40%-50% rejection is really amazing, I don't think you quite realise how tough the job market is right now.

I have a friend with chemistry PhD who has - with no exaggeration here - applied for at least 300 jobs with varying levels of success.

A chemistry PhD qualifies you to do advanced research in chemistry -- nothing more. If anything a PhD will work against a candidate in a general industry tech role, because the assumption is they either a) failed in the academic job market for whatever reason, or b) will get bored in a non-research role and split early.

Personally I'm biased against chem/bio/physics etc. PhDs who come in for development jobs because the ones I've known have had terrible, mind-blowingly bad coding practices drilled into them since undergrad and are strangely more resistant to learning best practices than those from more tech-related fields.

The chemistry PhD job market is generally considered oversupplied, particularly with the pharmaceutical industry in general retrenchment (see, e.g., <http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/01/07/the_phd_prob..., and yes I do realize the age of that link, but nothing much has changed since then).

Its 40-50% just due to degree, based on my estimation. I've got another pile of rejections for different reasons.

About 80% reject me before phone interviews, etc.

Literally the only pre-interview cited rejection reason was a lack of degree.

I always thought normal rejection rates varied between around 75% (in a strong job market) to 95% in down markets, say 2007-2009. When I was looking for a job, a 40-50% rejection rate would have been utterly amazing.

But 40-50% really isn't that bad at all, considering in the general (non-programming) job market, people often send out dozens and dozens of resumes before getting an interview at all. I have many non-programmer friends who have been looking for work for months, with a college degree.

So you have to send out two resumes where the average degree'ed programmer has to send out one? Could be worse. You did, after all, opt to not spend four years of your life in an academic institution -- there are pros and cons to that decision.

Eh, its more like 80% factoring in the jobs that didn't meet my criteria to consider them "degree related rejections".

But yeah, 5:1 resume:interview isn't bad. I'm just saying some people do care.

> So you have to send out two resumes where the average degree'ed programmer has to send out one? Could be worse. You did, after all, opt to not spend four years of your life in an academic institution -- there are pros and cons to that decision.

Yeah. That more or less seems to be the case. I'm not complaining, just replying to the post I replied to originally which said "no one cares" about a degree.

How do you know that 40-50% of places are rejecting you because of your lack of degree? Do they say this outright in their rejection emails? What's your overall rejection rate?

I don't even get a timely response (within a month of application) to 50% of the positions I apply for. That's why it's absolutely essential to be able to apply to places in bulk - have a cover letter and resume that are just generic enough to use for any job you would want.

I fully expect to have to apply to 100 places in order to have 3 solid interviews. And I expect that number to grow.

> How do you know that 40-50% of places are rejecting you because of your lack of degree? Do they say this outright in their rejection emails? What's your overall rejection rate?

1) I received several requests for an updated resume with a degree. 2) I was pulled aside in one interview and told I couldn't get what I was asking without a degree.

So, out of the people that I got a rejection reason for, basically.

Last Job Search:

61 applications -> 14 phone interviews -> 5 in person interviews

Before phone interviews:

2 requests from [one of the big 5] to interview that were unsolicited from their recruiters that I refused outright.

I received 9 emails related to the degree. 3 asked why I wasted their time without a degree. 4 asked for updated resumes with a degree. 2 stated their rejection was due to a lack of degree.

Additionally, the "failures" to reach the phone interview were heavily weighted towards places that mentioned a degree in their job ad. [e.g. I saw 150% of the failure rate for job ads with the degree than for job ads that just listed experience requirements ]

After interviews:

6 were too much money [ I was literally pulled aside at the in-office bar, told by the hiring manager that if I asked for $10k less he would give me the job ]

3 were due to other reasons that I didn't think were noteworthy.

I rejected 4 places on the basis of my interactions with them.

Wow, that's harsh. I'm sorry to hear you've met with such rejection. But I guess that's the difference between a hard requirement and a soft requirement on a job posting - you can usually fudge or talk your way around a soft requirement, but not a hard requirement.

Additionally, I've estimated that 30-40% of places I've interviewed don't really know what position they're hiring someone for; or they aren't serious about hiring and are just testing the waters to see how good their employees are. Maybe for you that's closer to 5-10%? It sounds like you get a lot more informative responses than I get. (But I'm in system & network administration and virtualization, not software development)

For the 6 that would have taken you for $10k less, that sounds like negotiation. Why didn't you take those jobs? Were you offered more elsewhere at the same time?

