Your Credentials Are Worthless Here
<i>Speaking as a graduate of one, top schools teach you credentialing and ladder climbing. If you’re lucky, you might learn how to create a financial model or craft a solid argument.</i><p>If that's what you got out of college, you were definitely doing it wrong. Maybe in a business degree, but most people who do a science, engineering, or math degree learn some, you know, actual science, engineering, and/or math, not merely schmoozing skills.<p>You could learn that elsewhere, but if you care about scientific progress, my experience is that few people without a science degree ever get around to developing a rigorous scientific education, whether out of disinterest, lack of time, or whatever other reason. Lots of people <i>plan</i> to one day work through some textbooks, but most people don't. You see it in a lot of self-taught programmers, many of whom have a weak grounding in computer science. That might be okay, depending on what you're hiring for, but there are many cases where you want some more solid foundations. For example, if you're doing anything with machine learning, you might want people who understand statistics. Oh, and if you're designing aircraft, you might want someone who's studied aeronautical engineering, or at least <i>some</i> kind of engineering, whether at a university or through equivalent self-study. Even Google, a canonical Disruptive Silicon Valley company, seems to prefer its technical employees to understand computer science, rather than to hire pure programmers.<p>If someone is a true autodidact, learning on their own the equivalent of what they would've learned in a rigorous 4-year degree, that's fine, and there are some of those, so I have no problem making sure to look out for them, or even actively seek them out. I don't run across them very often at all, however, especially if we're talking about people without any formal mathematical training who are able to do solid mathematical or engineering modeling work. When you <i>do</i> find such a person, they're often amazing, but they're not common. Maybe MOOCs will increase their numbers, but it's a bit early to tell.<p>That said, I agree in not caring about the actual credential. If someone studied CS at CMU but left without the piece of paper for whatever reason, but learned the kind of stuff people learn in the CMU CS program, I don't really care about the missing document.