Google, Apple and 13 Other Companies That No Longer Require Employees To Have a College Degree (cnbc.com) 224
The economy continues to be a friendly place for job seekers today, and not just for the ultra-educated -- economists are predicting ever-improving prospects for workers without a degree as well. From a report: Recently, job-search site Glassdoor compiled a list of 15 top employers that have said they no longer require applicants to have a college degree. Companies like Google, Apple, IBM and EY are all in this group. In 2017, IBM's vice president of talent Joanna Daley told CNBC Make It that about 15 percent of her company's U.S. hires don't have a four-year degree. She said that instead of looking exclusively at candidates who went to college, IBM now looks at candidates who have hands-on experience via a coding boot camp or an industry-related vocational class.
Theodp (Score:2)
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I read the headline as "Google needs janitors"
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
but they both had "some college.." and Steve did get his B.S. in Electrical Engineering
so not exactly the same as high schoolers being let in the door
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you're fixated on exceptions.
Looking at Apple job listings over the decades, I've seen they've required college degrees for years
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But having worked there in the '90's, non-college grads in professional positions were not uncommon. Hard to point to specific individuals, as with the examples I gave. But, the examples given very much point to the culture. Apple is (was?) very much a meritocracy.
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Apple has never required a college degree. Neither Woz nor Jobs had a degree when they started Apple.
Microsoft was similar - friend of mine got hired there straight out of high school, back in the day.
But that was a different time. Before the mid 90s, CS degrees were rare (most degreed developers has some different degree), and anyone who could write real code in a real language was welcome.
Apps in the Store (Score:4, Interesting)
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Quality on the outside that hides the crappy code...way to judge a book by its cover!
This is true.
No (Score:2)
What do you judge applicants on? Certifications? GPA? Whether they have a degree in an unrelated field like Computer Science?
Not that impressive, really (Score:2)
It's cool that companies like Google and Apple are opening the doors to people who are technically gifted but just didn't go through college, but "cashier", "housekeeper", "barista", and "plumbing associate" are not really worth putting on the list.
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IBM employs A+ or at least they did which doesn't require any college.
I'm sure there are positions at apple that don't require a degree I know that google has been hiring people with non-related degrees for a decade.
Tick tock (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Tick tock (Score:4, Insightful)
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This topic brings to mind one of my favorites [thefederalistpapers.org] that has come up on more than a few occasions...
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At the same time, colleges ha
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A sign the collage bubble will soon burst.
Wunderkinder who think college is useless have been predicting their demise since colleges were invented.
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Most IT employers don't care. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had a 20 year career without a degree. Most employers don't really care, and the ones that do aren't much worth working for. It's a bit of a red flag if you care about a check mark (in what could be a completely unrelated field) over actual experience.
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I too have had a long career in IT. Though I did get a 2 year degree from a trade school, I continually find that my knowledge is full of holes.
There are fundamental gaps in knowledge that, even this late in the game, I continue to fill in by listening to netcasts and researching problems.
My lack of knowledge has never held me back from meeting my ambition level and I have never had a problem landing a job in the field. I just think that, had I started with a real college foundation, I would probably be bet
For what roles? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Don't sell yourself (or anyone else) on a narrative where you can't do anything significant without a degree.
With a solid professional background, proven technical skills, and a couple of hardcore. certifications, a college dropout applied for a high end IT job at Apple some years ago.
Interviewed, received offer with healthy six figure salary, paid relocation, and various other (pretty impressive) perks. Specifics of offer were under NDA and might still be afaik.
Do your time in grunt roles building stuff an
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Don't sell yourself (or anyone else) on a narrative where you can't do anything significant without a degree.
With a solid professional background, proven technical skills, and a couple of hardcore. certifications, a college dropout applied for a high end IT job at Apple some years ago.
Interviewed, received offer with healthy six figure salary, paid relocation, and various other (pretty impressive) perks. Specifics of offer were under NDA and might still be afaik.
Do your time in grunt roles building stuff and supporting it at all hours. Earn some no-bullshit certifications along the way. It can take a dozen or more years of real effort to get near the top of the heap, but so does anything worthwhile in this world.
Well that's just the thing, you are building up years of experience and certifications. How much experience is someone fresh out of a coding bootcamp going to have?
