Location: The Netherlands
Certain junior programming job applications in the NL require you to have finished a HBO study (similar to a Bachelor’s degree),
As I understood, a lot of programmers are self-taught and do not have a degree.
Question: Why would not having a degree instantly disqualify a programmer? And what does this say about the person/company who wrote the application?
As I understood, a lot of programmers are self-taught and do not have a degree.
And likely don't work in jobs that have a hard requirement for a degree in CS.
Why would not having a degree instantly disqualify a programmer?
Some companies expect their developers to all share a baseline of knowledge before working in their respective teams. Some require them for clearance level work (I'm self taught, always reach a roadblock with NL recruiters looking to contract me because I don't have a UK degree).
And what does this say about the person/company who wrote the application?
Not much really. The person who wrote the application, depending on the company size, likely isn't the one who originally outlined to requirements for the candidate.
The person who specified a HBO is necessary may be:
Each company will have their own reasons, most of which you'll likely never know.
My recommendation is to apply anyway.
If they say no, you still don't work there.
If they bring you in for an interview and you get the job, you haven't missed an opportunity because of a badly crafted job description.
There is a lot more to software development than knowing a couple of programming languages and hacking out some code. Universities are how you get trained for that.
What does it say about the person hiring? To me it says they care about the product they are developing and want skilled people to do it. If you want to hire an accountant, you look for someone trained in accounting, not someone who took some math classes. You don't hire a self-taught structural engineer for your construction company.
Are there exceptions to this, sure, but my experience has been people who are self-taught just don't come in with the necessary skills to do the job and take a lot more training once they are hired.
Think it this way:
Do you absolutely, really, completely need sports shoes to go for a morning walk?
Answer: No, but it helps.
Many organizations take this approach, when they prepare the job description / requirement.
As suggested by Jay in the other answer: apply anyways, who knows, you may end up getting the interview and bagging the job.
To elaborate a bit on why companies take this approach:
Organizations needs some sort of filtering mechanism to get rid of the rubbish resumes as early as possible in the recruitment process. They also need to ensure that if they're going to process a resume, it should be a valid one for that role / requirements. Putting a formal requirement of a degree is the easiest way to achieve this, without appearing as discriminating. In most of the sensible workplaces, having a degree (or lack thereof) rarely matters, given that you can prove you're worthy of the job.
Also, with your career progression, the academic degree slowly takes the backseat and the relevant industry and domain experience takes the precedence.
A lot of programmers are self-taught and do not have a degree.
A lot of them do have degrees. Self-taught is a phrase that needs to die. Every programmer is "self-taught", formal education or not. It is commonly being used on social media to humble brag, not realising those with degrees are also largely self-taught.
Why would not having a degree instantly disqualify a programmer?
Often it doesn't providing you have proven experience, but there are almost an endless amount of reasons why it could:
What does this say about the person/company who wrote the application?
Nothing, and neither should you even think about it this way. The employer knows their company and the skills required for the position.
They might be asking for the wrong skills for the position but that's not really your concern. If you like the sound of the job, just apply and provide a cover note saying how passionate you are and how willing you are to learn any required skills.
for a junior programmer's position?
There is nothing wrong with a company wanting a junior with a degree, or a junior with 4 years experience etc... Junior does not mean a "training" position.
I know a lot of social media will publicly berate junior job descriptions that want more than 2 years experience but this is misplaced frustration.
There are plenty of junior developers that have 5+ years experience. They are still junior because they haven't developed their skills. It is not related to years of experience.
Some companies hire a junior to train up, but some want a junior with experience that can just do the job, without having to spend time and money training them up.
In my experience (working and living in the Netherlands all my life), most adverts in the Netherlands will not require a HBO study, they usually require "HBO werk- en denkniveau" (HBO-level of working and thinking). You usually must be able to demonstrate that in some way (eg job experience, courses, etc), but for a junior position having actually completed HBO (bachelor or master) or University (bachelor or master) is the only available sign, unless you are switching fields (otherwise: why would you be looking for a junior job, and not for a medior job). Other forms of assessing your knowledge-level is more work for the company, and less sure.
Programmer (or 'software developer' or 'software engineer') in the Netherlands is generally considered as a knowledge-intensive job, and a lot of companies will even prefer University-level over HBO-level. Having been to an HBO or University (and preferably completed with a degree) is seen as a test of your knowledge-level, which means that the company won't need to do this test. Having a degree in computer science, software development or similar isn't even a hard requirement, any degree will probably do (though 'harder' fields are probably preferred over 'softer' fields).
That said, generally the requirements in a job ad are not set in stone. Not having such a degree will not always be a deal-breaker, but it might be harder to get your foot in the door, and with multiple suitable candidates, companies will more likely skip you because then they don't have to dive too deep to assess your knowledge-level.
