> To an employer, your accreditation counts for almost nothing when comparing otherwise similar degrees (e.g. a CS degree)
You obviously have no understanding of the different between a CS degree and a Software Engineering Degreee. For starters, mine was a full year longer than regular CS. I did engineering Math the entire time with the other Engineers, and I did courses like digital electric design and digital signal image processing that the CS'ers didn't.
> If they’re not teaching about the most basic principles of building scalable systems, what is the point of doing a degree, or hiring people who have done a degree?
Some degrees in CS are really vocational certificates, while more traditional degrees are not.
>Most other degrees are meant to prepare you for a career.
False. Employability is a side-effect of those as well.
If you don't like that, don't get a four year degree. Many people don't and are successful.
If you want to be forced to have a broad background of different areas in computer science, learn theory, and do many-many projects, get a four year CS degree. Don't want to be pigeonholed into doing the latest-greatest variation of Visual FoxPro for the rest of your life? Get a CS degree.
>What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market.
The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
> ...four years doing something hate for a useless degree they'll never use.
Or 4-5 years getting a piece of paper saying "Computer Science" when they can't do the work, because society says "CS makes money" and the CS department is happy to take it. If people with only a high school degree can't make a living, we need to either make college free, or make companies pay for it.
>Beyond that, software development is plagued by this mindset that college degrees are useless and that only self taught people are worth looking into.
Ugh, yes. I've worked for a leading SIM and smart card manufacturer and they required a 4-year degree to even get in the door. I interviewed countless people, including some who were able to answer some quite technical questions that others couldn't. And many of those had to get disqualified since we found out during the interview process that they didn't have a degree. There were so many degree holders there that didn't know what the hell they were doing, and it was obvious.
>Probably universities are dumbing down requirements for $$$.
I 100% believe this is true. When I was in college it was pretty staggering to see my fellow classmates receive passing grades and get shoveled through the programs despite never grasping the basic fundamentals of CS. These were people who, at the end of CS 101, still couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, who after CS 202 _still_ couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, and so on and so on. Yet happily through the system they continued.
I eventually became part of the lowly drop-out club (I found attending college later in life to be a maddening experience of pointless busy work, rather than a challenging mind-expanding one). However, those people who fumbled around randomly swapping out types until things compile are now CS degree holders.
It seems true even for the higher tier degrees too. It seems even a masters degree isn't a good indicator. In the past year alone I've watched several guys with masters enter and then promptly leave our startup due to having just absolutely no idea how to write software. :(
This is simply not true as well. CS majors also can begin serious work with just a BS degree. I have no idea what school(s) the parent topic is refering to but remind me not to recommend people go there...
Four years is a LOT of time to get deep on multiple CS topics not just a broad overview. If you finish 4 years of serious study and don't have deep knowledge of a few things you did college wrong.
College is the only time in your adult life where your only job is to learn. It is incredible that many of us get that opportunity and that some people come out of it with just broad knowledge is disappointing.
In my CS program, senior and most of junior year were almost entirely specialized courses where we had a choice to pick a topic that interests us and deep dive. (AI, graphics, networking, bioinformatics, big data, programming language theory, etc). All the general studies were mostly done by the end of sophomore year.
> It also creates a prestige problem for whatever university graduated some nitwit who can't code from a CS degree. Over time, it will be harder for other graduates from that university to find work.
>A complete overhaul of credentialing, so that when I have a degree in computer science from a top university and decades of industry experience, employers don't need to independently confirm that I know how to reverse a string or traverse a tree or define what XSS is.
But 'top universities' don't know how to teach CS. That's the point. Don't waste your time there.
Maybe we should have a 'bar exam' type system, but the university system is a joke at this point, and there's no point trying to put lipstick on a pig.
>A complete overhaul of credentialing, so that when I have a degree in computer science from a top university and decades of industry experience, employers don't need to independently confirm that I know how to reverse a string or traverse a tree or define what XSS is.
But 'top universities' don't know how to teach CS. That's the point. Don't waste your time there.
Maybe we should have a 'bar exam' type system, but the university system is a joke at this point, and there's no point trying to put lipstick on a pig.
>There is a huge anti-CS degree movement, specially (and not suprisingly) among people without CS degrees.
I used to be one of those people until I broke down and decided to finish my degree.
I think most of the people who speak out against college didn't go (or didn't finish) a STEM degree. I've seen both sides (history, and CS). Most of my previous criticism of college is applicable to history (at my institution at least), but not CS.
There are so many little holes that I've filled in that I didn't even know I had.
>The affirmation that almost 100% of grads can't write a trivial program would mean that somehow CS grads are worst at programming than a sample of random people.
You're right that something is off about that story. There is no way that someone could get through the entire program I'm going through without knowing how to write that for loop.
>...admit it is our fault for thinking a Computer Science degree had any value.
CS degrees do have value. But their value is not constant, and depends heavily on the domain and requirements for a particular job. The real confusion is thinking that a CS degree is supposed to merely provide job skills training. While you get some of that as part of the deal, that's not actually the purpose of a degree -- and it never was. In that light, it really shouldn't be surprising that a degree isn't always required to be successful.
> People with CS degrees have a "bump" in the jobs they can get.
I don't believe that premise for a second.
My pre- and post- degree experience is that nobody cares about the degree if you have more than a couple of years worth of experience.
In terms of my ability to get high paying jobs, getting my MSc made no difference. I got great jobs before I completed my degree, and the same after. In fact, the only way my degree comes up in interviews is as a semi-suspicious "why did you bother, with your track record, it's not as if it matters?" For me it was a personal choice, not a career choice, and the research project was interesting.
