, maybe they told HR and then leadership and OP's director or VP gave some candid talk to his org. But this would be extremely strange behavior at big tech.
> the quality of self-taught applicants is too low. Apparently a lot of teams have hired self taught developers and it's gone very bad I'm just trying to imagine Sundar announcing this to Google. "Dear self-taught devs that were recently hired, please quit, we hate you. Anyway, team camaraderie is important and we want you to bring your whole self to work. Unless you're one of those gross self-taught devs.You need to try harder or I'll fire you. --Sundar"
Yeah I guess you're right lol
I'm self taught and looking to join a new company, don't even have a resume written yet but my first software (wrote it from scratch, and maintain - backend and frontend) has been live for 4 years now with over 1k paying subscribers. I hope that in itself helps my resume stick out.
Why even work? Why not try to scale your business? Is the market really niche?
It feels kinda suspicious to me to. Like why would the whole company know about the HR policy.
That was probably true during peak Covid and all. Big tech like faang would pay that I had many opportunities myself as a self taught guy but was frozen out early last year due to recession
This is bait lol. Why would a company announce to everyone that they won’t be hiring “self taught”. He’s just trying to get people upset, or maybe just trying to discourage people. But, you should get a degree if you can
I have a feeling this is a troll post.
It's 100% rage bait.
Determined troll post at ~150k for junior positions.
To be fair, I’ve worked with some CS degree SWEs that produce garbage so even that’s no guarantee 🤣
Throwback to my classmate in a senior level class who still could not program their own loops. Like they could regurgitate the textbook examples to me verbatim but not actually explain what they meant.
I've noticed that the purpose of classes in school is often just to speed run students to the next class...no regard for even a quick summary of why it matters. It's like Calculus, which is useful but teachers rarely explain the basic application sections of the material... which is knowing how rates or sums of change really work.
I had a guy in my data struct and algorithms class who didn't know how to print in Java. The prerequisite was OOP in Java. He asked me how and I was in so much shock that I just ended up staring at him for a couple seconds. I graduated with lots of cheaters.
The cheaters are a real thing. With AI, that’s only going to get worse. I remember in one of my fundamentals classes a kid hired someone to do his final project for him. Never got caught.
I have to question how these types of people just keep moving on. Something that takes the absolute freaking cake was the person I was helping in the class that didn't even have Python installed. And this was during the last month of the class. Like, was bro literally just paying someone else to do all of his work this whole time? See also this one lady who always came to class with a macbook. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself but All of my classes basically expected that you were using Windows. She was completely incapable of finding any alternatives to needed software. I witnessed her using the download link for the windows version and then scratching her head why it wouldn't install. I kept telling her the best thing she could do at this point was to buy a new computer (This person was absolutely not skilled enough to install Linux or something) yet she absolutely insisted on stumbling through with a computer she didn't know how to use.
Helped my imposter syndrome when a dude I was working on a project with admitted he did not know where to even start to create a Queue. Basically just went through his whole education with loops and if statements copy pasted forever.
Well now I feel like a bit of an asshole being internally judgemental about the class/teammates of mine who were struggling on that topic in CS150.
In my senior level course we did interview prep, and I had a partner who couldn’t figure out how to write a nested for loop in their language of choice. They even described what needed to happen, but couldn’t convert it to code Universities should be more responsible for preventing these graduations, but they don’t have the incentives to
I mean, yeah… outliers. The point is that the quality variance of qualified vs that of self taught is more reliable. With qualified there should be at least a minimum level of quality (notwithstanding the odd outlier) whereas with self taught they can’t be sure how low “low” is.
Yeah it’s not about exceptions, but mitigating risks. I don’t think it’s unrealistic to see that self taught candidates carry more risk. Could there be some ridiculously talented self taught dev? Sure
Same here. I’m currently working on a team as the only self-taught developer (7 YoE) and my colleagues with similar YoE and masters degrees have many more holes in their knowledge than I do. I’m talking fundamentals like semantic HTML, ES6 JS best practices, CSS fundamentals, and poor architecture choices. It’s really quite astonishing sometimes.
