7
bahua
6y

As a person who never took any CS courses, I don't really see the market value of them, apart from getting through ignorant degree gating at companies with backward corporate philosophies.

As I understand, even a degree isn't really that helpful in getting your foot in the door.

That said, the week 92 question assumes there is something wrong with the nature of CS instruction. College is not trade school. The point of it is to get an education, not a job. Many employers require that education, and that's their prerogative, but for a number of reasons, chief among them being the rapid pace of the advance of technological concepts, most employers do not.

A candidate having a CS undergraduate degree is far less attractive to an employer than one without a degree, but who has a year or two of experience with the technologies the position involves.

That said, I personally think that as college is for an education and not career building, computer science curricula should focus on theory, and not on applied technology. A focus on the latter just guarantees that the subject material will be dated and irrelevant.

But as many people (maybe even most) think college is trade school, I think it's absolute madness to enter into debt slavery in exchange for expiring qualifications.

Comments
  • 1
    A candidate with a year or two of experience is more attractive than one with a degree, but you still need a degree to get that experience in the first place. And the fact that basically the only way to get a job is to go to college means that college *is* a trade school.

    Technically you don’t “need” a degree to work in software, but when you have two candidates, one with a degree and one without, it almost always makes more sense to hire the one with the degree.
  • 0
    @rhubarbcode

    In the choice between two candidates with no experience, if one has a degree and the other does not, the answer is to keep looking. A degree might qualify someone for an internship, but the vast majority of the software developers I've worked with in my 18 years and 16 companies in tech have had no degree. The ones who did have one were no better off, in terms of compensation or seniority, than those who did not.
  • 0
    This depends on where you live, and the how much work experience you have. Since there is no universal way to get hired.

    But for getting that first job, a degree really helps. We're talking entry level here. That position is not going to be filled with an experienced dev (not on an entry level salary anyway).
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