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A few days ago, I learned a shocking news: a certain Internet Top Factory's technical post started to gradually card double 9 degree. This means that if you didn't study in one of the top schools in China, you can't even pass the resume test.

This is not an isolated case. During the same period, countless resumes from "doubly non-permanent resident" were stuffed into the garbage can and never heard from again.

Across the pond, in the Web3 world, another story is unfolding: 18-year-old NYU dropout Shayne Coplan built Polymarket, a decentralized prediction marketplace; mechanical engineering graduate Hayden Adams lost his job at Siemens, taught himself to program in his parents' basement for a few months, and created Uniswap, now the world's largest decentralized exchange. the world's largest decentralized exchange. They don't have a computer degree, or even finished college, yet they've been given opportunities in the Web3 space that would be unimaginable in traditional industries.

The difference between these two parallel worlds is leading to the question: does academic background really matter that much?

Educational Screening in Traditional Industries: Efficient but Distorted

We have to recognize the fact that academic screening has a legitimate cause.

When a large organization has to process tens of thousands of resumes per year, education becomes the least expensive screening tool. 985/211 labels do correlate statistically with higher average learning ability, self-control and test-taking skills. For an HR department, this is a "safe" choice - even if you hire the wrong person, you can use "he graduated from 985" to explain to the top.

This is a game based on probability. The problem is that when this mechanism is extended from the recruitment process to the entire career life cycle, it is no longer an efficient initial screening, but becomes a systematic oppression.

Academic qualifications become an invisible ceiling

According to the "2024 National College Graduates Salary Ranking", the starting salary gap between graduates of prestigious and non-prestigious schools is clear: graduates from Qingbei University earn more than 10,000 per month, while ordinary undergraduates earn 6,000 or 7,000 per month, which is nearly twice as much as the difference between the two. What's more, this gap does not narrow as work experience accumulates - graduates of prestigious schools see their salaries rise by nearly two times on average after three years of work, while the national average is only about 50%.

More difficult to quantify, but more fatal is the promotion channel bifurcation. In traditional industries, especially state-owned enterprises, manufacturing and financial institutions, the academic background in the entry to determine your "status". 985/211 master's degree is often included in the "management trainee" sequence, as a reserve cadre training, 1-3 years later can be promoted to grass-roots managers. On the other hand, graduates from ordinary colleges and universities will be promoted to specific business posts or operation posts, and it usually takes 5-8 years or even longer to accumulate grassroots experience to reach the same management level.

These are two different speed tracks. What's worse, when you enter the "slow lane", there is little possibility of switching later. In the state-owned enterprises and traditional manufacturing industry, the selection of middle and senior positions (division level, department general manager) often have hard academic indicators. Even if you have outstanding business ability, often because of the academic background in the competition for key positions in the "one-vote veto".

This leads to a paradox: the traditional industry claims to value ability and performance, but when you prove your ability with years of practical experience, but found that a label when you were 18 years old is still determining your ceiling at the age of 35.

Why can't traditional industries change?

Some people may ask: Since the correlation between education and actual ability will diminish over time, why don't traditional companies adjust their mechanisms? The answer is: path dependence and risk aversion.

For the HR system of large enterprises, academic qualifications are the easiest to standardize and the most difficult to be questioned indicators. If you want to replace academic qualifications with "project experience" and "business performance", you will have to face the problems of difficult quantification, even more difficult to prevent counterfeiting, and almost impossible to cross-departmental comparison. All of these will significantly increase the management costs. Moreover, in the event of "using the wrong person", HR can not explain to the senior management why a "no-name college" candidates.

Academic screening is like a locked-in setting. It is not necessarily the optimal solution, but the safest solution. A large number of talented people who do not have top backgrounds but have outstanding abilities are systematically buried in this system.

Web3: a world of watered-down HR

Why hasn't the Web3 field developed the same strict academic threshold? The answer is not because Web3 is more "progressive" or "fair", but because it is in its early stages and lacks the sophisticated screening mechanisms of traditional industries.

In 2015-2020, most crypto projects are small teams of a few people with no established HR department. What the founders need is not "985 graduates", but "people who can write this smart contract". In this case, the label of education is invalid - because there is no university to offer "Solidity programming" courses, graduates of computer science departments of prestigious universities and self-taught mechanical engineers are almost on the same starting line in this field.

Crucially, the decentralized nature of Web3 means that you don't need to "apply for a job" to start contributing. You can submit code directly to a protocol on GitHub, and if it gets merged, that's your "resume". This model of contributing without permission is almost impossible in traditional industries - you can't just walk into Tencent's headquarters and start writing code without an interview.

