35 ms·

I think people are over-emphasising the importance of a degree when it comes to CS (obviously some workplaces filter by "do you have a degree" but I wouldn't wa

by cyphar 8y ago

I think people are over-emphasising the importance of a degree when it comes to CS (obviously some workplaces filter by "do you have a degree" but I wouldn't want to work in such a place -- clearly they don't care about you as an engineer). Sorry to be a bit old-fashioned, but a degree isn't the most important part of going to university -- it's the education you get. I would argue that it is very difficult for someone to learn about data structures and algorithmic complexity (+ algorithm design) without taking a university course or doing some pretty intense self-study. It's not something you can pick up on the job. And this is knowledge that I think more folks in our industry should have. So you might be doing totally fine without a degree, and that's great, but I imagine that you also have some CS knowledge that OP doesn't have -- and maybe you picked it up from somewhere or did some study on your own to gain it. If I was a hiring manager I wouldn't filter on degree, I would filter on some sort of working knowledge of CS (and, for reference, inverting binary trees on a whiteboard is not an example of "working knowledge").

int_19h 8y ago
Oh, absolutely. When I say "self-learned", that includes bits and pieces of CS. E.g. I wrote a BASIC-to-C++ transpiler back when I was 14; and to do that, I had to learn things like recursive-descent parsing, for example, or how hashtables work (because I wanted my dialect of BASIC to have them) etc. None of it was from CS courses or books - just looking stuff up on the Internet as needed, often reading others' code. This kind of learning from experience is not a well-organized process, and the results were often a lot messier than they really needed to be - and would likely be with more formal education like SICP! - but it works.

35 ms·

I think people are over-emphasising the importance of a degree when it comes to CS (obviously some workplaces filter by "do you have a degree" but I wouldn't wa

by cyphar 8y ago

int_19h 8y ago
Oh, absolutely. When I say "self-learned", that includes bits and pieces of CS. E.g. I wrote a BASIC-to-C++ transpiler back when I was 14; and to do that, I had to learn things like recursive-descent parsing, for example, or how hashtables work (because I wanted my dialect of BASIC to have them) etc. None of it was from CS courses or books - just looking stuff up on the Internet as needed, often reading others' code. This kind of learning from experience is not a well-organized process, and the results were often a lot messier than they really needed to be - and would likely be with more formal education like SICP! - but it works.