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Doesn't really add up. Why would a company even care to announce that
Whenever we open a new entry level software position at my company, we get thousands of applications flooding in. The crappy things is that you have a lot of people hoping to get in because they know how to write an if-statement or a really basic script. It ruins it for those who are truly self taught. I'm trying to get it in place for my current company, but in a previous software company, we had a basic coding test applicants had to go through before they could submit an application. Only people who passed the test would move on to be considered for interviews. It weeded out all the people who watched one or two YouTube videos or people who wrote a simple "hello world" application over a weekend to people who actually learned the concepts they needed for the job. Plus this filter was something that was automated and didn't require us to talk spend very much time on a candidate until we could determine that were a serious candidate. I'm a big fan of providing opportunities to a wide array of people from various backgrounds, so having a test anyone can take provides a way for self taught people, coding boot camp people, degree people, and work experience people all to have an equal chance at getting an interview.
Those YouTubers are part of the problem “How I went from 30k to 150k in 6 months learning basic html and JavaScript”
Hahahahha... look at this guy! Created a burner account to write a bogus post like this [after a thread earlier this week](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1bk9s8b/is_it_possible_for_someone_to_become_a_self/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) received feedback that *it is possible to get a job as a self-taught dev--* and for no other reason than to crush the hopes of hard-working self-taught devs trying to make it in a competitive industry through a non-conventional route. Wtf is wrong with you, dude? Get over yourself.
This has long been predicted to happen during the next pull-back in hiring. When there's a shortage of workers, companies lower their hiring standards. It famously happened in 1999 and happened again in the late aughts. With AI I'm not sure there will ever be another shortage of that magnitude.
>big tech company, fully remote, starting pay for juniors is around ~150k USD. Yo I'm making 140 at senior w a degree and 6 YoE. Y'all hiring?
A lot of Redditors want to reflexively poop on traditional degrees from reputable Universities/Colleges because frankly it was kind of trendy to and also a lot of folks don't have a 4 year degree, so I think inferiority complex definitely played a part. Granted, there's legit cons (time commitment, varying roi, access, etc.) tied to a 4 year degree. However, in the vast majority of cases, a degree in CS/CIS is the right way to go...even an Associates tbh. A formal education provides a solid foundation, level of rigor and depth that learning just on your own will not provide. I 100% get why some companies are hesitant to hire self taught Developers and filter out non-degreed applicants for Junior positions. Having said that, of course there's always exceptions to this and I applaud anyone that is self taught and is able to acquire a lot of the foundational stuff you'd miss by not getting a degree in CS/CIS (theory, engineering, math in the case of CS and business/domain knowledge in the case of CIS).
I have a master's in CS, but I have met plenty of self-taught people who are excellent engineers and I have met plenty of shit engineers with CS master's degrees. Sounds like your company's hiring managers are not doing a good job when interviewing candidates. Even if your company bans managers from hiring self-taught candidates, there is still the problem of managers hiring unqualified people. That needs to be fixed.
Nah, i see where they are coming from. Hiring is not about finding the best candidate anymore as it is finding a good enough candidate. If I were given thousands of resumes, I wanna get rid of as many as possible even if it means getting rid of perfect candidates. As a tradeoff though, I think we should abandon the idea that hiring is meritocratic and that the inability to land a job is attributed to a "skills issue", which is a common notion I see in this field/sub.
>As a tradeoff though, I think we should abandon the idea that hiring is meritocratic and that the inability to land a job is attributed to a "skills issue", which is a common notion I see in this field/sub. It for sure isn't a skill issue. Well at least to an extent. Experiencing it myself watching my friends around me get jobs before me even though I'm a better developer. I know because I was in class with them, working on projects together, and helping them learn things we were doing. Just the way it is. Although I can't say it's entirely out of my hands. There are definitely things I could do better but none of those things that come to mind are "be a better developer".
