Do Developers Need College Degrees?

I got into web development about 5 years ago as a self-taught developer with no degree. Since I was laid off at the beginning of 2016, I decided to take the entire year (all of 2016) off work for personal reasons. Now that I have started interviewing again in the last few weeks, I've found my lack of degree to be a serious sticking point for interviewers. I think the industry is being flooded with "bootcamp" grads and other self-taught developers now, and it's becoming much harder to get your foot in the door without a BS.

If you're wondering whether you need a computer science degree to build your own iPhone apps or launch a SAAS, the answer is no. But if you want to work for large corporations or SV startups as a Software Engineer, then it's almost a hard requirement.

Jumped into programming as soon as I could around 13, I'm in my 30s now and have been reading every night since. I'm a self tought system admin/dev ops/code monkey and on the side a security enthusiast. I did a year Of college in late 20s and couldn't stand the pace/starting over.

Lately I've been going through a lot of resumes and interviews. Out of 50 resumes and interviews not one was female so I'll just throw that statistic out there. Most are out of college but are grabbed by government contractor work eventually if they are good and the rest need to be open to learning or think they know everything and get fired a lot. We finally snagged a junior from college we like and training him but you'd be surprised the mistakes he can make or get stuck on but he just wasn't the type to learn on his own outside of his college classes and I think that's the problem.

There's also a lot of big data stuff these college grads aren't getting exposed to and then they some how jump into a job for 3 years working with a database and still don't know after 3 years how to create a index let alone scale something despite having it on their resume.

What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know?

When I was 18 I spent dozens of hours pouring through a university course catalogue, looking at the required courses for each degree, the prerequisite trees and the requirements for graduate degrees. It felt like a bird's-eye of the entire fractal structure of human inquiry.

Later, I realized how much sharper the view is to people who do that today. Regardless of whether or not they're a student, they can see the course catalogues online and, in the case of MIT (and many top institutions), even see lectures of those courses recorded in previous years. If you're reading this now and you don't have a very high idea what kinds of knowledge are out there, it's probably your own choice.

The discussion here shows the three main aspects of this question; as a pre-requiste for getting hire, as a mechanism for learning skills, and as a limit on what I can do.

Is it a pre-requisite? Generally no. But the word 'developer' is very broad. Putting up wordpress sites? Definitely not. Developing real time systems in rockets? Definitely helps. Mostly though there are a lot of developers out there looking for the next big thing and having a degree differentiates you from people without a degree. It says you can take a multi-year project and see it through to the end. Shipping a fairly complex product has the same credentials, there is a lot of scut work you have to do when you ship a product just like there is a lot of crap you have to do to finish a degree, the big signal here is that you can do all the work to get the project done and won't stop when you get push back.

The second aspect is skills learning, here again a shipped project will help you get through a lot of the challenges for that particular project. A CS curriculum puts you through a bunch of material that is known to be fundamental. So people who have shipped a wordpress site or a Heroku project have an understanding a some of the things that have to be done when shipping such a project but no idea about the things that have to be done to build a new interpreter (for example). It is faster to develop expertise on a single topic by shipping product related to that topic, it is faster to develop tools to let you handle a broad range of topics by learning from a curated curriculum that is designed to be as wide as possible.

And then there is the limit question. In my experience people are mostly self limiting, which is to say the tell themselves "I couldn't figure that out, especially not on my own." So a college program typically has some history about how people went from not knowing something to it being part of the curriculum. And if you're lucky that rubs off on you and you develop a sense of how to get from not knowing to knowing. (that is the essence of science, getting to the right answer when there is no textbook to tell you what the right answer is.) As a result I've found people who are curious and stubborn and refuse to believe they can't learn something do well either way, but a college degree can sometimes indicate training in how to figure out the unknown. Whereas people who are self taught at one thing may become stuck when that thing is replaced by a new thing.

I often rail against "milestone" thinking as in once I have this milestone then I can make the next milestone. Especially when it comes to learning. Humans are a bunch of experiences and learning wrapped up in a personality. Their ability to learn new things is unparalleled but only if they have the right tools in the toolbox.

If you work to develop those tools, you will always be able to learn new things and be relevant in a changing world. If you learn only a few things and don't change you will become irrelevant as the world changes. Does anyone 'need' a degree to learn something? no.

Well now we're opening up a can of worms. Are not those with instructors also partially self-taught?