> Wow, that's harsh. I'm sorry to hear you've met with such rejection. But I guess that's the difference between a hard requirement and a soft requirement on a job posting - you can usually fudge or talk your way around a soft requirement, but not a hard requirement.

Well, supposedly, they are soft requirements as they say something like "Degree or N years relevant experience".

I've found a number of those were in the "You must have a degree pile" which is what made me conclude what I did.

> For the 6 that would have taken you for $10k less, that sounds like negotiation. Why didn't you take those jobs? Were you offered more elsewhere at the same time?

Sorry, that was one example of one that got to the interview stage. It wasn't all exactly like that, they were varying amounts from $8-15k.

> For the 6 that would have taken you for $10k less, that sounds like negotiation. Why didn't you take those jobs? Were you offered more elsewhere at the same time?

I was looking because we had a major layoff coming and I wasn't sure I'd stay. I basically kept my job and I literally cannot find people offering me what I make now.

> Additionally, I've estimated that 30-40% of places I've interviewed don't really know what position they're hiring someone for; or they aren't serious about hiring and are just testing the waters to see how good their employees are. Maybe for you that's closer to 5-10%? It sounds like you get a lot more informative responses than I get. (But I'm in system & network administration and virtualization, not software development)

I wouldn't really know. Most failures are silent or non-responses that say nothing. It could be you are correct and I'm attributing it to degrees

> How do you know that 40-50% of places are rejecting you because of your lack of degree? Do they say this outright in their rejection emails?

How many positions have you applied for that itemized the reasons for rejection? I've had that happen maybe once, and it was for a role at a startup.

Anyhow, often times the degree is a hard requirement. Mine is in Philosophy, and for a long time I left it off my CV because I didn't perceive it as being relevant.

When I applied for a position with a research lab, the [engineering] team politely responded asking if I had any academic credentials whatsoever. They wanted to move me along the interview process, but the lack of a degree would have kiboshed the whole thing.

I think it's important to differentiate that it depends on the company and the field. For lack of a better phrase there are sexy companies and not so sexy companies in the IT world. They get different people applying to them and they have different wants. If you are looking at doing R&D at a startup software company, the competition is going to be far different than working at a medium sized independent insurance company

Yes, but the 50% ratio is for those that aren't doing R&D or the like. They are literally asking for stuff that has been done 912834902384902380492349023 times before from an IT perspective like a standard OS db cluster backing a web app which is behind a CDN+Load Balancer combination.

I've been with teams who wouldn't hire anyone who couldn't finish a degree. It doesn't matter which kind, but they had to have proven they could do the degree.

That's a double edged sword I guess.

I chose my school and degree based around staying close to home to help with my disabled brother. It turned out to be a poor decision, academically that is, as the course combined software engineering students with business I.T and we weren't covering anything I didn't already know. I got a summer placement writing code and realised I was learning much more during that time, so when they asked if I wanted to stay on, I accepted.

It could be viewed as not being able to complete the degree, on the other hand would it have been a good choice to persevere with a bad decision just to prove I could? I'd be concerned with working with people who couldn't admit to making a mistake, then making the best of it. Or those who refused to see the grey areas.

I happen to agree with you, and I think we passed on some good candidates because of it. Frankly if I hadn't gotten lucky I would still be temping in warehouses or worse, and I actually finished an(arguably worthless) degree. I think it would have been interesting to explore the candidate's sense of prudence in not finishing school, because I suspect that it was a prudent decision for him.

It's not about the hiring team looking for anything specific that a degree could give you, it's that they've bought into the old idea that the piece of paper is a hard wall that separates them from the homeless guy outside. The corollary of "I'm superior and secure in my position because of this degree" is "someone without a degree is inferior". Fear and self-doubt are the only reasons that anyone requires unrelated degrees.

No, it shows that that individual is capable of sticking something difficult out through the long term. Are there people without there with that quality that don't have degrees? Certainly, but you don't know whether someone without a degree possesses that quality or not (and yes, false positives are a thing, there's always a risk).

Admittedly the value of a degree has likely been diluted in recent years given that college standards seem to be getting more relaxed, but that doesn't mean that it's not still a somewhat useful signal, especially when you have to filter hundreds (if not thousands) of resumes for a single position.

Just like nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, no one got fired for hiring the candidate with a degree. Believe it or not, there may be more reasons behind this than 'self doubt' and 'insecurities'.

Those places are silly. We'd hire you if you can do low-level stuff. (background check too, but I guess you'd pass based on other posts)

I'm happy where I am at the moment but thanks. :)