Turn On, Code In, Drop Out: Tech Programmers Don’t Need College Diplomas
(Feature from GOOD Magazine, Issue 025/WINTER 2011 The Next Big Thing)
David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice. Eventually, King landed a gig with Reddit, the biggest social news site on the web. Now he’s one of six engineers at Hipmunk, a travel site with good buzz and $5 million in funding. He works with his friends, makes a good living, has equity. By all accounts, Dave King is the midst of an impressive career. He’s a successful developer. And, like many of his peers nowadays, he did it all without a college degree.
While there are a few high-level computer-science concepts that require a college education to master, King says, 90 percent of developers won’t use that knowledge in their day jobs. And yet a diploma is still the first thing recruiters at most large companies look for when hiring a programmer. “It can be very difficult to prove yourself to the people you want to work for without a degree,” King says. “You aren’t even given a chance.”
That process is fine for most industries—a Harvard-educated accountant is a lot more likely to be a good hire then a self-taught one. But programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?
As programmers become the backbone of the business world and the tech industry embarks on a bubble-driven hiring blitz, that thinking is going to have to change. In many places, it already has.
