Well, * The tools to teach yourself are mostly free, for one. If you can invest a few hundred for a computer and have an internet connection (not entirely nece

Well, * The tools to teach yourself are mostly free, for one. If you can invest a few hundred for a computer and have an internet connection (not entirely necessary), you're on board. * Being so new, Computer Science and Software Engineering have nowhere near the academic clout of these other disciplines for which curricula have been refined for quite some time. Think of it this way: How much woud you have valued a doctor's certification in 1650, or even 1850, compared to today? I don't think that very many people really trust a CS degree in the same way that they do a law or medical one. * There's a lot to learn, but you can begin to be productive wth very little knowledge of programming. The nature of programming lends the discipline to a master-apprentice style of training over the highly theoretical.