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Do Developers Need College Degrees?

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Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#111

Post by lazaroclapp »

flukus wrote: post #108
alkonaut wrote: post #10

Succeed personally: no. Some dev jobs obviously require a lot of foundational knowledge. I wouldn't want to have a colleague who didn't know linear algebra, simply because that's important in my field. That's not important for making Wordpress sites. I think there are things "every good developer should know" such as knowledge about how cpus work, how OS'es work, how some important algorithms work, some basic set the…

> I think there are things "every good developer should know" such as knowledge about how cpus work, how OS'es work Considering the complexity of modern CPU's and OS's, does college go into enough depth to tech them well or does it just let students think they know how they work?

Well, what you need to know as a developer of either is pretty limited. Understanding the basic existence of the following will get you a long way: cache hierarchy, branch prediction, instruction reordering, syscalls, interrupts, virtual memory and page mapping, the layers of the networking stack, etc. You might need to go in depth about a particular CPU/OS later during your working life, but most likely not, just know enough to have a semi-realistic picture of the layers below your own code. Those are all things that can be self-taught to some level, specially if you have the discipline to write some experimental code to test them in your system. For most developers, however, those are things that are easier to learn in a classroom than on your own time.

(Some of the theoretical parts are even more suitable for college and equally useful: complexity/computability theory, lambda calculus, graph theory, autómata theory, ML, etc)

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#112

Post by maus42 »

blablabla123 wrote: post #6

It's quite ironic, I have a degree in (Theoretical) Physics but it's is waaaay easier to find work on pure programming/Web projects and not something with numbers involved. And the latter is basically what I've been drilled for in my studies.

Yes. I also have major in a math-y subject, with extensive minor in CS, but all the jobs seem to be in building shiny webapps with the latest JS framework to sell people stuff or services. Data Science that is much talked about seems to mostly about glorified statistics for advertising. Chances of getting into the R&D department of BigCo's moonshot project (think about self-driving cars or something) are 1-in-million.

As far as I know academia has no pay and no stable career prospects for a student like me because I'm not the top-of-the-top of my class, just slightly above the average, but at least there is a promise of a chance of doing something interesting that might wider humanity's perspectives and maybe even help us. With real technological progress.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#113

Post by psyc »

I've been in the software industry for 20 years. To my knowledge, there has never been a time when there wasn't a significant number of professional programmers without degrees. It's a field that attracts people who love to do it - aka "amateurs". Many people love it enough to delve into CS of their own accord.

I didn't go to college. I've never been asked about my education during any hiring process. I've worked on several phenomenally successful products, and I'm quite sure I've been considered a high performer at every job I've had.

I've worked with a dozen people like this, often at big companies with highly technical developer cultures. I know a few no-college developers whose knowledge of our mutual specialization is so deep that I have a hard time following them.

As long as demand for talented devs is like it has been so far, the industry as a whole can't afford to exclude any.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#114

Post by khedoros1 »

agox wrote: post #30
ffef wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've never been asked for GPA or transcripts (been graduated since 2012). YMMV, depends on where you apply I guess.

I graduated in 2008 and was asked for my GPA when I applied somewhere in 2015...but that was an unusual case. One place out of dozens.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#115

Post by CriticalSection »

This is not the time to ask that question.

The time to ask that question is when you're 38 years old, married with two kids and the wife home raising the youngest one. Then you're laid off. And it's 2000 or 2001. Or 2008 or 2009.

Companies need people now so it's in their interest to tell you to leave school and work. You're on the hook for your future, not them.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#116

Post by aithoughts »

Kalium wrote: post #107
aithoughts wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may or may not scale but I've been lucky to be part of a startup program that roughly matches your description of a "better option". It's a 2-year program; I was, and still am, part of their experimental first class of students. So far I've gone through 9 months of entirely CS study, and I was even placed in an internship working in Mountain View, and without a college degree. I have never held a dev job before,…

That does sound very promising. I, too, hope it succeeds. How much time have you spent on set theory or discrete mathematics?

None. At least not on the first 9 months. Mostly it has been about performance, data structures, algorithms, and time complexities.

So far, the first part (9 months) the focus is mostly on practical project-based learning and skills for developers. But we are encouraged to learn on our own. I certainly know about uncountable sets and the Axiom of Choice, but how much do I really need for the problems I am solving on my day to day?

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#117

Post by yourdegreesays »

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…

> I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated and highly specialized people.

Maybe a lot of that useful hardware and software was not written or designed by people who own a sheepskin?

> It's incredulous to think the future is only going to be built by Lucky Palmers and 16 yo hacker geniuses.

Does a sheepskin enable that type of high quality condescension? I guess it's good for something, eh?

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#118

Post by AnimalMuppet »

TillE wrote: post #78
seoknucklehead wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With everything that's available in documentation, on YouTube, in forums, and in boot camps and other trainings, doesn't it seem like there are much more efficient ways to get the foundational knowledge that don't require four years of expensive college courses?

All the material exists in one form or another, but I've yet to see anyone put together a credible "DIY CS degree" online resource. Some day most (certainly not all) aspects of university education will be supplanted by high-quality universally accessible materials. But it's not here yet.

Is this a market opportunity? Is there a way to make money producing a high-quality curated list of online resources, plus a series of online tests to prove that you learned it?

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#119

Post by yourdegreesays »

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"

Great point. I've always seen the computer industry completely operates in its own dimension, not like any other industry in history.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#120

Post by Kalium »

aithoughts wrote: post #116
Kalium wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does sound very promising. I, too, hope it succeeds. How much time have you spent on set theory or discrete mathematics?

None. At least not on the first 9 months. Mostly it has been about performance, data structures, algorithms, and time complexities. So far, the first part (9 months) the focus is mostly on practical project-based learning and skills for developers. But we are encouraged to learn on our own. I certainly know about uncountable sets and the Axiom of Choice, but how much do I really need for the problems I am solving on…

Thank you for answering my question.

Unfortunately, I must inform you that that is the answer I feared. There's a strong tendency for would-be "better options" and bootcamps to discard CS fundamentals and theory in favor of practical education. I am of the opinion that this sacrifices long-term practical utility for short-term utility. While seemingly of obvious benefit to those seeking jobs in the not-so-distant future, this is a penalty that mounts later in careers.

Odds are very good that your entire career will not use whatever tools this program has taught you. Odds are similarly good that your time as a junior engineer won't hinge much on abstract mathematics. But odds are very good computers will run on the same mathematics in twenty years.

Even today more interesting work (cryptography, geospatial, distributed systems, graphics) hinges on the sort of mathematical underpinnings that are generally found in a full collegiate computer science education. Of course, all of this can be learned independently, but most individuals struggle to learn crypotgraphic mathematics in such a way.

So really, it depends a great deal on what you want to do with your career. How much you know about how computers work will do a great deal to determine how much flexibility you have down the line. I have had jobs where reasonably complex synchronization problems involving work-stealing and partial orderings over a network were pretty common, and other jobs where `rails g ...` was the most complex thing I needed to know.

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