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Depends on a lot of factors, age, savings, debt, etc... Recently had to make this choice for myself as a 24 year old. Reach out to me if you want to discuss it further and I may be able to provide some insight.
Depends on a lot of factors, age, savings, debt, etc... Recently had to make this choice for myself as a 24 year old. Reach out to me if you want to discuss it further and I may be able to provide some insight.
Hey leesec, you don't have an email listed. I'm a 25 year old making similar decisions. If you wouldn't mind quickly sharing the factors that went into your decision, I'd appreciate it. Included my email address on my prof.
I'm 31 and considering getting a degree. Wondering if I should go for a masters in CS or do a bachelor's. Coming from a non-cs background and doing a career change at this point isn't easy. Master's would be much shorter and the Bachelor's obviously would take much longer. Any suggestions?
Now systems have become more mature, more complex, and companies expect more from an individual that they only want to train on the details of their own system rather than the basics of the craft.
Gradually that's meant that at the very least, you ought to be credentialed to have an advantage now if you want to be hired by larger companies. There is an exception to this, and that's if you manage to be front and center in a large self-sufficient software project. But getting to that point can be just as difficult as getting a degree, and leaves you with the burden of communicating your value even if you have learned a lot in the process of maintaining this codebase. See the story with the Homebrew guy failing his Google test.
From my experience a university program emphasizes theoretical material which gives you a bit of every domain in software engineering. You are still given a lot of room to direct your learning outside of this, but it would be mainly to keep current as to what tooling industry uses as well as maintain your network. What you are paying for is structured material plus access to the wisdom of professors, which can often be quite mind-expanding in its own right.
A master will give you thorough theoretical understanding, it shows you can get through difficult and boring phases but did not give up and you learn to learn and reason systematically. Outside that networking, social life and having fun should be a big part imho.
If you have to build up student debt (I am from the EU; it was basically free for me as long as I wanted, so I got several degrees) then it depends what you want with it; I would say for IT compsci is definitely worth it; other fields, you might struggle to pay back debt for a long time so then it would need to be something you really want. As you are not sure and asking here I assume you mean compsci.
That being said, having a degree makes it significantly easier to get your butt into a chair and have the opportunity to prove that you're a good programmer and deserve a raise. When you don't have a degree, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate to the interviewer that you're a good programmer, and then the burden of proof is on the interviewer to convince HR that you would be a good hire. But if you have a piece of paper with the magical words "Bachelors of Arts/Science (doesn't matter) in Computer Science/Engineering" and there's a strong need in the organization for people, the burden of proof is on the interviewer to convince HR that you can't program and that HR shouldn't hire you.
It's a role reversal. It's the difference between "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" in a criminal trial vs "preponderance of the evidence" in a civil trial. With a degree, you can get a job just because you don't suck. Without a degree, you'll have to convince a startup CEO that you're a ninja/rockstar/MacGyver or whatever the buzzword is this month.