Are You a Blue-Collar Or White-Collar Developer? 836
jammag writes "Some developers have gone to four-year universities, where they've also studied subjects like history and sociology, while other coders go to vocational schools and focus purely on writing great software. So why, asks a longtime developer, is there a stigma attached to not having a four-year degree, when 'blue collar' coders might be better trained? Why does the software industry keep emphasizing this difference — and generally giving better pay to four-year grads? Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"
Slaves wear collars (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Slaves wear collars (Score:5, Funny)
A telecommuter I hope?
Re:Slaves wear collars (Score:4, Funny)
Whether you should hope is hard to determine without pics.
It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
"Isn't being a developer about real skill level, not the piece of paper on the wall?"'
It's really a game of social status, education does NOT ensure someone is smarter or more skilled, it only ensures that, that person had the persistance or was a very good cheater.
Persistance and skill are often confused, the education system is really about handing out status to attempt to justify who gets jobs over who doesn't merit be damned. Anyone who believes education is not mostly about social status is not very bright.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Interesting)
>>>Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling.
No. The original poster was right on. The longer you spend time in school (2, 4, or 6-year degrees), the greater value you have to the employer. It's a status thing... like jumping over hurdles to prove how "fit" you are to your boss.
The annoying thing is that having a high school degree used to be good enough to prove yourself competent enough to hold an office job, or technical job. But once everyone was getting HS degrees, suddenly the goalpost moved, and you need two years of college. If college education ever becomes universal, we can expect the goalpost to move even further away (you'll need a six-year masters degree). The Human Cattle...er, Resource people need to filter-out the "hirables" from the chaff somehow.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Insightful)
The longer you spend time in school (2, 4, or 6-year degrees), the greater value you have to the employer.
Only because the Employer *thinks so*. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the real world, I've seen no correlation between education and programming ability, or communication skills, or planning skills. Absolutely none whatsoever. Despite that, I've worked at companies that require candidates to have a 4-year degree, a policy I thought was grossly unfair.
Why don't I have a degree? For some reason I've never understood, a CS degree that my University required calculus. I can't hack calculus... my failing that class multiple times destroyed my self-esteem to the point where I dropped out of school rather than try again.
What does calculus have to do with programming? From my experience, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
I don't have a degree because the degree program required a difficult, pointless, and utterly useless class. After a few years, I realized it wasn't me who was dumb. And that was confirmed when I entered the industry and began interviewing candidates who had calculus degrees, but couldn't code worth crap.
Obviously, maybe I'm a weird and special case, but you can see that I really don't care whether a job seeker has a degree or not, I'll give them a shot either way. If they can hack it, they can hack it.
(Oh, sure, there's going to be someone who stands up and goes, "well what about programming video and audio compressors?" But that's not using calculus as a *programming* concept, that's using calculus because it just happens to be relevant to that problem domain. Just like you'd be better off knowing the GAAP if you're writing an accounting application.)
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But you're in a problem domain that would have required calculus even if it you were solving the problem with rulers and graph paper. If you were working with accounting software, you'd do much better if you knew the generally accepted accounting principles... but do CS courses teach that? No.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Insightful)
> I can't hack calculus...
Sure you can be a great programmer (in most areas) without knowing calculus, but still.. there is the fact that you just couldnt figure out something that a lot of people can cope with. As an employer I would have to wonder what else you couldnt figure out. Unless there was something pretty damn significant in your favour to counterbalance this, I would hire the person capable of jumping over the (somewhat arbitrary) hoops necessary to get the degree
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So basically ...
There was a limited part of the workload you couldn't do, and wasn't directly relevant to everything else. But because you couldn't do it, you reacted to that failure by falling apart and not being able to do other things that, by your admission, you should be able to do. In other words, you're self-defeating, and under pressure are prone to falling apart.
I don't know, man. I can see how that'd be of concern to me as an employer. I promise you that, calculus or not, there'd come a day wh
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
You make a good point.
I'm an engineer, and I too had difficulty with math. In 6th grade I almost failed (the teacher was kind and gave each student one free A - that saved me), but then in 7th grade my understanding of math suddenly "clicked" and I sailed through with A's until 12th grade when I scored a D in Calculus. But then in college I repeated the same material and got an A in Calc 1, an A- in Calc 2, and then a W in Calc 3 (because I again had a D average). So I repeated the course, with a different professor, and got an A. The new professor even called my college adviser and said, "That guy is really bright." (Good thing he didn't look at my transcript.)
Sometimes perseverance matters.
And fair or not, that's what employers look for. As for calc's application to programming, it's pretty rare but sometimes you use computers to recreate real world problems - problems that need calculus to solve. If you don't understand calculus, you can't input into the machine.
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The reason is that it would no longer be computer science.
Especially when there are so many things about programming they don't even come close to teaching. Why don't they nix the calculus and have a semester on using source control, or working with a team?
