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Zoho Don't Need No Stinking Ph.D. Programmers
theodp writes "When it comes to tech academic credentials, Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has The Right Stuff: a Ph.D. in EE from Princeton. But Vembu has eschewed Google's Army-of-Ph.D.s approach to software development in favor of tapping into the ranks of high school grads who would not normally go to college for Zoho. Seeing his youngest brother succeed at programming without a college degree convinced Vembu that others could follow that example with the proper training and guidance. And studying the best employees in his own company led to another epiphany: 'What if the college degree itself is not really that useful?' thought Vembu. 'What if we took kids after high school, train them ourselves?'"
Many, many people have gotten themselves trapped into paying off student loans for the rest of their lives for a degree that is inherently worthless.
On the other hand I got a 4 year electrical engineering degree from a respected university for a grand total of about US$500. Thats what you get growing up in a country where the government thinks that education was important. I have no idea what student loan is and I think made my money back about 25 years ago.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
My current employer did a background check that included my high school records. Sadly, the cuniform tablets had crumbled.
Almost every employer will veryify that you in fact worked at each place that you claimed on your resume, and most large companies now have automated systems to facilitate this. Claiming that you worked somewhere that you didn't is a very stupid way to pad your resume.
Just because they're not askinng you for proof means nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I gotta disagree a little bit. A lot of a college CS program is not outdated in 5 years. Consequently a lot of it does not apply at all to most jobs....
Operating Systems -- The underlying principles are mostly the same
Algorithms -- New ones are constantly being discovered but the most popular ones have been the same for 30+ years mostly (the undergrad level ones are generally not newer things)...
Networking -- Some changes with wireless but most of the TCP/IP protocol that is taught in undergrad courses is the same
Discrete Math -- Again mostly the same for the past 30 years
Computer Organization -- Mostly this is the same (assuming the course on digital system design/k-maps/binary number systems/etc...)
Some Intro Programming Class -- The underlying concepts apply, although the specific language is changing all the time. Although they are not that different...C#/Java/C++ all imperative languages
The rest is all math (Calculus...not changing, Linear Algebra, etc...) and electives (Compilers, Databases, etc.). A lot of the electives are mostly the same at an undergraduate level. Although there do seem to be more fad of the minute classes, ie iPhone game design or state of the art classes...ie Video Game Design..... But they are in the minority and in 1998-2002 when I was an undergrad they didn't exist...in my school (today they do)
What seems to change hourly are the various libraries/programming language of the day/framework of the day. And my college didn't teach any of those. It focused on the core CS concepts, not specific technologies. Although we did use Oracle/MySQL a bit in database class, we did not learn Oracle/MySQL, we just used it as a vehicle for expressing concepts in class. Programming assignments were mostly straight forward algorithm implementations which just used programming concepts and easily can be ported into any language. We didn't get crazy into C++/Java specific things.
But one of my complaints has been that I really don't use any of that... I use some common sense things from algorithms about linked lists/arrays/hash tables and the various orders of magnitudes of common applications, but mostly I use libraries that implement them. And I knew that stuff before algorithms class. Mostly in business program you are using the STL/Java Library/C# libraries and all the collections are implemented. For building a quick GUI to a database it really doesn't take the advanced math/concepts of a CS program.... Admittedly if you were building video games or working for Google then sure computer architecture and advanced knowledge comes in handy. In a Google phone interview they took everything into consideration, the memory hierarchy, the swap space, disk access times, etc... With a job like that it is good to know the PC to wring out performance... Or video game programming because games are constantly pushing the envelope. But those are the exception, not the rule.
Where I have failed and a lot of companies are failing is that for the first job it is important for a lot of grads to learn how to organize big programs and program with an eye towards maintenance. That is where you really learn how to program (or working on an open source project). Colleges don't teach that. Most assignments are short, maybe 1,000 lines of code or less. Also you usually don't need to maintain them, so you can throw a bunch of garbage together that runs correctly and then wash your hands of it. Implementing a Hash Table, or maybe your own database class that writes to a file is not the same thing as taking over some 10,000 line accounting package....