Still fail to see why people give a fuck if you're self taught or have a degree. (By people I mean other developers, not employers.)

Why does it matter? Trick question: it doesn't matter. All that matters is their code.

And fun fact: both educated and self taught people can write shitty code.

Idk it just seems like unnecessary division in a group of people that all do the same fucking thing: program.

Personally, you can either do this job or you can’t. A piece of paper doesn’t prove that.

Now that’s not to say you won’t learn things doing a degree that will be useful, but it’s up to the person to be able to use that knowledge regardless of whether they were taught or taught themselves.

@C0D4 this, absolutely.

A degree can help when evaluating someone for a position if you do not know them and have little or no examples of work.

But its just a hint and to many get a degree without real knowledge.

So we look very much on how much you program as a hobby and anything you have made out of school.

On the other hand, having a degree means you at least had enough persistence to complete the education and if you have no degree it might also mean that even though you might be a good programmer you might not have the right attitude towards demands.

It does not matter if you are a brilliant developer if you just cannot bother doing that which we need you to do.

So without a degree you probably will have a higher threshold to reach to get an interview.

Once on site actual knowledge and interest is more important than grades.

@C0D4 Right. But some of the anti-college people have their head shoved so far up their own ass that they can't see the fact self taught isn't for everyone. Some people benefit from structure that uni provides for them.

If you can self teach yourself, then congratulations. More power to you. If not, that's fine too! There's an option for you.

I see no benefit for programmers being arrogant and acting like they're better than the other side just because of how they learned to program. It's stupid, childish, and likely a sign of them being insecure as fuck.

@Stuxnet not wrong, everyone has their own way of absorbing information, but absorption is only half of the problem.

A degree to me is just a sign of commitment to being in this field, why else would you go through 4+ years of study?
On the other side if you don’t have the paper, you better have the ability to show your alternative experience to make up for it on the CV.

Personally I don’t have a degree, actually I was a high school dropout but kudos to anyone that does have it.

You probably don't want to hand over aircraft systems, medical devices and other stuff to self-taught hobbyists.

Or writing software with EMI issues in mind, that's pretty hard if you don't have a firm grasp of the underlying physics, which are impossible to understand without a good deal of math and signal theory.

Or, even closer to the hardware, but that's also kind of code today - if the logic yields occasional glitches in the outputs when the inputs change, then you just know that the designer has never heard of Karnaugh maps.

A relevant degree implies that there have been exams on such matters if the university isn't a shithole. You can get a junior dev to traction if he knows the basic concepts but not the applications. If he doesn't even know the concepts, it's hopeless.

However, where such knowledge isn't necessary, it doesn't make sense to require it.

@C0D4 Pretty much every college student has side projects throughout the years there. With the technology we have today, you can also have a side hustle of freelancing.

So they have some sort of CV and a degree to show. Plus most unis require an internship these days, I think.

But this isn't even the point of my rant. This has turned into the pros and cons of a degree. Not what I mean. Can't really reiterate my point any other way to make it clearer lol

It was important 200 years ago when you didn’t got that widespread access to the information. When you need a mentor to teach you something. Now more people use cellphone then toilet. Access to knowledge is instant and matter of time.

There is something called secured position, universities give people physical security that diploma can secure their future wealth. There are some people who follow this easy path and people who question it.

That’s life some rely on secure solutions and see only tip of mountain for all of their life. Others jump from those mountains to see the world and how it’s build.

From my perspective traditional education nowadays is more likely lock your mind then free your mind and learn you to think outside box.

@vane i would say that such deal depends greatly on the institution. Some do make an effort to make their students reach towards new and more creative solutions whilst still providing the required academic knowledge to succeed. Its the fucktard teachers that ruin it for institutions.

I have always had this issue with the state of software development and computer science as a whole. The people in the area(this is true for literally any area) ruin it with arrogant attitudes.

Then again, what the other ranter said @Fast-Nop is true, a hobbyist will not be given much responsibility in certain scenarios.

If an aspiring programmer wishes to just code websites then fine really, it can be learned through dedication and self study. But the people working at Space X or writing software for NASA know better than to trust someone with no academic foothold.

Personally, for what I do I don't care if they have a degree as long as they can code. When I started developing i had the firm belief that I could learn enough to be dangerous. And while it is possible I realized that having a degree would put me in a more advantageous position. So i got my bachelors, and because I love the field enough I am already on my way for my masters.

