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Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills. Which isn't to say it

Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills. Which isn't to say it isn't valuable, but it may not have prepared you fully for work. You may not know anything about version control, for example, or agile development. Plus, it's always possible that you got your CS degree and aren't actually all that smart. I'm not a genius, but when I'd been programming for maybe a year, my ex-Googler friend asked me a Google interview question and said I did better than a PhD in CS that he'd recently interviewed. So education and credentials don't always prove that you can solve problems or do everyday work in this field. Which is why I'm GLAD when an interviewer wants me to solve real problems in the interview. If I don't have to, chances are my coworkers didn't have to, either...

Silhouette 16y ago
> Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills. If my own background is anything to go by, CS is almost a textbook university subject: it presents a lot of theory and academic analysis, much of which certainly does underpin practical software development, but the emphasis is not on teaching specific applications, nor on teaching the supporting practical skills required to implement those applications. These things are experienced to some extent via examples that accompany the theory, and to a greater extent via reading around the subject and experimentation where the course has provided enough context to direct the student's personal study. IMHO, one of the major differences between good and bad courses is that those that are taught well will also encourage the student to explore useful applications for what they are learning in this way, and thus to experience not only the practical implications of what they are learning but also the surrounding tools, processes and techniques that go with them in the real world. Someone with a broad foundation in the theory and experience of varied practical applications should have no difficult adapting to other applications the same theory, nor to newer theories that have evolved through industrial R&D and not yet made it back into academia. Whether a recruitment process is any good at recognising this important ability to adapt and learn independently is an entirely different question, but any remotely useful process should be able to weed out the people who managed to spend 3-4 years studying theory without experimenting practically and reading around their subject, and avoiding hiring those is one of the most important basic goals of any software developer recruitment exercise IME.

Silhouette 16y ago

> Besides all this, a CS degree, from what I hear (I don't have one) often teaches you a lot of concepts but not a lot of practical skills. If my own background is anything to go by, CS is almost a textbook university subject: it presents a lot of theory and academic analysis, much of which certainly does underpin practical software development, but the emphasis is not on teaching specific applications, nor on teaching the supporting practical skills required to implement those applications. These things are experienced to some extent via examples that accompany the theory, and to a greater extent via reading around the subject and experimentation where the course has provided enough context to direct the student's personal study. IMHO, one of the major differences between good and bad courses is that those that are taught well will also encourage the student to explore useful applications for what they are learning in this way, and thus to experience not only the practical implications of what they are learning but also the surrounding tools, processes and techniques that go with them in the real world. Someone with a broad foundation in the theory and experience of varied practical applications should have no difficult adapting to other applications the same theory, nor to newer theories that have evolved through industrial R&D and not yet made it back into academia. Whether a recruitment process is any good at recognising this important ability to adapt and learn independently is an entirely different question, but any remotely useful process should be able to weed out the people who managed to spend 3-4 years studying theory without experimenting practically and reading around their subject, and avoiding hiring those is one of the most important basic goals of any software developer recruitment exercise IME.