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Is a Computer Science Degree Worth Getting Anymore?
snydeq writes "Self-taught technologists are almost always better hires than those with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a huge student loan, writes Andrew Oliver. 'A recruiter recently asked me why employers are so picky. I explained that of the people who earned a computer science degree, most don't know any theory and can't code. Instead, they succeed at putting things on their resume that match keywords. Plus, companies don't consider it their responsibility to provide training or mentoring. In fairness, that's because the scarcity of talent has created a mercenary culture: "Now that my employer paid me to learn a new skill, let me check to see if there's an ad for it on Dice or Craigslist with a higher rate of pay." When searching for talent, I've stopped relying on computer science degrees as an indicator of anything except a general interest in the field. Most schools suck at teaching theory and aren't great at Java instruction, either. Granted, they're not much better with any other language, but most of them teach Java.'"
The mercenary culture is a direct result of companies not sufficiently increasing wages for existing employees. If you want to avoid having talent leave, then pay them what the competition is offering, and treat them well. It's pretty simple.
Wut?
Making grandiose claims with no actual data?
Yup. He probably didn't go to college.
Poorly written and full of absurd sweeping generalizations.
People are making a fundamental error in terminology here. If you're looking to hire someone for a programming job, then you shouldn't be looking at someone with a CS degree. Computer Science is not about coding or programming, it's about the practices behind it. If you want a coder, go hire a code monkey from your local technical college. If you want someone to design the software, make sure it's sane, and then hand it off to a code monkey, then hire a CS grad.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I would not hire anybody who is "Self Taught". In fact, I looked at schools, GPA, the whole shebang. I want to see that someone has the discipline to go through the process, work with others, and actually see something through to completion.
Tattoos, piercings, etc-- Didn't matter, I had lots of good people that may look funky. Degree from a good school- Mandatory.
Your mileage may vary, but I think you deserve to hear the truth from somebody that has actually hired developers and managed them.
The Author doesn't seem to make the point that he's trying to make. Computer Science degrees may not be a good predictor for coding in language-of-the-week, but computer scientists would not make the kind of dumb rookie errors that you see every day in the real world. I still shudder about a self-taught contractor who wasted weeks trying to write a sort. I'm surprised that an article as poor as this one made the front page.
I'm still surprised that there are /.'ers cannot distinguish between the degree/career mappings that be. At least in Canada and the USA
IT:
-Learn: Active directory, Windows or UNIX servers, user management, e-mail server management, virus removal, setting up routers and VPN
-Jobs: IT help desk, corporate IT, call centres
Comp Sci:
-Learn: Discrete math, basic programming, databases and DB theory, algorithm design, basic physics,
-Jobs: University/academia, entry-level programming jobs
Engineering (Electrical and Computer):
-Learn: Calculus, discrete math, electrical circuits, electronics, materials, advanced physics, chemistry, economics
-Jobs: advanced programming/development jobs, embedded dev, chip fabrication, academia
Most IT programs in Canada are 2-year full-time/accelerated programs, while CS is a full-time 4 year program, and engineering is a 4-5 year double-full-time program. I still laugh when people are surprised that comp-sci majors know shit about removing viruses from PCs, while the engineering and IT students have been removing and even MAKING viruses since elementary school (ie: before they were 13 years old).
"Now that my employer paid me to learn a new skill, let me check to see if there's an ad for it on Dice or Craigslist with a higher rate of pay."
Or, you know, my employer could pay me what I'm worth now that I have expertise with this new skill. You paid for the training. Great, thanks; much appreciated. Now pay me the new salary I can command, too. Them's the breaks. You needed the skill to be brought on board, and I learned it, now pay for it. Consider it an investment in a better employee.
I went in to ask for a raise years ago, having just graduated with my (you guessed it) CS degree, and also now that I had many more responsibilities and was travelling for the company.
I was told that "travel is a perk, and your responsibilities are the logical progression of your position. We can't afford to give you that large of a raise." So I found someone who could. Best job I ever had, but below a certain threshold, the money really did matter.
