<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>m_ke</author><text>This is BS, most of these companies are looking for snowflakes from top 10 schools, who have been programming since they were in middle school.&lt;p&gt;I have plenty of competent friends who had a hard time finding anything better than an IT desk job after graduating from Stony Brook, NYU-Poly and City College.&lt;p&gt;Most smaller tech companies don&amp;#x27;t even consider training their new employees.  Instead they want a &amp;#x27;ninja&amp;#x27; who is comfortable with their tech stack and can hit the ground running straight out of school. To make things worse 90% of them think their analytics platform or social network for cats is the next Google, so they put their candidates through ridiculous interviews that have nothing to do with writing CRUD apps.&lt;p&gt;I even know people here at Columbia University who didn&amp;#x27;t get any good offers outside of finance.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The value of an engineering degree</title><url>http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>meritt</author><text>You can also make an incredible ROI by not paying for an expensive degree and instead gain knowledge &amp;amp; experience through other means (teach yourself, free online courses, open-source projects, paid internships, etc). Just take a look at today&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Who is hiring?&amp;quot; [1] and you&amp;#x27;ll notice very few list degree requirements. Most are looking for a combination of experience and knowledge.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507765&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=7507765&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The value of an engineering degree</title><url>http://avc.com/2014/03/the-value-of-an-engineering-degree/</url></story>