4 ms·

Myself and the other 3 main programmers in my last company all lacked a college degree. I think a degree is pretty useless for software development.

djKianoosh 11y ago
I appreciate the fact that yall made it without a degree. But I wouldnt say "useless". More like "not necessary". A software engineering or CS degree can be useful, but not necessary to have an excellent career.
- eropple 11y ago
  Agreed. I was a pretty good programmer before I got a CS degree. But I can say, honestly, that my degree program (not even a particularly good one) made me a much better one. I've consistently ended up in roles where other people in those roles were five to ten years older than me, not because I'm a supergenius (jesus, I'm not) but because I was able to derive some real synergy from the academic fit-and-finish applied by college to my existing skill set, and the lessons I learned in school to the skills I've learned since. And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general. I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.
- marknutter 11y ago
  It's absolutely useless if you learn it by other means, in the same way second dinner is useless if you already ate first dinner.
nommm-nommm 11y ago
Some schools are handing out useless degrees, I don't disagree about that. A degree from a program that has a proper curriculum is extremely valuable for programming. Ok, maybe not for slapping together some extremely simple CRUD applications if that's only what your job entails.

djKianoosh 11y ago

I appreciate the fact that yall made it without a degree. But I wouldnt say "useless". More like "not necessary". A software engineering or CS degree can be useful, but not necessary to have an excellent career.

eropple 11y ago
Agreed. I was a pretty good programmer before I got a CS degree. But I can say, honestly, that my degree program (not even a particularly good one) made me a much better one. I've consistently ended up in roles where other people in those roles were five to ten years older than me, not because I'm a supergenius (jesus, I'm not) but because I was able to derive some real synergy from the academic fit-and-finish applied by college to my existing skill set, and the lessons I learned in school to the skills I've learned since. And when I say "my courses", I don't just mean CS. I have a B.A., not a B.S., because I wanted more breadth than being a mushroom sweating it out in the computer science lab. I did pick up a lot of actually useful, practicable knowledge around algorithmic analysis (turns out that intuitively understanding Big-Oh is really useful if you don't want to be a bottom-level code grinder), distributed systems (there's a reason I'm still the guy who acquaintances go to when they need to build such a thing), and low-level computer architecture (which still has to matter to somebody even when you're using very high level languages), but the humanities were fantastically important, too. Political science and economics courses have been invaluable; poli-sci for having something of a mental map of groups and organizations and an idea of the way that they change and flow in a larger community, and economics from the perspective of microeconomics, specifically the study of elastic goods and demand curves in general. I might have stumbled on what I learned in college, especially around "how to learn", without going to college, but I think it's more likely that I wouldn't, or that I would have dismissed it as unimportant, because one of the greatest benefits of college was twisting my arm to do things I didn't want want to do (and those were among them. I also graduated with under $30K of debt--state schools aren't that expensive and I'd been working summers--after four years, and paid it off by age 27, while working at companies that definitely would never have looked at me twice if I didn't have a degree and making a lot more money for it.
marknutter 11y ago
It's absolutely useless if you learn it by other means, in the same way second dinner is useless if you already ate first dinner.

nommm-nommm 11y ago

Some schools are handing out useless degrees, I don't disagree about that. A degree from a program that has a proper curriculum is extremely valuable for programming. Ok, maybe not for slapping together some extremely simple CRUD applications if that's only what your job entails.