@AleCx04 So far all my IT & CS professors have been good.

My intro to CS professor was super chill and I was in his office at least twice a week every week

Then there's not a professor. His class is really easy but I still go and just kind of hang out for a little bit since he was chill. He gave me some good book suggestions. His class was easy as fuck and I was really close to a 100, but I did learn a good bit considering I knew almost all the material.

But you're definitely correct. The professors tend to make or break a uni.

@Stuxnet they do bro. They really do. The head of the CS department HATED ME because she was my teacher before she was promoted to said position and she was beyond retarded. She had a phd tho, so apparently that exempted her from saying retarded shit like:

There are switch cases in Python(deducted 50 points from everyone)

There XAML is not a markup language and has nothing to do with C# or gui development(not even fucking with you on this)

JS cannot be used for server side(Node had already existed for years)

Android should use the NDK primarily (she was convinced that cpp was the primary language in Android development)

Jquery was not to be used for shit as well as JS since according to her it was not supported in ie

And many many many more. Fuck bad teachers

To me I sometimes ask because I've found self taught vs education tends to have different strengths. It's not true for everyone and the difference usually shrinks with more experience.

We have a trainee who came from a 3 month bootcamp and he is an amazing coder, a real talent I must say.
But he doesn't know what is UDP. He has a small scope of things he can understand and he doesn't know IT beyond that. Any deployment or Devops related matter are far away from him. Unless he somehow catches up to those things (Im not sure if there is a bootcamp in how IT works in general) we cannot promote him to anything and he is stuck at front end developer position forever.

@Stuxnet well. A degree by it self is not a disadvantage and as the only one at my place without one I still have the benefit of being first in so I never had that kind of anti academic problems.

Personally there just was no real computer focused university courses available, just side courses to the normal and reading 4-5 years to get 1 year if CS was not for me :)

But I have learned a lot from colleagues regarding theory and even more on my own, like compiler design and concurrency problems that I really did not learn by my own.

Today the internet provides much if that but the web was not available when I started.

@AleCx04 I agree about institution dependent but same I can tell about website content. This doesn’t change the point. University knowledge is subjective.

Like I wrote before 200 years ago there were not so many universities and sometimes you need to travel to different country to learn something. Still there were people like Fermat

Also years of education highly increased since 1800 and whole concept is from prussian education system from late 18 early 19 century so I am not convinced about it.

@Fast-Nop whatever you do there is something called domain knowledge, to do more in the field you need to learn all the time.

Of course physics and math helps, but those are subjects of first year of study. They do it only because they need to level up base knowledge to learn you their domain knowledge concepts.

Still after studies you got into different domains and there are many more despite your CS degree like medicine, gis, multimedia, automotive, architecture, electrical etc.

Those have no different math or physics. No one is questioning general relativity, algebra or calculus.

In my experience, education does matter. When you have a solid formal education in specifically software engineering (yes I have a degree in that) you will learn how to engineer a system, starting from an initial idea all way up to the support and maintenance of the realized system.

I'm not talking about basic systems/small apps here, think more of advanced enterprise applications. My education taught me how to do proper analysis, define requirements, create proper functional and technical designs using well known techniques, and to write decent code implementing it, even write the required documents for them installing, configuring and supporting the system.

I was always completely self taught until one moment I decided to formally study software engineering. Turned out there was still a lot to learn. Make no mistake, I could already create fine software but getting a degree improved it even further.

You don't have afinity with development? you'll suck anyways, education or not!

@vane you'll need a bit more than first year stuff to understand the examples I mentioned - a bachelor degree should cover that.

The thing is that nobody in such fields will hire a rookie without this base knowledge because that boils down to studying at work instead of a university, which the employer will not pay for.

And no, some Arduino project will not pump up the CV. Quite the opposite, people who think that an Arduino project is relevant screen themselves out immediately.

@Fast-Nop well ok because I was never doing pure hardware, only systems around those hardware. Not that I haven’t opportunity to do it but I don’t like doing hardware and I decline offers.

Now I used to say that real development starts when your questions are not on stackoverflow and you can’t ask them because you’re working in r&d field behind closed doors and can’t talk about your work or it’s hard to explain it with simple words.

From my experience I don’t have any degree but never got into pure website development, there was always some complicated system behind the scenes and if you have guts to understand it there is always help needed and you can go deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole until you say stop.
And you have to say stop because people would drag you deeper if they think you’re easy going, good person, you listen and understand them.

