If you have exactly one opening at a fixed salary for the offer and that's all you know about the two candidates, sure. If I magically knew their technical aptitude and employability in perfect detail, being a high school dropout is not just irrelevant, but actually a positive for the candidate. Other companies are looking to hire developers as well, and you're competing over the best-looking candidates. Like, there are plenty of great developers that you can't hire because they're happy making $250k/yr at Google.
I do not live in SF. In fact in my town, dev salary tops out somewhere near 100k.
Hiring is all about filtering. What people are going to be bad news? You need to do some rough filtering to get the resume count down to a reasonable number to look through. Maybe someone mentions his hobby is building bombs. Maybe ok, but maybe it's ok to pass him over to avoid getting blown up. Or in a less extreme example, one guy has a lot of rails experience, and one guy has a lot of .net experience... if hiring for a rails job, you get more experience in hiring the guys with rails experience.
Now is filtering on college graduation always right? No. If you have a lot of patience, totally dig through and look for the gems without a degree. But if I get 100 resumes and I need to turn that list down to 20 to do a phone screen, I will prefer people that pass obvious filtering signals (college education being high on the list).
That is my personal experience to prefer people that made it through college. Obviously not everyone agrees. That is fine.
Yeah, I totally agree with you about how hiring is about filtering. The concern I have is that there's only so much filtering power you have, so anything you apply on things irrelevant to job performance will end up detracting on things you care about. There's a fairly narrow band of able-to-pass-your-hiring-filter that you're targeting. Anyone below it gets rejected, anyone far enough above it works for Google or founds a company or something. If you turn up one parameter in your filter, you're going to end up turning down the others.
Like, I remember hearing a story about a college that ran some statistics on the SAT scores of incoming students. They found that math SAT scores for their students was inversely correlated with their verbal SAT score - yet, among the general population, this correlation doesn't hold. What was happening was students with low verbal + math were getting rejected, and students with high verbal + math were going to MIT and the like, so given that they went to that particular school, they had to have lower math scores if their verbal is high and their overall suitability is in a narrow range.
I'm basically trying to make a similar argument here - given that the person you're interviewing accepts an offer there, they've got a certain level of ability-to-get-employed-as-an-engineer. If more of it comes from "having a college degree", then less of it comes from all the other things.
Or you can offer a perk google and other's WON'T offer. For example 100% remote. That brings the guy in the middle of Alabama into your candidate pool. He is not competing against an offer to Google.
Yup, it's all about knowing what you care about, what other companies care about, and what tradeoffs you're willing to make. "Being willing to hire engineers who do not have a college degree" is one.
