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Classic gatekeeping argument insisting a CS degree is necessary to write good software. I don’t have one and have 20+ year successful career with accolades, kn

Classic gatekeeping argument insisting a CS degree is necessary to write good software. I don’t have one and have 20+ year successful career with accolades, know many others in the same boat. Obviously there are CS degree people who were also successful, and the flip side comes for both camps, I’ve worked with absolutely awful engineers with or without a CS degree. It is a signal, not the signal.

mbrumlow 1mo ago
Same here, 20+ years, no degree. but have a slightly different view about folks with CS degrees. It really comes down to the individual. Those who are good with CS degrees would likely be good without them. The majority of those who picked CS as a degree because “it pays well” are truly awful. Only a small handful end up enjoying and understand how to write code and make good software.
- marcianx 1mo ago
  I agree about the existence of people who really just aimed for the grades (sometimes dubiously) to unlock a career. There were also enthusiastic folks with whom I learned a lot. While I'm an interested self learner, I significantly benefit from structured learning. I don't think I would have had the breadth of depth of knowledge if I didn't do a CS degree since I didn't think I would have done such a variety of focused projects and homework. I would "shop" for good teachers and wait until they taught to take a course. I would have lots of questions in class. At the end of many of my semesters, I genuinely felt like Neo's "I know kung fu" - knowledge given on a platter. I didn't think I would have left covering undergrad subjects if I didn't, well, feel the need to earn my keep and at least aim for higher level studies and get assistantships for initial financial independence. That being said, this was all before the YouTube era. Although, YouTube is a double-edged library of distractions and amazing educational material.
alpha_squared 1mo ago
As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds. Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.
- GPerson 1mo ago
  Becoming a good developer was nowhere in the curriculum at the CS program I attended, unfortunately. It still had some interesting topics. I think the profession evolved too quickly for an academic curriculum to cover anything relevant. Nowadays I hope the CS curriculum explicitly disregards whatever the standard industry code factory meta is, since from the outside it appears to be soulless and dehumanizing. Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?
  - visarga 1mo ago
    > Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals? Obviously put all 20 in tmux sessions and have a monitor agent do the approvals.
    - GPerson 1mo ago
      The meta has changed in 6 months so the university is investing millions of dollars to design a new 101 course: Hit approve all day on the agent which should be taking your job any time soon.
- suusjjshs 1mo ago
  Classical developers IME can’t properly abstract their way out of a paper bag. They’ll draw semantic boundaries everywhere but where they belong usually following tech and tradition instead of properly reasoning about it. They are generally unable to see beyond an inch of their nose and think the business comprises 75-90% software dev and don’t see how their activity is actually the tiniest insignificant wiggle in the grand scheme of things (“the suits are just there to act important”). “Don’t see further than your nose is long” they say in Dutch. I think philosophy is an excellent match for development, certainly now with AI.
spoiler 1mo ago
I think it honestly not even a signal of how good anymore. It's become noise in my experience.. I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess. One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance. Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that. You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.
cvoss 1mo ago
> Neither the prestigious degree nor the good proficiency in algorithmic problem-solving guarantee a career success. They are factors that make statistics work in the favor of the candidate. I think the article takes a more nuanced view than you suggest. And the existence of counterexamples to a "for the most part" claim are not counterexamples at all.
Aurornis 1mo ago
There are many great developers who did not get CS degrees. Might be an unpopular thing to say, but in my experience interviewing a lot of applicants, the majority of applicants who don’t have CS degrees are not in that category. It’s always great to find a diamond in the rough who has been passed over by other companies for lack of degree and is looking for an opportunity to shine. On the whole, a CS degree is directionally correlated with being more likely to have a good understanding of the fundamentals, algorithms, and other important context that helps more as the problems get hard. These things can all be learned by someone without a CS degree, but in my experience being open to interviewing non-traditional applicants it’s more common for the self-taught applicants to be more trial and error type devs who got to this point by experimenting and seeing what works. I always have to give the blanket disclaimer that a CS degree does not guarantee a great dev and a lack of CS degree does not mean the dev is not good. However, I honestly can’t say that a CS degree is not correlated with better developers on the whole. I choose to interview non-traditional applicants who don’t have CS degrees, but to be entirely honest I can’t fault companies who get a lot of applicants who start prioritizing those with degrees.
- hellisothers 1mo ago
  I think your interviewing experience is valid because tech interviews have been designed to filter out people without DS&A experience which a CS degree will give you a big advantage at. Day to day job performance (for the most part, in most roles) will have nothing to do with DS&A though. If you know when to use an array vs a dictionary then you’re good for 99.99% of actual software development day to day tasks.
  - Aurornis 1mo ago
    We weren’t using DSA interviews at the job where I had the most leeway to interview candidates without CS degrees.
x3haloed 1mo ago
[flagged]
- zaksa 1mo ago
  To be completely frank, I'm scared of missing out on not learning the fundamentals properly and having this omission bite me in the back later in my career. I also think that AI can make terrible people "look good", and some filtering isn't too bad.
- ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
  > "I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, zaksa.... you're not a brain surgeon." Your account has existed since 2015 so you should know very well that comments like this on Hacker News are not permitted.
ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
The author didn't have a CS degree so it's not classic gatekeeping: "For the majority of my career, I neither had a formal, rigorous computer science education...". The author also directly addresses the parent poster's viewpoint: "If I had to categorize the 'no need for education, no need for algorithms' crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics." Personally I agree that a CS degree isn't needed for most software jobs because frameworks and libraries hide most of the gnarly CS stuff. But those are the software jobs least likely to survive adoption of LLM-based software development.

