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Do Developers Need College Degrees?

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Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#141

Post by u_wot_m8 »

alaskamiller wrote: post #52
mindcrime wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

> That also means we're moving towards making being a developer a blue collar job rather than a white collar job

This will never happen, the majority of the population doesn't have the dedication and/or intelligence to be employable as software developers. I've given numerous people resources to learn how to code and none have stuck with it.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#142

Post by burkaman »

rezashirazian wrote: post #140

I would not hire a software developer if he/she does not have a CS degree from an accredited university. I could care less about what people learn at colleges or how someone without a degree could know more than them. It's not the knowledge that I'm after, it's the person. Someone with a college degree has shown they can make a long term commitment, take on a large and complicated task and see it through. I know that…

Wouldn't 4 years of work be pretty equivalent, especially with good references? I think college is incredibly valuable, but it's pretty ridiculous to say that the odds of good engineer without a degree existing are "miniscule". Have you really never worked with someone without a degree?

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#143

Post by u_wot_m8 »

notadoc wrote: post #8

No. Some people are self taught and self motivated, and they are often more capable than someone whose primary exposure to development (or technology beyond consumer use) was through a CS program. That is not to suggest that CS degrees are unnecessary, but once you understand the entirety of someones experience and knowledge you will often find their degree or lack thereof is entirely irrelevant. Of course there are…

>Of course there are some employers who won't even acknowledge someones resume exists without a degree, which I have always found silly.

It really is stupid, I would hire a software engineer who dropped out of high school over a PhD if he's better. Never understood why people care about degrees, the whole point of college is to learn, not get a piece of paper. Only excuse I can think of is that it's a sorting mechanism for lazy businesses to filter applications.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#144

Post by bb611 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #118
TillE wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the material exists in one form or another, but I've yet to see anyone put together a credible "DIY CS degree" online resource. Some day most (certainly not all) aspects of university education will be supplanted by high-quality universally accessible materials. But it's not here yet.

Is this a market opportunity? Is there a way to make money producing a high-quality curated list of online resources, plus a series of online tests to prove that you learned it?

Udacity is trying with their nanodegrees.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#145

Post by falcolas »

romanovcode wrote: post #70
alkonaut wrote: post #10

Succeed 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…

Maybe early in career you are correct, however after 5+ years of professional experience nobody even cares to which school you went or do you even have a degree.

This is my general experience as well.

The exceptions are companies like Facebook and Google, whose hiring practices seem to really be focused on hiring people straight out of college as opposed to established programmers.

Perhaps it's too broad a generalization - I haven't worked at Google - but all the companies who ape the GAFA hiring policies are indeed only interested in developers straight out of college. And I have a hard time blaming them; college students are fairly inexpensive to hire, and there's a lot of them out there looking.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#146

Post by FLUX-YOU »

ghettoCoder wrote: post #4

Define succeed. Nice job, nice wife, etc... or FU money level of success? I can only speak from my experience hiring and getting hired but all things being equal that piece of paper will likely get you hired over the other applicant(s). For inexperienced folks it also makes getting those critical first positions easier, which will allow you to quickly move up, or out, in the field. I question the validity of their cl…

>I can only speak from my experience hiring and getting hired but all things being equal that piece of paper will likely get you hired over the other applicant(s).

It may take you 10% more applications to get a single job, but that's not much if you live in an area with a lot of jobs. I have read about struggles from both sides of the fence (degreed/not) to the point where I can't take common advice of degree advantages seriously any more.

We really need to find a way to assess skills and make a great interview process that many companies can adopt, and that will solve the problem because then the CompSci curricula will have to switch over if they want to keep incoming students and graduate hiring rates high. "Who cares about your degree? Take this test to see if you're actually worth employing at a given career level!"

