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Would a CS Degree Be Good for Someone Over 30?
mbuckingham asks: "I'm 39 and have been programming for 20 years. By 'programming', I'm talking about the usual business applications type of stuff. Easy stuff really. I went to college for a while, but never got my degree. It bugs me that I've never completed my degree, but since I've always had decent jobs, it hasn't really mattered too much. I'm really bored with what I do every day, and I'm thinking about going back and getting the degree, because I think it will make it possible to move towards doing some more advanced, system-level type stuff. I know I don't want a MIS degree, because that would be rehashing everything I'm already bored with. Does this make sense? Would a CS degree or a Computer Engineering degree be better?"
And I went & did my CS degree.
And it does lead to more interesting job offers.
The trouble is, moving from doing business logic type boring stuff to interesting CS type stuff is that you have to take a $40k a year paycut. (and that's after you've had no income for the time it takes to complete your degree).
Its worth thinking about how important money is for you. In the end, I have my CS degree (and I feel good about it, dont mistake me), but am doing the same work mostly.
But I don't mind doing boring work for 6-9 months a year if I can take another 3 months to travel / do charity work / etc.
Would a CS Degree Be Good for Someone Over 30?
That depends. How are you at headshots with an AWP?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Granted I am only 21, I started working on my CS degree when I was 17, went for 3 semesters and stopped. I have been hands on with machines since about the age of 7 and found the classes boring (the teacher tried to tell us how an ip address is exactly like a phone number, and would not hear how its not really that much like a phone number more like a street address.... he said I was crazy)
Being 21 I find it IS worth going back to classes,even if its only part time. Unfortunately I found out the hard way no matter how much you know, without that little square of paper, they will not even look at you 90% of the time.
Now if you know someone who will open the door for ya great, but if not, at least grab some certs. They will at least look at you that way.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
From my experience thus far (3rd year CS major), getting a CS degree involves very little programming, and involves a whole lot of theory, particularly math. If you're interested in the theory and mathematics of it, by all means, get a degree in CS. If you're not, the piece of paper will still break the corporate ladder's glass ceiling for non college graduates. However, realize there are other options, depending on the university: for me, there's IS (Information Systems), IT (Information Technology), CE (Computer Engineering), and HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). Those majors, with the exception of perhaps CE, won't seat you firmly into operating system land, but will open up broader opportunities than a straight CS degree would.
Note: 20, still in college, basing solely on conjecture and experience of colleagues and alumni.
I think - honestly - that a CS degree at your time in life is worthless for the most part. I am in a similar situation, in that I have a degree in International Politics. Yet, I've been programming since age 11 and working professionally as a programmer, project manager and systems development manger since 1993. Many of my staff have CS degrees. However, I find that a CS degree does little for ensuring a person is well-suited for the task of developing software and/or running systems.
:P
I have hired staff members with CS degrees who would be better off as real-estate sales staff. Conversely, I have one programmer with a history degree who is excellent at his job.
I am thirtysomething as well, and have no plans to go back to school for a CS, MIS or even a MSIS degree. In my opinion, the degree just gets you "in the door" as it were. Once you've got some (hopefully good) experience behind you, the degree becomes less important.
Keep in mind, too, that even as a manager, I get to write queries against SQL databases with 140M records - that impresses some of the young'uns.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I decided to go back to school to get a math degree, and either minor in CS or make it my second major. I'm 29, not 39, but I've gotten bored with coding business apps too. I decided to focus on math because it opens up other areas, as well, such as EE, ME, finance, structural engineering, and many others. I think I'd rather work with robotics than develop desktop/server apps, because I'll actually be able to physically interact with my creations. You might consider something similar to get more interesting work. I enjoy doing the math, hence my major, but anything with embedded systems work may be more interesting to you and therefore, CE might be a better tack.
You ARE crazy. How the hell do you fit a street address through a tube? Dont you know anything about the internet?
Geez, kids these days!
"more advanced, system-level type stuff" is.
System administration, or embedded programming? Or just challenging programming in C, or C++?
