Diversifying IT Hiring with Flatiron Software’s Kirimgeray Kirimli

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Carim re il, who is president of Flatiron Software, and we're talking about, well, to what degree do you actually need to have a four year college degree to succeed in the world of it?

Given all our current shortage of skills, it seems like maybe we should reconsider that, some of that thinking. Cor, welcome to the show. Hello.

What is your thought about, it seems like every time I look at a job posting, it says they want somebody with a four year degree. They don't. And yet we talk about making it a more inclusive area, and it's as much about aptitude and skills.

So What's your sense? I think, uh, that a lot of the job descriptions, um, are actually a bit outdated in that sense. Um, a lot of the big companies are posting these job descriptions, and the smaller ones are just, um, copying from them.

And it's obviously safer to, um, have a four year college degree. And, um, in most cases, it makes it easier, uh, to vet the candidates. Um, obviously if you don't have a college degree, then don't apply.

Um, but what I've seen is, um, about 10 years ago, I was seeing a lot of, uh, software engineers who'd come from other fields, uh, without any software engineering, um, degrees who were very successful. Um, and that actually started, uh, like I actually started questioning that I myself, uh, have a degree in computer science. I spent four years, but then I would meet other people who come from other backgrounds who've studied music economy history.

They just, they're just self-thought software developers who are very good. Th those were the first, uh, instances that I've seen, uh, of people who actually do not have a, a computer science background, but have a college degree. More recently, uh, as we started seeing a lot of these, um, companies, boot camps, uh, and as it became much easier to actually do software development, you end up seeing a lot of kids actually that haven't even been to college who are very good software developers.

Uh, maybe not necessarily, uh, the specialists in some areas, but I've seen a lot of, um, young, uh, graduates or, um, engineers without a formal college degree who are, have just self-thought, uh, or coming from a bootcamp. And they're very good at some of these technologies like, or, um, python, uh, mostly web technologies, uh, the other, uh, and also I guess, uh, like, uh, mobile technologies as well. Um, so some of the other more complex bits might be, uh, challenging, but I've actually, uh, witnessed a lot of, uh, engineers learning by themselves or just following tutorials on the internet and then working at, uh, like smaller jobs, uh, slowly working their way up.

They've actually been like, they were some of the more successful engineers that I've seen, in fact, because they, when they actually learn by themselves, they're actually gaining a very important skill. They learn how to learn by themselves, which makes them, which puts them ahead. Uh, in other words, like if I comparing two, uh, profiles, so like, um, if I had like two resumes of like a 25-year-old engineer, one of them went to college at 18, studied computer science until 22, and now, uh, he has three years of experience.

The other one, uh, let's say they did not go to college and they started, they did some bootcamp at 18, and then they started working at a job at 19, and they've been working for six years. I would actually go for the six year experience. One because they're more experienced in the field, they might, um, need some help.

And definitely we need to like do a more careful interview process because, uh, the college degree actually promises, uh, like a few of qualities that you might wanna be more careful about if you're, um, going for a candidate without a college degree. But at the same time, that also, uh, means an additional years of experience, which in some candidates might actually be a benefit. Are the candidates who are coming outta college with four year degrees ready for the workplace anyway?

Or do I wind up having to retrain them as much as I would have to train somebody who doesn't have a degree? Yeah. Um, I also think about myself.

Uh, like when I, uh, studied in college, a lot of the college courses that they taught me were about, uh, core, core software concepts, which are very good, and they make you a better engineer in the long run, but none of the courses that they taught me were actually useful. When I got my first job, uh, I had to actually, I was trained in Java and computer systems and operating systems, and I took all these classes about, um, artificial intelligence, which again, made me a great person when, and actually, uh, like a deeper engineer in the long run. But to get me to do my job in my first company, they actually had to teach me web development from scratch.

And from the company's benefit perspective, at least in the first couple years, I would've been better off, uh, being, uh, someone with a bootcamp training and a couple years of industry experience instead. Um, but, um, I guess like looking at my career, I'm glad I had the software engineer degree because further down the line, what I learned from that school, that fund, uh, like those fundamentals helped me go further. So it's, uh, really, uh, it's a, it's a very different perspective, but, um, I would say it's not necessarily black and white in either way.

And I would definitely say that it is worth considering candidates without a college degree and not having a college, not having a college degree should not be a reason to, uh, dismiss a candidate. How do we assess aptitude if we don't have, say, the, the, the certificate from college with the four year degree attached to it? And how do I get a sense of whether or not somebody is gonna fit for the job?

Because, um, a lot of times they're being vetted by people who are not IT people initially. So how, you know, what, how can we make this whole process better? Well, from the technical perspective, the answers easier because, uh, like you can actually assess someone's ability to write code, um, fairly efficiently these days.

Uh, there are a lot of coding tests. There are a lot of, um, different problems that people have been, um, asking on technical interviews. But with a candidate without a college degree, I feel like the focus on at te, uh, focus should be, um, more on their communication skills and their overall, uh, ability to actually understand and read, uh, some of the requirements that were given to them and fitting in with the rest of the team.

And that really relies on, um, your team's ability to understand. So you're gonna have to, like, this is not a tech, uh, straight technical, uh, question. It's more about your team, the team that, let's say that you're actually hiring someone without a college degree, then you want to make sure that the team that they're gonna be a part of, they need to be involved, uh, in all part of the, uh, interview process.