It's helpful to consider your question in the larger context of hiring processes. Typically, hiring processes have multiple stages, which are designed to filter candidates until a single person can be selected. Each step in the process therefore needs a set of criteria on which the filtering can be done. Importantly, each step needs to be designed as a trade-off: how much time can we spend on this step in order to do an acceptable job of screening candidates?
In essence, a hiring manager may not care whether or not an employee actually has a specific degree. What they really want are people who can consistently do the work they have in front of them. However, you can't realistically test that directly, so you need to come up with things to use as proxies for testing that. And, these proxies need to then be organized into the different stages of the process based on effectiveness versus cost (time) spent to evaluate.
In an interview, of course, you can ask a candidate detailed questions, and you can evaluate many proxies for a specific requirement. In an interview, you can afford the time to have open-ended "storytelling" or narrative responses. You can ask someone to describe how they work, what things they consider as they make decisions about their work, and so on. You can ask people about times they have failed, and what they learned from those failures. And so on. These questions help bring out the nuances between candidates. They can be highly accurate but they're also expensive - all of these questions take time, but they are valuable enough that it's worth taking that time, once you have filtered down to a small set of candidates.
That last sentence is crucial - you can't literally ask everyone who applies all of these questions, or you might find yourself spending a thousand hours evaluating candidates when you can realistically only afford to spend 25 hours doing so. So - obviously - you don't ask every single candidate all of those detailed questions. Instead, you come up with a much coarser proxy - one that's quick and easy and might occasionally mis-classify people, ideally as accurately as possible, but isn't blatantly incorrect. This type of proxy becomes your written job description and your application screening questions. This way, you can spend 2 or 3 minutes on each candidate, instead of 2 or 3 hours. Yes, you might discard a good candidate here or there, but in a job market like our current software development market - where there are a ton of openings, and a ton of candidates, and everyone is spamming everyone else, you need a way to roughly filter before you even consider interviewing.
Further, there is often an element of oversight from other factions within an employer. Typically, HR is involved in writing job advertisements. While HR wants to support hiring managers in their attempt to find the best candidates, HR is also usually responsible for protecting the company's best interests when it comes to employee issues. In terms of hiring, this means that HR is responsible for ensuring hiring processes protect the company from lawsuits or other issues. Any time a hiring process can be made objective in a black and white manner (either you meet this requirement, or you don't), that can be perceived as a way to reduce the chances of candidates having a legal complaint. On the other hand, a process that is highly subjective can leave the door open for a candidate to say "you didn't hire me because you're discriminatory." Being rejected because of a clear yes-or-no requirement tends to shut those things down quickly. So - it's common for HR to make job adds as objective as possible, which often means enforcing strict requirements about things like degrees or years of experience.
When all these factors come together, it's easy to see why job adds often include rather high level "requirements" that may or may not make sense in terms of a specific individual's fitness for the job. Certainly, there are lots of software developers without degrees who do great software development work and are excellent employees. Some employers understand this and are willing to make exceptions to requirements, so as others have suggested, you have nothing to lose by applying anyways.
I don't know how it's done in The Netherlands, but here in Bulgaria every job listing requires you to have university degree in some sort of computer related field.
In reality I haven't seen seen a case where someone was rejected because they did not meet that criteria.
When I ask the people who write the job requirements: "Why are you including this when it doesn't matter?" they say "Because it looks better that way." and "To prevent people who have no technical background at all from applying.".
That's just what I've heard.
In my opinion you should just apply anyway. Focus on the non official experience and education.
To put this into perspective place yourself in the recruiter's shoes. How would you like to post a job that has no requirements other than a passion for programming? Imagine that you get hundreds of job applications from around the world from strangers that claim a passion for programming. You have a month to find the best applicant in addition to your regular job duties. How would you go about choosing the one applicant that is best qualified for the job?
You can't. An application this open- does not draw highly qualified applicants.
You essentially filter no one and accept everyone.
From the applicant standpoint- none of these people are served well. The chance to acquire the job is abysmal yet you still demand to take each applicant's time and energy. How much better are you for posting a job application with literally no requirements? What you propose may actually be worse.
As an aside- if I were a college graduate then I'm not sure I could take a job posting that has "no requirements" seriously. On the other hand- if I had no degree and no programming experience and found myself desperately unemployed- I would say anything to convince someone that I'm qualified for a job, to include lying about my experience. The only way to expose such fakers is to thoroughly interview them. It's not fair to the recruiter to put-up with such nonsense and posting a job with little to no requirements is asking for trouble.
Question: Why would not having a degree instantly disqualify a programmer?
