Ask HN: Is it worth continuing my computer science degree?

Sounds like marketing and psychology could prove very useful in the long term. And a CS degree is great to cleanup the hands-on experience you have. So based on what you described, I'd say: yes, continue your degree.

> but with the boom in startups lately

That will not always be the case, and when the market starts cooling off, you will want as many options as you can find. A degree may feel worthless right now, but it provides you with a well-rounded skill set and credentials that bigger companies with actual HR departments will value. Developers won't always be the ones who filter through the resumes.

Ancedote: A college grad made more money with his guitar playing in bars than with his english degree.

If you are generating good income with your skills then you have already achieved the goal.

Firstly, it sounds like you have a very solid grounding in programming. Why not expand your mind? Take some economics, law or statistics subjects, and you may find a personal interest and niche at the intersection of the two fields. The classical reason that they force kids to do this is so that you don't develop narrowly as an individual. If you don't want to do psychology, do some research into other fields, find one you want to learn about, and talk to the professors about swapping psych for one of them. Remember - programmers in IT are a dime a dozen. Programmers in other fields are rarer than hen's teeth.

Secondly, as an employer a degree serves as a signal that a student is ready and willing to accept short-term pain in return for long-term gain. Compared to other graduates who have a degree, you'll always be second-best.

Lastly, don't be fooled by the perception that iOS will be around forever. A degree will give you a foundation that you can fall back on.

You've already made the commitment of the first year - stick it out. Talk to the professors about accelerating your course if you're doing incredibly well and finding it boring.

> with the boom in startups lately, a degree is seldom necessary

This is true. What do you do when the boom ends though? Companies went through layoffs in 2008, in 2000-2001, in the early 1990s etc. What will you do once you're married with kids, laid off and then any job opening available needs a college diploma. Yes, you're OK for the next year. Will you survive the next downturn though, and the one after that?

> In addition, during these 3 years I could optimize for my specific niche: iOS development

Specialization is good, but you never know what might happen. Whether or not it's likely, it's conceivable Android could kill off most iOS jobs in a few years. At that point a broad underpinning of CS theory and a diploma are helpful. Will you be doing iOS development 20 years from now? It's hard to say.

> kept up with individuals that have over 15 years of experience in the field with degrees

Some people get degrees without ever seeming to have learned much. It's not something that should affect your decision one way or the other. When time gets tough and Craigslist job postings start saying "BSCS required", an e-mail from you saying that you have "kept up with individuals that have over 15 years of experience in the field with degrees" is not going to mean much. They'll be knee-deep in resumes of people who have a BSCS. Yours will go right to the waste bin, in many cases.

> I'm forced to take things that don't interest me like psychology...half of the work that I put in won't even be relating to my field

Most of the pioneers of computer science did and do have an interest in human psychology - Marvin Minsky, Noam Chomsky, John McCarthy, Alan Turing and on and on. I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion, two years into a CS program and without knowing what the psychology course was teaching, that it was irrelevant to computer science.

> Every adult that I talk to (all of whom have degrees) swear by them and say how they're such a great fallback but I'm having a hard time connecting the value, especially in the field of computer science.

When the economy goes south, it is better to have a degree than not to. Also, while theoretically someone can do a program of self study, I've never met anyone without a CS degree who understood pushdown automata, theory of computation and so forth. It is helpful to have an underlying intellectual framework. It is possible to be a code monkey who can put together for loops and if statements in PHP or Objective C and so forth, and make money doing it, but an intellectual framework allows people to do more. I see people self-studying practical things such as learning a programming language, but it's very rare for someone to spend months studying theory of computation, or representation of floating point numbers, or formal mathematical definitions of computational complexity, and so forth. So there are gaps in their knowledge. They can muddle along, but then one day they will have a critical race condition crashing their program. As they never studied mutual exclusion, they will only have a vague idea of what will do. Software in general is famous for mutual exclusion bugs, precisely because so many people who don't know what they're doing can jerry rig for loops and if loops together to get something going, but have no deeper understanding of theory, architecture and so forth.