If your close to finishing your degree, I'd go for it. Typically, our company hires more on experience and skills than education, but that said, we have a tough time finding people in general.
You might want to do some functional interviews - find companies that do what you are interested in, and go in and talk to them. Find out if it's really what you are interested.
Once you find what you are interested in, tailor your courses to make you a good candidate for the position. IE if you are interested in embedded, real-time development, avoid "Ethics in Computer Science" and take the real-time programming courses. If your school is any good, they'll be very challenging.
A degree also gives you management potential; as you get older, you might want to get out of the grind, get an MBA. I keep reading that business+technology is very in-demand.
One final benefit of a degree - if you want to travel and work (ie move to Australia and work there for a year), a degree is almost mandatory for getting the visa.
It won't hurt, and it could be interesting. I went back for a second degree when I was 27, in Accounting, of all things. I used it to get a job with Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, which has led to a great career for me.
If you do the degree at the right school, a key benefit will be the availability of the career placement apparatus of the school, which is one of the easiest routes to a quality job with major industry players at the end of the process.
I agree with the person who noted that the more CS'y jobs pay less. I do datawarehousing/data mining/predictive modeling, and make much better money than the average Java/C#/C++ dev, based on watching the job boards. My work isn't as -cool-, but it pays well and I find it interesting. Sure, it'd be cooler to be a game programmer or device driver hack, but I like to play with my kids and golf, and if I have to write SQL and Crystal Reports stuff to make that happen, that's fine with me.
It's also fun to go back to school and babe watch.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
i can't tell whether you're looking to use a degree to advance your career or not. on one hand you say you've not needed it so far, and on the other you say you think it might open doors. it doesn't sound like you have a specific goal for which a CS degree is a requirement, so lacking that, I'd say don't get an inferiority complex.
ask yourself, "do i enjoy dealing in underlying academic theories, or do i prefer concrete applications to real problems?". if you're tired of dealing in the latter, intellectually curious about the former, or want to gain some specific skills, go for it. if, however, you're just having a vague feeling of "missing out", i'd say don't. degrees are best attained with a purpose in mind, and it sounds like you're doing fine as-is.
if you're still not sure, why not try to find an appropriate class to take without committing everything, as a test of your own enjoyment/committal.
as someone who did the opposite and started with much schooling and less practical experience, i'll tell you i look over the fence at your green grass now and then too. i don't utilize the theory i've learned nearly as much as the more practical knowledge. the rare circumstances i do utilize the theoretical learning are fulfilling tho.
In any case it'd be interesting to read about your point of view if you wouldn't mind sharing.
-- the cake is a lie
On the other hand, accreditation is no protection against potential employers looking at your resume, noting that you got your degree from an online diploma mill, and deciding you're probably not worth interviewing on that basis alone. It's an old joke that BS means "bullshit", but this sort of thing makes it less of a joke.
And stay upwind.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Maybe a math or applied math degree?
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
I have been hands on with machines since about the age of 7 and found the classes boring (the teacher tried to tell us how an ip address is exactly like a phone number, and would not hear how its not really that much like a phone number more like a street address.... he said I was crazy)
He should have said you were fucking stupid. And then he should have told you to shut up.
There's no point in wasting his time and your classmate's time with such pathetic, petty "debate". A phone number is a much better analogy, especially when considering mobile phones (which is the only phone that many people have today).
Unlike a street address, but like a phone number, IP addresses are not fixed based on location. On an internal network, you can use whatever IP addresses you want, regardless of where your devices are, or where they might happen to move.
We could go on, but I don't know if you'd really understand such concepts. I mean, you couldn't even make it past your second year of undergraduate studies.
I am helping a friend with her degree from the University of Maryland(they do a lot with the military community and I am a contractor and she is the wife of a soldier) and from what I have seen the program is pretty decent, if a bit light on programming. They actually do real discreet math for instance(they have to prove a lot of things), and I was surprised since before I held a pretty dim view of online programs. I still hold that view on most programs(University of Phoenix being among the chief offenders), but there are some decent ones that you can do while still keeping your job. Hell, the company might even pay for it. My advice would be to find a program that is associated with a good program in meatspace and see what the requirements are. Even if you can just do half the degree online, that can still save you a lot of time and money, two things pretty much everyone is short on.