mbrumlow 1mo ago

Same here, 20+ years, no degree. but have a slightly different view about folks with CS degrees. It really comes down to the individual. Those who are good with CS degrees would likely be good without them. The majority of those who picked CS as a degree because “it pays well” are truly awful. Only a small handful end up enjoying and understand how to write code and make good software.

marcianx 1mo ago
I agree about the existence of people who really just aimed for the grades (sometimes dubiously) to unlock a career. There were also enthusiastic folks with whom I learned a lot. While I'm an interested self learner, I significantly benefit from structured learning. I don't think I would have had the breadth of depth of knowledge if I didn't do a CS degree since I didn't think I would have done such a variety of focused projects and homework. I would "shop" for good teachers and wait until they taught to take a course. I would have lots of questions in class. At the end of many of my semesters, I genuinely felt like Neo's "I know kung fu" - knowledge given on a platter. I didn't think I would have left covering undergrad subjects if I didn't, well, feel the need to earn my keep and at least aim for higher level studies and get assistantships for initial financial independence. That being said, this was all before the YouTube era. Although, YouTube is a double-edged library of distractions and amazing educational material.

alpha_squared 1mo ago

As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds. Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.

GPerson 1mo ago
Becoming a good developer was nowhere in the curriculum at the CS program I attended, unfortunately. It still had some interesting topics. I think the profession evolved too quickly for an academic curriculum to cover anything relevant. Nowadays I hope the CS curriculum explicitly disregards whatever the standard industry code factory meta is, since from the outside it appears to be soulless and dehumanizing. Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?
- visarga 1mo ago
  > Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals? Obviously put all 20 in tmux sessions and have a monitor agent do the approvals.
  - GPerson 1mo ago
    The meta has changed in 6 months so the university is investing millions of dollars to design a new 101 course: Hit approve all day on the agent which should be taking your job any time soon.
suusjjshs 1mo ago
Classical developers IME can’t properly abstract their way out of a paper bag. They’ll draw semantic boundaries everywhere but where they belong usually following tech and tradition instead of properly reasoning about it. They are generally unable to see beyond an inch of their nose and think the business comprises 75-90% software dev and don’t see how their activity is actually the tiniest insignificant wiggle in the grand scheme of things (“the suits are just there to act important”). “Don’t see further than your nose is long” they say in Dutch. I think philosophy is an excellent match for development, certainly now with AI.

spoiler 1mo ago

I think it honestly not even a signal of how good anymore. It's become noise in my experience.. I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess. One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance. Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that. You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.

cvoss 1mo ago

> Neither the prestigious degree nor the good proficiency in algorithmic problem-solving guarantee a career success. They are factors that make statistics work in the favor of the candidate. I think the article takes a more nuanced view than you suggest. And the existence of counterexamples to a "for the most part" claim are not counterexamples at all.

Aurornis 1mo ago

There are many great developers who did not get CS degrees. Might be an unpopular thing to say, but in my experience interviewing a lot of applicants, the majority of applicants who don’t have CS degrees are not in that category. It’s always great to find a diamond in the rough who has been passed over by other companies for lack of degree and is looking for an opportunity to shine. On the whole, a CS degree is directionally correlated with being more likely to have a good understanding of the fundamentals, algorithms, and other important context that helps more as the problems get hard. These things can all be learned by someone without a CS degree, but in my experience being open to interviewing non-traditional applicants it’s more common for the self-taught applicants to be more trial and error type devs who got to this point by experimenting and seeing what works. I always have to give the blanket disclaimer that a CS degree does not guarantee a great dev and a lack of CS degree does not mean the dev is not good. However, I honestly can’t say that a CS degree is not correlated with better developers on the whole. I choose to interview non-traditional applicants who don’t have CS degrees, but to be entirely honest I can’t fault companies who get a lot of applicants who start prioritizing those with degrees.

hellisothers 1mo ago
I think your interviewing experience is valid because tech interviews have been designed to filter out people without DS&A experience which a CS degree will give you a big advantage at. Day to day job performance (for the most part, in most roles) will have nothing to do with DS&A though. If you know when to use an array vs a dictionary then you’re good for 99.99% of actual software development day to day tasks.
- Aurornis 1mo ago
  We weren’t using DSA interviews at the job where I had the most leeway to interview candidates without CS degrees.

x3haloed 1mo ago

[flagged]

zaksa 1mo ago
To be completely frank, I'm scared of missing out on not learning the fundamentals properly and having this omission bite me in the back later in my career. I also think that AI can make terrible people "look good", and some filtering isn't too bad.
ThrowawayR2 1mo ago
> "I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, zaksa.... you're not a brain surgeon." Your account has existed since 2015 so you should know very well that comments like this on Hacker News are not permitted.

ThrowawayR2 1mo ago

The author didn't have a CS degree so it's not classic gatekeeping: "For the majority of my career, I neither had a formal, rigorous computer science education...". The author also directly addresses the parent poster's viewpoint: "If I had to categorize the 'no need for education, no need for algorithms' crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics." Personally I agree that a CS degree isn't needed for most software jobs because frameworks and libraries hide most of the gnarly CS stuff. But those are the software jobs least likely to survive adoption of LLM-based software development.