Ask HN: Is it worth continuing my computer science degree?

I did IT work during the day, and took public college classes at night and on the weekends, and took on no debt at all.

People should look at the numbers, possible salaries, debt and all of that. If you're thinking vocationally and as an investment, an English degree from Sarah Lawrence might not be worth it, depending on your financial situation. I myself would rather have some debt and be working through the next recession or two, then to have no diploma, no debt, and not be working through the next recession or two. If he can't get a job during the next recession, he is going to go into debt, and not have a diploma.

The material in a CS degree is pretty accessible for self study compared to that of some other majors. No expensive materials are required beyond a $500 computer. Instructors don't generally spend time with you while you are actually programming, so you won't be missing the kind of 1 on 1 feedback a music major would get. Also of critical importance, CS materials tend to be strongly represented in MOOCs. There are already people using Coursera, edX and OCW to complete full degrees (see: http://youtu.be/piSLobJfZ3c).

As far as credentials go, it's a similar story. There are few fields in which the credential matters less than they do in tech jobs. Tons of my friends work at YC companies with either unrelated degrees or none at all. I personally graduated with a Japanese degree and still managed to break into the industry quickly once I started focusing on developing my hard skills. I received interview offers from pretty much every top tech company in the bay area and the degree never came up. I very, very nearly took one of them but instead chose to do a start-up. At this point it's possible some investor would be hesitant about us because we don't CS degrees, but it's also probably likely they'd be interested in our exceptional backgrounds.

One caveat to this is is that without the CS degree you have to have the skills. Also I wouldn't count too much on being an iOS domain expert since specific tech stacks keep changing. You probably want to learn all the things you'd get from a CS degree if you don't have them already.

Unlike a lot of posters here I really don't see anything wrong with not getting the degree. I would strongly suggest that you make a bargain with yourself and save/invest everything you would have spent on college. That will limit your downside and give you the option to stop working and get the degree if you change your mind and/or find your skill-set is no longer in demand. Even if you learn the equivalent of a CS degree on your own, you might find yourself wanting to return and study something like applied math, which pretty much gets you by the credential barrier for any job a CS degree does plus quite a few others.

Whether or not it is, I have yet to meet anyone who has done self study who has studied theory of computation, mutual exclusion, and that sort of stuff, month on end, like CS students do. Everyone seems to go straight to what is immediately useful, like the syntax of Objective C and so forth.

Also, the big technological leap allowing this was the Gutenberg printing press, not MOOCs and the like. Theoretically one just needs the textbooks and some other materials to self-study almost any topic. Yet people have still been going to universities for centuries. The movable type printing press was the major innovation for this, MOOCs have been relatively minor in comparison to this thus far, yet people have still gone to universities for the past few centuries.

> Also of critical importance, CS materials tend to be strongly represented in MOOCs

I did not find this to be the case. Some subjects we went into in class that I did not understand or wanted to look into more indepth, I would go online looking at Youtube videos, MOOCs, various materials etc. I was usually disappointed. If I was lucky I would get a poorly shot Youtube video of some professor with a thick foreign accent explaining the subject, often poorly.

Well now it depends.

Do you want to be a front line programmer your entire life?

Sure, skip taking those courses. Never learn about psychology, after all, what use is knowing how people think, leave that up to someone else. They can figure out what the user's want.

And hey who needs marketing? I mean you may make the best piece of software in the world, but you don't want to actually sell it do you?

Those electives are what make for a well rounded person. Writing good code is hard, but engineering software that serves ends users well is a lot harder and requires a lot more knowledge.

From understanding cultural issues around the world, to basic principles of design. Having a wide background helps a lot.

Do you have any scholarships? What percentage of the degree are you paying for and how much of that is being financed?

Might you be able to walk into the president's office and negotiate your tuition? Not the bursar. Speak to a decision maker with vision. If you're as good as you say you are and can prove, with pay stubs, that companies also find you that valuable as a sophomore, you're an asset to your university.

You're the success story they're dying to tell prospects. And you might be willing to make introductions to those companies just in time for the campus career fair. And what about when you become an alumnus? If you're this promising as a sophomore, where will you be in 10 years that they can continue to reap the benefits from? College is a business, too. Sell them on you.

You're concerned that you could better spend the time in university improving your skill in iOS development. How can you leverage those gigs in your curriculum to count toward credits?

As for the courses you're not interested in, don't make the assumption that you are aware of all the things you will ever need to know to be successful in life. But again, there's a price at which that exposure makes sense, and a price at which it doesn't.