Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer?

jammag writes "Some developers have gone to four-year universities, where they've also studied subjects like history and sociology, while other coders go to vocational schools and focus purely on writing great software. So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained? Why does the software industry keep emphasizing this difference — and generally giving better pay to four-year grads? Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"

Comments

Re:proofreading for the college graduate?

[ceoyoyo]

The sentence is badly constructed anyway. My brain hurt reading it. The spelling mistake at the end was just icing.

Re:It's about social status...

[Blakey Rat]

Yah, but most programmers don't write programs that do mathematics. That's my exact point!

There are many more programmers writing UIs than their are programmers writing math programs. And UIs generally suck. And yet my university didn't teach jack about UI design.

Their priorities were way out-of-wack, and still are. I'm getting sick of people defending it by just echoing the same "calculus is really important" crap.