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Completing a computer science degree on Coursera
- AFF87 3mo agoCongrats on sticking with the impulsive decision and congrats with your first class!
- lexandstuff 3mo agoThank you!
- sieabahlpark 3mo ago[dead]
- DenisM 3mo agoHow do employers perceive such diploma? I would try to find out before spending time or money. Did you?
- doezi 3mo agoSo… obligatory not in HR and also not a manager. But I’ve helped hire a couple engineers over the last 5ish years. Seems that HR at my companies filter for college degrees, and basically require 2 - 4 more years of experience (sans degree) or pedigree at their last couple companies. Maybe this depends more on the size of the company, but, for <1000 at each of them, HR is strapped for time and shortcuts the interview process with filters like this. I work with a great data engineer who never finished college and is fully self taught, and we’re currently navigating a recent "degree’d" data scientist hire who appears to have lied on their resume and used AI in the interview. Note, they lied about experience and title, not the degree or the companies. So not something a background check would catch. Kinda sucks that the first barrier to interviewing at most companies is HR, and they generally are the least qualified or motivated to properly assess candidates. I don’t fully blame them, as there are just too many resumes and interviews to go through for the limited time we have in a work day, but great candidates can come from any background and demographic. Edit: Sample size of 1 here, so take with an appropriately sized (whale?, school bus?) grain of salt.
- dominotw 3mo agoLying seems to be the only way to get a job these days
- scrame 3mo agoTrue, because lying is the currency that HR and Recruiting traffics in.
- AlexB138 3mo agoI've hired probably 200+ people in my career and I totally share your opinion. It's just an unfortunate reality of how things currently work.
- HoldOnAMinute 3mo agoI always saw motivated people taking the "road less travelled" as a HUGE green flag.
- colechristensen 3mo agoThere's a stark difference between self motivated curious people and certification collectors even though on the surface they can look very similar.
- alpinisme 3mo agoYeah but writing detailed blog posts about the experience is usually a signal pointing toward the former group
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> Yeah but writing detailed blog posts about the experience is usually a signal pointing toward the former group Writing detailed blog posts about the experience is rather usually a signal that the person is an annoying self-promoter. :-(
- colechristensen 3mo agoSame issue with the cert collector. Some people with certs and some people with blogs are legit. A lot of them are really eager to be seen and that's it.
- bahmboo 3mo agoSome people are legit and some people are not. Got it. Thanks for the clarification and analysis.
- galleywest200 3mo agoA bachelors degree is way different than a program certificate.
- alephnerd 3mo agoI've hired non-trad candidates. We'd treat them as any other hiring candidate. OP would just put "BSc Computer Science from Goldsmiths, University of London" on his resume and LinkedIn.
- HoldOnAMinute 3mo agoPure computer science, you can teach it on a chalk board, without ever touching an electronic device.
- angry_octet 3mo agoYou can teach it like that, but you can't learn it like that.
- Obscurity4340 3mo agoIts technically true but it can take a long time for it to solidify for people and it would have taken way longer for me if I didnt have an IDE/compiler to experiment and experience it in real time and life
- angarg12 3mo agoI got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life. As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free. Universities (elite ones particularly) still give you credentials that have some value getting a job. However I wonder for how long that will still be true. Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it. Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
- chorkpop 3mo agoUnfortunately a degree required if you don't want your resume immediately filtered.
- echelon 3mo agoYou can do the Georgia Tech online masters in CS. It's rigorous, demands a lot of time, but carries the full prestige of the on-campus degree.
- annzabelle 3mo agoYou still need a bachelor's to gain admission to that. There are other options for online CS bachelor's programs (WGU is the most famous).
- none2585 3mo agoI think the biggest thing is most software "engineering" jobs are in no way engineering and are closer to a trade like being a mechanic or (imo) a doctor. It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything. Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement dark mode. These are the things that everyone is doing at their six-figure tech jobs.
- jalalx 3mo agoCongrats!
- drnick1 3mo ago> The exams themselves are done remotely using Inspera proctoring software. Then it's almost trivially easy to cheat with a VM, or, failing that, a KVM switch with real hardware.
- lvl155 3mo agoCS degree is not all that fun. You’re better off doing math and just learning to code on the side.
- annzabelle 3mo agoIf you like math, this is the best advice. I did math with a CS minor, had a great time in college, and I seem to go in the same pool as people with a CS degree for hiring on any team I would actually want to work with. It also opens up a different set of backup plans or potential career switches if you don't want to or can't stay in software long term.