Honest employers realize this, and while everybody likes to save a few bucks, the best employers are the ones who care. It's a rare gift when you work for one.
A job requires a bachelors? Well there you go it matches. If they require one in "computers" it also matches.
Also don't whine about keyword matching: Learn it and use it. In many big companies, resumes are filtered by HR. They don't know shit about technical jobs. So what they do is look at the list of requirements given to them, and see if the resume matches. If so, it goes in the "good" pile, if not it isn't sent on.
So if a company asks for experience in TCP/IP and you have networking experience, don't put networking, put TCP/IP. HR doesn't know those two things are related.
This is how it works at the university I work at. Most departments have HR filter their resumes so the manager doing the hiring isn't inundated by crap. Some people resume spam no matter how little their experience is related to the job so you can have literally hundreds to wade through. So they have HR filter. What that means is only resumes that meet the requirements are passed on and THAT means buzzwords have to match.
Like writing code, writing resumes requires using the proper terminology. Don't bitch about it, learn it and do it.
Self-taught, learned Basic, Pascal, C back in High School. Got a job and career without a degree, wanted to get a degree, thirteen years after high-school eventually got Computer Science degree.
From that perspective I can tell you that it only made me a thinking programmer (not just a coder), a program designer. Topics such as asymptotic analysis are indispensable. Those who do not have such a degree, I found them to be lacking in code quality.
Computer Science degree is absolutely needed.
I'm not a coder, but I did do CS in high school back in the pre-Internet late 80s. We first learned flow charts, then algorithms, then had to program functions on calculators, and finally got out hands on TSR-80s to write BASIC programs. The brilliance of this was that my education was not limited to languages, but rather to techniques and logic. And now I teach philosophy, and have a healthy fascination with computers.
As a professor, I ask my students to do the simplest thing - writing blogs with decent lay-out. They have all the tools they need, and I offer whatever help they request. Yet, this Facebook generation often gets confused with the simplest of tasks, including uploading pictures outside of Facebook. The Internet, obviously enough, has dumbed down everything. Students no longer try to apply techniques, but rather to respond to interfaces.
To bring this back on topic - schools need to teach the logic and the basic techniques - with those, one needs simply to learn a language, which is not that difficult.
When I hire I find most self taught aren't very good either. I think those with a degree generally have better breadth and depth with different technologies and theories. This is partially because a degree forces you to do some things you aren't interested in. But if you're looking for corporate developers go with information systems majors. Databases design and applied programming languages are more useful to most internal business analyst/developer types than compiler design, Assembler language, and even C.
A CS degree is a requisite but not sufficient property to make a good developer. They also need a genuine interest in the field, which most often manifests as being self-taught before getting a degree, and continuing to self-teach after getting said degree.
Purely self-taught developers will miss learning a lot of important topics, not because they're difficult, but because they don't realize what they don't know. In particular, data structures (anything beyond arrays), databases (and normal forms) and algorithmic complexity. I don't care how good you are with $language, if you don't understand the above topics like the back of your hand, you're going to make a mess.
On the flip side, purely academic developers are typically going to have knowledge gaps in more practical topics like input validation, version control systems and bug trackers. Again, you can get by without these, but you're going to make a mess (or someone else is going to make a mess of it for you when they exploit it).
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
What you want a guy who went to automobile trade school and owns at least one performance car he built/maintains himself.
Employers don't have to choose between CS degree OR self-taught. They can choose both - look for people with CS degrees and side projects. Lots of kids I went to school with wrote some other software that had nothing to do with their classwork. And we put that on our resumes.
That's why the whole, "I have a CS degree but I can't get a real job because I don't have experience!" excuse is BS. Anyone worth their salt as a programmer who has a CS degree can MAKE THEIR OWN EXPERIENCE at ANY TIME! When you get home from your call center job, just put down the controller and write some software, and assuming you stick with it, 6 months later you'll have some experience.
paintball
..and the point being missed is that you can be someone who worked on cars their entire life, have a mechanical engineering degree, too - those are the guys who work on F1 cars.
The best candidates will have proper academic training AND drive. They're not exclusive!