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No one is going to hand a coding bootcamp graduate a six figure salary when there's other folks in line for the same job â"people who've done their time in the trenches for a decade or moreâ" that are willing to bring considerable, deep, and hard-won expertise to bear on an employer's challenges.
Don't mistake meâ" I commend folks for doing a bootcamp. But much like in the military, no one goes directly from bootcamp to three star general.
The world we live in is hypercompetitive. The easy nich
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No one is going to hand a coding bootcamp graduate a six figure salary when there's other folks in line for the same job â"people who've done their time in the trenches for a decade or moreâ" that are willing to bring considerable, deep, and hard-won expertise to bear on an employer's challenges.
Don't mistake meâ" I commend folks for doing a bootcamp. But much like in the military, no one goes directly from bootcamp to three star general.
No, I agree. I just feel like this list is leaving out important information. People think "big money" when they hear Apple, Google, Amazon, etc, and so a lot of people might see this and think they can get an $80-100k job after 3-4 weeks in a coding bootcamp but that's not going to happen. So that's why I asked "what kind of jobs are they really getting?"
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No, I agree. I just feel like this list is leaving out important information. People think "big money" when they hear Apple, Google, Amazon, etc, and so a lot of people might see this and think they can get an $80-100k job after 3-4 weeks in a coding bootcamp but that's not going to happen. So that's why I asked "what kind of jobs are they really getting?"
Agreed. I'd like to make an apples-to-apples comparison:
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New college grads and people with a few years experience don't compete for the same positions at big companies. It's generally not even the same group of recruiters. There's not reason not to interview someone entry level if they've done a coding boot camp, and then demonstrated some real ability though some screening process.
Big companies would do well to broaden their entry-level hiring to include alternate paths, and I do think they're working on it. However, it's tough though to figure out a screenin
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How many non-college degree holders at those companies are getting the huge six-figure salaries vs $10-15 an hour support roles? And for those lucky enough to get more productive roles, is their pay comparable with their coworkers who have 4 year degrees, or are these companies using this as cost-cutting and just bringing in cheaper people to do the same roles?
I don't know about support roles but I'd think someone with a technical degree (or less) could slip into QA in a manual testing role.
Once you're in QA you're close enough to the technical side that you can start applying your skills, writing scripts to perform more advanced tests, build fuzzing tools, etc. Once you've demonstrated enough skills you can work your way into the development side.
You need to choose the right kind of org for this to work, probably a smaller to mid-sized org where roles and manage
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The support role is the first stepping stone.
My own path was-
Call center tech support lv1, 1 year
Learned the ins and outs of working in a call center, built my tolerance for bullshit here.
Call center support lvl 3,4 years
Learned what a real support role offers, got exposure to technical writing, interacted with very high end clients, grew used to responsibility.
Military, 4 years.
Learned REAL responsibility, how to deal with extreme performance pressure, interacted with extremely high end hardware.
Sys admin
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The difference is you have more years of actual coding experience than a recent grad has with reading. At some point that trumps everything else.
Having a degree makes less and less sense (Score:3)
With college costing more and more, I think we are way way past the point where going to college actually makes a lot of sense for almost anyone.
You could get housing near a college, take only online courses, and learn more than most students for probably 100 times less outlay than a college would cost. And probably eat a lot better.
Sure for technical degrees you can make back the money you spend on a college degree, but it's still a lot of money that you have to pay back, that you could have used to start savings earlier - and it's not like what you learn in a CS degree cannot be replicated by external courses.
I would say hiring-wise it's harder to tell if someone knows something without a degree but is that really true? People get interviewed anyway and that is where you are supposed to figure out if they know enough to be helpful; it's not like all college graduates know the same things anyway.
It's especially good to see Google dropping the requirement for a degree, as I believe they used to require not just a degree but a graduate degree for some positions...
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Or you could go to university in many European countries for (almost) free. Or move to NY State, establish residency, and get the resident's scholarship to CUNY/SUNY. Or do the first few years at a community college in a state that offers it for free...
Online classes suck -- they don't get you face-to-face interaction that allows you to network with other students and professors.
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Online classes suck -- they don't get you face-to-face interaction that allows you to network with other students and professors.
That's the whole point of getting housing near a college. You can get plenty of networking in the same way any students do, and pick whatever college you like to meet students in...
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Friend of mine finished his degree a year ago. Half his classes were online anyway. He said those were more useful to him, as he could watch each section of a lecture he struggled with over and over until he got it.