The reason I didn't complete my degree in the first place, was that it was so trivially easy to find high paying jobs based on my skills and experience (I started programming at five, and did my first paid development at 13) and nobody ever asked about the lack of a degree. I ended up leaving to do consulting and start a couple of companies.
At the same time I also know that none of the places I've worked - including a multi-billion dollar company that certainly had the budget to pay extra well for the degrees if they'd cared to - has placed any preference on people with a CS degree. The few great programmers we've found with good CS degrees have been offered no more because of their degrees than equivalent developers with other degrees or no degree at all. By your argument these people should've gone elsewhere because we'd be offering them well below their market value by offering the same as developers with no degrees, or with say, a Linguistics degree.
That idea just does not mesh with any of my experience.
> The ones who are really good get hired at better jobs than any that you can offer.
The ones that are really good without degrees also get hired really quickly - it doesn't stop me from seeing CV's from, and interviewing, a lot of people like that, many of which we immediately pass on because we know they will get offers much higher than what we're willing to pay.
Sure, I don't see many CV's for people who'd be able to claim $1m+ base, either, but people in that range are so few overall that even if every single one of them somehow have CS degrees it would not make much difference.
It also ignores the issue of the contents of the CS degrees. See below.
> Conversely good people without a CS degree have a hard time getting into those really good jobs, and are therefore available for your sample.
Junior developers or mediocre developers without degrees might face more of a challenge without a degree, but for experienced developers, my experience on both sides of the table is that years of experience matters far more when considering whether or not to give an offer, or when discussing remuneration - both when negotiating with technical managers and when negotiating with non-technical HR people.
> obviously positive attribute (CS degree)
Here you let your bias shine through. Why is it an obviously positive attribute in this setting?
Software engineering is not computer science.
A big part of the problem I see with CS graduates is that most of them don't have the faintest idea about engineering discipline. Many of them have not had any exposure to testing practices; many have not had any exposure to software design methodologies; many have hardly written any programs, and if they do they often only know one language and don't understand how to generalize the concepts (sure, they know the theoretical underpinnings, but often don't know how to translated that into writing code). Far more don't have much domain knowledge in any fields outside pure CS - it doesn't help if they can write code if they need a business analyst to babysit them all the time.
The issue is not that a CS degree makes people bad programmers, but it does very little to make them good programmers and even less to make them good, well rounded software engineers. Many places you can pass through a CS degree without having had more than a passing exposure to programming.
At my university, you could've easily get as much programming experience while completing a biology degree (or pretty much any other science related degree; for humanities/liberal arts you'd have to work a bit harder to get there) as in the CS degree, and that's not unusual.
Personally, I passed through my entire degree with the equivalent of less than 2-3 months worth of actual programming and I picked a few programming courses on purpose because they were interesting to me (e.g. a class on Smalltalk, and a course on compiler construction), but it would've been trivially easy for me to opt for a more math or theory heavy degree and avoid pretty much all practical programming exposure.
And my experience - both from hiring, and from talking to people in the business - is that a lot of people do, and very few go the other way and try to pick subjects that makes them better suited as software developers. Most people that go that way end up picking other degrees - such as going to schools that actually offers software engineering as a subject.
But I'm not hiring mathematicians or logicians or people who are meant to run research projects where undergrads do the programming - I'm hiring software developers.
While it is perfectly possible to combine the two, the important part to consider is that a CS degree teaches you computer science, not software engineering, and while there is varying degrees of overlap at different schools, if you spend your time doing a CS degree you spend a lot of your time 1) not programming or learning about software development skills, 2) not developing communications skills or more business oriented skills that are generally far more valuable most places that needs software developers than the additional skills CS does give.
Over the years I've had far more use for my (natural) language skills and communications skills than I have had for my CS degree. And I've had far more use for programming experience I've built up than either. I don't regret my CS degree, because I get a lot of pleasure out of using those skills on a hobby basis, but if I'd gone back and were to pick a degree specifically to be the best possible software engineer, there's just no way I'd have picked CS degree.
I've had situations where we genuinely had use for someone with a CS PhD, but for most development the CS skills are not that interesting and what you need are software engineering skill sets that most CS degrees simply don't teach. In the cases we've needed someone with in depth CS knowledge, we've in some cases found it easier to pair up someone with the CS knowledge with a good developer rather than trying to find the perfect combination.
> There is no way to show people how much time you invested in your self study. It is not about what you know, it is about other people getting to know so they can hire you.
Your point still holds true in this industry when you get as much as 300+ candidates applying for 1 graduate job. As much as I hate it, unfortunately some companies would hire internal candidates than external ones even if they were highly qualified, because they are highly networked within the company.
Having just a CS degree in 2019 is not enough to market youself as a better candidate. It is meerly seen as a minimum expectation from larger companies.
> If a 6 week course can get someone to be even 50% as good as a 4 year degree then the degree is the thing that has a problem.
Defining 50% here would be hard. I may not use all of the skills I learned at the university, and one may learn more at the beginning of one's study, but I fear it takes the good part of 2 years to get to 50% of a 4 year CS degree.
Learning is also a kind of Maturation process where ones abilities tends to grow over time. This may be hard to substitute, even by study more intensely.
> Engineering, mathematics and theory is the biggest part which you can't get at a 6 week school
Agreed. Sadly lots of people are getting sucked into the start up tech bubble. Sure you can get a really high paying tech job on limited knowledge as a web developer at some shitty start up, but it might be gone tomorrow and you'll find yourself SOL.
Having gone the no CS degree route myself I can say that I find myself in a constant loop where I have to prove my abilities even with the recommendation of former bosses and a nice resume.
Not all CS degrees are created equal I'm afraid.
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