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Silicon Valley is starting to realize that the huge talent pool of nontraditional candidates may be the answer to its pipeline problem.
The technology industry is now trying to figure out a way to attack its cultural and demographic homogeneity issues. One simple initiative is to begin to recruit talent from people outside of its preferred networks. One way is to extend their recruiting efforts to people who don't have four-year degrees.
IBM's head of talent organization, Sam Ladah, calls this sort of initiative a focus on "new-collar jobs." The idea, he says, is to look toward different applicant pools to find new talent. "We consider them based on their skills," he says, and don't take into account their educational background. This includes applicants who didn't get a four-year degree but have proven their technical knowledge in other ways. Some have technical certifications, and others have enrolled in other skills programs. "We've been very successful in hiring from [coding] bootcamps," says Ladah.
For IT roles, educational pedigree often doesn't make a huge difference. For instance, many gaming aficionados have built their own systems. With this technical grounding, they would likely have the aptitude to be a server technician or a network technician. These roles require specific technical knowledge, not necessarily an academic curriculum vitae. "We're looking for people who have a real passion for technology," says Ladah. He goes on to say that currently about 10% to 15% of IBM's new hires don't have traditional four-year degrees.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3069259/why-more-tech-companies-are-hiring-people-without-degrees
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 5, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday April 10 2017, @05:29PM (8 children)
The jobs described - "a server technician or a network technician" - may be good candidates for people without four-year degrees. But there are many jobs that you may find are not well suited to someone without that education.
What you'll miss is what universities teach in all those soft humanities classes that pad a 2-year degree into a 4-year degree. That would be communication, research, and creative problem analysis. The 4-year degree in general is filled with many classes unrelated to your ultimate career which nonetheless grow these three skills.
Take your basic English class. These classes are full of relatively unstructured work such as "write a 6-page analytical essay with at least 4 scholarly sources on a topic related to the required reading". First thing there is communication: if you can't communicate your ideas effectively, you won't be able to write a coherent essay. Next is research: anybody can pull crap out of their ass, but being forced to use accepted sources requires students to expose themselves to ideas other than their own, identify effectively communicated ideas relevant to the task, and build off of those instead of starting from nothing.
Last is creative problem analysis, and this is where it gets really important. The student is given a vaguely defined abstract task and told to produce something profound based on next to nothing. What follows is the process that all of us, especially effective software developers, must master: prototyping, returning to the customer (professor) to refine our ideas, cleaning up our work, following accepted style guides, producing a complete product, submitting it for review, and dealing with the results. These are all steps that are completely absent when you are a solo hacker writing your own game engine, but they are crucial to operating within a major enterprise. Furthermore, the most effective enterprises are able to trust their employees to handle all of these steps themselves, without any helping hands to guide them along the way.
So what does this mean? Well, if you are able to effectively define every task your new hire must accomplish, then your new hire can skip university. But if, as with most software work, effectively defining the task is more than 50% of the work, skipping university will have about the same results as outsourcing to Elbonia: the wrong code, written for the wrong reasons, which must now be rewritten after several months of a complete lack of feedback.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @06:13PM (3 children)
Maybe you can effectively communicate your subject in 2 pages; why should you have to pad that shit to 6 pages? Insanity!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:10PM (2 children)
Found the dropout! "I'm good enough as it is, its not my fault the professors are so stupid! Who needs such elitist bullshit anyway? Amirite guys??"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @07:17PM
It needs to be at least 6 paragraphs, with 4 citations of Wikipedia, before it's sufficiently sufficient.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday April 10 2017, @08:11PM
You're the guy who turns the 15 minute meeting into a 90 minute meeting because we "need to all be on the same page". Meanwhile, i just implemented the more popular opinion in prod and left mid-meeting while you were basking in the sound of your own voice. I have actual things to do today.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Monday April 10 2017, @07:45PM
I'd counter, a lot of the humanities courses I took in college were not concerned with enriching my overall skillset.
Example: Most of the English courses were concerned with making me learn arbitrary rules like double spaces after sentences. The only one to make a serious difference on me was the speech giving course; that prof actually talked about the theories of effective communications and generalized things rather than making me learn arbitrary rules specific to the time and place I was learning them. Everything else was a rehash of what I had in high school or pointless.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 10 2017, @10:52PM
I generally agree, though one thought...
Last is creative problem analysis, and this is where it gets really important. The student is given a vaguely defined abstract task and told to produce something profound based on next to nothing. What follows is the process that all of us, especially effective software developers, must master: prototyping, returning to the customer (professor) to refine our ideas, cleaning up our work, following accepted style guides, producing a complete product, submitting it for review, and dealing with the results.
I know of quite a few technical programs that introduce some sort of advanced hybrid course generally in the junior or senior year, and frequently in engineering disciplines, which gets at a bunch of this practical stuff. Except rather than learning abstract skills in an English class writing a research paper, these are all focused on a more practical engineering issue -- e.g., you have a team and broad problem to solve. You need to do some investigations (which could be reading secondary sources, doing calculations/estimates, even trying out some basic feasibility experiments), write up some proposals, reports, etc., but it's all in your discipline doing stuff that a real-world engineer might be called on to do.
These sorts of classes are often quite challenging, but they're much better prep for a career than a bunch of abstract problem-solving. If our goal is to train university students in practical fields to do stuff like this, why not incorporate it early on? Sure, you might need some basic or remedial skills in your first year or so, but I personally think we spend way too long in college curricula focusing on theoretical stuff that most kids will forget within a couple months of taking the class. Whereas if they were integrating it with the kinds of real-world situations you're talking about, at least more of it might "stick" and serve as good prep for an internship/apprenticeship and then an actual job.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11 2017, @01:49PM
Next is research: anybody can pull crap out of their ass, but being forced to use accepted sources requires students to expose themselves to ideas other than their own,
I thought the point of those research papers was having to cite sources properly and be able to show them when asked. At least that's what people tended to get dinged on the most when I was in school.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 11 2017, @02:22PM
Last is creative problem analysis
There's a bathtub curve to this where the blue collar "git er done" union craftsmen types are good at this but are never optimal. Engineers do the same thing but much cheaper faster and provably safer. Then in between that's the bottom of the bathtub curve where people are really good at regurgitating what the boss wants to hear to the authorities in charge, but they tend to have very little agency or creativity.
So likely they're trying to jump over the liberal arts degree holder types and grab talent out of the blue collar segment of society.
Its kinda like entrepreneurship where only the extremes are present, successful new businesses are either created by drop outs who are master plumbers (or programmers) or really smart folks, but in the middle roughly no successful businesses come from MBAs who took a class in small business or something like that.