I grew up taking apart 8-bit machines, hacking opcodes in memory and messing with analog phone lines. First I wanted to know how stuff worked.. then I wanted to know WHY stuff worked.
YMMV. It's not black and white.
..don't panic
I manage software developers for a large tech firm and have done significant hiring.
My experience is in direct conflict to the ideas presented here. I have found the best results with pure CS graduates. The vast majority of self-taught developers I've worked with have huge gaps in their fundamental CS knowledge, while CS graduate rarely make poor algorithmic choices that we come to regret when our projects scale. Their code is often of higher quality so code reviews are less cumbersome and require less rework. CS graduates are usually nerds from an early age, and to a large degree self-taught before they reached college. These people are generally "serious" about computers, general nerdiness, and their work.
Some self-taught people may be brilliant developers with less student loan debt than CS graduates, but they are not a reliable source of talent. If you are a professional bulding a team, stick with CS graduates, or you take a big risk. That well-spoken self-taught programmer might seem like a great candidate, but wait until you come across real CS problems.
PS - There are a few engineering degrees which I think are just as good as CS
I love it how a CS degree gets you an "entry-level programming" job, but an engineering degree gets you an "advanced programming/development" job, as if someone will hire you as a team lead straight out of university.
If you want an "advanced development" job, a CS degree will do just as well as a SE degree in the long run. The advantage of CS is that it will work marginally better for you if you want to do R&D rather than just D.
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I want to see that someone has the discipline to go through the process, work with others, and actually see something through to completion.
So what you're saying is, you're an asshole. You aren't hiring based on experience or ability, but because you went to school and therefore they should go to school. You say that you value someone seeing something through to completion -- but you can't fake ability or skillset for years on end. You can fake test scores, classes, hell -- you can buy yourself a degree online if you so desire.
But you can't fake job references. You can't fake supervisors saying "that guy really knows his stuff." You're a bad manager because you've made an assumption, you're operating on belief. That's what bad managers do. Good managers go on instinct and experience... and maybe, if you had worked your way into your position instead of having been handed a degree and slotted into it, you'd know that.
I have no respect for you, and I wouldn't work for you whether I had a degree or not, regardless of the pay. I work for managers who understand information technology is a creative profession, where skills change faster than courses can be designed to teach them, and experience is worth more than book smarts. I don't want to work with someone who can name all the layers of the OSI model but can't explain to me why having large buffers on the border router is a bad idea when it serves a call center.
And that's what you get with a college degree: Book smart. Not street smart.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
At least from my observation, self-taught developers tend to stick with higher languages such as Ruby or Python rather than C or assembly (not a bash on their skill, just the tool they favor). Following this tendency, they would rarely run into a problem with C that requires them to call assembly code and they wouldn't miss this skill-gap.
Some nations provide grants and, arguably, a superior education as a result. It is my contention that educational systems that are driven by "market forces" must, by definition, offer the least at the greatest price that they can. (The more you offer, the greater the cost of providing the service. The lower the price, the less the return. Profit is return - cost. Market forces maximize profit and the only way to do that is to reduce what you offer and raise the price.)
It is also a truism that beancounters aren't very good at deciding what services are actually important to the consumer. They're very good at telling you the price of everything but the value of nothing.
What is wanted is to abolish student loans, switch universities to grant-based systems, fund students via grants, and pay for it by demanding that the universities so-funded provide education of high enough quality that the fraction of the increase in profits that go into taxes covers all those grants. That doesn't mean any individual line of education needs to pay for itself, only that the system as a whole be in dynamic equilibrium. The cost of one course must be covered by the benefit of another.
By eliminating market forces, universities can focus not on fund-raises and PR stunts but teaching and research.
Oh, that's another thing. I'd argue that all universities must do both as must all lecturers. (How the hell else are the lecturers to stay current, if not by research? How the hell else are the researchers to improve their communication, if not by teaching? Have different ratios for different jobs, since not all people are good at both, but breadth of experience shouldn't be limited to students. Fossilizing is how you ruin a good lecturer.)