Monstar L
You're obviously not unintelligent. So think of what you would really like to do, and then teach yourself the langauge that would be most useful in that position. And then USE IT. Not for pay, but using it in the real world is the only way to really, really learn a language. For example, if my end goal was to be soemwhere it would pay to be known as an accomplished C progammer, I would teach myself C and then do something utterly crazy like start making simple contributions to the Linux kernel. Point to that sort of thing in an interview and you will already have established yourself as knowning (and having proved that you know) more than any other candidate.
Sure, this will be hard, and especially if you keep a full time day job it's going to be a pain and take a year or two. But you'll end up in a far better place than if you go the "normal" route.
No, this advice is not theoretical. You're welcome to ignore it, but don't do so because you don't think it would work. It does. There's a whole generation of well-paid people rather older than you who never had any formal computer training but got their feet wet in exactly this kind of way.
Well I think there was a day when what you said may have been true. But don't think that isn't going to rapidly change when everyone gets faster broadband. The demand continues to grow in this sector, and I suspect that online degrees will gain increasing currency because traditional schools will simply become less attractive to those that don't want to put up with everything from weird antics of professors to parking problems.
Thousands of people are paying bills online now too. A concept unheard of seven years ago. If you can trust an online bank, why couldn't you trust an accredited online school?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
When you have complete knowledge of the system you're working in, you can rely on the basic analytical techniques taught in all scientific disciplines. Most often, though, you have a complete understanding of limited parts of the system and have to rely on instincts and guesswork for the rest. That's when a knowledge of history comes in handy, if only to help you generate a list of things that could go wrong. A basic background in CS also helps avoid the situation where you get carried away with an awesome "new" idea you just thought up that has actually been around for twenty years. Spending your time rediscovering the limitations of a twenty-year-old idea is fun, but basically a waste of time. There are enough unsolved problems that you can cheat on the solved problems without worrying that computing will be too easy :-)
(Note that I'm not saying you should skip the problem sets. Quite the opposite! The problem sets are designed to impart skills and knowledge, not artificially slow you down.)
Both the applied classes and the theory classes teach you a standard vocabulary that makes it much easier to communicate your ideas to people who share that vocabulary.
I'am almost 32, and like you, I did not complete a CS degree when I was 21. But, I've been working as a programmer, DBA, project manager, system administrator for the last 10 years, with some pretty good money. I then decide that it was enough, that I need to have this CS done at once. But wait.. They won't accept me at first because I haven't been at school for a while (universite de montreal, that is). I have to do some credits to 'prove' that I am still schoolworthy. I don't think it's much fun first, I wanna do CS. But while doing these credits, I discover that I can really use my computer skills at a professionnal level, but in another faculty. So I've applied in an Environmental Geography program, and I like it ! I've been doing it for a year now, doing remote-sensing and numbercrunching with ease. I work part time at my last employer, and it's ok. Less money, but enough to do a trip per 2 years oversea, +the usual stuff. I think that when you are 30 and going back to school, you really know what you like, and what you don't, compared to youngster around. And experience cannot be so much learn at school neither, so you can really keep it up if you want it. Good luck to you ! flak
I just finished my MS in CS last summer at the ripe old age of 36. I had switched careers from biotech to programming, and felt I needed some kind of lambskin saying "this dude has a CS degree" before HR would pay attention to my resume - I had a few phone interviews that went really well until they saw my MS Biology..... :( Seemed to have worked; I got my current position after getting the degree.
I really enjoyed the classes involved, and it did a good job of exposing me to new (to me!) topics, such as AI. I recommend it if you can afford the pay cut. If you can't, well, it might not be worthwhile.
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
When I studied CS in Ireland back in the 1980s, we had a term for people like you: cockbaiters.
