Do Developers Need College Degrees?

Yet, perhaps there's something about that process. After all, there are aspects to a formal collegiate experience that are not neatly captured by boot camps, fora, YouTube, and documentation. Perhaps some of those aspects, like an instructional environment that values theory, are of nontrivial significance.

Obviously, it's still possible that something better can be done. This may not be the same as a better option having been developed and being on offer, though.

I'm sure things are (potentially) quite different now compared to the 17 years ago when I first landed a job building web applications. (My very first job was an internship - sort of - while pursuing a CS degree. My next job was after I had dropped out, left that job and was busy delivering hoagies as my job.) So that was "luck" and being "in the CS education world" when I got started.

Still, I think if I have a point, I started out in silly, minor jobs for little local companies that needed someone that could code more than they needed a highly polished computer scientist or engineer. From there I, more so, "learned on the job" the rest of what I needed to advance (and I continually self-taught by working on my own projects).

I have also been doing a college degree part-time online, it will take six years in total, but I am working full time so I don't need it, but just want it to maximise my potential.

I am three years into the degree already, so only have three left. I am 21, and my friends are all still at college, so feel like I already have the upper hand.

Just need to get some good content on my GitHub profile!

I can tear apart any engine to understand how it works.

I can rip out the bathroom in my house and install a totally new one.

With closed source, I can't just rip out component X and replace it with component Y. I can't read the binary to understand how it works (Technically I could, but I mean that with modern languages, the assembly looks massively different from the original source).

Exactly this. My father is a civil engineer who's now in his early 60s, and he recently got to work with colleagues much younger than him.

He told me that said colleagues didn't know some trade-related stuff which hadn't got covered in university courses (like how to reinforce earth ditches when digging in mountainous terrain with probable heavy rains) but which was paramount in keeping the work going (not much that you can do once a ditch collapses because of heavy rain). He told me that in this instance he had instructed his younger colleagues on what was the correct procedure to take, but he also told me that he's got other professional secrets that he's not ready to share just yet.