Posted by 01-_- 1/20/2026
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.
Strongly disagree. I say this as someone who went to a state school and didn’t start reading literature until well after college.
The classics are classics for good reason. Even if one can’t learn to appreciate them, they’re critical for understanding entire epochs of political thought and history. It would be like trying to navigate modern retail politics while ignoring memes.
But as I’m “aging” into the real world after grad school, I’ve similarly realized how silly it was to turn my head to literature.
Curious if you’d be willing to recommend a classic, or share the genres that you’ve been enjoying.
Yes. They reflected the culture of the ruling strata in their contemporary periods. That's why they are classics. The rest of the society (~90%) had no means to do any literature. That's why the classics were out of touch with their own times - which made Dickens such a difference by the way -, and the upper strata that was educated on them up until today are still out of touch with their own societies.
Besides the classics were elite fashion. Like speaking French or fencing. They were a means to distinguish class, with hard to access knowledge and habits. It wasn't because these things were good, it was because the average person could not easily attain access to them.
The great books canon was partly constructed retroactively by people with agendas about what civilization meant. A real collection of classics would have much more folk stories, common herioc figures and fantasies.
While I understand and agree to a certain degree, (and as a person with degree) it still fills me with dread where I work with senior developers who don't have a clue what is complexity of their algorithms or lack basic problem solving skills that a degree would instill in them. People can absolutely learn on the job but degree would still give me an idea of what I can expect from given person.
As a side note, LLMs are an equalizer that makes degrees less relevant when near keyboard; still, I want to talk to people that understand the concepts they're operating with when afk
Reading a canonical set of old stories gives you shared experience with readers across continents and centuries and civilizations and class and complexion. It's not inclusive of everybody, but its a broader than just the "affluent in-group" it might currently include.
> 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.
https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/google-founder-sergey-brin-hi... ( https://archive.is/fefa9 )
If it is AI, this is the easiest type of AI content to generate: a summary of a small, delimited text corpus, with some generic filler added.
If it isn't AI, it's still nevertheless low-effort and (IMHO) doesn't belong on HN. The primary journalistic source (Fortune) should replace it.
Look at this before/after comparison, how lazily they (or it) paraphrased the source material:
> [Primary] "Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute."
> [Derivative] "Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%."
Or this:
> [Primary] "And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring."
> [Derivative] "Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."
I do miss when people argued whether Yahoo or ask Jeeves was better. Those were good times.
>artificial intelligence tools got better at performing tasks that once required formal training.
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.
Another statement from Google way back said that 14% of their engineers had no degree whatsoever.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
Is that because their leetcode questions are hard?
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.
I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
One of my best working experiences.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I went to school, all the non-CS engineering tracks involved two years of bootcamp. Harsh weeding out of underperforming students, not always in a responsible way.
In my fourth year I was in a CS OS class (my own pedigree was EE/CE). A group behind me was talking, and someone openly expressed concern that they really liked CS, but they were unsure about their ability to program. Oh, ... man.
I think the fact that any real CS talent had an easy time getting great employment for a long time, left some schools with less than the most ambitious grads as professors. Talent just self taught themselves past that, or had already done so before enrolling.
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.
Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS.
My how things have changed!
I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.