Do Developers Need College Degrees?

Then you die.

The promise was bolstered by the returning GIs of WW2 who took advantage of the GI Bill to go back to school. Every generation there after took to that prototyping.

Earn a degree, get a job, buy a house. Repeat.

But in 1996 a very curious thing happened.

The folks that commercialized the works of academics and scientists started to take off and get attention.

Thereafter the work in the industry started to outpace the output from academia.

You want to build a dot-com business? School wasn't going to teach you that. You have to go learn it yourself. You would be stupid to stay in school.

This held true so much that in the early 2000s, when the risk of NOT having a college degree made dropping out to pursue your tech dreams an actual proposition.

But we're flipped now.

In 2017, schooling has caught up. What's discussed in the latest industry is discussed in the class rooms. And not only caught up but been condensed to mere months. You want to build a website? It makes more sense to go to a technical school or college, participate in the college level entrepreneur safe space, or leverage networking.

You would be stupid to not have a college degree.

But now the high cost of college is more of a privilege than anything else.

Good luck.

Will having a college degree hurt your chances for getting a job? Not likely.

I'm a developer, and I have a post-grad EE degree in addition to undergrad CS. It's surprising to me how often the EE material and math is useful in my job.

I wouldn't tell anyone to go get a Masters in EE in order to be a good dev, but if you have a realistic option to get a degree without saddling yourself with crippling debt, get the degree.

It's likely to help and unlikely to hurt.

My top university's CS program had a linear algebra class that loaded me up with theory though like Hilbert spaces, wavelet transforms, spectral theory, abstract algebra, and of course, principal component analysis (but the latter, along with SVD, is becoming more valuable these days with data science-y type jobs).

It was more concerned with proofs and advanced concepts than applications, which was fine for me, because I already learned the applications in high school because I was bored and self-motivated. The most valuable benefit of learning all of this extra theory to me was learning how to solve problems because doing proofs isn't some algorithm like long division or evaluating a derivative that you can just crunch as a cog-in-the-wheel.

The question is whether all of that extra rigmarole is worth it in my day-to-day development work. The answer to that is "no." Occasionally, I'll borrow some code that does thing X that is tangentially related (like convolution for computer vision and deep learning), but the theory behind it rarely comes in handy because I'm not doing academia or R&D work.

Of course, your usual full stack developer job won't even come close to touching any of this, but if you're doing moonshot type work like self-driving cars, you're going to need all of this theory to really attack the types of unsolved problems you're facing. Those types of jobs are rare, sometimes highly-compensated, and inaccessible to your Hack Reactor grad.

To get any job? No

To get some specific jobs? Yes

To learn how to program? No

To learn computer science? Technically, no. But may be an easier path for most than self-study.

Magicians!

(an exception that proves your rule of course)