The distinction between "online classes" and "college" is becoming "college is where you buy your degree after doing the online classes". I expect it won't take too many years before the biggest dev employers find a way to recruit using "and you don't need to buy the degree" as a competitive t
Or (Score:4, Funny)
You could get a job as a Slashdot editor, you don't even need to know elementary school English.
An *official* lie (Score:2)
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Co-worker of mine became a product guy at Google. His undergrad degree was from an no-name school, but his MBA was from ... Harvard. I'm sure he fits in well.
My engineering interview at Google left me with a similar impression - very culturally monolithic, very sure the had all the right answers to "scale", no need for outside ideas. I don't think they realize they're not the big dog any more (especially not their cloud platform, which is a tiny also-ran).
well then (Score:3)
Makes sense.
"I'm sorry, we only hire people who have proven their maturity by spending their parent's retirement for four years while burning couches on the weekends after drinking binges."
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You're being too harsh. A college degree shows someone is dedicated, finish what they start, can meet deadlines, and can usually work on their own without micromanagement. High school doesn't teach you any of those things.
Making this about me ... (Score:2)
... is self-serving, so I'm in.
I was a contractor (Manpower Temps) for Mobil Oil, doing data entry on an Arnold Schwarzenegger IBM portable (OK, it did have a handle).
In an unprecedented move, Mobil flew me to Fairfax, Va. to talk with some people, including the CFO.
The CFO said, "You get very high ratings up and down the line and people relate to your methods (IT guy).
"The problem I'm having is that you don't have a college degree."
I said, "In your position, as a rule, I'd want only college graduates. You'
Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Apparently Trump's H1B limits are finally forcing Google et. al. to do the right thing and hire US workers.
They are trying to undermine wages (Score:2)
This is their way of paying everybody less, make no mistake about it. When computer programming has turned into vocational bootcamps, you can bet they are looking for any way to make labor cheaper so they can be trillionaires one day instead of billionaires.
Hey man, why allow your grunt workers to afford homes when you don't own a small continent yet?!?!?!
This is news? (Score:2)
These companies have been hiring none college grads for decades now. I know that for 100% certain.
Dumbing down America (and the world) further (Score:2)
Great news and a good move in the tech sector (Score:2)
The reasons for post-HS education matter the most (Score:2)
If you're doing any education past HS and it's all about "getting a good job", tech schools should be considered first.
Tech schools are great for getting hands-on skills to do something necessary and valued by society. It's the age-old American path to success (like apprenticeships, only you pay with money instead of time and cheap labor.) With hard work and fiscal wisdom/savings, you can eventually make a ton of money following this path without any degree (when you inevitably start your own business).
Univ
Don't let them fool you. (Score:2)
No degree might get you in the door, but if you want a good job, not just a job, you're going to need an MS or MA.
And with women as the majority of college grads (Score:2)
This will somehow be men's fault.
dot com (Score:2)
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This is the Second Dotcom Bubble. Look at all the front end developers being cranked out of JavaScript bootcamps. In my field (IT), I ran into lots of MCSE bootcamp graduates around 1999-2000. There will always be people chasing the money with no real talent for the work, and bootcamps will spring up to make them "overnight experts."
Still can't hurt in my opinion (Score:2)
Apple, Google and friends already have their own independent evaluations of someone's ability. They can afford to be picky and hire geniuses. For a time in the early days of Google no one got in without a top-10 CS degree. When employers like that run out of elite CS grads to pick up, the next stop is finding people who can pass their interview process. These companies are looking for once-in-a-generation savant geniuses to come up with the next world-shattering trillion-dollar product. If they don't have d
Code monkey (Score:2)
Means They're Serious (Score:3)
When you're looking for skills rather than credentials, that tells me you're more concerned with doing good work than looking good in sales proposals.
While some career-minded people might seek credentials to "demonstrate" their skills to potential employers, there are a lot of great people out there who don't bother.
And you may see less poaching of skilled employees simply because they don't have the right mix of buzzword bingo to attract the scavengers.
Piss poor article... (Score:3)
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You mean Whole Foods and Costco.. (Score:2)
One size doesn't fit all (Score:3)
Some people do better at college than others. Some people are good learners but poor test takers.