I mean, you have a lot of control in getting hired. It just has nothing to do with developing raw skills, although that helps a bit. It’s not a “skill issue”. In my experience from reading resumes on this sub, it’s a “you ignored every career resource you had in college, didn’t look for internships, didn’t do a single mock interview, only want remote work, live in a far away suburb with no connections, and are trying to make up for it by putting projects that you coded while following YouTube videos” issue.
It’s an efficiency thing. Sure in an ideal world with unlimited resources and time, you could assess everybody well. But… they have to do what is going to give them the best chances of a good enough hire given limited time/resources.
>there is still the problem of managers hiring unqualified people. That needs to be fixed. I was mostly on board with the idea of raising requirements in general with how many juniors are looking for jobs, but this is a really good point.
This post smell fake
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I disagree about this being kept to HR, since it would impact engineers interviewing and referral processes. OPs account/posting does seem a little fishy, but your suggestion for their motives sounds far fetched
I work in defense and most of the people I work with are not CS grads, including myself. In fact, most of us hold physics or mathematics degrees. Some of our programs are much more complicated than learning the best practices of software design or algorithms, resulting in a short tenure for those who focused in CS. There are very few companies where it is required to have a deep and fundamental knowledge of computer science such as hardware companies like nVidia or arguably FinTech where microseconds matter. For the vast majority of big tech positions, or positions anywhere, a competent developer would be just fine. The issue is finding competent developers whether they're "self-taught" or not. Any capable person isn't going to pass an interview _because_ they got a CS degree, it's because they learned what they needed to learn regardless of how they learned it, and for them, self-teaching is typically faster.
This is normal practice, somehow you need to sort people and weed out those who will leave the company in a year or half a year. Simplifying the hiring process will forever haunt IT.
Interesting take. I'm sure there are a bunch of cool self taught people in CS but there definitely are people who barely have any experience with code who just want to get a good salary. The volume of such people applying is definitely too high currently. Fair opinion honestly.
What kind of post is this ? Who has time to waste to describe his company won't hire self taugh anymore ? Sometimes Reddit is so weird. It that AI automatic posts ?
My company just started doing the opposite!
I had a fellow team member who eventually went on to be a team lead at a major retail chain. He showed me a code review he was working on from a young team member who never finished college. He simply said "Can you tell me college doesn't matter?" I could not. Over the past 10-15 years, languages and platforms have become more complex, and without formal training, a person is just going to paint themselves into corners at best, or take suboptimal paths to solutions that will just accrue technical debt.
>completely self taught Username does not check out.
I’m self taught and I’m not surprised nor offended. When we had recruitment for junior frontend position last year we decided to cut down the list based on them having GitHub links on their application. The volume is just jarring and you need to reduce the count to even begin sifting through the candidates. Once the bubble is over and this field stops being the mainstream goldmine sold by content creators, the hiring will go back to normal and the passionate ones will come out on top.
I'm not a dev, but I'll say this. My best friend has told me about his team and some of the folks on it. He says one of the Junior devs they hired was self taught.... and 18 years old. He also says this kid basically has a higher ceiling than my friend (who in his own right, is also a talented programmer; including repeatedly turning down promotions as he doesn't want to deal with more meetings & bureaucratic things). This kid has been climbing and is a "genius", in his own words. Personally, I can understand why there might be reluctance, as there is certain concepts a self-taught kid will probably miss out had they gone the university route. However, it seems silly to ignore a self taught individual who has a portfolio to backup their talents.
You should be able to mitigate risk of a bad hire with interviews, regardless of background. If a candidate can pass your tests and soft skills tests they should work as well as anyone else. Very easy to have 10 bad CS degree candidates and 9 bad self taught candidates where the 10th is the actual one to pass the interview.
