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Ask Slashdot: CS Degree While Working Full Time?
An anonymous reader writes "First, some quick background: I am 26 years old and I have been working for a large software development company with more than 50,000 employees for about 5 years now. My actual title is Senior Software Engineer, and I am paid well considering I have no degrees and all of the programming languages I have learned (C, C++, C#, Java) are completely self taught. The only real reason I was able to get this job is because I spent a year or so in a support position and I was able to impress the R&D Lead Developer with a handful of my projects. My job is secure for the time being, but what really concerns me is the ability to find another job in the field without 95% of companies discarding me for lack of formal education. I started looking into local community colleges and universities, and much to my dismay, they offer neither nighttime or online courses for computer science. Quitting the job to pursue a degree is not an option, especially considering they will compensate me up to $10,000/yr for going back to school. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? Does anyone know of any accredited colleges and universities that offer a CS degree through online courses? Obviously excluding the scam 'colleges' such as Univ. of Phoenix and DeVry."
Why is it wierd? Any decent company will offer academic compensation and pays for training. Maybe you work at a company run by assholes?
While most universities will not allow you to enroll in a degree part time, they will have no problem with you doing one or two courses. See if your employer will allow you to take off the 1 hour / day 3 days/week to do a course... this would let you do 4-5 courses / year. Whenever you do find the time to do your degree, all these credit hours will be out of the way and it will save you a lot of time.
If your employer is willing to pay for a formal CS education, it's likely they'll be flexible with your work hours. Find a quality university near you, investigate their program and their requirements, and lay out a plan for your boss to look at. They'd probably let you leave a couple hours during the day as long as you came in early/left later to compensate for the hours you've missed. I'm 24 and have a full-time salary position and am getting a CS degree part-time, and only because my employer allows me to leave for a few hours during the day to go to classes.
It's convenient, as I go to a university in a large city, bus to campus when I have them, and bus back to work afterward. Usually I try to take night classes to avoid leaving during the day.
Warning: you will work extremely hard and you won't have much free time if the University you go to is any good.
I've been in the industry nearly 15 years now. I think not having a degree has only come up maybe one or two times. Sure didn't stop me from getting recruited by Microsoft.
What I would focus on is a couple of things:
I'm not trying to knock a college education - if you want it for the education. If you want it just for the advancement, the things above are going to have a much bigger impact on your career and your ability to find employment in many cases.
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