"Work as a resume": a new evaluation system

In the absence of a traditional screening mechanism, Web3 has gradually developed a talent evaluation system of its own: using verifiable work and contributions to speak for themselves.

GitHub contributions become "resumes". Many DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) use platforms such as Kleoverse and GitPOAP to scan candidates' GitHub activity and generate "skill scores" and badges. A developer with a large number of merge pull requests has a more compelling resume than any PDF.

On-chain data becomes "proof". If you've contributed liquidity to a DeFi protocol, created an NFT project, or run a community of thousands in the Discord community, these are all verifiable on-chain records. Traditional resumes can be made up to say "responsible for XX project", but on-chain contributions can't be faked.

Community reputation replaces background checks. In Web3, your influence on Twitter, the quality of your answers in technical forums, and even the security vulnerabilities you've found and reported are all part of your "credit history". Samczsun, the famous white hat hacker, is almost completely anonymous, but he is the most respected security expert in the industry because he has saved billions of dollars in assets by rescuing protocol vulnerabilities many times.

At the heart of this mechanism is: prove you can do it, not prove you learned it.

Unleashed talent: who found opportunities at Web3?

Who has been released by this mechanism? Let's look at a few specific cases:

Vitalik Buterin (founder of Ether) - he dropped out of the University of Waterloo after a year to take the Thiel Fellowship (a scholarship for dropout entrepreneurs). He wrote the Ether whitepaper at age 19 after traveling the globe and researching various crypto projects. If he had stayed on the traditional track, he might have become a good programmer, but wouldn't have had the opportunity to build the second-largest blockchain platform in the world before the age of 20.

Hayden Adams (Founder of Uniswap) - Graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering and was laid off from his first job at Siemens. After spending months in his parents' basement teaching himself Solidity, he built Uniswap, a "practice project" that now processes trillions of dollars in transaction volume. In traditional financial institutions, no matter how much a mechanical engineer learns to program on his own, it is difficult to cross the threshold of "non-financial professional background".

Andre Cronje (Founder of Yearn Finance) - started out as a law student, then realized he hated law and crashed through a computer science course in a few months. He is known as the "Godfather" of DeFi, but his success is based on an aggressive style of "testing in production", which would be considered an unacceptable risk in a traditional financial institution.

FEWOCiOUS (NFT Artist) - a transgender teenager who started selling NFT art at the age of 18 without any art school education. His work had crashed the website at Christie's auction, making him one of the youngest high priced artists. In the traditional art world, it's nearly impossible for a teenager without a degree in fine arts from a prestigious school to make it into the top galleries.

What these people have in common is that they would be screened out in the traditional industry. Not because of a lack of ability, but because of a lack of "ID".

But this is no utopia.

Before praising Web3, we must recognize the fact that it is open to talent not because it is "more advanced", but because it is in the early window.

This openness has had a distinct double-edged effect. On the one hand, it unleashes talent that has been buried in traditional industries and promotes innovation and diversity. On the other hand, the lack of a screening mechanism also means that scammers, opportunists and low-quality projects are easier to mix in. In the past few years, we've seen too many pull-the-plates-and-run projects, fake whitepapers, and purely funding programs.

The point is that as the Web3 industry matures, traditional academic screening mechanisms are starting to creep in. When Coinbase, a16z such as large organizations to establish a mature HR system, you will find that their recruitment tends to "famous schools + traditional factory experience" candidates. The barbaric era of "as long as you can write code" is over.

Therefore, we need to rationally look at the talent ecosystem of Web3: it is not a fairer future, but a special window. Its value does not lie in whether it can exist permanently, but in that it allows us to see another possibility.

How long will the window last?

Back to the question at the beginning: why is traditional industry so obsessed with qualifications and does Web3 really offer different possibilities?

The traditional industry's dependence on academic qualifications is a structural problem - it arises from risk aversion and management cost considerations, but it also systematically buries talented people with outstanding abilities but not top-notch backgrounds. web3 does provide a window in which abilities are more important than academic qualifications.

But how long will this window last? No one knows. As Web3 institutionalizes and matures, traditional screening mechanisms will gradually invade. But at least at this stage, it proves one thing: how much creativity can be unleashed when an industry lets go of its obsession with academic labels.

For those who feel the ceiling in the traditional industry, Web3 may not be the final answer, but it at least proves that: your 18-year-old choice should not be your 35-year-old pronouncement.