Computer Science is not about teaching "programming". Computer science is the systematic study of the algorithms of information. Calculus is the language of algorithms. Calculus
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're confusing computer science with software development. What's that Dijkstra quote? "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." Computer science is way (way) closer to mathematics than it is to software development. That's why you were supposed to learn calculus.
If all you wanted was to learn to write code, you should have done a vocational program.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't say anything about being a programmer. CS is not about programming. Let me repeat it again for you. CS is not about programming. The job you are in has little to do with Computer Science. Computers are not little pocket calculators. They are hugely complex and adaptable devices, and software written for them is developed in several layers. The very state-space the software is developed in is complex enough to be analyzed. Programming is not solving problems, and solving problems is not programming, for anything more complex than projects a student might undertake on their own. Ad hoc development practices might work for a nifty web app or that cool shell utility you wrote in the dorm. It does NOT work for real-world problems.
One more time: CS is not about programming. You took a theoretical degree in an applied field and then went to apply vocational training. Your success has nothing to do with your education or your inability to succeed in calculus. If anything, you argue strongly FOR formalized education.
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You have the misfortune of commenting on a story whose sole purpose seems to be flamebait.
Based upon my experience in the field, I see it this way:
1. There is a wide spectrum of computer and algorithmic knowledge, and the boundaries of the various disciplines within this spectrum are fuzzy. To me all these flamewars over what CS is, or is not, are ridiculous. You draw from different parts of the spectrum as the problem domain requires.
My stab it would be thus: computer science helps you understand, analyze
What "those" courses have to do with programming (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an over-simplification, but take a look at the cognitive domain of Bloom's Taxonomy [wikipedia.org]. It lays out 6 "levels" of learning: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The reason universities require classes like calculus and liberal studies for a computer science degree is they strengthen your abilities in the higher aspects of learning: analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. 2 year degree programs focus primarily on knowledge, comprehension, and application.
Does this mean those with 2 year degrees can't be competent, even exceptional programmers? Not at all. Most day to day programming work doesn't require more than application, with a little into analysis for debugging. Additionally, those with 2 year degrees are often better than university graduates in those areas for a specific toolset, because they've spent more focused effort on it. These are the people we all know with encyclopedic knowledge of APIs. They know every little detail of the standard libraries they use. They know every little compiler quirk along with its workaround. They often code faster than university graduates because they don't have to look as much up.
Ironically, it requires good evaluation skills to see the value of the top three levels of learning. The things you learn in calculus or anthropology don't help much in just applying knowledge of a specific toolset to a specific set of requirements, which is what we spend most of our time doing, but it does help tremendously in the ability to answer questions like, "Would google's new programming language be a better fit than what we're currently using for our next major project?" or "Is this the best way to implement this algorithm?" It's also beneficial when you have to teach yourself a new technology that wasn't covered in school.
Of course, there is significant overlap between the two groups, because schooling is only one factor in one's education, but that's the general difference.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if "Computer Science" is a vocational degree about teaching students how to be computer programmers. Teaching computer science majors source control is kind of like teaching English majors how to use Word - it may be an important tool in making practical use of what one has learnt, but it's not relevant to the theoretical underpinnings of the subject, and university degrees are usually about the latter, not the former.
Which is why calculus is a reasonable prerequisite for a Computer Science degree. Calculus is a fairly important part of higher-level maths, so, first, if you can't do calculus there's a good chance you won't be able to do the non-calculus math that a CS degree needs, and, second, calculus is actually used in a fair amount of Computer Science - I would think some calculus was important in understanding complexity proofs, for instance.
Calculus isn't a good prerequisite for a vocational qualification in software development, but a BA or BSc in Computer Science probably isn't that kind of vocational qualification.
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We used svn...we didn't have a class on it though. Somewhere in the computer systems class it showed up though and we started using it. The first time it showed up, there was a little info on how to use it but otherwise it was a lot like matlab or stata in an econ class..."here is a a tool, it sort of works like this, now use it to do this...ask for/seek help if you need it"
As for requiring calculus for CS...absolutely. CS i
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No, calculus is not used in complexity proofs.
---linuxrocks123
What are you talking about?
Calculus [wikipedia.org] is the foundation to complexity proofs. Without it, they wouldn't exist.
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That is not complexity theory.
This is complexity theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory [wikipedia.org]
---linuxrocks123
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like your problem is that you think you want a computer science degree. You are obviously not qualified. If I wanted to hire a computer scientist, I would not hire you. Luckily, most people are looking to hire programmers and it sounds like you are an excellent programmer. One of the responsibilities of a university that grants CS degrees, is to make sure that their CS graduates are equipped to move into a graduate CS program (whether or not they have the grades and other qualifications to get accepted to a grad program) and there is NO WAY you would make it through any respected CS masters or phd program without calculus.
