[greghinch]

It’s funny that he wrote this now living in the UK. As an American living in England for the better part of a decade now, it still shocks me how much grades matter in the hiring process for professionals with many years of experience. If you don’t get a first or at least a 2:1 in uni, and/or do poorly on your A-levels, it will hold you back for the rest of your life here

[jokethrowaway]

As a developer?

Nobody ever asked me anything about my education.

Maybe you need to find the right workplace. And this is still if you're doing the employee way. You can find other ways to create value in society and make money out of it.

[AlotOfReading]

This is highly region, industry, and company specific. I have "unrelated" degrees from a reasonably high tier university in that field. Asking why I'm in software is the first question I get in every interview. I've even had bay area managers tell me to my face that if I had gone through normal channels, they would have thrown my application out.

Outside the west coast, it's much, much harder. I ended up back in SF when an east coast company retracted their offer after a high level exec found out about my degrees and freaked out.

Yes, you can find places that don't work like this, but the vast majority of the market absolutely evaluates education. You need to fit into every interviewer's idea of what constitutes a reasonable path to qualification.

[tsukikage]

Agree.

Anecdata: am doing interviews with prospective new people right now.

Things I care about in my software engineer hires (for whom this is not their first job):

* that you're able to talk about stuff you've done in the past, involving diving into technical detail at will, and showing some understanding of what was happening one level of abstraction below/above whatever bit you were working on. (I don't actually care what you did. Don't tell me proprietary stuff. I want to know that you understood what you were doing, why you were doing it, what it depended on and what depended on it, and that you are able to communicate this to me.)

* that you're familiar with the languages/tools/environments you said in your CV you are, and are able to communicate this to me

* that you have some general data structures+algorithms awareness, and ability to apply this knowledge to at least trivial problems rather than merely recite the textbook contents on demand

[codefined]

Interesting. Mileage may vary by company / area of work. I didn't go to Uni and went straight to work. Got a few A-levels but nothing special.

Wasn't even asked about them for my first job.

[yw3410]

It's certainly true for a lot of corporate graduate schemes require a 2.1 in a relevant subject and reputable university in the UK. It's typically used as an initial filter.