10% better hiring speed just does not seem attractive considering you spend tens of thousands plus the opportunity cost of working somewhere and contributing to your retirement (which for millennials is apparently very far from previous generations). Student debt is only increasing. Number of graduates are only increasing. Degrees make you stand out significantly less-so unless you are able to attend a prestigious school -- and at that point, the decision may not even have to do with the technical rigor involved. The hiring managers are playing the same risk aversion game everyone else is, only they can sometimes afford to be picky or not.

The only time a degree will become super-important is if the middle and low level jobs suddenly start disappearing. I haven't heard any doom and gloom about that, but if it was actually happening, it'd be the biggest sleeping giant of a news story for our industry.

Even then, most of the hiring that gets done will shift to people with experience and/or a degree. It's just that there will be less hiring overall.

Plus, you can always move laterally to another portion that still uses Excel as its backing store and probably automate your job away and do 30 minutes of work per day -- I'm seriously thinking about doing this because it seems easier to reduce the amount you work than to increase your salary for the same 40h/week.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#148

Post by ThrustVectoring »

There's also a huge difference between "how much does a college degree help an individual programmer" and "how much does a policy of requiring CS degrees improve programmers as a class". I'd argue that there's more of the first than the second - a college degree is a largely a positional good in that having a more impressive educational background gets you hired only as much as other folks have less.

I don't think the program is worth the massive investment getting put into it. There's obviously superior alternative structures - proctored algorithms tests to filter for IQ/ability, which qualifies you for a year-long apprenticeship with a working programmer.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#149

Post by falcolas »

rezashirazian wrote: post #140

I would not hire a software developer if he/she does not have a CS degree from an accredited university. I could care less about what people learn at colleges or how someone without a degree could know more than them. It's not the knowledge that I'm after, it's the person. Someone with a college degree has shown they can make a long term commitment, take on a large and complicated task and see it through. I know that…

I appreciate your optimism about the value of your average CS degree, though I think it's completely unfounded. There are hundreds of thousands of CS degrees handed out from over a hundred accredited universities every year.

> I know that for at least four years they have been exposed to individuals who are at the top of the industry

The chances of all of those students being exposed to "individuals who are at the top of the industry" is pretty much nil (I'd even argue that folks who fit that description are not to be found in most, if not all, universities).

> peers who share the same interest and are now their close connections.

Those close connections with their peer groups is going to provide, IMO, pretty much zero value in the short term. That's a recipe for an echo chamber where programming memes are passed around and mistaken for wisdom.

In the long term, as they gain experience and learn about the real world, that's when those peer groups are going to be valuable. But by that point, if you're still looking for that CS degree, you're looking for the least valuable part of their experience.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#150

Post by rezashirazian »

falcolas wrote: post #149
rezashirazian wrote: post #140

I would not hire a software developer if he/she does not have a CS degree from an accredited university. I could care less about what people learn at colleges or how someone without a degree could know more than them. It's not the knowledge that I'm after, it's the person. Someone with a college degree has shown they can make a long term commitment, take on a large and complicated task and see it through. I know that…

I appreciate your optimism about the value of your average CS degree, though I think it's completely unfounded. There are hundreds of thousands of CS degrees handed out from over a hundred accredited universities every year. > I know that for at least four years they have been exposed to individuals who are at the top of the industry The chances of all of those students being exposed to "individuals who are at the to…

> I appreciate your optimism about the value of your average CS degree,

It's not perfect, but when you're hiring you're taking a chance and have to hedge your odd for success.

> The chances of all of those students being exposed to "individuals who are at the top of the industry" is pretty much nil

It's higher than someone who is plowing through online courses and YouTube videos.

> Those close connections with their peer groups is going to provide, IMO, pretty much zero value in the short term.

I would have to disagree with your opinion. Being exposed to other individuals who share the same value and aspiration has plenty of short term and long term values for the student and the individual that hires her.

In short term, when you hire a new grad who is a great fit, odds are his friends from college would also be a great fit.

In long term these individuals and their network "gain experience and learn about the real world" concurrently. So their network expands much faster than someone who is picking up the trade on their own.

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