alt Hacker NewsClassic gatekeeping argument insisting a CS degree is necessary to write good software. I don’t have one and have 20+ year successful career with accolades, know many others in the same boat. Obviously there are CS degree people who were also successful, and the flip side comes for both camps, I’ve worked with absolutely awful engineers with or without a CS degree.
It is a signal, not the signal.
Replies
As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds.
Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.
There are many great developers who did not get CS degrees. Might be an unpopular thing to say, but in my experience interviewing a lot of applicants, the majority of applicants who don’t have CS degrees are not in that category.
It’s always great to find a diamond in the rough who has been passed over by other companies for lack of degree and is looking for an opportunity to shine.
On the whole, a CS degree is directionally correlated with being more likely to have a good understanding of the fundamentals, algorithms, and other important context that helps more as the problems get hard. These things can all be learned by someone without a CS degree, but in my experience being open to interviewing non-traditional applicants it’s more common for the self-taught applicants to be more trial and error type devs who got to this point by experimenting and seeing what works.
I always have to give the blanket disclaimer that a CS degree does not guarantee a great dev and a lack of CS degree does not mean the dev is not good. However, I honestly can’t say that a CS degree is not correlated with better developers on the whole. I choose to interview non-traditional applicants who don’t have CS degrees, but to be entirely honest I can’t fault companies who get a lot of applicants who start prioritizing those with degrees.
I think it honestly not even a signal of how good anymore. It's become noise in my experience..
I've worked with an absolute leetcode beast and had a masters in CS. He insisted we use Redis for a project with a lot of relational data. We ended up building a mini relational database on top of redis. Whatever you're imagining about the dev experience, it was worse. He was a lead/senior engineer at the company. Turns out he never bothered to properly learn SQL because he didn't like it. C'est la vie, ggs I guess.
One of the best engineers I worked with was a biochemist who fell in love with programming through chance.
Most of the people I admired in the industry are self taught and passionate about the craft; a lot of them are also immigrants who didn't have access to prestigeus unis. Some went to uni but admit they've been programming since before that.
You can't really learn to be passionate about the craft and to enjoy learning at any uni.
> Neither the prestigious degree nor the good proficiency in algorithmic problem-solving guarantee a career success. They are factors that make statistics work in the favor of the candidate.
I think the article takes a more nuanced view than you suggest. And the existence of counterexamples to a "for the most part" claim are not counterexamples at all.
The author didn't have a CS degree so it's not classic gatekeeping: "For the majority of my career, I neither had a formal, rigorous computer science education...". The author also directly addresses the parent poster's viewpoint: "If I had to categorize the 'no need for education, no need for algorithms' crowd of our field, they’d fall into three categories: They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics."
Personally I agree that a CS degree isn't needed for most software jobs because frameworks and libraries hide most of the gnarly CS stuff. But those are the software jobs least likely to survive adoption of LLM-based software development.
Yup. This post is the worst idea I've ever seen. There's a reason some jobs require formal education, training, and certification (neurosurgeon).
If you're young and thinking about making this your career, absolutely go to school. It's a LOT harder to land a job without that stupid sheet of paper. Especially if you can get someone else to pay for your education.
I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, zaksa.... you're not a brain surgeon. You're scared that you're on longer a rare resource.
Same here, 20+ years, no degree. but have a slightly different view about folks with CS degrees.
It really comes down to the individual. Those who are good with CS degrees would likely be good without them. The majority of those who picked CS as a degree because “it pays well” are truly awful. Only a small handful end up enjoying and understand how to write code and make good software.