This article outlines an opinion that organizations either tried skills based hiring and reverted to degree required hiring because it was warranted, or they didn’t adapt their process in spite of executive vision.
Since this article is non industry specific, what are your observations or opinions of the technology sector? What about the general business sector?
Should first world employees of businesses be required to obtain degrees if they reasonably expect a business related job?
Do college experiences and academic rigor reveal higher achieving employees?
Is undergraduate education a minimum standard for a more enlightened society? Or a way to hold separation between classes of people and status?
Is a masters degree the new way to differentiate yourself where the undergrad degree was before?
Edit: multiple typos, I guess that’s proof that I should have done more college 😄
Just because I got A++ in college doesn’t mean I wanna go the extra mile for your stupid ass company or believe my coworkers are a second family, you corporate wastes of space. I’ll do the bare minimum as long as I get paid enough to enjoy life and have a family. College was fun, working is not.
It seems like businesses have forgotten quality of life in the workplace. I remember my grandfather working for a company that invested in nice furniture, art, painted walls, and even a daycare to make their employees lives better. People tended to stay there a very long time.
Every company I’ve worked for has been a grey hellhole with cubes as far as the eye can see and anti-decoration policies for your individual space. It’s a little better now with WFH, but the office remains a grim cave that nobody wants to visit.
Maybe if they used a little more carrot and a little less stick, they’d get better results.
Last stage crapitalism garbage companies are a waste of human resources to be honest.
Started working for my current company as tech support. No degree, in a homeless shelter, just good with tech and helping people. It bothered me not understanding how things I supported worked, so I started to teach myself to code and offer ideas for potential fixes when submitting tickets. Ended up being approached and hired by the head of development who allowed me to continue learning on my own. I’ve been with them for 12 years now, and in the first few years hobbled together the product/feature which became their flagship. Find people who are eager and excited to learn and they’ll thrive.
In my mind, if a company wants to set a generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans. Otherwise it’s using the education system as a subsidized training program.
Note I said generalized. Engineers, doctors, etc who desire to ever be employed can’t stop at a bachelor’s anyways. Even still, their employees should have to pick up their training tab.
Business has gotten a free pass for 40 years and look at the society they’ve created with it. Maybe civilization needs more than a love of money to sustain it. Crazy huh.
This would make getting a job out of college SO MUCH HARDER. Companies would do everything the could to get existing employees in the workforce, for whom someone else has already paid off their loan.
Much like cell phone carriers locking you into a contract, companies would try to force you to work for them for X number of years because they paid your loans. I suppose this could work similar to vesting, so it wouldn’t be impossible. But companies would still try very hard not to hire anyone with student loans. It would just benefit the wealthy people who don’t need them.
Much easier to just raise business taxes by enough to pay for free education at all levels.
Tax based upon the average education level required for the job in the industry. This would change them all to a skills based hiring system overnight.
I guess the real answer is government subsidized college.
Free college.
An investment in the future through rigorous and accessible education.
Companies would do everything the could to get existing employees in the workforce
I’m not disagreeing with you. I would submit that this is already true for other reasons. Speaking specifically of IT or INFOSEC fields, companies currently have extremely high expectations or experience requirements/desires.
This has been a problem for the INFOSEC field where there’s a shortage, but companies don’t want to hire entry level candidates with little to no experience. They want reasoned, veteran INFOSEC practitioners, which there isn’t enough of.
generalized education requirement, above high school, that company should be required to pay off its employees student loans
Much like cell phone carriers locking you into a contract, companies would try to force you to work for them for X number of years because they paid your loans
I like that you both brought this up. There’s a real life example of this in the US military. It’s a well known benefit/incentive for military service that they would fund your college education if you work for them long enough. You signed your service contract, but if you met that, you got your education for ‘free’ if you want to call it that. It’s a little different in you might be killed in a stupid political war along the way, but it shows that the idea is practical and can work.
I guess if I had the choice of being hired at a really decent company and they would fund some highly sought after training as long as I gave them a reasonable number or years of employment with reasonable compensation, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.
On the other had, the SyFi fan that I am, I could see a bit of a dystopian future where you have to belong to companies for a while to start off in life. If you consider that people now start off in massive student loan dept, the dystopian ownership is currently banks while people take up to 20+ years to repay student loans.
Personally, I think education should be free to all, rich or poor, as its the summation of the human experience thus far.
Or in other words, it’s our birthright
No one should have the right or ability to paygate it, and that includes the state. The labs necessary should be publically funded because society would suffer more for having less physicists and chemists than an abundance of them, for reasons I hope are obvious.
True. Even though many will argue against this citing the ‘practicalities’ involved, this is just another instance of long vs. short term investment (in general, not just financial terms). Long term investment (like free education and state funded science) is supposed to be harder and more costly in the short term, because the payoff comes later, but it is much higher and leads to a healthier system, making things easier, incuding more investment. Whereas short term is usually damaging to the system and makes things harder long term.
