Are CS degrees supposed to teach how to code?
No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
111–120 of 480 posts
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#112I have a CS degree, and while I agree with the general idea that you don't need a CS degree to be a successful programmer I'd say the biggest barrier to entry is in the start of your career - both getting a job and keeping that job.
I've worked with loads of self-taught developers, mostly from tech/coding bootcamps, and I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out due to a number of factors:
1. Bootcamps are hard, but suddenly these developers find themselves in a harder environment where 12 weeks of coding experience might not be enough to get them out of a problem.
2. Bootcamps cost a lot of time/money, without the option for a student loan, so many people put themselves into debt to switch careers, and that added pressure is a lot for people - especially when they've been sold a lucrative career and find that a company has hired them because they are cheap.
The CS knowledge aspect is largely irrelevant, because many developers can get by quite happily without ever using a linked list or priority queue, or knowing anything about quicksort, merge sort, etc. For most projects where you need to merge k sorted arrays, concatenating them and running the standard language sort function is good enough.
IMO, the problem has never been one of skill, because many industries have developed skills on-the-job or with time spent in industry. Where a CS degree comes in handy is in giving a student a structured approach to learning over a respectable amount of time, and offering a step above the entry-level barrier of entry.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#113I’m a programmer who studied information technology (with a number of programming courses, but zero true CS coursework) first at community college and then at a budget brand state college. I’m now a senior developer/engineer and frequently work on projects alongside CS graduates from prestigious schools who seem incapable of completing even the most simple coding tasks - this is the case nearly 100% of the time in my experience with these CS grads. That said, I’m sure there are many such graduates that are more than capable, but a persons degree and where it’s from doesn't seem to indicate much other than socioeconomic background.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#114Since these articles seem to be putting a cash value on the word "success" (or at the very least an instagram buzz value), I would point that IMHO, most of this success comes from people skill. You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does…
Agree 100%. Not to mention, having a degree opens up a lot of opportunities in case you ever want to leave the field. Many people get sick of coding after doing it a while due to its highly repetitive nature. Having a degree essentially gives you a pass to enter a myriad of fields that still require one.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#115I’m self taught and do data science for work and game dev for hobby.
Functional programming has seemed much easier to pick up without formal teaching than object oriented. The latter appears to have many more unknown unknowns.
e.g. in game dev I did not know that static methods and objects existed, so I built a bunch of dictionaries in an instance of a single use class to store some data for a game. It works, but its garbage.
But hey, all things are discoverable eventually, and I would argue going through the experience of why things are nice before learning they exist has some merit to it. I don’t blame companies which require credentials though. Hiring is hard, especially hiring many people at once.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a CS degree (in fact, I have both a BS and a Master's degree in CS) - I'm still "self taught" in the sense that I learned to program the same way you did, by reading Stevens, K&R, Knuth, etc. outside of my coursework. Don't get me wrong - I learned a lot of interesting stuff: I never would have learned calculus if it hadn't been a degree requirement, and it helps to understand a lot of AI, but learning to prog…
That was similar to my experience on a CS course - you were expected to do a lot of development, but nobody really specifically taught you about it and you were expected to pick that up by yourself as you went along.
In this field, you're always going to have to learn things on your own... The trivial example is new technologies that weren't available when you were in university.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#117I'm self taught but went to CMU (not for cs) so employers don't care
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#118I fall into this category. I have no CS degree. I'm the author of numerous things with the best known probably being the ZeroTier network virtualization engine.
I got my first programming exposure when I was 5 or 6 on a Commodore VIC-20. By 10 or so I was doing 6502 machine language on a Commodore 64. I went from there.
I have a BS degree in biology. I studied that because I wanted to study something new, but more importantly because I was interested in AI. I always thought (and still think) the best way to learn about intelligence is to study the only existing examples of intelligent systems. These are found in biology. The University of Cincinnati let me do a little bit of a "design my own major" thing so I designed one in "organic intelligence" with classes in genomics, evolution, neuroscience, and ecology. Those are the four scales at which intelligence is found in nature.
I work in computers now (founder of ZeroTier) but still follow AI and biology avidly and would like to return to some of those areas of study someday. I also find that my study of biology deeply influenced me as an engineer and the types of systems I design.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to learn most things through self-study. But the vast majority of people will only learn the parts that they find fun and interesting. They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program. For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by get…
No, you don't need a degree. All you need is a resolution to learn the things that you're missing. I covered C++ in all its hairy glory, assembly, SIMD, data structures and algorithms (implementing them, not just using them) and concurrent and lock free algorithms and data structures. Some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write p…
I find it odd that you did all this extra work, yet couldn't even be bothered to write a paper about it and still haven't.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not even government jobs are out of reach for you. I work as a federal employee without any college degree doing web development with React/Node/AWS.
That would heavily depend on the (unspecified) country.
That is true, since the commenter never specified. I work for the U.S. government.