Why do tech roles still prioritize degrees over actual skills? I have met developers who can out code half a team without ever stepping foot in a computer science classroom, and it made me rethink how I approach my own growth. I have had interviews where my portfolio and projects carried more weight than my academic background, and honestly, those were the only processes that felt fair. Do you think the tech industry is finally shifting toward skills first hiring?

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So a consulting firm gave me a "free" resource for a few months. This kid did not go to college, but had graduated from a tech boot camp. He was so immature and not ready for the working world. I had to ask him be removed because he would go into meetings and introduce himself by his age and that he didn't know anything.

College degrees do more than teach a technical skill. They teach professionalism, show the ability to follow through/see something hard through to the end, and give more time to mature.

Are there amazing people without degrees? Absolutely! But it's a gamble. Hiring is so expensive and time consuming, it's a huge pain if it doesn't work out for me.

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Exactly

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Way back in the history of tech and computers, there was a common saying among business people: "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." That type of thinking partly explains why degrees carry weight with hiring managers. If a hire turns out badly, the reputation of the person's school and degree will protect whomever hired them. Hiring someone with great experience just doesn't carry prestige, and if the hire doesn't pan out, it won't look good for the person who rolled the dice on them.

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But I thought it's skills rather than just degree?

I'm right there with you. 20 years of experience and I can barely pull an interview, much less get a position. I feel like college degrees are an easy filter option for recruiters. They need to look at things differently. College degrees are a snapshot in time where as experience is an ever evolving thing. Also, It is completley possible to graduate college with a higher blood alcohol level than GPA.

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What do HR do if the degree is not related to the position?

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Two drivers
1. HR recruiters are lazy - they will take the path of least resistance and filter the pool based on education level
2. It’s a liability issue - what happens if he doesn’t perform to level you expect but not enough to fire? Now you have to explain to your boss why you hired the highschool graduate over the computer science grad.

Remember in business, companies primarily are focused on 3 things: sales, liability and compliance regulations.

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Literally have a combined 10+ yrs of IT/Mechanical work and can't get anyone from either field to even humor me with a declination or primary call for an interview. And I'm talking jobs that I am PERFECTLY qualified for with a decade of experience, not even a single call. Have applied to at least a dozen roles I'd be a perfect fit for the last couple weeks and haven't heard a peep from a single one.

Huh, what about roles that degrees aren't needed. Do candidates still get screened out for it?

im sure there are great coders that are better than some folks with degrees. but degrees offer more than just the focus of their major right? they force you to take other technical electives that you may think have no value, but in truth forces you to have a breadth of knowledge that can be ultimately applied elsewhere. sure psych 100 might feel useless, but the linear algebra and differential calculus comes back when your talking ai and machine learning. when selecting someone with a college degree from a decent school, you know you are getting someone who was forced to get exposed to a breath of knowledge. these days being an amazing coder doesn’t really cut it as much with llm tools. you have to have a breath of specialties to be able to deploy your systems in the cloud and build things that scale or solve particular problems.

regardless, you can still get people that are bad with college degrees, and you can get people that are bad out of boot camps. the entire interview process really sucks in general and its hard to get the attention you deserve.

I think believing in a candidate potentials is better off

At (a good) college you learn the foundations, you learn the why's, learn how to learn and how to extrapolate. In a boot camp you learn one thing and sometimes not that great (as in it compiles and it works but the design is not too elegant). I put "a good" college because there are also low rate universities that offer very targeted programs which IMO are the same as bootcamps.

A non-tech example: in an industry conference I met a portfolio manager, asset portfolios, not projects, and her boss. They work in a top asset management form and manage billions. Her major was art history, her boss's was history. They started at the firm and then they went on to pursue their MBAs. Why were they hired instead of economics of finance majors? Columbia and Wharton. Sure that is more of an Ivy League thing but it also shows the thinking. They don't expect you to know a lot of something specific but to be able to learn and see beyond the specifics.

Sometimes it's about the type of college that one attended

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