I really like the saying that an idealist is a realist (or pragmatist) just using a longer timeline.
I think that just makes new grads (with loans) unemployable
Or, you know, get some state-funded free college education like most other civilized countries other than the US, so you actually do not end up with $100k student loans like a dumbass.
Engineers in the US regularly stop at the bachelor’s level.
Removed by mod
In technology, what about software for an aircraft written and tested by skilled developers, but ones without degrees?
Hiring devs with degrees does not guarantee anything quality about the software they write.
A degree for developer just means that they know how to learn.
I’ve seen some straight a solid developers come straight out of college enter the enterprise sector and bomb right out.
Why aren’t you using Python, why aren’t you using inheritance. They’re walking into these places with 20-year-old code bases and nowhere near enough money to rewrite any of it.
And the problem is, even if they get the opportunity to rewrite it, they try so hard to optimize it and put so many little smart decisions in there that becomes very difficult to maintain.
As someone currently getting a degree (and therefore surrounded by soon-to-be devs with degrees), I couldn’t agree more. The requirements to pass are so low that it means nothing.
The control system and sensors algorithms would be developed by engineers (not software engineers). Then implemented by the software engineers. That is subsequently tested again by the non software engineers. It often auto coded from simulink models, requiring less input from software teams.
Most of the software development done by software engineers or developers in aircraft is scheduling, connecting pipes, data recording, networking etc. Keeping the aircraft flying is done by other engineers. These algorithms are more related to aircraft dynamics, electrical systems and sensor physics than algorithms used in software. Most control systems implemented are represented as analogue electronics, even when the engineers have only ever used digital systems for their control. In these cases knowledge of non-software topics are more important.
So it would still be people with degrees keeping the aircraft in the air. However, many of these roles could be accomplished by people who have non university qualifications or 4-5 year apprenticeships. But it’s hard to teach the background maths involved during an apprenticeship as it’s not being applied day to day and the other engineers skills may have atrophied compared to a university course. Degree apprenticeships do work well for this sort of thing.
to be fair, software engineers are a lot more design heavy than implementation. software developers are the “implementers” where software engineers generally focus on the bigger picture as well
require skills
Does this mean skills learn on the job or from a higher education institution?
Would people accept a highrise Disney by a team of self taught engineers?
Would we allow a surgeon to practice without a medical degree?
What about if that surgeon went to a vocational school and then did the normal years of internship, fellowship, supervision, etc?
I spent the last 4 years working on this at a state-wide level at my last job, so I’ve seen a lot in this space. Skills based hiring is extremely effective when done right. The problem is that most employers don’t know how. They take the degree requirement off the listing and then go through the same interview processes as if nothing changed. In tech specifically, there is a huge highly skilled talent pool whose potential is going untapped because of a glass ceiling keeping them from senior positions. If employers were effective at identifying what applicants, and even existing employees, are capable of they’d have a much easier time filling roles and the ‘talent gap’ wouldn’t be nearly as severe as it is.
I’ve been in management for about 15 years and have hired many people. My take-away is that standard HR interview practices (“Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker…”) are basically a popularity contest that strongly favors extroverts and people with good story-telling and language skills. I suppose these techniques are good if that’s primarily what you are looking for. However, if you are hiring for actual technical skills, these interview techniques are worse than useless, they are discriminatory.
Also, HR people, in my experience, are quite under-educated when it comes to interview techniques. I’ve worked with about dozen different HR people over the years and none of them had any kind of imagination or technical expertise when it came to interviewing. In my organization and in other similar organizations where I have peers, any deviation from the standard HR interview is entirely driven by managers who are sick of the usual HR crap.
Most of HR processes are pure ideological bullshit. “Personality tests” that are nothing else but “we search for obedient drones and here is our tarot to help” and “intelligence tests” that are based on some racial science bullshit made to prove the inferiority of Jews that might be useful only if you work in a factory of math patterns.
They are not there to ensure efficient production, after all they don’t know shit about the product or internal processes of the teams. They’re a caste of priests whose role is ensuring compliance with the feudal-corporate system.
This is a TERRIBLY written article.
To believe otherwise, you must believe that business leaders and hiring managers don’t know what they’re doing – that they are blindly following tradition or just lazy. […]you’d need to believe that businesses have simply overlooked a better way to hire. That seems naïve.
IDK, Has the author ever worked anywhere? Talked to anyone who worked somewhere? READ SOME POSTS ON REDDIT ABOUT WORKING SOMEWHERE? The amount of times no one could understand why a business does what it does, seemingly to its own detriment, is staggering.
They are right that it’s wrong to believe that people with college degrees don’t have skills - some do. The issue is that it appears to practically be non correlated to each other. I’ve seen people with college degrees who clearly learned very little during that experience. I’ve seen people with no degree be very knowledgeable and skilled.
