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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 major
by Aurornis 2mo 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 2mo agoI 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 2mo agoWe weren’t using DSA interviews at the job where I had the most leeway to interview candidates without CS degrees.