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So I'm going to be blatant with you. (Your friends are on the right track.)
A master's degree is probably pretty useless for most jobs as a programmer.
Companies have started accepting experience and skills over just a degree. You need to actually be good if you apply.
It hit me too. Granted it was just the intro class, but there were times where I really struggled in my CS class. As a result, I'm now going to carefully think about how well/poorly I do in the next few CS classes and think about if I still want the degree or not. I may end settling on a minor in CS and get an IT job. (I'm getting an IT degree regardless of the CS situation) Then I'd just program for fun/build my skills up to the point I could get a programming job. -
No, formal education is mostly meaningless and could be compressed into 2 semesters. I appreciate your enthusiasm but sitting in classes ans studying all the bullshit they teach you will help you nothing. I learned 90% of what i know on my own. This is coming from a former data scientis, now working with blockchain data, so its not like im a web developer who needs literally nothing from the theory they teach.
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But I too think that learning from ourselves and gain skills is really important but if you go that way just try to learn the theoretical part of what are you learning and not just copy paste what you've saw on the internet, even on stack overflow.
This is what I'm trying to say. They prefer people who just "do" but they don't care if they know what that people know about it. If the interface is good, fine. But what about the code? What about the integrity part? This is what upsets me more. I'm learning to understand every bit of what I'm doing. I always ask why I'm doing something while coding. I think this is the best approach to become a better professional. But I clearly see in my group of friends that I'm the one who's wrong. -
@JNuno007 See that's where you're wrong.
People who are autodidacts don't just copy and paste. Most actually do learn the theoretical principles and how to apply said principles -
@JNuno007 I think you're assuming programmers without a degree don't understand they are writing.
You can learn a lot by doing. I like to think of it as building blocks for the brain. Everything I have worked on would help with the next. -
The autodidact fears these questions:
*) What is Big O and how does it inform your work?
*) Of while, for, foreach; which is best for checking for a number in a string? Why?
*) How would you optimize storing a tree into an array?
But as an autodidact, I’ve never had those questions for programming. It has always been about “getting along” or tooling. -
@Stuxnet I ended up going that direction with a BS in IT and a minor in software engineering. I ended up self-teaching myself a lot of programming in my spare time. (Doing JDBC self-teaching as I speak).
It was less stressful than working on a CS degree and I think I made the right choice in the end. -
@starrynights89 I just don't want to waste thousands of dollars and years of my life on a degree that's basically useless.
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Your friends are right. If I were to be brutally honest I'd say you either have impostor syndrome or you're using getting another degree as an excuse to put off the work needed to learn on your own.
I can pretty much guarantee that you won't learn a single smidgen of a thing in your cs degree that you'll use in actual development -
@Stuxnet If I had a quarter for everytime I thought that....
Look, I'll tell you this much. The market these days pretty much expects you to have a BS to even have someone talk to you for an interview. I've had companies contact me from 1000 miles away from my hometown with offers for Java backend devlepement after I get graduated in the spring. You need a baseline for a company to want to commit.
A degree is really just a way to get you a set of tools, it's what you do with those tools that matters, but I'd rather have those tools then to start with nothing. I wouldn't be half the compent system admin that I am now without it let alone a programmer.
A degree in any general IT/CS field is going to be worth it. I have yet to meet anyone at my job where a STEM degree didn't pay off. -
@Fexell You risk major gaps in your knowledge if you decide to enroll in the copy paste school of Computer Science. Even if you make sure you analyse and understand the code you read, you won't learn much theory, which is useful for analysing programs beyond readability. You will however be great at doing work of minimal complexity, but some people have greater career goals than that.
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@DataJockey that's an overstatement. Theory is important, but most degrees today don't really offer anything substantial towards learning theory, other than direction. Someone who knows what they want to know, can easily learn it outside of a university.
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@hashedram you are right, you can learn it outside of university but i don't think someone does. Things that seem to doesn't matter are important for the big picture at the end.