The other obvious question in regard to hiring is - if going to college was necessary to do a job, then surely the degree would matter. However, outside of limited situations, the thing they’re looking for is a degree, not one related to the job they’re hiring for. Also, degrees are stupidly expensive which at least has to drive up wages a little anytime there’s some competition in the labor market.
I’d argue the biggest obvious mark against a degree really doing much is that it’s relevant at most for the first job. After that, no one asks to see the degree, or cares what your GPA was, or whatever - because the much better skill assessment is actually doing a job in the field. At that point, while it’s tradition to require a degree, it’s literally a check box. If these companies thought about it better, they’d realize the hiring mostly ignores degrees for any position outside of literally the first one out of college. An obvious solution to this problem IMHO would be the probationary period. Set it for 6 months renewing for some period. You need some time having someone do the actual task to really know if they’re going to be a good fit anyway.
As much as I hate the higher education requirement, if I get another “boot camp” developer application I’m gonna puke.
This is why I only interview barefoot candidates.
only interview barefoot candidates
Would you elaborate?
Can you talk about this more?
- Does it mean that a boot camp coder is not skilled enough?
- Would that have those skills if they did a degree program?
- Would any degree in computer/IT suffice?
There are people who went to Boot Camps that are excellent developers. There are people who have a masters degree in computer science who are awful developers.
skilled enough.
For entry level? Honestly, not usually. They know one thing, and if they deviate from that, their quality breaks down fast.
degree program.
Well, there’s no guarantee right? But they’d have a more well rounded understanding of programming. Anyone can use a Class, but can you make one?
degrees
Any programming degree, along with an acceptable understanding of the technologies they need on day one.
For my job specifically, we need someone with PHP experience. Not just how to <?php echo $title;?>. My favorite interview question is, “explain to me your understanding of PHP magic methods and how you would use them, in a basic example.”
I get a lot of dumb looks, and wrong answers.
That being said, I hired someone who failed that test, but they had a good personality and a willingness to learn—and they have a CS degree.
I take the PHP, and I throw it in the trash.
And replace it with?
Python.
Is that because you’re more familiar with python than PHP? What framework do you use?
I built sites in PHP before I knew any Python.
All of my personal web stuff is now based on Flask. I basically just replaced the P in LAMP with Python.
The vast majority of boot camp grads are terrible candidates. A degree guarantees almost nothing but a boot camp cert guarantees even less.
From my exp in tech has been getting to know people on projects and getting known is been 100% the way to go.
What is someone good at and how they work with a team is best seen by working with someone. Getting started though just means taking the shit work and being willing to learn more your own.
Code has been skills-based for as long as I’ve been working. The few places I’ve seen that really have a hard degree requirement are not places I’d work. Most CS degrees are also mostly worthless for most app jobs because the theory is not the practice. There are degree programs that focus on shipping applications. In my own hiring, I’m looking for experience over degree and potential over buzzword bingo.
For a lot of jobs that want bachelors degrees, people with lots of experience will do. But for jobs requiring masters and doctorates its a different story.
I work in IT. I majored I’m French and Linguistics. Yeah that degree is coming in way more handy than my experience lol
Having a degree means you are docile, obedient and perseverant especially in the face of bullshit, welcome aboard.
Lmao, perseverant yes. The rest of that sentence sounds like sadness & jealousy masquerading as projection. Or is my challenging you too docile?
How do you write this article and not once reference I/O Psychology or the literature that examines how well various tests predict job performance? (e.g. Schmidt and Hunter, 1998)
I swear this isn’t witchcraft. You just analyze the job, determine the knowledge and skills that are important, required at entry, and can’t be obtained in a 15 minute orientation, and then hire based on those things. It takes a few hours worth of meetings. I’ve done it dozens of times.
But really what all that boils down to is get someone knowledgeable about the role and have them write any questions and design the exercises. Don’t let some dingleberry MBA ask people how to move Mt. Fuji or whatever dumb trendy thing they’re teaching in business school these days.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve interviewed with a contractor/headhunter and a few minutes in stop them to say “I’m not what you’re looking for, here, let me help you re-work those requirements so you’ll get the right people to interview”.
HR provides those requirements, which just shows how bad HR usually is.
I read about a study years ago showing that hiring via interviews was no better than pulling cards out of a hat.
This is an interesting observation.
In theory, the section/department manager should be providing those requirements to HR, not allowing HR to do it for them, right? I have to agree, if companies are letting HR drive the requirements train, it’s going to be a poor experience for everyone.
Clearly HR didn’t talk to the hiring manager, so I put the blame squarely on them. They want to “own” this element of business, they get the blame.
I’ve never once taken a role that matched much of what the ad said, except for some specialized stuff that no one likes to do.
Then again, what your role becomes is determined by you/your skills and the relationships that develop at work. Even for highly specialized roles, everyone I’ve worked with brought different perspectives and approaches to the table.
