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Computer Science Degrees Aren't Returning On Investment For Coders, Research Finds (theregister.co.uk)
According to a new survey, coders with a bachelor's degree in computer science only earn 3,000 British Pounds (BP) more a year than those who don't have one. The survey of 4,700 developers in the UK was conducted by Stack Overflow, a community site frequented by developers for answers to technical questions. The Register reports the findings: This is despite the average degree now costing 9,000 BP a year in tuition fees alone. Average student debt is now more than 50,000 BP, according the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The research found that the median salary of those who did not have higher education was 35,000 BP per year, while those who gained a bachelor's degree earned 38,000 BP and postgraduates took home 42,000 BP. It found that 48 per cent of developers with less than four years of professional experience currently hold a Computer Science-related undergraduate degree, while 49 per cent had completed an online course instead. The research also found that JavaScript developers were most in demand, with almost 27 per cent of jobs advertised on Stack Overflow now requiring this skill, followed by Java (22 per cent), Python (16 per cent), C# (15 per cent) and ReactJS (9 per cent).
Computer Science degrees aren't supposed to lead to jobs as "coders". That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
You can learn coding in a couple of days. Computer science is something different.
Why? You listed them in increasing order of incompetence. The only people who write shittier code than EEs are mathematicians.
And all of them had the exact same duties: take specs, design an algorithm when needed, and implement it in a programming language.
Some companies gave the title 'engineer' because that was how the pay grades worked.
My job title changed to "engineer" when my duties started to include things like:
- Going through contracts and turning them into milestones.
- Timeline and budget estimation, and tracking projects relative to the estimate.
- Managing a team and mentoring other people.
- Appraisal of and response to issues raised by professional ethics, safety, privacy, environmental impact, and other legal requirements and the public interest.
You know, actual engineering.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I can't be the only one who is proud of their CS degree. The courses I took challenged me greatly, and often taught me the answers to questions that I didn't even think to ask. Maybe I was lucky, but the professors I had helped me expand my knowledge far quicker than I could have done without them. Their dedication to education showed, and made it far easier to learn the concepts, history, and practical application of software development and computer science in general.
I often hear that "I'd rather have a self-taught English major, because they show dedication and adaptability", and I respect that, but I this attitude also sort of dismisses the fact that CS students can be just as dedicated and adaptable, and also have a large amount of relevant knowledge on the subject. I have worked with people with and without degrees in the relevant field, and those with seem to lean on me far less than those without. Just my personal experience.
I wouldn't say that I'd be lost without my CS degree, but I doubt very much I'd be able to get where I am today as quickly as I did, without it. Plus, I really did love my classes, so even if it isn't a "positive return on investment" (which I still kind of doubt is really the case), I do not at all regret earning the degree.
Telescope Builders are often only mediocre Astronomers.
Big surprise!
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If a degree provides an assurance of a "very low" skill level then your schools are either not very good or then they're just letting students pass courses they have no right to pass with their knowledge and skill level.
A degree is supposed to guarantee an at least halfway decent skill level and a versatile foundation to build additional skills on. If a degree doesn't do this, then it's clearly not worth even the paper it's printed on.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."
Once, management finally realizes to that coders without a degree are in most cases actually far more expensive due to lack of skill and limits in what they can do, those without that degree will find themselves unemployed pretty fast and pretty permanently. The funny thing is that the coders without degree do not realize what they miss. Sure, as long as it is simple business logic, almost anybody could do it. But as soon as it gets more complicated, I have yet to find a coder without CS degree that actually gets it and that is really expensive in the long run.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A degree provides an assurance of a *very low* skill level. Some people are very highly skilled at getting degrees they definitely don't deserve. That said, the degree is not worth very much.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
Ideally the knowledge gained on the road to getting that degree is very valuable.
Well, duh....
The vast majority of the time, you don't need a CS degree to write a business application. These days it's mostly CRUD operations using some web stack and database, governed by some business logic. You don't need a CS degree to effectively do that.
We need to take a lesson from the material world. We have materials scientists who invent new materials and do some engineering when an extremely deep understanding of the underlying physics and chemistry is needed. But 99% of the time, a structural engineer is the one who designs how to build a building/bridge/whatever. And typically that structural engineer has a much better understanding of how to put the pieces together in a far more practical way.
We should be aiming for a similar split in computers. We need computer scientists who advance what computers can do and deal with very hard problems. But the vast majority of the time we need a software engineer to assemble what the computer scientists invent into a business application that is secure and just keeps working even when the shit hits the fan.
For example, a computer scientist would generally not need to worry that much about things like failover and automatic recovery since they're primarily building prototypes and testbeds. Just like a materials scientist doesn't spend much time considering "what if a hurricane struck my lab during this test?".
But a software engineering degree could focus a great deal on writing software the just keeps working in very adverse conditions just like a structural engineer has to consider a natural disaster striking the building.
Over my 20 years doing this, I've come across a lot of very elegant systems that are wonderful computer science....and they instantly exploded as soon as they had to deal with something slightly outside what the developer considered.