Posted by 01-_- 2 hours ago
Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.
with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
> If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent.
> AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows.
> This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs.
> What's being done about changing hiring practices? The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
I do miss when people argued whether Yahoo or ask Jeeves was better. Those were good times.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
Can't comment on if that's still the case as it's been several years now since I graduated, but it was notable.
same could be said for Adobe and their HQ was even closer to SJSU than Google's was.
It is like Facebook that once wanted only young people and now have their share of greybeards.
It is traditional economy companies and consultancies like Accenture that usually don't have exceptions for people without formal credentials.
Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard.
Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.
I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.
There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.
The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.
Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.
One of my best working experiences.
It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place.
I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result.
I think that reputation has lessened.
Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives.
I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.