Well maybe it's something personal, maybe it's too long ago, maybe it's the country. I can only speak about my experience. -
@DataJockey on the contrary, 100% of the people I work with, taught themselves theoretical subjects like architecture and design patterns. I don't know of a single architect who didn't become one through self learning. That includes more than my own country.
I'm sure there are studies out there that find the percentage of self learners -
There are still some parts of the industry and some specific countries that value a degree in CS for a role in CS.
But most of the companies value someone who can learn and unlearn on their own. It's an important skill that you should have.
Those YouTube copy-pasters won't reach any real level of problem solving if they don't evovle.
And you won't be able to do anything usefull if you don't learn something from outside of uni.
These are all based on experience. -
i'm sorry, but they are right. maybe not in the source (using YOUTUBE as tutorial source for coding is pretty stupid), but yes in principle.
i'm a self-taught programmer, i have friends who finish IT school in a year, and i'm still better at coding than at least 50% of them.
i had no trouble finding programming work at 18, right as i finished high school, and nobody cared I had no official uni IT education. in some cases (and I agree with it) it was even taken as a positive, a show that I really am interested in the area, if without uni education, i know as much or more than people with uni education.
i have the fundamentals... not all of them, but i'm still learning, always learning, so i'm learning those as well.
funny tidbit: i learned basics of Java in a week, on a paid project where I was doing the end term project/homework for a uni student who has been "studying" java for 2 years and knew basically nothing of it.
me neither, but i learned all i needed while making the thing -
well, you don't really need the degree, if you want, you want, that's your deal, but you can still learn everything that you need on internet, not just copy pasting code from YouTube, I'm talking about, algorithm, optimization, the math, the theories. it will just take you that extra time doing it by yourself. but you don't NEED college.
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@bkwilliams autodidact here:
big O - time/instruction complexity of an algorithm. usually it doesn't inform my work at all, i just try to avoid cubic and quadratic n's, with today's hardware and what software is usually being written, that's enough.
"check for a number in a string" - what do you mean by that? check there is a specific number in there (and is it 1digit or multiple digit?), or just check whether there's a(ny) numeric character in the string? vague question. i'll assume the last option. in that case, "while", because (at least in c# and at least in Unity) foreach does boxing/unboxing on each element, which is slow, and for would iterate through whole string which is unnecessary. so i'd go for while with manually defined and updated counter, with a loop condition of "while counter position is smaller than string length and char in string at counter position++ is not number", and a line after which checks if the counter is smaller than string length (we found num) or not. -
@bkwilliams tree into an array? any kind of tree or a binary one? again, vague question, but even the easier variant here would require more thinking that i'm willing to do right now =D
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@starrynights89 What I meant by useless degree is me not being a good programmer and therefore not getting a job.
I struggled to apply what I was leaning to the assignments (which were pretty real world based assignments, so shout out to my awesome professor for that). I could tell you everything you want to know about my code, my professor's code, and even classmates code. Understanding it was not an issue.
But it oftentimes took me way too long to get the assignments done. I struggled with over thinking everything and not knowing where to start was my biggest weaknesses.
So I'm not trying to get a degree to still be a shit programmer who can't get a job because he's shit. -
@Fexell I hope you've considered the possibility that some of these "stuck up" people may in actuality be more capable than you, and have simply met people like you and found them wanting.
However, your actions don't suggest you are a person who is secure in their intelligence and competence, and I can't have a debate with someone who is more interested in protecting their ego than forming better (more productive) opinions. -
@starrynights89 Oh and I'm getting a BS in IT for sure. Was going to get an IT minor for the hell of it, but then I decided to say fuck it and get the IT degree lol
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@Alice @hashedram true, i was not clear enough. Most programmers i know learn through self learning. I learned coding long before uni and i still learn new things every day.
But! ...most of the stuff you learn through self learning are things you are interested in or you need for your job/current project.
Uni has a plan for you to learn and you have time to learn it. And you have to learn it allthough you don't understand (yet) what it's for. These guys at uni who make these plans are no retards. They know what you need to study to get the big picture at the end. -
@segfault0xff Those are literal geniuses.