No, the 'cock' portion of that word does not refer to penis. It refers to your cockiness. You know, the way you always think you're correct, when actually you're a fucking moron.
The 'baiter' part refers to how you, driven by your endless supply of cock and a need for attention, must constantly harass professors when they make straightforward analogies. You try to bait them into a debate, which in turn only wastes everyone's time.
Such people rarely lasted past their first year, and were surely gone by the end of their second year. I see that was the case with you. You came into the institution with all the cock in the world, and then reality smacked your sorry ass down, and you become a pathetic drop out.
I'm barely over 30 years old, and I've worked in Microsoft, Cisco, Stanford, Juniper and other Major high-tech corporation as a Senior Software Engineer, and I didn't graduate from high school or even offically become matriculated to a University or take an SAT. I did audit many core CS courses at a top school (UC Berkeley) for no credit, and hence would like to think that I know a bit of CS. My opinion is that having Computer Science knowledge (not IT knowledge) is more important than the degree, but having the degree is of course a way of getting there.
Yeah, clueless. It's been a long time since either a phone number or an IP address was like a street address.
The distinction is how "locative" an ID is. Seat numbers in a stadium are locative. But few other IDs are completely locative any more.
At one time, phone numbers really were locative; the first three digits specified the central office, or for larger offices, the switch within the CO, and the last four digits were the line number within the switch. That dates from the era when phone numbers were read like "PLaza 5-1000". But that was a long time ago. Now there's a lookup in the middle; the number goes into a database and a location comes out. That allows for number portability, and also means all the numbers can be used.
The same thing happened to IP addresses. At one time, you could route by tearing apart IP addresses. In the beginning, network 10 was the ARPANET, and the last byte was the IMP number. Now, it's lookup-based, and routers have huge tables.
This is a continuing struggle with numbering plans, from zip codes to Ethernet addresses to UPC codes. They tend to start out locative, but eventually become a flat, arbitrary space as the demands on the number space increase and things change over time.
A degree is good for everyone, no matter whether you are 30, 50, 70, or 90, and no matter whether you can actually use it for a career. The purpose of a degree is to broad your mind and make you think better and become a better human. Degrees are not designed to help you feed your stomach; this is what a job is for. While a degree that can be useful for jobs is of course better, I think you should pay attention to your mind and your education first (especially considering that you have successfully penetrated the job market), and not surrender your education to your employer's needs. Of course, if you can find a degree that is good both for your education and your career, it's better (as all win-win situations).
In choosing a degree you have to take into account:
I recommend Oxford's Software Engineering programme and the Open University (UK). If you decide to take the certification route I would suggest to take university certificates in addition to professional certificates (like Cisco's CCNP). For example I have found this company and O'Reilly Learning offer vocational training programmes with non-academic continuing education certificates issued by real universities.
I'm replying a bit late, but what the hell...
I think you should go for the CS degree, but only if you're genuinely interested in some CS topics like algorithm analysis, language design, advanced data structures, distributed systems, machine learning, etc. If you like that sort of thing, then you'd probably enjoy the CS program and the kinds of jobs you could get with the degree afterward. But if you're thinking of going back for the degree just so your resume looks better, I'd recommend against it. Your years of experience as a developer should matter more than a degree for most jobs, at least at companies that you'd want to work for.
In a past life, I was a manager at IBM for a while, and I had a very good team of engineers. About half of them had a CS background, but the other half had degrees in things like percussion and philosophy. My degree is in geophysics. And one guy on the team was still working on his associates degree. A person's degree didn't seem particularly correlated with how smart they were or how much they got done. The percussionist and philosopher ended up writing some of our trickier, more algorithmic code.
On the other hand, here at Google where I work now we seem to have a pretty strong emphasis on degrees, especially for people without much industry experience. It makes some sense, given the huge volumes of data we work with and the interesting algorithms we have to use to do it. But still, it's possible to get into even this kind of environment without a CS degree if you have some knowledge and experience in the right areas.