Look at the NBA for example. Kevin Garnett, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant didn't play college ball but were (are) exceptional players. Does that mean that every high school kid is ready for the NBA? Of course not...but some of them are. Some kids have great college careers (Jimmer Fridette for example) but lousy pro careers. Steve Nash nearly switched to soccer because he couldn't get any college to give him a try. Yet he had a great pro career.
Similarly, there are lots of outstanding college educated IT professional and lots of outstanding IT folks without a degree. As near as I can tell, from over 20 years in the business, there is no direct correlation between a degree and success in IT. Some have it and do well, some don't have it and do well.
Personally I don't think that having a degree should be a hard and fast requirement. As long as someone can demonstrate that they have the skills, aptitude and attitude I think they should be given a chance. Where they obtain those attributes is immaterial.
Save a penny, create crapware. (Score:2)
Decreased Job Mobility (Score:2)
It will still be harder to move between jobs without a degree; you'll be more likely to put up with them than quit. The bulk of coding will be made simple enough that it is more accessible to more people. The CS majors will do the big picture planning and optimize the horribly slow parts. AI will be a library where most of it will just more like training a pet... again with a few experts handling the tough bits and trying to make better tools so lower skilled people can access it.
JAVA was really all abou
Re:Decreased Job Mobility (Score:4, Insightful)
Well for a lot of businesses we need more Programmers and Less Developers and Architects.
Having too many skilled people in a room will just make a lot of arguments.
With new programmers fresh out of college with their shiny BS in CS degrees, eager to impress with their knowledge, only to have them spend hours arguing over every decision I make as an architect, because that isn't what they taught them in school.
I have taken the same classes, that covered the same topics just with older technologies. But with decades of experience I know when trying to make an OO model is worth it or not, and I know the type of changes the program will need without the detail what they are. So I need to you code it that way, so when these changes are in place we don't need to recode from start again.
For some jobs we need people to do what needs to be done just because there isn't enough man power for someone to do it themselves. And when working in a group people will need to do their jobs wither or not the final location is clear.
Education is great, I recommend it. However for a lot of jobs even ones that needs smart people, it is overkill and in general harmful at some levels.
Get a job as a programmer out of High School. If you want to get promoted take night classes and get a degree.
Re:Decreased Job Mobility (Score:4, Interesting)
With new programmers fresh out of college with their shiny BS in CS degrees, eager to impress with their knowledge, only to have them spend hours arguing over every decision I make as an architect, because that isn't what they taught them in school.
You know, I've never had that problem. I expect some discussion, of course: you should be able to explain your design convincingly to anyone technical. But I've never had a lengthy argument over choices of data structure or algorithms or the like from junior devs. They ask "why don't you do X instead, isn't X better?" and I reply with the ways X will fail in production and make life suck for everyone. It's pointless to have philosophical arguments, but practical explanations based on experience shuts them down, and is useful and educational to them. Maybe they can avoid some of the mistakes I made.
All of my painful arguments about architecture have been with semi-technical managers, who think the thing they once did 5 years ago must be the best possible way, but aren't technical enough to understand how it will fail.
Re:Decreased Job Mobility (Score:5, Insightful)
It will still be harder to move between jobs without a degree;
Not once you have a few years of experience. Once you've proven you're really a developer, by delivering real commercial software, few people care. College only matters when it's still the majority of your experience. I don't have any information about a degree on my resume (or anything more than 10 years back, really), and only Google has ever asked me about it in over twenty years and quite a few job changes.
It's really tough to get that first software development job without a degree, though.
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What you say is true, once you get past the HR drone and their "checklist".
But until you get past that hurdle, you have nearly zero chance without a degree. Ask the one who knows.
So, thus policy hopefully gets past at least one of the barriers, by removing " degree" from the HR checklist.
Now if "age over 39" would be removed, too...
For your first job, absolutely.
Beyond that? Like I said, there's nothing about college anywhere on my resume or online profiles, and it's just never come up, except with Google (who uses education as input to their comp algorithms).
My resume is also carefully free of anything that shows just how old I am. Obviously, nothing about college is going to be there.
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Well, if I ever had to get back into the rat race, I think it would be impossible for me to have a resume that would not clearly give a good guess at my age...
I would have to have stuff like my first assignment being the AutoDIN switching center at Tinker AFB, OK, as a system operator; and for employment history, it would show USAF from 10-86 to around 03-90 (need to dig out my first DD214 to see exactly).
