Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.
with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.
> If you spent years and tens of thousands of dollars earning a degree, companies' hiring people without that credential might feel frustrating. The change could leave graduates wondering if their time and money were well-spent.
> AI's popularity also creates environmental pressures. Training and running AI systems requires tons of electricity and water for cooling data centers. As AI becomes more embedded in hiring, operations, and daily business functions, energy consumption grows.
> This can strain power grids, increase costs for consumers, and contribute to pollution if the electricity comes from sources such as gas or coal. AI may help optimize some clean energy systems, but its resource demands present trade-offs.
> What's being done about changing hiring practices? The business community is recognizing that degree requirements often screen out talented people unnecessarily.
https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/google-founder-sergey-brin-hi... ( https://archive.is/fefa9 )
If it is AI, this is the easiest type of AI content to generate: a summary of a small, delimited text corpus, with some generic filler added.
If it isn't AI, it's still nevertheless low-effort and (IMHO) doesn't belong on HN. The primary journalistic source (Fortune) should replace it.
Look at this before/after comparison, how lazily they (or it) paraphrased the source material:
> [Primary] "Between 2017 and 2022, the share of job postings at Google requiring a degree dropped from 93% to 77%, according to analysis from the Burning Glass Institute."
> [Derivative] "Data from the Burning Glass Institute shows that in 2017, degree requirements were part of 93% of job postings at Google. By 2022, that figure had dropped to 77%."
Or this:
> [Primary] "And Google isn’t alone: companies including Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco have reduced degree requirements in recent years, signaling a broader industry shift toward skills-based hiring."
> [Derivative] "Other large tech companies have also begun judging candidates by their abilities instead of their diplomas. Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are among those dropping degree mandates."
I do miss when people argued whether Yahoo or ask Jeeves was better. Those were good times.
>artificial intelligence tools got better at performing tasks that once required formal training.
It is like Facebook that once wanted only young people and now have their share of greybeards.
It is traditional economy companies and consultancies like Accenture that usually don't have exceptions for people without formal credentials.
But they always had a good number of people with no degrees or degrees wholly unrelated to computers.
Can't comment on if that's still the case as it's been several years now since I graduated, but it was notable.
same could be said for Adobe and their HQ was even closer to SJSU than Google's was.
I never "require" a degree in the job postings I put out here. I don't even mention it.
Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.
The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.
Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.
There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.
The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.
One of my best working experiences.
Their brain doesn't work like a hacker's, and they would have to work very hard to compensate, but they got into this for the easy high paying job, they don't want to work hard.
Somehow other degrees seem to be better predictors of competency. A lot of physics/math folks, and various non-software engineers realized that they have a hacker's brain, and programming pays more than what they were doing, so they got into software.
Glad I didn't spend another 8 years and instead took a job at AWS.
My how things have changed!
It was always seen, in the first decade of the millennia, as a kind of very academia friendly/focused place.
I had impostor syndrome the whole time I was there as a result.
I think that reputation has lessened.
Of course that's just anecdotal and may be the exception. And there's plenty of CS grads who have been passionate about the space their entire lives.
I studied Spanish for 3 years in high school, coasted by. I'm a complete beginner though. Nowadays I have a bit more curiosity in learning it again, and I'd probably make more progress in a few months than I did in all those years.
I think degrees are useful for comparing candidates with no experience (work or project experience, that is), but beyond that have little value. Especially when the candidate's university years were a decade or longer ago. If you've been working for at least a couple years I won't really look at your education at all.
Slow news day, I guess.
I checked at random on their careers page for non entry level roles, ones you’d expect that you don’t need to rely on education as a signal like for entry level, and they are still having minimum qualifications of a bachelors, and preferred qualifications of a masters
https://www.google.com/about/careers/applications/jobs/resul...
In my case, I have CS degree and work as SWE but I probably would've been fine with just my Data Structures & Algos course as I already had programming experience.
Are computational theory, circuits 101, discrete math, logic 101, etc necessary for being a good SWE? Probably not, but they do probably expand your mind a bit.
Plenty of highly intelligent people don't get educated because they see through the farce, or they decide that being submissive to the system is bad, or they test poorly (e.g. dyslexic), or their intelligence has found better opportunities.
Higher education does not make you more intelligent. Nor is it a good filter/measure of intelligence. Too many people chase it for status.
I always remember one very smart lady skiting to me about aiming for B grades and manipulating lecturers since she only needed a degree to pass HR requirements. I wasn't that smart.
I try to understand my successful friends that left school at 15. Unfortunately that is a biased sample of people without higher education: they are very intelligent, effective and hard-working.
In the schools in which I was, the best results were obtained by the students who were intelligent, but not too intelligent, because they were able to accomplish easily whatever was requested from them by the teachers and they were content with that, so they had good relationships with all teachers, resulting in uniformly good grades.
The students who were more intelligent than that, had difficulties, because they were frequently better than the teachers. Few teachers were OK with that, especially when the better students were unable to restrain themselves to not point at mistakes done by the teachers. Even when they avoided conflicts with the teachers about what is right and wrong, the better students were bored by what they were taught and they were reluctant to do various kinds of homework that seemed pointless for them. So they usually did not have good relationships with most teachers, with the exception of a few teachers, who either were very good themselves or they appreciated better talent when they saw it. So the best students had excellent grades only at one subject or two, with low grades at many others, so they ended only with average grades.
If you have skills, you can get a job. If you have a degree, you can get a job. If you can GDB, you can get a job. You just have to go out and get one.
He seemed mostly checked out about a decade ago. Before Larry did. Basically right after G+ failed. More of a figurehead. And then not even that anymore.
Frankly it seems like a pretty weird thing to say to a group of college students. What does he want them to take away from it? “Just apply now”? “You’re not that great”?
I mean, maybe if he means the technical meaning of the word namely “more than two” and not “a noticeable percentage” which is implied.
In my time there I literally only knew two googlers without a college degree. I didn’t pry but people also aren’t shy about it. And zero people without degrees made it to offer stage in any hiring committee I was part of.
Maybe in the very beginning they had such a bar, I wasn't there. As late as 2007 they were still recruiting on-campus at non-T20 schools like Michigan State. Much of my team are from various Big Ten/similar universities that aren't top 20 but are solid (plenty are also from more prestigious universities, but unless you explicitly ask someone at lunch about their education no one ever talks about it). I've been involved in hiring and interviewing for 7+ years there and have done interviews with people from all caliber of school - top 10, middle of the pack US, HBCU, international - so there's no such requirement for that now either.
Call me skeptical considering they've got hundreds of applicants for each open role and are doing AI resume screening. I'm not sure how 'abilities' is going to even get someone to the point where a recruiter will call them. If it does, apparently I've been applying to jobs all wrong.
Sounds more like a knock on the person making the comment than it is on me.