Mostly. I took a Perl, C++ and Java classes at SF City college. $13 per credit hour. Best money I ever spent. I also had a Fortran class in college.
Programming languages are designed to be as easy to learn as possible, while still being powerful. You can’t expect every dev to be a genius with 5 years to learn their craft. All the hard work goes into designing the language so that learning it should be as easy as possible.
So it’s not like learning biology or chemistry or something - which is designed by nature and often super counterintuitive and inscrutably complex.
So what are the employers thinking? Why take the self taught dude with a physics degree over the self taught dude with no degree? Why not just attempt to evaluate who is better at the job and pick that person? I could see the degree being a tiebreaker if it’s close, but I don’t understand why it is a requirement.
Believe me, I’ve tried (not for programming but same argument).
If you can see it’s dumb and I can see it’s dumb, you would think they would see it too. But they can’t.
The most cogent excuse I ever got (which was of course idiotic) is that well for job X we have always required a college degree, so it would be unfair to those who already have that job if we take someone who doesn’t have one. Even if that person could do the job well.
It’s not completely idiotic. Even an art history degree shows that you have done some critical thinking, can meet a deadline, are less likely to be an anti-social weirdo, etc. It’s not a great policy, but I can see the line of thinking.
It also shows you’re of a certain level of status - which is crap imo.
The only time it ever became an issue was one guy. And the really stupid part is we weren’t even hiring him directly, it was on contract through Infosys.
But then as soon as he got in, he was so good and they were in this millennial fetish phase - they wanted to immediately hire him full time. All of a sudden the degree requirement evaporated.
Sure, but the soft skills shouldn’t take precedence over the hard skills.
That’s why I feel like a degree is a fine tiebreaker to separate people who are close. Look at programming ability first and then after you’ve assessed that, consider unrelated degree.
Looking at whether they have a degree of any kind first is doing it backwards.
As someone who has hired many people the answer is simple. It’s a filtering mechanism to limit applications. Hiring someone is very time consuming and expensive. It costs around 1/3rd their annual salary. Many jobs get hundreds of applications. Things like a degree requirement are one way to limit the application pool.
A degree also signifies at least a basic level of social ability and ability to learn and execute.
The only time I pay any attention to the actual degree, courses etc is if the person is completely green with zero job experience.
I think about risk of ruin every day. It’s much scarier than death for me. I know if I recovered and was one of those people who can’t walk to the kitchen w/o taking a rest, I’d want to die. I’d be in such a black depression with no end in sight.
The point is that they want both, the soft skills and the hard skills. It’s a lot quicker to do the degree check first as that’s a yes/no answer. Is this person a good programmer? takes more time.
I learned, such as I did, almost entirely on the job. I had a friendly interview because I knew people who worked at the company who had faith in me. I demonstrated a bit of knowledge in the interview. Mostly learned on the job though.
Last year I had a programming contract working 2 days a week for several months and same thing basically. I knew someone there who had faith and I figured out what was necessary as I went along.
I took a semester of Fortran in college (I started as an engineering major) and a semester of BASIC in Jr. High.
Yeah, people are just impressed and it makes a difference. My first real job was as a Real Estate Appraiser, but Math and English degree from a good University was like - instahire (I also knew people - knowing people is the best). (I made more money that year as an appraiser than I ever did as a programmer and I did alright as a programmer)