So you need to make sure that everybody actually speaks to them. And this might eventually add a couple more steps to the interview. So like, if someone with a college degree needs to speak to three different per people, someone without a college degree might need to speak to five, six different people, uh, just to make sure that, um, everybody's on board with this person and everybody actually gives a thumbs up.

But, um, once you do that, and, um, and yes, obviously you need to be a little bit more strict with the interview and you can still like potentially ask a few more questions, uh, that dig deeper about, uh, their approach, um, how methodical they are with their problem solving and some of these more, um, uh, some of these questions that actually delve deeper into their, uh, fundamental skills that you would expect someone to earn from a college degree. I think it's worth paying a little bit more attention to those skills. But other than that, um, I'm not sure if there's any method that I'm aware of.

You have to do the work. Um, it seems like there's a disconnect somewhere in the system. 'cause regardless of whether you have a degree or not, and you hear all the time from folks and they can't get past that initial HR gate to get, you know, considered.

And yet we hear all the time from the IT folks that they're not seeing enough people who have the skills that are required. Is there, is there a fundamental impedance mismatch here in the whole hiring process? I think, uh, the overall resume review process could be, uh, could do with a facelift.

Um, I have applied to jobs when I was looking for, uh, when I was out of college, and I would notice that too. Um, yes, uh, obviously like I did not have much of a background in web development at the time, and I actually had to, um, uh, learning on the job, but I would notice that very much so, um, you get a lot of, uh, applicants that are not necessarily very good, um, or like they have what you'd call the bottom 30% of the resumes I'm talking about. Um, And People need to pay closer attention to those, uh, resumes and potentially actually commit to, and some of those, uh, candidates might actually require a little bit more attention than your senior, uh, engineers.

But in the long run, you might actually benefit, um, from them if you could, may, if you could commit to investing in that candidate and make that clear to the candidate, um, then mid to long run, you might actually end up, uh, winning. Of course, we see a lot of AI these days and people are using AI to, um, help them write code and at some point maybe automate more tasks. How will that affect the way we think about assessing humans in their capabilities?

Because, well, a lot of the stuff that we currently test for might be done by ai and it might be perfectly fine, it might be better, or it might be worse, we don't know. But how do we work this into the system? That's definitely something that, um, is coming up.

Uh, like we, uh, in my company use AI in two different ways. Um, one of them is just as a code review tool. So a junior engineer would actually co if a junior engineer starts, um, then, um, their work would actually be code reviewed by ai.

And then, uh, we also use AI in actually assessing the workload that was delivered, um, by individual engineers. So you can actually look at, uh, the workload they using ai, you can actually read the code that was delivered and get an understanding of the complexity. But in, uh, incorporating AI at a wider scale could definitely be a solution there.

Uh, a lot of the, uh, tech challenges these days, uh, that were submitted by engineers, uh, if it's a takeaway homework, then usually people, uh, the interviewers ask, um, during the interview about, um, that takeaway assignment or they ask an engineer to potentially do live coding test. Uh, but even that system is, uh, open to gaming a lot. A lot of engineers, um, just study these questions and then they ace the interview, the initial interview, but then you end up realizing they're not necessarily the best engineer, potentially an AI based, uh, interactive, um, more interactive interview set up could be a good, um, first round to, uh, vet some of the candidates.

But, um, for a high later stages, I don't know if AI is mature enough at the moment to be better than, to be a better assessment than, um, a live in-person interview. So ultimately, are there types of people out there that don't have a four year degree in computer science that you've seen, like kind of lend themselves well to the way software engineers need to think per se? I mean, you mentioned people who are musically inclined, but are there professions out there that are more closely aligned and maybe we should look at those folks with a different level of analysis than we might somebody else?

Definitely. Um, I've seen, uh, several engineers, uh, that fit that type. And one of the more co uh, one of the more common patterns that I've seen, uh, on these engineers is that they're not afraid to learn.

Because if you had to, uh, learn software development by yourself, then you are already brave enough to jump into a topic that you know nothing about. So somebody who has learned, um, web development by themselves without any college training, then they would be more inclined to jump onto AI topics that a lot of the web development engineers might take a longer time to do so, or an engineer who's self-thought, um, could actually, uh, jump into DevOps topics, um, more comfortably than, um, some of the other engineers that come from a more traditional path. And the reason that, I guess that I've seen, and this is obviously not a generalization because every case is different, but some of these engineers are more brave in tackling unknowns, uh, in other words, coming from a non-traditional path to make you braver when you wanna tackle, uh, new unknown problems.

And that's a very valuable skill in the software engineering world because you're always gonna have to learn new things. On the other hand, obviously, um, there are some weaknesses that you notice. Um, the main one is the methodology and communication whenever there, like, uh, one of the main things that I learned from the college was solving problems methodically.

And that's something that I've noticed that, uh, when people don't have a college degree, might need some help. Uh, efficient communication is another one. And overall documentation skills, um, might need some help depending on the candidate.

Well, folks, you heard to hear it's more about assessing the level of courage that somebody has and their willingness to take on projects and maybe solve issues themselves, and they might ultimately be a better hire than somebody who's expecting maybe a more structured approach to everything and isn't able to quite take care of themselves anyway. So, um, as the man said, consider all your options. Hey, Kareem, thanks for being on the show.

Thank you very much for your time. All right, and back to you guys in the studio.