I’ve been thinking more about degrees, schools, work experience, etc. I think I’ve boiled it down two parts: setting expectations & meeting expectations.
When I see a resume, it sets certain expectations about candidate. 4 year CS degree from a well respected school? My expectations increase for that candidate. Several years of programming experience? Expectations increase. Contributions to Open Source projects on GitHub? My expectations increase. So when I look at 20 resumes, I’m not going to call all 20 people to come in an interview in person, that wouldn’t be efficient time wise. So we’ll likely pick 5-7 resumes who seem to have the best expectations for what we’re looking for, and call them over the phone. This is where the “meeting expectations” begins. If the initial phone call goes well, we might follow up with a more technical phone interview. If that goes well, we’ll likely invite 2-3 of the candidates for an in-person interview. When we get to the in-person interviews, it is all about seeing if the candidate meets, exceeds, or falls below the expectations we have formed about them. If you have a 4 year degree, 6+ years of experience, etc, my expectations will be higher than someone fresh out of college or has just a little work experience. So where degrees come into play, a CS degree from UoU or BYU can help you by setting a higher expectation so you’ll likely get more return phone calls to interview. However it can hurt you if you fail to meet that expectation of “I would assume someone who spent 4 years learning about CS would know how to write a SQL SELECT statement.” Likewise, a degree from University of Phoenix by itself might set a lower expectation than a UoU, but someone with a solid work experience & a degree says “Here is someone who cares about helping prove their education through getting a degree and has experience doing this type of work.” Sound like they could meet our expectations of what we need, lets bring them in. If the degree is from someone like an ITT Tech… honestly that would likely do more to lower expectations than raise them. But once again, the degree is about setting expectations. You might not get as many calls back for interviews (personally I’d recommend just leaving that degree off a resume and just go with work experience). So in summary: a good degree from a good school can set a positive expectation, but you have to be able to meet that expectation or it won’t be worth much. Justin -- Justin Carmony Sent with Airmail _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