Degree can open you doors more easily when you got no experience or personal projects but doesn’t prevent you from being stupid person without imagination.

If we consider luck I’d say degree add you maximum 25% to those 50/50 to succeed to get job you want, is it much ? Don’t know I never got rejected when I didn’t want to.

@vane yeah, web dev and many applications are often about glue code, and you don't need a degree for that. Instead, you need to know how to use the existing fragments correctly, the pitfalls, where the documentation is misleading or downright wrong. Also, reading and actually understanding existing code, where deep math mostly won't help. It's quite easy to fuck up the glue, typical example would be yoyo code.

That's where a nice open source project can help especially if it integrates foreign code because that's close to quite some commercial work.

I think the core why people don't get to the point of the rant and deviates between advantages and disadvantages is because most people with degrees think everyone has had the same experience in Uni which is really naive, higher education around most of the world isn't like in the US or Europe, there's a reason why it is so sought-after

@JKyll first mistake is that people assume that if someone tells something on uni he is right. They don’t consider fact that knowledge is subjective, even physics is subjective to some size of matter.
So the same people when told on uni 500 years before that earth is flat they would believe it is.
Moreover most of them would treat you shit and kill you when you tell them it’s not.
Evolution and law isn’t so fast as technology so most of people think the same today, they think flat.
Maybe we got internet, computers, tv, cars, planes, newspapers but we are flat.
Most of us don’t question laws established by other people.

@vane maybe you should try taking a course in college before you go on spouting such nonsense.

@totoxto explain

@vane I'll try to keep it short because I'm not interested in spending so much time on it. I'll skip the philosophy shit and factual errors about flat earth belief.

Some parts of technology moves fast, yes. A very small part of my education covered parts like that. Java has gone through several version since then as an example. But in terms of the algorithms I was taught little has changed, new interesting ones may have come in certain specific areas sure. But I don't think anyone finishes their uni education thinking that they are done learning. However, a lot of technology does not actually move fast. Take TCP/IP for example which came around in the 70's. A lot of graph algorithms were around long before computers and so on. Even in the programming subjects a lot of the focus was on programming concepts rather than languages and frameworks. To say things you learn in college is wrong on the basis that technology moves fast is silly.

@totoxto sql, if else clauses, loops are not changing anytime soon. Or wait, what if they were just a theory like flat earth, and we were fooled? And they never existed? :D lol

Some things we learn will become outdated. A college education will teach you some of those things, but they're not stupid so most of it will focus around concepts that are not likely to be outdated quickly. These things will give you a good foundation for further learning. Remember how I said I find that self taught vs education tends to have different strengths? In my opinion self taught tend to have used more various frameworks and have a better practical knowledge, they've often written more code. People who go through education tends to have stronger knowledge on concepts. Most self taught people I've met have not been strong on programming patterns as an example. Ofc the things that are useful in the job you're doing will come with experience learning from others. The educated ones will gain programming experience and learn the frameworks they need and the self taught ones will usually encounter various patterns and learn them.

@totoxto ok fair points but don’t get me wrong I don’t think it’s all bad I even acknowledged that it could get you +25% chance to get the job. Because that’s what majority think, study means knowledge and I don’t argue with that.

I am just questioning that not everything is ideal, there is no one path to the end and we always need to look at things outside box.

Sure patterns or antipatterns don’t change rfc, iso, ecma don’t change once their established. Still there are newer versions and implementations of ex.TCP/IP that is different between os.
Not many people remember what is MTU in UDP.
Same is with memory management there are different malloc techniques and ex. google got their own memory allocator. I can grab 100s of those rabbit hole examples but...

The whole point is when you don’t know yet what you want to do in your life so you go study. I would even say at least learn this math and physic from first year so you can read scientific papers and feel more confident you would understand software development abstraction.

But if you know what you want to do in life you can learn from book about algorithms or grab latest to papers and try to understand them.

Sure it can take you more time then attending to prestigious universities and having good lectures but you can attend them anyway because when you enter they don’t check id. If you listen and don’t make noise professors won’t grab you and kick out. You can even pick up girls by doing it, trust me was doing this shit at some point in different universities and different cities with bunch of different people.

I might know something about studies also from drinking with people who teach cs students but who knows can’t deny can’t confirm.