Since most kids enter university with inadequate education to actually DO any kind of real degree program (universities often waste the first year teaching remedial maths and English), I'd contend that schools should also be forced to pick up the pace. This, of course, requires adequate funding, but it also requires a serious look at what is being taught. Creationism and ID are distractions. Standardized exams may be cheap, but they allow teachers to teach to the syllabus (ie: teach the least) and to avoid teaching any understanding. Schools should be 100% about understanding, facts should be on formula sheets. I'd also abolish leaving school before completing a BS/BA rather than at a fixed age. It means the best can leave at age 15, so it doesn't change school-leaving ages, it just means those leaving early are competent to.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
[quote] that's because the scarcity of talent[/quote]
Hogwash, no such scarcity exists. There is a scarcity of talented programmers that will work for minimum wage (inside the U.S.). But that's not really the same thing now, is it?
Whenever someone claims there is no talent scarcity in the software development industry, I am reminded of the poker proverb: If after ten minutes at the poker table you do know know who the sucker is, you are the sucker.
If you work as a developer and you do not notice the severe level of talent scarcity, you are probably not talented enough to notice. I don't know you at all so I could be way off base in this one case, but I have never met a skilled developer who wasn't frustrated with the lack of talent in the industry.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
>> "I don't have a computer science degree"
Found this sentence and did not read the article. The guy lucked out by being in the right place at the right time, and now he's spouting his confirmation bias to anyone who would listen. I'm also pretty sure he doesn't know what "confirmation bias" is. :-)
Stay clear of anyone who is [anything]-only.
Anyone who will only use one language will warp all problems to that language -- and worse, warp all solutions to only those that they don't have to think about. It doesn't matter if the language is Java, C#, C++, C, Perl, Python, Ruby, or COBOL. If they are only willing to code in one language, let them go.
Nearly every accredited university offers "language survey" courses. This is where a CS degree can be useful -- the graduates have, in theory, been exposed to other languages. Bring this up in the interview. See if they can articulate the tradeoffs of various languages.
Entirely-self-taught developers often require a lot of basic remedial training. I'd suggest investing in them only if they will spend their evenings completing a CS degree. For an intelligent and skilled person, this isn't terribly difficult. The ones to be careful with are the "Meh, I can't be bothered to obtain/complete a degree." types. They might be intelligent, and they might be skilled. But their ego is going to make a lot of work for everyone else, as that can't-be-bothered attitude is a sign.
(Yes, there are lots of people who could only possibly succeed in an academic environment where the problem is carefully structured to be completed in five weeks by a mediocre and distracted person. This is where "what do you do in your free time?" comes in useful. One of the best teams I've ever worked on had "What are the last three books you've read for pleasure, and when?" as a key interview question.)
As for the 10% effect ... Sturgeon's Law.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
People seem to have the most problem with the last one, so let me break it down for you: Do NOT go to the whiteboard and start coding. Do that and you have pretty much failed before you have even started. Start by asking some questions. Is it OK if X modifies its parameter(s) in place, or should it pass them in as consts and return by copy? (Usually X is something with a string.) Is it OK to allocate memory if necessary? Is it OK to return a copy or should the programmer pass a buffer? Should I worry about unicode? Should I use char*'s or strings (In the case of C++)? Is there anything else about X that I should be aware of? This is called "gathering requirements." It indicates that you're not just some code monkey. It would also be a good idea to write requirements down somewhere. Like on the whiteboard, maybe.
At this point do not go to the whiteboard and start coding! Go to the whiteboard and a start analyzing the problem. Draw out your memory and look at what happens when you do swaps and things. Push variables around. Consider various methods of solving the problem and their advantages and disadvantages. Think about the loops you'll need to go through. Show the interviewer your train of thought. This is called "designing." It indicates that you're not just some code monkey.
Once you've got that down a couple of them might still want you to code something, but you've already proven you're a man and not a cabbage or something. And even if they DO want code, it'll be easy at this point! You don't have to die on this question, people! Of course that still might not get you in the door at a Google or an Amazon, but that's still all you need at a lot of other companies.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Man, if I had a nickel for every time I'd had to design a query language that doesn't allow queries which will have EXPTIME complexity...