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Maybe. You've never heard of a practicing lawyer who never went to law school. But you have heard of talented engineers who never went to college. The differen
by coralreef 13y ago
Maybe. You've never heard of a practicing lawyer who never went to law school. But you have heard of talented engineers who never went to college.
The difference with software is that your work will always stand for itself, because the barrier to creating anything is so low. Unless you have to be credentialed to access an IDE and compiler, you'll always be able to learn and improve.
- bigiain 13y agoProgramming is such a wide field though. There's people writing yet another CRUD web app backend, and there's people writing autopilot software for auto-landing passenger jets. (And many categories in between, or perhaps even outside that spectrum). I, for one, hope the people writing autopilot software have some formal training along the lines of a four year degree to back them up, rather than just a Githib account and some commonly used open source software. _Some_ "software engineering" really does have the risks and responsibilities of civil or mechanical engineering. There does need to be some sort of evaluation/certification of people who've been trained and tested appropriately for that - without at the same time denying completely unschooled enthusiasts to do what the want with less life-threatening hardware and software.