Gates dropped out of Harvard aka one of the most reputable and competitive universitoes in the world. He also made 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT.
Not to be a dick or question people's intelligence, but comparing an average person to Bill is bullshit. -
@Stuxnet not comparing, just stating fact.
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@segfault0xff Right, but you're implying anyone can do that.
And that is total bullshit.
These people are far from the average human being. Their methods of success will not work for anyone. -
@DataJockey I would like I think most modern University education is completely retarded as far as software development is concerned actually
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@Fexell That doesn't really work, does it? I'm not the one swearing and insulting people. My comment simply posits that people who aren't insecure don't go around insulting people who are expressing different viewpoints in a polite manner (which OP was).
Unless you feel I was insulting you with my first comment, I'm gonna assume you're taking the "I know you are you said you are but what am I?" approach to arguing, which I'm not interested in engaging with. -
Well @Fexell you didn't need to insult me but ok I understand that being behind a screen makes easier to insult. I just want to thank all of you for chatting about this. I think I was misunderstood... I wasn't bragging when I said I had BS and MsC... That didn't give me anything for my professional life, that's why I'm taking one in a field that I truly love. And I'm a self learner, I like to learn everything but I thought that taking a degree in computer science would be a plus. And my friends were disrespectful when they said those things because they were just saying without a cause that a degree is nothing.
I think you did understand I was saying that having a person with a degree is better than a person o self taught... I wasn't saying that and sorry if I misguided you, English is not my first language.
I wanted to say despite of being a person who has a degree and has good grades, he/she doesn't deserve being insulted with "anyone can do whatever you do by checking on YouTube" -
I've learned web development way before I entered in a course and I must say that having a teacher that is open for questions and exploration is easier because we can have faster answers for our problems.
Thanks again for talking, this is a great community and I'm happy we can discuss this and be open minded :) we don't need to be agressives with each other. -
@JNuno007 no it wouldn't. No one has to tell me about mvx. Id eventually figure it out if I worked on MVC frameworks
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@JNuno007 not at all. A university isn't just about syllabus. You have projects, like minded people to work with teams, clubs, motivation sources, etc. Those will help immensely with the self learning you do aside from what they teach.
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@hashedram @Alice thank you for your advice :)
Brothers and sisters... Some of you know this frustrating argument that I'm going to present you and please... please talk with me about this rant and how to get over this...
I'm a boy that finished a scientific bachelor degree and a master degree that didn't help me to find a job, I've tried every day for a year and was literally scammed two times by two companies. I hit rock bottom but didn't give up and decided to take another degree... In computer science. I'm a year short to end my bachelor's degree and I'm really happy of what I'm doing... But when I try to talk about that with my friends, about what I've learned and what I can do... They simply respond with "you can do that by just watching some YouTube videos, I can build an app/website/software just that easy"...and I argue with them by saying that you can build some of it but not with the complete fundamentals and with the real business patterns and development...
The worst part is... Some of my friends are computer scientist and they agree with this... "You don't need high grades or a degree to be on the market and build this stuff, you can't even imagine how bad programmers are there in this world working with high salaries"...
This is frustrating because they are just losing all the fundamentals... The need to know what we are doing while we are coding instead of just looking an example on YouTube and thinking that now they know it all...
These are the kind of people that can create apps or other kind of software with bugs or security breaches... And they dont care... They prefer to lower my all night study to be the most professional person I can be. I don't want to create anything just because "it's how the man/woman said in the video"...
This really suck. I'm really sorry to rant with such a basic commentary. But the discussion was heated... They prefer a person with internet without any knowledge in computer science over a computer scientist that must create an application without any help...
It saddens me because I believe we can be self learners and be successful, but having the help of experienced professionals to certificate you and give you a diploma for your ability to build projects is a must to initiate the journey to become the best developer/programmer you can be...
Thank you in advance rant friends, you are the best
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