Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do Developers Need College Degrees?

stackoverflow.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 198 posts

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#91

Post by dntrkv »

CJefferson wrote: post #26
choxi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of "open source" is also unique, I can't think of any other professions that have something analogous.

No, closed source is I think the more unique thing. I can go to planning offices and see the plans of any building. Almost no-one has "secret painting methods", or "secret plumbing methods".

Those professions cannot be compared with software, you would have to compare an industry where the product is intangible.

Do you see musicians making samples and giving them away to other musicians for free? Sure, you can find some online but it is definitely not the norm.

Does Hollywood create stock footage and release it for other production companies to use for free?

Do photographers allow others to use their photos for free?

OSS is very unique to the software world.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#92

Post by Feld0 »

stpe wrote: post #34

Rhetorical question: Am I the only one who did get a degree to actually learn stuff? I was self-taught, had programmed as a job for 4 years but wanted to make a leap in my skills. Dedicating 5 years to just focus on learning stuff, practicing, all in a structured way (courses) was really, in hindsight, pretty amazing in terms of accelerating my learning. I did get an MSc in CS, but the main motivation was to learn st…

I'm in the same boat. My self-taught experience inspired me to pursue a CS degree. The degree did put me in a serendipitous position that led to a number of great industry opportunities but personal growth was my main reason for starting it.

FWIW, I'm studying in Canada and paying my way through school with internships.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#93

Post by alexhutcheson »

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"

Reminds me of a funny Steve Yegge Blog Rant: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-intervie...

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#94

Post by johnnyhillbilly »

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 agree with this. Furthermore, the bright youths of the nineties spent a lot of time putting hardware (and software) together. Now a lot of this is on a commodity level, open source packages abound, and the theory is more accessible than ever.

Software as the future is yesterday's news.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#95

Post by alkonaut »

n0w wrote: post #77
Kalium wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the much-downplayed things that degrees are more likely to indicate than personal projects is foundational knowledge. When you work exclusively on Wordpress sites, this is irrelevant. When you work on distributed systems or cryptography, then foundational knowledge gets pretty important. It is completely possible for any person to learn foundational knowledge outside of a formal instructional setting. I person…

You don't know what you don't know. This is what struck me about my formal education. While I also believe you can learn anything with enough material and dedication on your own, having the structure to ensure that you cover a set of subjects that constitute "foundational knowledge" can be invaluable.

This is an excellent point. A lot of what I learned in university was things I didn't know before, and didn't learn either, but I learned they existed.

When faced with a problem now, I can often identify at least what area of my non-knowledge it belongs to. In that sense I knew a lot less after university than before (in a relative sense).

The ninja skill you get from a very broad education isnt solving problems by applying knowledge, its solving problems by identifying them (then Googling)

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#96

Post by amorphid »

ganfortran wrote: post #27
amorphid wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not agree. It's nice to have options, but one doesn't not need, and practically speaking cannot take advantage of, infinite options. If maximizing the number of doors opened were the best choice, then a logical extension to "Do Developers Need College Degrees?" is "Do Developers Need A CS Degree From ?" Clearly they don't. When we're given infinite time, energy, and other formerly finite resources, I might feel…

But the truth is a bachelor degree is not a very difficult option, for 40% of US population, it is very PRACTICAL. Having a degree definitely helps me get a lot more interview opportunities than my friends who come out of a coding bootcamp.

If I am hearing you correctly, you are saying that a CS college grad (maybe with STEM grad with programming) is more likely to get the opportunity to interview than someone with only bootcamp coding experience. I agree with that. The former has been coding for at least a few years, and the latter a few months. There's no substitute a the right kind of foundation built from experience.

That being said, when hiring for a junior role, it's hard to spot the "right stuff" on a resume. If you figure out how to spot that, let me know :). Or keep it a secret and sell me that as a service! There's a reason that currently most recruiters can't charge a commission for placing junior candidates. It's hard enough for you to spot the junior dev you want to hire in a sea of applicants you've never spoken to. A recruiter who isn't you will have an even harder time figuring out what you want.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#97

Post by alkonaut »

ekm2 wrote: post #74
alkonaut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually obvious from the ones I see (I don't see diplomas I get transcripts with classes taken, dates they were passed, and grades) The usual sign is someone e.g getting a masters degree 2000-2005, and passing the introductory math classes in 2005.

Your metric will lock me out:I did Real and Complex Analysis sophomore year but was forced to take intro to statistics senior year in order to graduate.

That kind of thing is in every transcript. Doesn't look strange at all with the odd one like that. It's rather systematic failure I'm trying to look out for.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#98

Post by Kalium »

markdown wrote: post #88
Kalium wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the much-downplayed things that degrees are more likely to indicate than personal projects is foundational knowledge. When you work exclusively on Wordpress sites, this is irrelevant. When you work on distributed systems or cryptography, then foundational knowledge gets pretty important. It is completely possible for any person to learn foundational knowledge outside of a formal instructional setting. I person…

What do you think of this curriculum? https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science I'd say that these days it's easier to gain all that "foundational knowledge" without attending a university.

A person with a strong grasp of the subjects described therein would have excellent foundational knowledge.

I would say that you're right! These days it's easier to access all the required instructional material for foundational knowledge outside a university. I would also say that this has probably been true for multiple decades. I would say that a list of MOOC courses is possibly not the same as a strong grasp of core materials, however.

Such a curriculum, while strong at first blush, likely suffers from many of the flaws of self-directed learning. It is perhaps not access to information or instructional material that is the problematic part of the educational process.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#99

Post by hackermailman »

markdown wrote: post #88
Kalium wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the much-downplayed things that degrees are more likely to indicate than personal projects is foundational knowledge. When you work exclusively on Wordpress sites, this is irrelevant. When you work on distributed systems or cryptography, then foundational knowledge gets pretty important. It is completely possible for any person to learn foundational knowledge outside of a formal instructional setting. I person…

What do you think of this curriculum? https://github.com/open-source-society/computer-science I'd say that these days it's easier to gain all that "foundational knowledge" without attending a university.

The best I've found is to find any university and look at their recommended course calendar for a CS degree and go to those course homepages to get the lecture notes/slides or vids if they are public. This will be a course structure made by professional educators to give you the intuitive ideas for a subject. Then look up the same foundational material in The Art of Computer Programming or other academic text with enough challenging problem sets so you remember the material. Unfortunately many universities require campus accounts to get at homework or tests so the only other way is get it from TAOCP.

While you do this apply for entry level support engineer somewhere and work your way into development from within the company or find open source projects and write requested features, debug them when problems arise, repeat. That plus being helpful on the mailing list and stackexchange for whatever project it is almost always leads to email job offers coming in. When you have enough experience you can directly apply to developer ads and hopefully survive the initial screen for not having a degree as you have real experience, plus all those problem sets you did will help pass a whiteboard interview.

Re: Do Developers Need College Degrees?

#100

Post by brudgers »

pedalpete wrote: post #59
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"

Actually, I'm always amazed at how many Real Estate Agents suggest that others should get into it because it is so lucrative. They seem to ignore the fact that they are welcoming more competition in a finite market.

In the US, there's a bit of pyramid to real-estate commissions and a lot of the recruitment is done by brokers. And even at the sales person level, the commission structure of most company's pays better when an agent sells the listing of another agent in the company so the more agents the better the odds of a better commission.

But coming from the architecture profession, I don't discount encouraging others as a form of self-validation of one's own career choices.

Post reply on HN