Last summer I took CS184 Startup Engineering. It was a free Stanford Computer Science Course on Coursera, taught by Balaji Srinivasan.
It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.
Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".
My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.
This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.
I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.
From the perspective of a recruiter, simply listing that course has zero predictive value for a candidate. It's too easy to fake/cheat. The value is demonstrated by what you do with - like what you say about creating your own PRs, etc. Hopefully that will be demonstrated by your professional references and career advancement.
Isn't this a Catch-22 though? In order to show that you can contribute PRs to the codebase, you must first get hired to AirBnB. And in order to get hired, you must first show your ability to contribute.
You mention that a way to show ability to contribute is through "professional references and career advancement", but doesn't that also first require that you get into the company first? For the former, you need work to find colleagues who can give meaningful references, and for the latter, you need to enter the job first in order to advance in it.
Am I missing something? Is there any way to get these jobs without first getting the (dubious) credential from universities?
It might not mean much to most recruiters, since most of them aren't technical themselves. But as someone who hires, and is technical, you would absolutely have an advantage if I were hiring for a marketing position (honestly, if I were, I'd reach out to you now). It's a no-brainer for me - especially for traditionally non-technical positions like marketing, where technical skills beyond MS Office are rare.
I think the bias against "University of Phoenix" type degrees doesn't really apply to online courses like Stanford's. Everybody knows that they're money-making schemes - so it frankly calls your judgment into question if you do it. I would wonder - why did this person choose to spend time and money on a University of Phoenix degree, rather than just take the free Stanford courses and learn on their own?
The issue with the Stanford online courses is that it's common knowledge that not many people stick it through to the end / pay attention. So having it on your resume would get my attention, but I would need to verify that you actually absorbed the knowledge. Once that concern is addressed though, you absolutely have an advantage in my book.
I guess my concern is that most recruiters aren't you, and probably aren't anyone commenting on this thread.
My bias is that mass-adoption (and ultimately, online learning as an alternative to a ~100k education) will only happen when an entry-level recruiter is able to filter through and use online courses as a hiring signal. So far, the only people I've seen get anywhere close to this, or care at all, are very technical founders hiring for a very small team, usually in the valley.
Even if they respect the course or what was learned, they don't actively seek these people out. I've seen startup founders aggressively seeking out and trying to hire Stanford / Harvard / Princeton alumni because they're alumni. Yet I've never heard anyone saying "Let's go recruit and hire CS184 grads".
Successful recruiters are efficient. By that, I mean they want the shortest route possible from getting a job to fill to filling the job. Filling as many jobs as possible with qualified candidates is how they pay their bills. They don't have all day to go over the life stories of candidates and why they didn't want to pursue a 4 year degree. The bottom line is that 4 year degrees show a consistent effort toward acquiring a domain-specific set of knowledge that is favorable to most hiring managers.
Is it possible that a non-degreed candidate with no work experience is the best of a pool? Sure. Is it worth a recruiter's time and energy sourcing candidates to put THAT guy in front of a hiring manager if he's only got a few spots available (because he probably isn't the only recruiter in communication with said hiring manager)?
IMO, no. As someone who has worked both sides of that aisle (currently a developer), unless a recruit has serious experience, he's not in the final pool of qualified applicants. Let someone else take that risk. I've got to worry about my next paycheck. This is a sales job, after all.
My perspective is that this just takes time, because it's necessary for people making hiring decisions to have personal experience and knowledge with the material. Very similarly to how people who went to some college project their opinion (good or bad) about the program at that college onto other people who went there. I've done some hiring, and I've taken lots of online courses, and if I see a certification for one that I have taken and thought highly of, then it absolutely means something to me. But I'll definitely ask a bunch of questions to get a sense of how well you learned the material.
Edit to add: I think I left this too implicit: my main point is that as these courses become more prevalent, there will be more people with personal familiarity in higher positions, and that will make them more valuable.
It was about 10 weeks long. There were ~100,000 students enrolled. It was free. And it was, far and away, the most valuable thing I've ever done in my life. It was an order of magnitude more valuable than my 4 year undergraduate education at the University of Connecticut.
Since taking that course, I've pushed hundreds of code commits into the Airbnb codebase (I work on the online marketing team here). They're small pull requests , and I'm rarely ever writing anything from scratch, but the number of engineering hours I've saved by being able to write my own PRs is extremely valuable.
Out of curiosity, I asked a few of the recruiters at Airbnb what putting CS184 on my LinkedIn means. I explained to them what it was, how much value I got out of it, and how much value the company got out of it. I showed them the course, and the certificate you get when you finish. Everyone had the same answer: "It doesn't mean much".
My bias is, online education still has that "University of Phoenix" stigma. How valuable the course actually is still doesn't seem to mean anything yet. Maybe, in general, that's correct. Maybe most online courses still suck. But I can very much verify that life-altering, immensely valuable online courses exist.
This idea of online learning and more specifically, credentialing, looks more like it's a social engineering problem rather than "knowledge delivery" problem.
I've been geeking out on institution-agnostic credentialing and accreditation for a little while now. If you're interested in this space please get in touch with me - email is in my profile.