And on top of that, there would have been all the combat comm stuff done in the Air National Guard from
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I thought everyone in software got their promotions (beyond the first) by switching jobs? Waiting for your current employer to decide to pay you more for the work you're already doing for them sounds ... poorly optimized.
Re:More anti-intelluctialism (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a difference between formal education and intellectualism.
The problems is having College degrees being a prerequisite for a good job, means more people will get a college degree, and being that the paper to say you have a degree is a major factor in your life. Colleges will need to lower/adjust its standards to accommodate. The hard working but dumb as a box of rocks student will often still pass and get the degree, because they are a hard worker, and the college and professors see the person as a general asset to the community and can probably do the work assigned to him. But he isn't really college material.
College should have the best of the best, and people who are in college to study the topics they are interested in, not for people who need the paper to get a job outside of education.
Back 40 years ago. An Employee with a college degree was actually someone special to employ and wasn't given entry level work. Today a college degree is the requirement for entry level work, because they are handed off so easily.
Growing up, Expectations from my parents were the following.
Graduate from high school: a Must
Then.
Go to college (preferred path)
Join the Military or the Seminary (Secondary path)
Go to a trade school (if all other options are out of the picture)
Going to full time work out of high school would be just bad parenting.
However for some people they just want a job not a career. And they are skilled at a job and should be able to do it without extra education to delay their earning potential.
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You seem to have missed my point.
Jobs should be available without college degrees that pay well. Free college or not, not all people are fit for college, or at least fit for it when they are 17-19 years of age. Colleges should be allowed to have high standards, so when you have a college degree it really means something.
The problem is the degree has been watered down. Even the degrees I have, I have maintained a well above average GPA. But I wouldn't consider myself College Material, because I got by Do
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How about not stealing my money to fight wars *OR* pay for other people's college degrees?
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Re:Whaaa?? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?! Thanks for the info....but I've been working as a developer in High-Tech for the past 30 years...without a degree...
To be fair, a lot of the people who have had long careers got into tech early enough where a degree wasn't really necessary, and have now gained enough professional experience to make up for that lack of degree. But someone with no degree and no long work experience will have a much tougher time.
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I can get a job as a stocker at Costco without a college degree?!
Costco has a rule, or used to, that everyone in their org, even senior management, starts as a stocker and works their way up. Very egalitarian that way - I hope they still have that rule.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
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The third way, learn how people did this in the past and adapt from that. Not just "in the book", which these days seems to be the same as "find it in the code library somewhere". Having a creative solution can often be just as bad. The creative solution may not work, it may have terrible performance, and so forth.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've found the exact opposite. People with degrees not only are faster at picking up new things, they have more exposure to different paradigms and can adapt more easily, their critical thinking skills are better...
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I've seen a lot of code that was 'creative'. Typically it's been the worst, most unmaintainable code I've had to deal with. WAY too may people think that once they've solved the immediate problem at hand, they're done. That's not how software works.
The Y2K event should have demonstrated very clearly that code you write will be around for MUCH longer than you think, and somebody has to maintain that code. I don't want creatively solved problems. I want boringly solved problems with obvious, self-describing code that can be easily updated later on.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
And most importantly, they learn best practices that help them avoid pitfalls down the road.
You definitely don't learn this in college. That's the main thing I've had to teach new grad hires for most of my career.
Although I have to ask... what do you mean by 'creatively solve problems'? I
I've seen many people with no flexibility in problem solving. Just too few tools in their mental toolbox. They think there's One True Way to solve problems, and that all problems are really the problems they know how to solve. I haven't seen any correlation with college degree on that one though - it's mostly people who have not worked for software companies who have that problem. Not enough exposure to multiple coding styles, tools, and methodologies, since everyone in their shop (e.g., bank) was forced to rigid compliance with one approach.
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No, on the 50 or so recent college grads I've worked with and mentored over the past couple of decades. They generally had a good grasp of data structures and algorithms, but had no "best practices" worth speaking of, except where they might have picked up a little from an internship.
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Higher education seems to at best give some structure to the self initiated learning for the really gifted folks, where it's not an impediment. It's more useful for the rest of us.but by no means the only way to excel. Mentored learning works better for example.
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Yes I agree in many ways. I have heard the excuse of "but we didn't learn that in school" several times.
New languages don't solve things. As the saying used to go back in school, "you can write Fortran in any language".
