Ask HN: CS degrees, do they matter again?

I mean, we live in a day and age where an entry level administrative job requires a degree. Gotta make sure to keep us trashy blue collar guys in our place.

As someone who has interviewed candidates for a FANG company in the distant past I can't say that degrees matter, but I can say that people I interviewed with degrees generally did better. There's a hidden bias in that this is only people who got through recruiters and recruiters are their own filter. Strong referrals usually guaranteed a phone screens. I think previous experience at a major competitor in the same tier or a degree from a top CS school were also meaningful, but I don't know how else they filtered.

There is a non trivial relationship between colleges and businesses, so you are likely to do many problems in college that are not terribly different from the interview questions. Additionally all of your peers have been interviewed/do interviews/do referrals and that does matter.

College students generally did not do incredibly well on practical problems, so I would expect a non college candidate to do really well on them.

Many of the best co-workers that I remember had physics degrees. In fact, it was so pronounced I personally consider a physics degree to be a top tier signal of programming ability, but that's my own personal prejudice.

If your degree isn't from a top 10-20 CS school it's probably not worth it if you have experience. If you can't make friends while doing the courses, then I don't think it's worth it. Going to a good college is much much much much more than a few lectures, some book reading, and some assignments. It is face to face time with world class experts, it's a culture, it's social, it's exploratory. You can potentially work on bleeding edge research or be introduced to things you never knew existed.

It sounds like your idea of what college is, is that it's a technical education rather than a liberal education. If that's true I think your perception of college is wrong.

There are some situations where a college degree really matters. If you want to apply for a work visa in a foreign country, a degree from a good college can potentially get your application a rubber stamp or lack of one could completely restrict you from it.

At almost 45 i barely have 3 years of experience, because of mental health issues.

I failed to get back a degree for the same reason. Also in France, once you're above 25, you can't go back to university, you need to do classes for adults, which are lower quality and delivered by the labor department. Most of those classes are for people who never wrote code.

I tried to sign up some paperwork to get a degree equivalent but it's cumbersome and got refusals.

Needless to say, getting a job is impossible now. Most of the experience I have is because of the post COVID job market, but that's over now.

I say I am a developer without a job and people are surprised. I have excellent senior C++ test scores but without an engineering degrees, it's a no.

I might not be the best candidate, but there is no shortage of developers at all. They don't "hire anybody who can type code", that's just false.

Also ghost job ads, maybe?

I think you may be undervaluing effort and payoff of CS fundamentals, as well as overestimating payoff of the paper from an online degree.

(Caveat: If you'll be emigrating in the future a degree can make a difference for visas if recognized )

If you do it and actually apply yourself (as opposed to optimizing for points/effort) I guess you'll be on the up regardless of which (:

Thank you for your response.

I'm not really interested in specific companies. I'm really NOT interested in FAANG type companies. I have however seen many listings where I was like "this fits my knowledge and interests perfectly other than the degree requirement"

- While I'm interested in the paper, I absolutely love learning everything I can about computers. I'm super neurodivergent, and have trouble learning things I'm not interested in. Gen Ed is why college didn't work out for me 20 years ago.

- There's always going to be jobs that require specialized degrees. I understand that. I just don't want to have my resume thrown in the trash when I apply for an entry level front end web dev job.

- Totally, I'm not terribly interested in university jobs, and this seems like the worst time ever to work for the government

- Doesn't apply to me, but I appreciate you sharing your experience.

- Thats true, but I'm in no place to actually go sit in a classroom right now.