My asshole coworkers talking about how programmers without a degree are worth shit and cannot achieve anything in industry besides working from startup to startup.

Well, surprise, I'm sitting right next to them, in the same big company and I don't have ANY higher education at all.

Just because I prefer more hands-on experience than theory stuff doesn't make me worse developer than those bastards. I just learn more from working on something, than from sitting in classroom and taking notes.

Fortunately people at HR and boss also valued my previous experience when they hired me, but now having to work with those guys every day is killing me.

Stand up to them, and tell them they're wrong.

Well, people usually won't learn programming from taking notes in lectures? Anyways, if you have the skills, you can pay the bills right.

I know people like these,who think only having a degree makes you smart. I also know some with a degree, who are a little stupid and i also know people without a degree, who know stupid people with a degree and by that logic, think that people without a degree (like themselves) are actually the smarter ones. While i know some without a degree, who are smarter than others with a degree, i also know cases where the person is just too stupid to get one.

In the real world, what you can do is what matters. Good managers know that, the rest is ego-bullshit and they can go fuck themselves.

I'd say it's like drinking at a party. You don't *need* it to have fun but it does help.
They've probably just never knowingly met someone like you before.

How it's obvious they're wrong? Businesses are regularly turning down applicants with a college degree but no experience.

Having both now at this point? I've seen what they do in others as a sort of catty justification of their own life choices. Might be outright arrogance or something else in their case though.

I feel it's mandatory to mention here that 2 of the largest companies in the world were both started by dropouts: Microsoft and Apple

@Jop- wouldn't use Apple as an example for anything beyond design

I have a degree and i think for the most part i would gave been better off just jumping into the industry

@Jop- sure. I'm just saying that education is not a guarantee of competence nor quality.

I'm 21, I'm a full stack engineer who also co leads our end to end automated testing team. No formal education, I have experience with C++ ( actual std not MS ), C, C#, Java, FPC Lazarus, JavaScript ( primary focus ), Python ( secondary focus ), and GoLang ( learning ).

I have experience with both agile continuos integration/deployment. I'm up to keep with industry standards like Docker, Vagrant, and AWS, Chef/Ansible, and other fascinating tools.

I've set up my own independent CI systems for personal projects namely Jenkins and Concourse, I have basic sysadmin experience including NGINX/Apache.

I have a very extensive background reverse engineering and creating embedded systems.

I know and use both relational and NoSQL databases on the daily.

What I can tell you after interviewing members for both my teams is that formal education is shite. You only learn programming basics and theory, with a focus on algorithms in most schools. They don't prepare you at all for the real world.

There's a difference between education and intelligence. Education imparts knowledge, not intelligence. The latter is pretty much decided from birth.

Don't diss education because you know some idiots who believe that education makes you more intelligent.

Knowing more is always better than knowing less. Don't be proud of the fact that you know less than someone just because you are able to compete with them in our shitty industry.

That said, higher education of course isn't the only way to educate yourself. But computer science theory is fucking awesome ok? Enough putting it down.

I'm so sick of people going on about how theory isn't important. Of course it's always the people that don't know any theory saying that. Maybe if you actually knew some you wouldn't be so quick to put it down.

I don't have a degree in this field myself, but I work with another engineer who does, and he always says "I went to college so I can pay off my college loans." I think degrees can be very useful, however, in my eyes, a degree can be substituted for experience.

Actually, @devios1 that isn't true at all. Intelligence isn't 'decided at birth'. Intelligence is not static. The human mind is a beautiful tool and can adapt amazingly well.