I got a Masters in Software Development, part time evenings, studied over 3 years. I don't think it's strictly necessary, but in my experience, it doesn't harm your prospects. I think it's nice to have the combination of experience and education, personally. Certainly don't underestimate the commitment if you study in your spare time. Also, you may enjoy the course, work on new things, meet new people - all can be valuable in their own right.
Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
141–150 of 246 posts
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure leaving the education off of your resume entirely is fine. Don't lie if they ask, but as others have said, once you get experience under your belt, most employers tend to stop caring about it altogether. Even if it is listed as a requirement on the job posting, hiring managers care way more about competence than they do a fancy piece of paper.
Yeah. This is what I've been told. The issue is that getting your resume into the hands of a hiring manager feels increasingly difficult.
The past year or so has probably been the worst market for developers since 2008. It's been picking up again, or at least it was for a bit.
If you haven't yet, one thing that would be worth doing is working with a recruiter. There's plenty of bad ones out there, of course, but a good one will have direct access to the people hiring. If you're willing to work on-site, even better, as that will significantly reduce the number of people you're competing against for attention.
I hope you find some of this useful, and either way, I wish you luck!
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#143There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…
I tried to apply to wgu but got stuck in some bureaucratic hell. Have a degree in an unrelated field. Also have ap credits from 20 years ago. Wgu demands I send them the ap credits but at this point there is basically no way to get them from the college board.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#144I'll say yes. I am the only one in the company that has a degree (MSc compsci). I know stuff the others never heard of. Your exposure to obscure things in uni are really worth the time for deeper topics. I focused on machine learning and had classes like operations research, non-linear optimization or complexity theory & approximation algorithms and I kid you not, I could make use of these things quite a lot to find…
Yes, this is so true. Too many people just want the immediately useful information, but this is not what universities is for! In Uni we should learn things that can be relevant decades later. Not just learn the most modern tools that is currently used in industry. It should be coupled with that too, but not only.
The short 2 year educations to learn CS basics are kind of like the fast food of learning. It gets you there, but something is missing.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Skip the easy stuff and spend your energy on the hard stuff is excellent advice for anyone doing a cs degree. The easy stuff you can google. The hard stuff is what will mold your mind into a sharp tool and you will never get the same chance to spend your time on it as you do in uni.
100%! I learned so much at a really high rate, I'll never ever have the time and focus to do that again, most probably. It felt really good to dig deep
That, and some subjects are really hard to learn at home/at job. Learning Linear algebra at home would be really hard, but learning some new programming language would work fine.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#146There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…
Yes in this world of AI in everything, hiring tooling that is dog shit is the reason someone should go to college? I'm not commentating in where you're right or wrong, just want to point out what an utterly horrid reality.
It cannot be long before anyone can apply for any job, and everyone gets an "AI interview" that does the actual screening.
Not perfect, but far better than the current resume filtering.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#147There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…
The time sink is real, but (at least for me personally), there is a sense of accomplishment when I get a a credential that is rarely felt when completing a "project".
(I control how I learn and absent a professor being a dick and purposely setting up an exam that 3/4 of the class bombs, learning is a joy compared to the politics, power games and sometimes even incompetence encountered at "work").
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#148There's a story that goes: A man was tasked with hiring an employee. He got hundreds of resumes. His friend looks at the stack and asks him "how are you going to decide among all those?" The man grabs half the stack, throws it in the garbage and says "Simple, I don't hire unlucky people". Degrees matter when employers don't have the time and/or ability to make a reasonable decision for every candidate. They need ways…
I tried to apply to wgu but got stuck in some bureaucratic hell. Have a degree in an unrelated field. Also have ap credits from 20 years ago. Wgu demands I send them the ap credits but at this point there is basically no way to get them from the college board.
I feel like someone who has been employed in tech for 15 or more years should simply be able to test out of a lot of these requirements anyway.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#149As someone who has interviewed candidates for a FANG company in the distant past I can't say that degrees matter, but I can say that people I interviewed with degrees generally did better. There's a hidden bias in that this is only people who got through recruiters and recruiters are their own filter. Strong referrals usually guaranteed a phone screens. I think previous experience at a major competitor in the same ti…
Physics degrees are the low-key blanket STEM degree.
You can find people with physics degrees working in pretty much any technical field.
Re: Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?
#150It's complicated. I work at a "target" software company (competes with FAANG on prestige, but not literally FAANG). I interview candidates for senior+ roles, approximately one per week. By the time a candidate gets to me, I read their resume only for icebreakers/small-talk, and I couldn't care less what their resume says otherwise. But, I also happen to know that our internal recruiters, who are the first line of scr…
> the lack of a degree.
Lack of a degree or lack of a C.S. degree?