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> A skilled engineer starting out in their career will begin with zero leverage This is true, but it's important to recognize the huge industry shift that has

> A skilled engineer starting out in their career will begin with zero leverage This is true, but it's important to recognize the huge industry shift that has happened in recent years. There used to be a lot of starting leverage. For folks who remember the early 00s and late 90s, it used to be that just by being a kid who knew stuff about computers, it was assumed by the general public that you were super qualified and possibly more qualified than most people already in the field. You could literally be the "hacker kid" from your high school, and walk into a high-paying software engineering job with a 401k, or become a company's first technical hire. Then as software engineering became more formalized and in-touch with industry on the academic side, people with a CS degree started getting the best entry level positions in the mid 00s. Now things are shifting again, as frontend and backend frameworks have increased exponentially in complexity, recent CS grads often no longer have the domain knowledge to jump into the field without prior experience, so we're seeing a shift towards bootcamp grads, who have some actual practical experience in developing software. The value prop of getting a CS degree is rapidly diminishing at least in a short-term, start-of-career sense, and I say this as someone with undergrad and grad degrees in CS. At the same time, if you manage to get a CS degree _and_ be a major open source contributor or graduate from a bootcamp, you'll beat out most of the competition, and this will also be a benefit later in your career when you are vying for CTO positions.

Aperocky 5y ago
> recent CS grads often no longer have the domain knowledge to jump into the field without prior experience, so we're seeing a shift towards bootcamp grads, who have some actual practical experience in developing software. Is this true? I have nothing against bootcamp grads and have known a few great ones, but anecdotally people who graduated from CS degrees are much better at adopting to software engineering roles than bootcamp grads. And I think the reason is the fundamentals. People with CS degree know about concepts like contention, memory models and the difference between pass by reference and value. These things take a while to grasp for someone that just went through the firehose that is the bootcamp.
- sam0x17 5y ago
  I've found that this was true 5 years ago, but these days recent CS grads just don't know how to code like they used to. Many have never even toyed with web dev of any kind before, and lack many fundamental concepts outside of the traditional algorithms/data structures column of material. For example, I've found many junior devs with only a CS background don't understand client/server boundaries and often need to be taught how web browsers work on day one. Many have also only ever used Java and/or Python and seem to lack significant systems understanding that used to be commonplace in CS grads as well. I think one contributing factor to this is it has become increasingly easy to be a math major and easily get a CS degree by dipping into a few CS courses at a lot of schools.

Aperocky 5y ago

> recent CS grads often no longer have the domain knowledge to jump into the field without prior experience, so we're seeing a shift towards bootcamp grads, who have some actual practical experience in developing software. Is this true? I have nothing against bootcamp grads and have known a few great ones, but anecdotally people who graduated from CS degrees are much better at adopting to software engineering roles than bootcamp grads. And I think the reason is the fundamentals. People with CS degree know about concepts like contention, memory models and the difference between pass by reference and value. These things take a while to grasp for someone that just went through the firehose that is the bootcamp.

sam0x17 5y ago
I've found that this was true 5 years ago, but these days recent CS grads just don't know how to code like they used to. Many have never even toyed with web dev of any kind before, and lack many fundamental concepts outside of the traditional algorithms/data structures column of material. For example, I've found many junior devs with only a CS background don't understand client/server boundaries and often need to be taught how web browsers work on day one. Many have also only ever used Java and/or Python and seem to lack significant systems understanding that used to be commonplace in CS grads as well. I think one contributing factor to this is it has become increasingly easy to be a math major and easily get a CS degree by dipping into a few CS courses at a lot of schools.