Dropouts Need Not Apply: Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers With Degrees – Real Time Economics – WSJ

It turns out that tech companies are more likely than other employers to require college degrees when hiring software developers.

There’s a long-lived myth that Silicon Valley and the technology industry are meritocracies where all that matters is the caliber of your code. But it turns out that tech companies are more likely than other employers to require college degrees when hiring software developers. Seventy-five percent of job ads for those roles at technology companies specify an educational requirement, compared with 58% of openings posted by the full universe of employers that are hiring software developers, according to Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-market data firm that analyzed 1.6 million ads for software-developer jobs nationwide. And in 95% of the tech-sector job ads that list a minimum credential, the employer calls for a bachelor’s degree or higher, versus 92% of the ads from all employers seeking developers. Matt Sigelman, Burning Glass’s chief executive, said he was struck by “the extent of the discord between, on the one side, the meritocratic mystique and the lore of the Bill Gateses and Mark Zuckerbergs”—both Harvard University dropouts—“and on the other side, the reality of so many of the best kinds of jobs being closed to those who don’t have a college degree.” Nationally, 68% of adults over age 25 don’t have bachelor’s degrees. Burning Glass found employers in Silicon Valley were the most exacting in terms of credentials, listing education requirements in 77% of developer job postings, and in those ads, demanding a bachelor’s or advanced degree 98% of the time.

Source: Dropouts Need Not Apply: Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers With Degrees – Real Time Economics – WSJ

 

The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the…

STYLE IS A STICKY SUBJECT, perhaps especially when it comes to writing. The term is commonly used to gesture toward that bit of composition that both exceeds and augments meaning: that flourish, however ornate or austere, that makes a sentence something more than just declarative. Style in writing is celebrated for transcending the expected, even where that style is described as “plain”; style is the thing that makes an interesting-enough idea resonate long after we’ve read it. Style plays an outsized role in what attracts us to one writer but not another. Style is what makes our common language our own, that sets our writing apart from the average.



STYLE IS A STICKY SUBJECT, perhaps especially when it comes to writing. The term is commonly used to gesture toward that bit of composition that both exceeds and augments meaning: that flourish, however ornate or austere, that makes a sentence something more than just declarative. Style in…
The Future of Academic Style: Why Citations Still Matter in the…

 

Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing



JESSICA LIVINGSTON: The most important thing an early-stage startup should know about marketing is rather counterintuitive: that you probably shouldn’t be doing anything you’d use the term “marketing” to describe. Sales and marketing are two ends of a continuum. At the sales end your outreach is narrow and deep. At the marketing end it is broad and shallow. And for an early stage startup, narrow and deep is what you want — not just in the way yo…
Jessica Livingston: Why Startups Need to Focus on Sales, Not Marketing