I'm a student at a top 5 CS school. I feel that the majority of the value of my degree does not comes from lecture, homeworks, or exams. I feel the acess to opportunities on campus is where much of the value comes from. We have many bright, talented, and diverse people on this campus. Not only my fellow undergrads, but also the professors, grad students, researchers, employees of companies with a campus presence, etc. There's huge opportunities for collaboration on programming projects, both in class and out of class. There's a great startup culture, with a lot of campus resources. There's a slew of companies that employ students for part-time co-ops on campus. Almost every professor talks about research they would be interested in getting students involved in. We have very active IEEE and ACM student orgs. We put on a great hackathon everywhere. I could go on, but to put it short, you almost have to try to avoid opportunities to not develop yourself as a computer scientist/engineer. If you're teaching yourself, you have to be proactive in working with projects online, motivating yourself to work on personal projects, seeking out opportunities, where as on campus, the opportunities basically come to you.
Do Developers Need College Degrees?
51–60 of 198 posts
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#52I'm someone who graduated with a non-cs engineering degree (and worked professionally as an engineer) whose now in a MSCS program after trying my hand in the job market. Not for a lack of trying, but my experiences definitely relate to an uphill struggle just to get even noticed. And before anyone says "you should do x|y|z", I've done my part pretty well. A few decent sized personal projects, constant studying, meetu…
IIRC, the article says that a whopping 56% of developers don't have a degree. Given that the majority of developers don't have a degree, I'm not sure I'd agree with saying " without one, your options are very limited". Maybe "somewhat limited"? My anecdotal evidence, looking at both my own career and a lot of developers I've worked with over the past 17 years, is that having a degree, or not, isn't a big deal.
What could be true with the last generation may not necessarily hold true for the next generation.
Many are working towards abstracting schooling out of a being a developer, great.
That also means we're moving towards making being a developer a blue collar job rather than a white collar job. We're also making private businesses now the trainers of labor.
The time to be a dropout rockstar developer was in the 2000s but we're moving towards 2020 now.
The real question is meant for the generation of 13 yo now in the next 5 years. They can study software development on their own but in 10 years time, will they be better spending half of that with expensive college education or nah.
Everyone in this thread are giving out answers based on their own experience surviving the past 20 years as if what happened the last 20 years in the tech industry is where we're at right now or will be going forward the next 20.
I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated and highly specialized people. It's incredulous to think the future is only going to be built by Lucky Palmers and 16 yo hacker geniuses.
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#53I've talked to developers who have said that it can be a strike against you if you have a college degree, because it implies that you wasted time that could have been better spent learning real life coding.
Have you ever seen a situation where having a degree counted against you when applying for a job?
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#54I responded to a recent 'Will quitting school hurt my career?' type thread. I banged my head against the wall of youthful perspectives about what experiencing a career will be like across several variations of 'you play the odds and take your lumps when you lose' until I ran out of steam. Later, having thought about it (by writing) I recognized a very distinct benefit that pretty much only a college degree will provide.
It comes up on 'Ask HN' from time to time that a person without a degree is looking for a way around a degree based work visa requirement in order to immigrate for a software job. Now for a lot of developers in the US, this is probably less of a big deal since they don't have to emigrate for a high paying job at sexy company. Probably not as big a deal within the EU either. But there are a lot of other places in the great big world where it can matter and not having a degree does curtail access to jobs that a developer might want and opportunities that a developer might want to pursue for professional or other reasons.
Except in pretty rare circumstances where a person qualifies for a 'snowflake visa', a portfolio does not fill that gap. Likewise graduation from a coding bootcamp probably won't be an alternative visa qualification any time soon.
Despite their drawbacks and for better or worse, credentials provide an objective criteria for decision making and in contexts with legal implications that is very useful -- not just visas but for complying with employment laws and any other CYA context.
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#55I sometimes find it hard to discuss some subjects with some of my co-workers that don't have some degree directly related to computer science.
For instance, it's very common for electrical engineers to work on software development and they tend to have a good grasp of how things work in the lower level, but when you start moving up in the abstraction ladder, the discussion starts to become harder. Compilers, types, and generally anything that is more related to math or "formalization" is not within their standard knowledge.
It could be argued the same could be said about some with CS degrees as well - category theory, what? - but that usually is a sign of a lacking education. A good electrical engineer does not need to know about context-free grammars, same cannot be said about a good computer scientist.
This is usually a problem when discussing solutions: "How are we going to solve problem X?" tends to be approached by a computer scientist from the POV of algorithms and the concepts involved (for instance, CAP for distributed systems, and how to deal with conflict resolution, etc) and then search for tools that match the criteria. OTOH, most of the time people that don't have the understanding of this area would want to choose a tool that best fits the problem by its description, without thinking about the underlying algorithm and the implications or trade-offs.
I also had some issues when discussing languages and paradigms - it's hard to evaluate the available options when you can't see the concepts and understand what they provide you with. Most engineers don't have the slightest idea of what is logic programming, though it is essential to a good number of fields in science and industry.
Either way, I don't think anyone should be forced to have a degree to be able to work with software, only reservation I have is when people say it doesn't make any difference, as "programming is easy, anyone can do it and understand anything without formal education". Sure, surgery is also easy... the hard part is to keep the patient alive.
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#56Succeed personally: no. Some dev jobs obviously require a lot of foundational knowledge. I wouldn't want to have a colleague who didn't know linear algebra, simply because that's important in my field. That's not important for making Wordpress sites. I think there are things "every good developer should know" such as knowledge about how cpus work, how OS'es work, how some important algorithms work, some basic set the…
With everything that's available in documentation, on YouTube, in forums, and in boot camps and other trainings, doesn't it seem like there are much more efficient ways to get the foundational knowledge that don't require four years of expensive college courses?
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#57No. Definitively. That's not the same as not needing an education. Some US college is optimal imho. US High school is specifically socialization now (thanks to the teacher's unions). Nowhere was this more evident than in pursuit of a teaching credential where the filters are stark and narrow for a specific mindset allowed to be a teacher.
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of "open source" is also unique, I can't think of any other professions that have something analogous.
No, closed source is I think the more unique thing. I can go to planning offices and see the plans of any building. Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods".
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Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#59We are such a weird profession. What other industry is like "Hey, you can do my job. It's easy, here are lots of extremely detailed courses, documentation and guides on how"
Actually, I'm always amazed at how many Real Estate Agents suggest that others should get into it because it is so lucrative. They seem to ignore the fact that they are welcoming more competition in a finite market.
Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of "open source" is also unique, I can't think of any other professions that have something analogous.
No, closed source is I think the more unique thing. I can go to planning offices and see the plans of any building. Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods".
Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods".
For plumbing, building codes dictate the range of solutions that are available for any given problem, and they're not secret (but buying a guide can be expensive.) However, painters, plumbers, and other trades definitely have tips and techniques that they've learned through experience and from mentors, and you won't find much of that being given away freely. You've got to learn it the way they did, through hard work and apprenticeship. And that's ok, because those skills require mastery to use properly, and that's true in software development too.