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Do Developers Need College Degrees?

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Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#181

Post by dozzie »

Nadya wrote: post #180
dozzie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach. You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this…

>who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If th…

> Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available.

Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#182

Post by mindcrime »

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…

What could be true with the last generation may not necessarily hold true for the next generation.

Fair point, but I still haven't seen much - if any - evidence that it's any more necessary for developers to have degrees now, as opposed to in the past. But, as always, it's going to vary by (company|geography|industry vertical|etc ), so my sample data is almost certainly not broadly representative.

I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated

True, but FWIW, I would argue that "highly educated" and "highly formally credentialed" are not the same thing.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#183

Post by brianwawok »

ffef wrote: post #13
brianwawok wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the diploma is from a prestigeous school but says they failed math 101 four times over that would make me doubt their capacity. I don't think diplomas nor resumes normally list failed classes ;)

It's not uncommon for employers to request GPA and/or transcripts. Source: I graduated 2 years ago.

If I see a resume with any GPA but a 4.0, I generally laugh.

If you got a 4.0, sure put it on resume. But a 3.2 or a 3.6? Silly, leave it off.

Source: Graduated longer than 2 years ago. Never been asked for a transcript.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#184

Post by Kalium »

aithoughts wrote: post #167
Kalium wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right! The world contains a wondrous bounty of instructional materials the curious might use to attempt to edify themselves. You're also right that the argument can be made that any individual who might seek self-study of advanced mathematics is not "most people" as I described previously. To that subject, let me offer a different formulation: most individuals attempting to study advanced mathematics independe…

As a percentage, how many US colleges would you say are excluded from the opportunities provided by "rigorous course of study"? Would you say you could get this kind of rigorous study at any university? If not, how many (as a percentage of all undergrad colleges)? Is this scalable/sustainable for the entire population?

I don't know, and I don't think the answer is as relevant in this context as might be hoped. There are many known, admitted, and well-documented failings in and problems with the current tertiary educational system. Yet, it's perhaps possible that these are not repaired by stripping away some of the aspects that are of value.

The general need for a better approach might not be the same as a given different approach being better.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#185

Post by hajile »

smcl wrote: post #16

We 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"

I used to do card tricks for fun. I made an interesting observation about card tricks. I could show someone how to perform the slight of hand. I could even show them the trick and explain how misdirection works. Despite that, they couldn't do the same thing (even if it was a fairly simple trick). Free info simply wasn't enough to copy the trick. They had to have the aptitude and put in the hours if they wanted to do it themselves.

As coders, we do something similar. We show the code and explain how it is put together. We even talk about the theory behind the application. But for them to learn, they have to have the aptitude and the practice.

Coders have the aptitude, and they seem to insist anyone can do it too. Companies go along because it's in their best interest if this is true. The reality is that people have varying degrees of ability for handling abstract logic. Only a small portion of the population is adept enough to handle abstract logic at scale and we need that skill in more fields than just programming.

Reality seems to bear this out as we have increased the amount of recruiting every year at every level of business, school, and government, but with diminishing returns.

I believe that we offer to teach because we like finding people who think like we do (or maybe wish to believe we think the same way as the rest of the world), because we like to believe we are making other people's lives better, and on some level, because it's safe in that the returns are small enough to not threaten our own wellbeing, but maybe I'm just too cynical...

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#186

Post by hajile »

mark-r wrote: post #159
JonathanAgosto wrote: post #28

[College drop-out here] TLDR: A degree is not completely relevant, but it gives you an edge. Im my experience, a degree is not necessary, but demonstrating skills is harder than it sounds; a lot of interviewers at non-tech companies are not technical and rely on typical CS material for interviews (algorithms and the like). As a self-thought, I rarely paid attention to this sort of stuff (I started as a web developer)…

Your salary is lower because it started lower, and there's an unwritten rule in the industry to never hand out disproportionate raises. I was lucky enough to have a couple of jobs that broke the rule, and as a result I believe my salary is in line with my degreed contemporaries. The degree gives you an edge in two important ways. First it qualifies you at those places who absolutely demand a degree, whether you belie…

That's one more issue with the industry. Everyone says they don't want to train because the devs will just leave, but they refuse to give them the raise to keep them there. If a company won't give a disproportionate raise to a person who deserves it, then some other company will hire that person.

My first gig paid only around 30K/yr, but I became aware that moving jobs was a good way to get a raise. When you already have a job (and genuinely have the ability), it's pretty easy to negotiate aggressively. My next job was 70K and within two years, I was in the top 10% of dev salaries.

If I weren't willing to jump companies, it would have taken years more because (as you point out) companies don't like giving raises.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#187

Post by hajile »

flukus wrote: post #157
Steeeve wrote: post #127

There are doors that close when you do not have a college degree. That's the plain and simple way of things. That being said, a diploma from whatever institution with whatever major, honors, or other kind of augmentation is simply a very expensive piece of paper. Getting a good grade in a course, or doing well in a series of courses brings about precious little practical knowledge in and of itself. And that piece of…

> There are doors that close when you do not have a college degree The question then is, are those doors worth opening? Most jobs ads I see with "requires degree in CS" are for large boring companies and government agencies.

Large, boring company job used to coincide with stability. That seems to be far less true now than 25 years ago. The gig economy of today is far different than what last generation grew up with.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#188

Post by hajile »

tbrowbdidnso wrote: post #162

Do any engineers need degrees? Does anybody? Before you go too deep down that philosophical rabbit hole just consider one thing. Is it a job that requires a lot of skill? Any job I've seen that is highly skilled and not in the "get your hands dirty" kind of way usually has a degree behind it. I've seen many kind of engineers without a degree. It's not like you couldn't figure it out on your own for any kind of engine…

If you are an engineer, you need to take the PE exam. In most states, you cannot take it without a BS degree. Not really comparable to computer science where such things don't really exist.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#189

Post by arielcamus »

Nadya wrote: post #180
dozzie wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach. You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this…

>who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If th…

I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#190

Post by arielcamus »

Kalium wrote: post #76
leereeves wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in an ideal manner when entirely self-directed With all the resources available these days, including MOOCs, textbooks, syllabi, and recorded lectures from the best schools, there's a middle ground between "degree" and "entirely self-directed".

You're completely right! Those are all amazing resources. I would posit that using textbooks, syllabi, recorded lectures from the best schools and greatest professors, and documentation is still a form of self-direction. The learner is left entirely to their own direction, discipline, and environment. Perhaps the only thing that's changed in that list of wonderful resources since the 1960s is MOOCs. I thought of and…

> The learner is left entirely to their own direction, discipline, and environment.

I think this is one of the main problems of self-directled learning and why, in average, is not nearly as effective for most people unless they are incredibly motivated.

I just started playing with the idea that online collaborative learning can considerably reduce that pain and I just wrote and launched a little experiment to test it:

https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

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