This has always been true in tech. Degree’s pave way to leadership but skills opens doors.

If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.

Why is this a thing to be surprised by? How many of the tech industry's biggest corps were started by college drop outs leaving them with no degree? The fact that they put needing a degree in the requirements for their job listings is something that has always been laughable to me. A degree pretty much just that you are more than likely in debt beyond belief and you didn't have much else to do so you kept with it long enough to finish. That's probably a bit cynical, but we all make fun of MBAs while cherishing CSE degrees??? Put someone to work that shows they can do the work regardless of having or not a sheep skin. If they can't cut it, get rid of them and do it again.

This is not very surprising. I've always thought that it's more of correlation than causation. If you're a good problem solver, then there is a good chance that you are probably good at both college admission and software engineering. So companies have been using it as their proxy for hiring because... why not. I'm not saying college curricula are useless, but this dependency on (imperfect) correlation might have caused significant opportunity costs for talent acquisition and now companies are slowly acknowledging it.

He might be right but during my time at Google (coincidentally without a degree), I never found Brin to have much of any idea of what was actually happening inside the company.

He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.

Having worked at Google, been a hiring manager, been on numerous hiring boards: I don’t believe you.

I mean, maybe if he means the technical meaning of the word namely “more than two” and not “a noticeable percentage” which is implied.

In my time there I literally only knew two googlers without a college degree. I didn’t pry but people also aren’t shy about it. And zero people without degrees made it to offer stage in any hiring committee I was part of.

Sure, for a value of “many” meaning more than 10. I doubt it means anything close to, say, 10% of new hires.

Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?

Forget not having degree, to get even an interview call, you need to be T20 alumni! Shows how execs are out of touch day to day operations of big companies.

"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."

Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.

The grammar and structure of this is weird like soen trash AI wrote it.