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Really, though, 99.995% of IT (in my experience at least) doesn't actually require a degree (obviously, since I'm doing it right this very moment without a degr

Really, though, 99.995% of IT (in my experience at least) doesn't actually require a degree (obviously, since I'm doing it right this very moment without a degree and have been doing so for more than half a decade). It does require a lot of background knowledge that, sure, might've come to me faster had I received a formal education in IT, but I've been able to acquire it just fine through real-world work experience (and have been paid for it, to boot). Unfortunately, that is not true: you can get by twiddling something, but the software you'll write without formal education in computer algorithms and data structures will always be inferior and often unmaintainable. This is from personal experience debugging lots of code over the years written by people without formal computer science education. You could attempt to make the argument that not everyone needs to be a programmer, but system administration skills of such people are also subpar: sooner or later one needs to automate, and the shell scripts written by such people are always either hacked together or overcomplicated because the knowledge of algorithms, data structures and common solutions (like this enqueuing scheduler) simply isn't there. It's exceedingly difficult to educate oneself on something one isn't even aware exists. If you really love IT and love what you do, get a computer science degree which provides a quality, required education (and not just for the paper so you can say you have one).

yellowapple 8y ago
I feel like folks who are this elitist about a degree being mandatory (regardless of field) are trying to justify their crippling student debt :) Yes, an academic background is helpful in IT. Yes, I do see the value in acquiring that formal education, and certainly wish to do so. No, it is not mandatory, and no, it does not magically turn people into good programmers. And no, I am certainly not going to stop working because some random commentator on Hacker News thinks that having a successful IT career is strictly dependent on having a CS degree despite such an assertion being demonstrably false. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell managed without. Larry Wall's degree was in the study of languages (of the non-programming variety), and that's what paved the way for him to create Perl. Besides, CS grads are no more immune against writing bad code, in my observation debugging (and/or working around) code written by people with those degrees. The degree itself is not a reliable indicator of whether or not someone is competent.
- lizmat 8y ago
  FWIW, as a former employer of a web dev company, I can say that having a CS degree tended to be a minus rather than a plus: CS graduates tend to be too theoretical and not practical enough in day-to-day development work.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    That might be your experience, but mine is exactly the opposite. Besides what you've written sounds like trying to self-justify why one didn't get a degree. We didn't just theorize: my entire advanced C programming class was spent in front of the whiteboard, debugging code; we had to manually depict what the pointers and the memory looked like; the operating systems class required writing a virtual memory manager, and my diploma thesis was building a firewall based on a Sun Enterprise 250, Solaris 7 and CheckPoint Firewall-1. It would be a bit of a stretch to call all of that theoretical, especially since the firewall went into production at the company where I used to work full time while I was studying, also full time. Later on, I debugged and developed for a living and I still do, even though as a technical architect I could comfortably get away with doing nothing but "Powerpoint" and "Excel" all day long. But I don't and the only reason why I don't is because I went to study computer science to program and design computers, not masturbate in the realm of theoretical. None of the CS graduates I ever worked with were pure theorists, we were all driven by applying what we learned in the simplest, most effective way possible. That's what we went to school for, and that's why I can only recommed to everyone else working in IT to do the same: those algorithms and data structures learned at the university sure came in handy and saved my ass many a time, producing small and fast software.
- Annatar 8y ago
  "I feel like folks who are this elitist about a degree being mandatory (regardless of field) are trying to justify their crippling student debt :)" However, feelings aren't facts: I paid the remaining 12,000 USD of my student loans to the federal government within months of graduating. The rest of my tuition was covered by scholarships because of my 4.0 grade point average, and the other part by my then employer, minus the IRS taxable parts which I paid fair and square. Those scholarships were free money: all I had to do was maintain a grade point average higher than 3.0 and send in my report card at the end of every semester. That's reality. As far as immunity to bad code, you really, really need to watch Brian Cantrill's videos; if he doesn't change your mind about that, nothing and noone will.

yellowapple 8y ago

I feel like folks who are this elitist about a degree being mandatory (regardless of field) are trying to justify their crippling student debt :) Yes, an academic background is helpful in IT. Yes, I do see the value in acquiring that formal education, and certainly wish to do so. No, it is not mandatory, and no, it does not magically turn people into good programmers. And no, I am certainly not going to stop working because some random commentator on Hacker News thinks that having a successful IT career is strictly dependent on having a CS degree despite such an assertion being demonstrably false. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Michael Dell managed without. Larry Wall's degree was in the study of languages (of the non-programming variety), and that's what paved the way for him to create Perl. Besides, CS grads are no more immune against writing bad code, in my observation debugging (and/or working around) code written by people with those degrees. The degree itself is not a reliable indicator of whether or not someone is competent.

lizmat 8y ago
FWIW, as a former employer of a web dev company, I can say that having a CS degree tended to be a minus rather than a plus: CS graduates tend to be too theoretical and not practical enough in day-to-day development work.
- Annatar 8y ago
  That might be your experience, but mine is exactly the opposite. Besides what you've written sounds like trying to self-justify why one didn't get a degree. We didn't just theorize: my entire advanced C programming class was spent in front of the whiteboard, debugging code; we had to manually depict what the pointers and the memory looked like; the operating systems class required writing a virtual memory manager, and my diploma thesis was building a firewall based on a Sun Enterprise 250, Solaris 7 and CheckPoint Firewall-1. It would be a bit of a stretch to call all of that theoretical, especially since the firewall went into production at the company where I used to work full time while I was studying, also full time. Later on, I debugged and developed for a living and I still do, even though as a technical architect I could comfortably get away with doing nothing but "Powerpoint" and "Excel" all day long. But I don't and the only reason why I don't is because I went to study computer science to program and design computers, not masturbate in the realm of theoretical. None of the CS graduates I ever worked with were pure theorists, we were all driven by applying what we learned in the simplest, most effective way possible. That's what we went to school for, and that's why I can only recommed to everyone else working in IT to do the same: those algorithms and data structures learned at the university sure came in handy and saved my ass many a time, producing small and fast software.
Annatar 8y ago
"I feel like folks who are this elitist about a degree being mandatory (regardless of field) are trying to justify their crippling student debt :)" However, feelings aren't facts: I paid the remaining 12,000 USD of my student loans to the federal government within months of graduating. The rest of my tuition was covered by scholarships because of my 4.0 grade point average, and the other part by my then employer, minus the IRS taxable parts which I paid fair and square. Those scholarships were free money: all I had to do was maintain a grade point average higher than 3.0 and send in my report card at the end of every semester. That's reality. As far as immunity to bad code, you really, really need to watch Brian Cantrill's videos; if he doesn't change your mind about that, nothing and noone will.