Upon starting work as a software engineer at Groupon this April, I noticed that I was an outlier. Pretty much all the engineers I talked to had technical degrees, and a huge number were from one of three sources—Stanford, an Ivy League school or a start-up that Groupon acquired. My particular group was full of crazy-technical Chileans from one of those acquisitions. Needless to say, nobody else had a B.A. in a foreign language like I did. Within my first month on the job I started planning a roadmap to increase my skills to the point where I could shine even among this impressive company.
Education vs schooling
I can't say I felt intimidated by the formal credentials of my peers. To be completely honest, I was and am a little concerned about credentialism being used to close certain doors, but it's my belief that such barriers can nearly always be overcome. It's true that companies tend to be conservative in matters deciding who to let do what work but after a person attains a certain level of mastery, credentials start to fall by the wayside. I learned that first hand when it came to university admissions