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
> In my experience, many people who have a degree in computer science are worse coders because they are taught that there is a specific way to do something rather then being able to creatively solve problems.
In my experience, the exact opposite is true. When you don't have a background in thinking about the structure of code, the algorithms it will use, how that will translate to memory and CPU usage, you are likely going to code your way into a big mess. A good CS school will not teach a specific way to solve each problem - they teach various programming styles, algorithms, and concepts. If you think that a coding bootcamp can make you a good programmer, I simply beg to differ. What makes a good programmer is having the right knowledge and the right experience. That's not to say that all CS schools do a great job of this, or that the right hands-on experience and post-graduate learning can't replace it. IMO it can if someone is passionate enough about their craft. That is the key - passion, experience, and studying the craft. And talent. I just take issue with the idea that somehow having a background in CS would make you a worse coder. I have never experienced that. Maybe you've just worked with people who had degrees but no passion or talent? That I have experienced.
Re:Not surprising. (Score:4, Insightful)
> creatively solve problems.
Do you want to read code that is logical or "creative?" I know my opinion on that.
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In my experience the reason students don't know about version control is that they never need it. Most of the code they write has one version, the one they turn it for their specific assignment.
Just looking at the present CS program at my old school. There's a lot of math. An algorithm course. One on data and file structures. Computer engineering and digital logic design courses. A C++ and Program language concepts course. Even a single Operating Systems course.
At the 400 (senior) level the student selects
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How the hell does a student pay tens of thousands of dollars a semester to learn how to computer, yet never get taught the basics?
By attending a school that doesn't provide a remote repository host for its software engineering students to use. Though Git can work purely locally, backing up a repository to a zipfile on a FAT32-formatted USB flash drive isn't the most convenient way of planning for possibility of media failure.
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there is a specific way to do something rather then being able to creatively solve problem
Only if they went to a bad school, and/or are idiots. Their strengths are generally having a good working knowledge of how similar problems were solved in the past, and what was good/bad about them. If they get stuck on that, the problem is not education, it's IQ. The issue I have seen is being overly focused on finding the optimal algorithm, when simple or straight-forward will suffice, and being nerd baited into ar
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That's too bad. CS used to actually teach stuff, but it has been dumbed down over the years. Coding is simple. If a company only wants coders then good for them but they won't be making great products that way unless they start mixing in people who can go beyond that and start thinking.
A college degree isn't just a way of getting a trade, it should be a way to get the student to learn, learn how to learn, learn how to think well, learn how to be logical, learn how to be abstract, and basically exercise the
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It is a selection bias.
It is just that the self taught coders you met are exceptional. I mean, why was that self-taught coder hired? It is most likely because he has shown that he really is good, otherwise, the recruiter would have played it safe and hire someone with a degree instead. Also, why did they chose to code? For a CS graduate, it is a natural choice, for someone without a degree, it must be that he really wanted to do that because of an innate talent or passion.
I've met people who became coders a
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The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I've seen commercial accounting software that used enforced-unique signed int transaction IDs for their general ledger database tables. This ensures that any organization of sufficient size will run out of addressing space in their ledger a little after 2 billion transactions, and will do it twice as fast as necessary because they are wasting half of their address space on "negative" row IDs that will never be used.
That's probably fine if you're a small business, but
32-bit PHP lacks unsigned or big ints (Score:2)
How much of that is because the application side of it was written in a language that has neither a 64-bit integer type nor an unsigned 32-bit integer type? PHP, for example, has no 64-bit integers unless it's running on a 64-bit architecture, and last I checked, a lot of virtual private servers were 32-bit in order to fit more pointer-heavy data sets in RAM without having to expand to the next larger size (and next larger price) VM. Has this changed recently, to where even 512 MB to 1 GB VPSes are 64-bit?
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Insightful)
Some individuals have the ability to design elegant solutions. Comp-Sci degree plans can be passed without those abilities, and the skills can be learned outside of a classroom.
The gist is that degrees have been used as an indicator of coder quality and it's a very poor tool for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Nobody codes a red-black tree or writes a game engine from scratch now, it's all libraries put together like legos."
I have a science degree (not a CS degree) and I agree that this is the case. Run of the mill development is indeed gluing a massive Lego project together. But in my opinion it's very important to have a grounding in the fundamentals...start from the bottom and move up the stack instead of starting 400 levels up and not knowing how the magic box you're calling works under the hood.
This is happ