- heresie-dabord 3mo agoFurther to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency.
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> Further to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency. ... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly. In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(
- traes 3mo agoAs someone who has met a lot of math majors and a lot of CS majors, I am skeptical of your supposition that CS majors are better at finding and applying novel abstractions than math majors who know how to code.
- aleph_minus_one 3mo ago> As someone who has met a lot of math majors and a lot of CS majors, I am skeptical of your supposition that CS majors are better at finding and applying novel abstractions than math majors who know how to code. I do work with people who have a math major. Let me put it this way: if they were interested in finding and applying novel abstractions for programming, they would for sure often be very capable in this, but people who majored in math often rather love to apply these skills to more mathematical problems in their area of interest.
- bfung 3mo agoCongrats! > Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups. I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging out. :p
- sieabahlpark 3mo ago[dead]
- lazyasciiart 3mo agoI once had a group project during a masters course where one guy disappeared halfway through the semester. Didn’t respond to phone, email, anything. The rest of us were discussing how to let the professor know after he had been over a month MIA (we didn’t need him but didn’t want him to get the group grade) when the professor emailed us to say he had heard from the guy, who had been literally hit by a truck and was still in hospital; medical withdrawal.
- chr15m 3mo agoAn important lesson.
- CrimsonRain 3mo agoI still remember in a varsity project, we're a group of three. I took over the design and coding. Another guy was bad at coding, so he took over all the documentation etc. The last guy was doing db design and write some basic SQL for the CRUD. We were supposed to integrate everything a week before submission. Project was assigned about 6 weeks before submission. The last guy kept saying he's working on it and we don't have to worry. Then a week before submission, he has nothing to show. Didn't type one word. I had to scramble and get it done myself. Time was not enough anymore; we got B instead of A. I was already known to get A grade in every project where teachers would give me A++ if that was a grade. The teacher of that course was so disappointed... Since then I did all projects solo. Had to fight a little with some teachers to get that approval; esp when there were really big projects for 5/6 people group. Still did solo and got rated as best project in every single one of them.
- weakened_malloc 3mo agoI'm actually doing something similar, myself, and doing a MSc in CS right now. I'm somewhat jealous of how little group work you had to do! Almost every course I'm going through now has 1-3 group work assignments each. Often the reason is something like _"that's how it is in the workplace"_ which is a blatant cop out, imo. It's clear the reason that Universities force group work is because it's a cost cutting exercise. They need to pay the hours for people to mark assignments. Make groups of 2, and you've cut the number of hours that need to be paid by 50%. Make groups of 5, and you've cut the cost by 80%. Of course, this comes at the cost of some students unfairly carrying others.
- left-struck 3mo agoHuh, I was doing a mechanical engineering degree at the same time as working on a engineering team and when I was doing exams it struck me just how distorted the exam is from reality and how it selects for a completely different skill set. So you’re going to put me in a room, under extreme time pressure, where I can’t access the internet, reference books, modelling tools or talk to people? Versus an office where you often have to collaborate, or ask for help or approval from someone more senior, where important decisions are reviewed over and over by multiple people? Where you need to use tools like the internet, books and modeling software. Where you need to talk to people whether they are engineers, business people or machinists. Not only that but exams I think are better for people who are good at solving mostly math problems quickly with reasonable accuracy, where as most mechanical design roles require intense attention to detail that rewards taking your time to make sure there are no mistakes made. And most mechanical engineers end up being projects managers anyway I suspect in my country.
- Vaslo 3mo agoI got the MSCS from U Illinois on there. It was more work than I expected even with one class a semester. I definitely learned a lot I could use in my current role. I was in the inaugural class and it was pretty smooth other than one professor there who was an asshole and felt that online classes were beneath him. It felt like we got scraps from the table (then Covid happened and online was everywhere). Also, one prof quit just before the semester on a required class that seniors had to take and a replacement couldn’t be found in time. They offered us alternatives which weren’t really good class replacements. Strongly recommend if your time and money is limited.
- theflyingpigeon 3mo agoI have a similar trajectory. I attended two very competitive military schools in Brazil but never finished and moved to America. Today I’m a senior software engineer at a FAANG company. The lack of diploma has never been a barrier and I progressed very quickly in the company from junior to senior (4 years). But this has always been a perceived pain point and limiter for me so I decided to get a CS degree during COVID online from a college from Brazil. Just finished last week :) I do look for a stronger school name on my resume and got accepted at Johns Hopkins Masters in AI (online). Anyone had any experience with that program? Thoughts?