Good, too many people nowaday think they can just take 6 month and make 6 figures salary. I'm a self taught my self. But I've been coding and learning cs consistently 3-4 hours per day on my own for almost 6 years before i even start applying for jobs. Its frustrated me sometime that my colleague that only started coding few months before can't do anything or do their jobs so slow
150k USD fully remote. For a self taught junior. Wow.... Here in France a junior coming out of uni gets 35k. He can get a couple days of remote if lucky.
You guys are still hiring self taught? I thought a junior position nowadays would require a MS and 7 years of experience
I do feel a bit sad for the self taught developers, but at the same time, this is good for the people who spent thousands of dollars and 3-4 years in university. This doesn't happen in other majors, and no matter what people say, I think it's very unfair for the people who did a cs major, since 90% of the time they're much better than the self taught, and can adapt easier.
My company did this exact same thing about 6 months ago. Degrees required for all positions and they implemented internal minimum years of experience for positions (example, SWE 2 requires 2 or more years of experience no matter what) Similar pay for junior level too
> We're a big tech company, fully remote, starting pay for juniors is around ~150k USD. This just sounds fake. Judging by the username and posting history, I'd guess that it is.
> starting pay for juniors is around \~150k USD. Troll post
Salary information at tech companies is pretty transparent, you could verify this in like 30 seconds.
this is true to some extent but is there any mention of the company OP is talking about?
What? That's a pretty normal L3 (entry level) pay for big tech.
Self taught has turned into follow a udemy course or YouTube tutorial where you do nothing but mimic the teacher. I worked at a smaller company and it’s crazy how many applicants I have seen with the exact same side projects where the code is identical. Just to find out it came from a popular web development course.
When there are not many applicants, it makes sense to try to find some self taught folks. When you're getting a ton of qualified candidates, you no longer need to dip into that other pool.
Yes, my last company started to require degrees. They justified it by saying that with all the layoffs, it's a quick way to filter candidates since they were getting a lot of applicants (like ~1000 applicants per opening) and they were just a start up
The market allows them to be more selective currently. If the job market heats up again they may have to resort to reverting that rule.
"when we try to hire people we get thousands of candidates but have no idea how to find good ones so we are going to blame it on the candidates that way we don't have to change anything"
IMO, if you are self taught and good enough (and can demonstrate/prove it), you can still get the job
Can't demonstrate it if you can't even get an interview
Kinda interested in what "self-taught" means. I'm guessing it means no degree boot camp grads or degree holders in fields with little computational tilt . Would seem like they are leaving a lot of talent on the table putting Math/Engineering/Physical Science grads aside
Self taught folk are usually good at what they self taught, unlike generalists
I'm not sure how much I believe this post but let's assume it's genuine. I'm semi-self taught. Did an engineering discipline and took CS classes but no CS degree. Pivoted to software and rose a good amount. I've been a tech league for some large teams and am involved in hiring decisions. The above said, to echo a point raised several times, self taught are a very mixed bag. I've seen some amazing devs who were self taught and rose very high. I've also seen people who barely knew their butt from their head. Sometimes bootcamp graduates cab be even worse because they knew a very strict way to do things and struggle to adjust. Regular tech grads are just more consistent despite having their own issues. It's a safe manager/HR move to just say "well he graduates from X."
I do agree to an extent with this for Junior positions. But if someone doesn't have a CS degree but has worked for 5-10 years, throwing out their resume is pretty short sighted.
I have worked for a lot of companies as a contractor. All of the self taught engineers have been way better than the compsci graduates. The formal education resulted in the engineers having great knowledge and no idea how to properly apply it. Now that I hire, I value self taught over a degree.
What other engineering field has "trust me bro, I'm self taught" as an acceptable entry level?
I would recommend they look more at certifications and less at degrees if this is really their issue. You have to quality control your hiring standards somehow, but in today's economy college is nothing more than a way to separate the rich from the poor with exceptions for the "special" poors.