Crazy. It depends on the kind of software being built. Working on embedded systems for avionics is an entirely different animal than working CRM software development as an example. Even Wozniak didn’t have a degree until 1986, long after Apple went public.

Most of the people I worked with at Apple didn’t have CS degrees yet they built the thing many of you are using to read this.

Much of software development is deciding what to build rather than how to build it — that takes skills far beyond CS. We are building software for people to use rather than building it for its own sake.

CS people might know algorithms but do they understand why they even need it? How does it help the user? Some of the worst places I’ve ever worked had lots of CS degree people who spent more time complaining about framework defaults than building something people are able to quickly use and pay money for.

Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees.

Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub,) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox.) — no CS degree.

Stewart Butterfield (Slack) had degrees in philosophy! Reid Hoffman — also a liberal arts guy.

Avie Tevanian (Architect of MacOS,) — no CS degree. And while Steve Jobs wasn’t as technically astute as Wozniak — he still did tech and of course, no degree at all.

I could go on all day — I only mentioned the famous ones. At Apple I could list a hundred top engineers with no CS degree. I am sure most people here could.

The CS degree gatekeeping is complete ridiculousness.

I am biased though— I spent 7 years at Apple and have been in this business 16 years and my degree? Journalism.

CS people might be able to answer questions, but many times they don’t know the questions to ask. Tech has room for everyone and everyone brings a different skill set to the party. Not all doctors need to be neurosurgeons.