Ramiro Franco

I recently read a book called "Smart and Gets Things Done", which was an interesting book on the hiring process for a tech company. I really enjoyed it and I thought it had a good chunk of advice that I will definitely take into account, but it has a passage on filtering resumés that I didn't particularly agree with.

The book essentially stated that ivy league candidates could outperform community college candidates, and it made absolutely no mention of candidates without the opportunity to have taken higher education.

Being a software engineer without a degree myself, I feel like I'm constantly having to fight the mentality that because I don't have a college degree I'm somehow an inferior developer, even though I have a good, long work history, I have contributed to open-source projects, and I have sample works that show an obvious passion and skill that is at least on par with that of anyone who does have a degree.

I understood the logic that having higher education means someone else has already filtered this person for "intelligence", but the smartest, most talented developers I know did not come from universities, they are people who started programming on their own to follow their passion, frequently, years before they would even be old enough to begin higher education.

I don't have a problem with people who have entered a tech career through a path of higher education, I just don't like the exclusive attitude that I frequently see in hiring guides, especially since it seems very few developers share these same prejudices.