I don't think a CS degree will ever compete with genuine interest. People get attracted to the hot job market and the insane FAANG salaries, but those people will never stack up to the folks who dumped their childhood and adulthood into understanding how software works.
A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
111–120 of 330 posts
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the article made the best points in favor of a CS degree. I went to a top 40 program and I took a lot of CS and hardware classes and what I did learn, crucially, that is more difficult in the workplace, is how complex systems work and how to approach complex systems. Now, you could accidentally learn that on the job, or intentionally if you choose to, but you can also sort of skate by in a fog of ignora…
I think that is fair but remember over half of the classes you took in the pursuit of a CS undergrad were not CS classes. Of the half remaining maybe half of them were truly vital? Even the example of building a microprocessor (or your own compiler as a right of passage) totally useless to 99.5% of practitioners in industry. That is a quintessential "hoop-jumping" class. Did you also learn the proper way to heat sand…
That was my experience in college. Most of my classes were fluff and filler. Of course, I finished college in my 40s after taking a 20-year break to raise my kids, so my perspective is probably a little different than most.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#113Talking with co-workers who completed 4 year CS degrees, I feel like I got a much better value out of my now defunct 2 year trade school. Mind you this was 15 years ago, but I came out of it with a decent enough working knowledge of C, C++, VB.Net and Java - and basic understanding of SQL, PLScheme and functional. On top of that there was a solid year of data structure class. Trade schools have been largely demonized…
Same here, getting close to hitting 7 figures. Never stepped foot in a university but I was coding from 13 and working part time from about that age. Uni just seemed like a waste of time as the CS curriculum was already out of date for modern development in the country I'm from (this was mid 90s and internet was taking off). I would not recommend this career track if you're the kind of person that wants to climb a ca…
Regarding the management comment. I took the trade school route and after being an IC for a while I currently lead a team of engineers - without a degree. Maybe it would have helped though. I've had to read CS books everyday and still do.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#114Universities are such a waste of time for the whole society. Having lectures in 21st century is already pointless (we have video on demand). And what is worse, we force professors to teach basic stuff to undegraduates when they could spend time doing their research. And general education requirements? Ugh. Let's be real, most of programming-related jobs don't require knowledge of a 4 year undegraduate degree in CS ev…
Is this true throughout a developer's career, that they don't require any knowledge from the undergrad level to do better?
As a developer progresses further in his/her career, it becomes more and more true.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with no degrees hate degrees. People who can't pass FAANG interviews hate FAANG interviews. It's a defense mechanism, along the lines of "I'm not a bad student, the teacher hates me".
I got a degree and graduated summa cum laude with a 4.0 GPA. I don't think my college education has been anywhere near as valuable to me as reading software engineering books and coding a lot has been. If I could do it all over again, I would save the $60,000 and buy a sailboat.
Any book recommendations?
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#116When loading this page, it slowed Firefox to a halt. It contains hundreds of 1x1 iframes for some reason, labeled aswift_(number), along with an Amazon marquee at the top. I would call this website malware at this point.
It seems pretty snappy to me on Firefox. I have webrender enabled though.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#117It is interesting to juxtapose this conversation with semi-recent comments by Peter Thiel on how the West has technologically stagnated in the past ±50 years. Perhaps there is a link between "no-heavy-CS-required web development" becoming the dominant tech industry and this stagnation.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#118I’m a complete self taught programmer. I guess it took longer for me to reach specific knowledge as others but I’m a passionate programmer. I read tons of books, read a lot of articles and opinion pieces of how to do x (not that I follow them blindly) and most important I read and write a lot of code.
Granted not everyone does that and my motivation was never just to get a job. The second part which I don’t really concur with are the soft skills parts being taught during a CS degree. I happen to know plenty of new programmers who constantly overcommit and or get fed up with small details. I think that these skills can only be acquired at work with the help of good instructors.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I know what is happening at a network layer, OS layer, memory layer, application layer, and system layer, and code layer. Yep. For me, the biggest reason I think a degree is necessary is because it is comprehensive. Self taught people are going to inevitably have multiple holes in their understanding. And worst of all, they will be ignorant of where those holes lie and how large they are.
In my experience, self-taught engineers are self-taught because engineering is a passion and they spend their lives doing it. I can see the "I want to earn more money" boot-camp types having holes in their knowledge, but those who read engineering books and stay up all night coding always seem to have the deepest understanding of all because they live for it.
It'll get complicated talking about age too, because we don't want to pretend older people are "better", or risk turning into an agism-in-technology rant, but it has to be said that the older self-taught people probably started with 8-bit home-computers back in the early 80s.
At that time there was no formal courses, and their knowledge probably covers everything from assembly language all the way up - because most people who weren't just playing games started tinkering with BASIC then moved to assembly.
That low-level understanding of the whole system is invaluable, and really hard to self-teach yourself these days when computers are so complex and mysterious.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience, if people don't have the discipline to self-study some specific topic then they'll have a hard time in CS. The problem is CS is constantly changing and you need to be routinely upgrading your skills as time progresses to stay competitive in the marketplace. I would even go as far as saying that being able to self-study on your own is an essential life skill, up there with learning how to read/writ…
There's a huge difference in degree between the ability to keep up to date in CS once you have a foundation and building that foundation from scratch. I worked for years as a programmer before going back for a degree, and I've hired and worked with many people with and without the degrees. I've yet to run into someone who self studied their way through the equivalent of a CS degree. I'm sure they exist, but they're p…
I've bumped into quite a few in the bay area, sometimes they're even people building the infrastructure for huge companies like Twitch or people who have made significant contributions that have advanced the field in one way or another.