- alephnerd 3mo ago> got accepted at Johns Hopkins Masters in AI (online). Anyone had any experience with that program? Thoughts? Not worth the tuition. GATech and UT Austin is highly respected and they only costs $6k and $10k respectively for their OMSCS. The only online CS degree programs I can think of that are actively taught by top faculty and don't break the bank are GT, UT Austin, and UIUC.
- rootsudo 3mo agoAgree on the list, I would say GT is hardest to get in, but most inexpensive. While the later two are much easier. I also suggest reading Dr. Joyners’ Reddit posts and books, they helped me quite a bit and I do want to reiterate that if you need help on admission and completed the EDX cs50(?) course, you can personally email him, as it’s stated on one of the last slides. All around an amazing program that I hope to one day do, but I went the UIUC for business for now.
- EB66 3mo ago> I would say GT is hardest to get in, but most inexpensive. While the later two are much easier. Regarding the acceptance rates, it's actually the opposite. GT OMSCS has a very high acceptance rate (~80%) and UIUC and UT Austin online masters are much more selective (~30%).
- jmalicki 3mo ago
- rootsudo 3mo ago“ I was ready to enter the workforce and become independent as early as possible. I got into tech through certifications like MCP, MCSA, and A+ (they were all the rage back then), which was enough to land a helpdesk job at 18.” Same sentiments, if you had an MCSE you were hirable everywhere. A+ put you ahead of the pack and was lifetime back then. The early 00s were def a time. This is how I started too and also just recently completed my bachelors and now doing a masters.
- rrvsh 3mo agoI did this too for my BSc! Prof. Yee King is a great teacher, and although I was mostly doing it for the qualification and knew most of the course materials going into the degree, his explanations of web app architecture still really helped solidify my understanding. It's a great course in general, especially if you like data science
- rahimnathwani 3mo agoThis reminds me of Miguel's post about completing a BS in CS at WGU: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31180816 (470 points, 402 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25467900 (425 points, 377 comments) I was inspired by Miguel and took the same path, but I had no pre-existing credits to transfer so the whole process took me 7 months, instead of 3.
- grougnax 3mo ago[dead]
- dirkc 3mo agoWow, I'm surprised that doing an online course through coursera is still that expensive - £17,000 or $22,000 USD over 3 years! Interestingly it does seem comparable with what it would cost through The Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/computing-it/degrees/bsc-computer-science-with-artificial-intelligence-r88/ https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/computing-it/degrees/bsc-comp...
- f6v 3mo agoThe diploma doesn't say it was earned through Coursera. And it's probably still cheaper than doing the program in-person.
- zshn 3mo agoCongrats! I've been considering this particular one too for some time... Wondering sometimes if I want to do this for "my career" or if it's really just for myself.
- sublimefire 3mo agoI did masters in a similar way, just to get some credentials and fill in the gaps and learn something new. There is an idealistic part to it which is quite romantic as you spend the nights learning and doing the assignments. The structure of such online based learning systems is great for a determined person. However the “other” part of such courses are cheating and ai use. It is depressing to know that the specific credentials prove little because of it. So the only valid signal is: this person did not quit and they know how to write a report, use references. You’d need to test them to fully validate the credential.
- tajd 3mo agoCongratulations that's a great achievement!
- mailship 3mo agoDamn, you got some confidence of adding this on your CV
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sscaryterry 3mo agoUni is there to teach you how to learn/think about problems.
- pipes 3mo agoI'd really love to know how this person filled the gaps in their maths knowledge, it's the thing that put me off trying this in the past.
- grumple 3mo agoI have found khan academy to be really good for filling any math gaps - it goes up through linear algebra and differential equations. Coursera also has a bunch of math courses you can take as well.
- 13hours 3mo agoThat's more expensive than I expected. In South Africa you can do a 3 year degree at a top university (in SA terms, top 300 in the world) for about that, including lodging, food and other expenses. Mind, not foreigners, that's the tax subsidised cost for locals.
- protocolture 3mo ago>I've heard from other students that before COVID, people actually went to local teaching centres for their exams. The testing/proctoring industry in Australia seems to be completely dead. I actually liked using testing centres, I hate the invasiveness of remote proctoring.