Not having a specific degree is not bad. Even no degree is not bad if you have the experience to make up for it. But having no degree at all for a junior position means I have to educate you. I'm not looking for an apprentice to train, I'm looking for a junior developer that is inexperienced but can do the job. Had I been looking for an apprentice, then I would have made that clear in the job ad.
And what does this say about the person/company who wrote the application?
That they need people that get the job done, not apprentices or interns.
As I understood, a lot of programmers are self-taught and do not have a degree.
Some of the best developers I know are self taught. But only because they are so old that back when they went into the work force, something like an apprenticeship or degree did not exist for them. They are self-taught because they had to, not because they skipped their education. They are also "self taught with 25 years professional experience".
Sorry to be blunt. But ask yourself the following questions: Would you buy meat from a butcher that is self-taught? Would you let the brakes of your car be repaired by a mechanic hat is self-taught? Would you go to a dentist that is self-taught? What about a policeman? Judge? Teacher? I require a degree (or actually a finished apprenticeship) from the people that paint a room plain white for me. Why would I require less from someone to develop software? A degree means you have been certified to be able to do a good job on average. Why would I want less?
My personal preferences aside, most companies that require degrees will also allow you to substitute years of experience for on a 1 to 1 basis. IE, four years of DEMONSTRABLE programming experience is equal to a degree, in many instances.
Part of the problem these days is that anyone can hop on Google, and find code snippets, there are tons of answers to technical questions that can also be found online.
So what is an employer to do?
Require a degree so they know that you are walking in with at least the basics (A bit optimistic on their part, given the state of education). Also, requiring a degree lets them cull the resumes to a manageable level.
If you have 500 applications for one opening, you're not going to want to go through all 500. Eliminate those without degrees in the specific field, and you're going to be down to half of that, if not less.
No employer is going to want to interview more than five, ten people tops, for a position. Fair or not, requiring a degree is one major way that employers narrow the field.
Once you get a few years of experience under your belt, the degree becomes less and less important.
I have over 20 years experience, and no degree and it's not even a concern anymore. And, the few places that require it anyway have screened themselves out of the running, as I would not want to work for a company that has such a poor understanding of the industry.
As a current junior developer in NL, it is true that most (almost all) job postings I have seen have this requirement.
It helps the filtering process, but as someone involved in recruiting from the other side, what matters is the knowledge and not the paper, so do not let it stop you from applying if you think you have the required knowledge.
As for the reasons why it simply is a combination of old customs and the fact that self-taught persons have quite frequently large fundamental gaps in computer science knowledge and often have a more practical approach to programming. I'm not judging if that is a good or bad thing, but many of the companies willing to receive and mentor a junior developer are looking for someone with strong fundamentals that they can build on and teach them industry standards and their own project specifics, as fresh juniors are not expected to be productive anyway.
In any case, neither not having a degree will bar you from applying, nor having one will ensure you meet the requirements in the interviews. Sometimes recruiters or intermediaries will take these requirements as rather strict even if they really aren't from the company's point of view.
Note that in some specific scenarios, the hard requirement might be due to regulations or policies in place. Those would disqualify you immediately, but they should be fairly rare.
Having a degree in CS, or having done a technical engineering school, certifies that one person has followed some courses and passed an exam, so a minimal knowledge on the subject should be granted. So the HR has a quick way to cut the number of candidates for a given job. Granted there are people that got a degree by luck and brilliant self taught people.
Why would not having a degree instantly disqualify a programmer? And what does this say about the person/company who wrote the application?
It doesn't, and in fact it can say something about the company.
A lot of answers seem to come from people without actual experience in hiring software developers in the Netherlands which I have been doing for a lot of years now. (disclaimer: this answer comes from my personal experience in the field, no more, no less)
First: Like another answer already mentioned, most companies actually don't ask for a degree, but for "werk en denkniveau" (they expect you to operate on this "level", regardless of actual education). This is fine, just apply if you think you have the skills.
A hard requirement for a degree is actually quite uncommon (even if it looks that way from reading the application form, just ask them). The reason for this is simple:
The Netherlands has a huge shortage of software developers
A lot of companies just want to appear to be very picky about who they hire, but in reality they'll hire anyone that's willing, and the real selection will be after your first contract (6 months most of the time). They just want to appear like they're "only hiring the best" for marketing purposes. Unless they are part of a select group of companies (like Google or in game development) they cannot afford to be as picky as they appear to be and they know it. So again, just ask if you can apply, the answer will almost always be yes.
This leaves (in my experience) only three reasons why there would be a hard requirement for a degree:
It's vital to understand though, and by the looks of it a lot of other posters don't seem to know this, that Dutch Universities do not teach software development at a level required to actually be a software developer. If someone fresh out of school has any real programming skills it will be either because of their internships or because of what they taught themselves in their own time. The curriculum alone does not prepare you, and the chances that your teachers actually know the industry are slim at best.
Furthermore, the way the curriculum is set up, with all the group assignments and such, makes getting a degree in "application development" without having written any software a very real possibility. We used to "weed out" applicants by having them pull 100 records from a mysql db and putting them in alphabetical order. About 50% of applicants with a bachelor degree (or better) could not pull this off. With internet access. In 3 hours.
Then there is the observation (as researched by Google but I can't seem to find the document anymore) that after a short time on the job (I think it was a year), no correlation between job performance and academic background is found.
The above leads me to confidently state this: Not having a degree is not a real inhibition for getting employed in the Netherlands, except for a small amount of jobs. Your experience and skills are all that matters, and you can work on those without formal education.
As an aside (since this is a pet peeve of mine) consider this:
4 years of relevant experience on your CV are in fact a better starting point than having a bachelors degree. I've been asking this question (which is better) for years to an ever increasing number of persons involved in hiring software developers and the result is (neigh) unanimous. That does raise some interesting questions about education in general and student debt in particular, doesn't it?
I don't know if it's the same in The Netherlands, but in the US you should not generally consider the job requirements listed in a job posting as a firm list. Finding a person who has all the qualifications is usually nearly impossible.
Think of them more as a wishlist. The hiring manager will list all the desirable qualifications, and hope to bring in candidates who meet many of them. They will often accept substitutes for some of the requirements -- if you've been working in the industry for several years, your practical experience will often make up for the lack of a degree.
Consider that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were both college dropouts.
Publishing a large list of "requirements" is often done as a way to weed out candidates who are obviously unqualified. If you look at the list and find it daunting, you may not want to bother applying. But if you think you can do the job even though you're self-taught, go ahead. What's the worst thing that can happen?
What it really tells you is that the person who wrote the ad is clueless and lives in magical Christmas land. A lot of job ads get posted by HR personnel who don't have any real technical skills. They often just rattle a bunch of keywords that the technical manager has mentioned in passing to them.
So, yes you are completely correct in saying that there are MANY! programmers who are perfectly proficient at there job who don't have degrees, self-taught is often the way the majority was taught.
Here is the catch though, you can still apply for jobs even if you don't have the degree. If you mention that you have a couple of portfolio websites you can show the prospective employer then you can easily get your foot in the door and then it is your own skills and knowledge that is going to matter.
All employers would like to pay minimum wage for a CS graduate from Harvard College, but the reality is that if they are going through the trouble of looking for candidates they usually cannot afford to have the position go vacant, usually they still need to pick the best candidate from the application pool and that could very easily be you.
In addition to the the points covered in other answers, there can also be regulatory considerations. In the USA, for example, companies that sponsor work visas for foreign employees can get more power and flexibility in the work visa lottery system if they can prove to the government that they only hire foreigners who can do the job at least as well as the average American applicant. One way to prove this is to enforce a hiring policy that requires relevant degrees and certifications. It's not uncommon for companies to reject even applicants with graduate-level (5+ year) degrees, if those degrees are not directly relevant to the position.
If this company is an outsourcing company it may be the requirement of their clients. I was once applying to such an outsourcing company which was working in the financial industry. They told me that their client's - Banks - require a degree from developers whom they want to work for them.
Also my current employer, an outsourcing company, requires a degree, when i have to work in a project for the (German) government.
It is a simple lazy filter. You should not take it personal. Maybe company decided that instead of receiving 30 CVs (including 10 CVs without BSc) they just want to review 20. And they don't particularly care about hiring the best out of 30 possible candidates, just one good enough from 20 with BSc (and they are willing to ignore 1%(or %5 or 25% or 50%) chance that the best candidate is in their ignore list).
In general this is a bad sign, but you should not extrapolate too much from your only contact with the company(different SW teams can differ significantly, and even bigger changes between different departments are normal).
If you are still interested in the company I would suggest writing a nice mail to HR department explaining why despite your lack of BSc you would like to interview with them.
Many people without formal training or qualifications are perfectly capable of doing electrical or plumbing jobs. If you have the right aptitudes, you can probably teach yourself to be a midwife or a nurse without going through formal training courses. Yet employers, and the public, tend to demand that people aren't allowed to practice these trades without some kind of training and qualification.
Why should programming be different? The amount of harm a rogue programmer can do is at least as great as that of a rogue electrician or midwife.
Yes, I've come across many self-taught programmers in my career who are extremely capable. I've also come across self-taught programmers trying to write a sort routine having no idea that there are good sort routines in every textbook.
And there are certainly lots of practising programmers asking questions on StackOverflow who are clearly not qualified to be doing the job.