So please, keep on coding but remember that you have brought up what is part of the fundamental question the submitter is really asking. The "blue collar" coders they were trying to describe are people like you--those with coding training but without the well rounded education granted with a BA. The "white collar" coders they are attempting to describe are the people with some extra training in less related and less job specific areas...they are the people who I could put on a project requiring a little calculus or something else knowing that they could relearn it with 10 minutes and a wikipedia page and then get on with the project.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Funny)
"Sounds like you're confusing education with schooling."
We all know dumb people with degree's, my point is just because someone went through school does not guarantee they are any good at what they do or that they learned much of anything while they were there.
The degree is about handing out marks of status, in my experience with people someone with a masters is not really better then someone with a bachelors. One simply had more persistance, endurance/ability to cheat amd money to pursue a mark of higher status.
Indeed. Do you happen to have one?
It's a trick question (Score:5, Insightful)
All developers are blue collar. Programming is the IT equivalent of brick laying, it's a trade, not a profession.
Professions have legal status; Doctors, lawyers, accountants have to be certified and approved.
Re:It's a trick question (Score:5, Insightful)
Plain programmers became obsolete with structured analysis and design. The reason they still exist at banks and other huge bureaucratic organizations is that they have to maintain ancient systems that are both too risky and expensive to replace.
Most modern design techniques focus less on details and more on interactions and flexibility, giving the developers much more liberty to make important decisions.
Truth is, if you're just a code monkey with absolutely no imagination and problem solving skills you're useless for the modern software industry.
Sorry for the lengthy response, but I'm in systems engineering and I get the same 'programmers are brick layers' from all the useless guys that have absolutely no skills and feel the need to bash on good developers to increase their ego. Somehow everyone incompetent enough to code thinks he is above a developer. It makes me rage a little.
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but I'm in systems engineering
Really? You're in systems engineering. Which engineering body are you affiliated with?
Re:It's a trick question (Score:5, Interesting)
If your development includes tasks that are equivalent to brick laying. I think you should consider automating the tasks. Once all trivial tasks are handled automatically there are no trivial tasks left, and thus it is no longer a trade, but either art or science depending on your point of view.
That said: Developers are often treated as blue collar, perhaps because of this mistaken view you share?
And in some companies hiring untrained programmers, they have never automized their trivial tasks, maybe because their untrained programmers have never thought of the idea, or thought of reading a book that would teach them that idea.
Re:It's a trick question (Score:5, Informative)
Sure if you use your own made up definition of white collar and blue collar.
The term "white collar" was coined in reference to clerks, which don't need certification and approval and have no legal status.
A blue collar worker usually does manual labor and earns a wage, two things none of the developers I know do/get.
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I sit in a chair and do nothing for 80% of the day and I get a salary not a wage.
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No, they're about to go bankrupt. Not sure why.
Re:It's a trick question (Score:5, Insightful)
phd. certified and approved.
Programming is a trade, not a profession.
Now... *Engineering*, is a profession. But you can be a developer/programmer without being an engineer and the number of programmers/developers who pretend they are engineers (without actually following any engineering practices) is astounding.
Re:It's a trick question (Score:5, Insightful)
A PhD has no more legal status than an MS or BS or even an AA degree.
If you're going to claim that government certification is the distinguishing mark of a "professional", then Einstein was just a "tradesman", while the teenager with the shears at the Hair Cuttery is a "professional". I don't think this fits with the usage of educated native speakers of English. (It may conform to some legal definition, but those often have nothing to do with the linguistic meanings of words -- for example, cocaine is not a "narcotic", but that doesn't stop the law from classifying it as such.)
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And what about those who view a life long debt and slavery as insufficient to make up for persistance on a piece of paper?
You are right in that degrees are not an insurmountable challenge to achieve, but for an increasingly competitive marketplace, you are required to accrue greater and greater levels of debt just to keep up, let alone stand out. Landed a great paying and stimulating job, right out of university? Lucky you. Many people are not so fortunate, and others still view that risk as too great, espe
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really a game of social status, education does NOT ensure someone is smarter or more skilled, it only ensures that, that person had the persistance or was a very good cheater.
And who exactly were they cheating off of? You think everybody in Caltech is cheating off of the guy going to DeVry?
Persistance and skill are often confused, the education system is really about handing out status to attempt to justify who gets jobs over who doesn't merit be damned. Anyone who believes education is not mostly about social status is not very bright.
Somebody who believes educational success is all about social status in technical subjects is probably somebody who was lazy and prefers to say stuff like "Persistance and skill are often confused."
In the real world, persistence multiplied by skill gets stuff done. And yes those students who had the social maturity to recognize that even though they may be smart they also have to put in their labor too are the ones who get ahead. As they should.
What level education are you thinking about anyway? My experience is that the level of intelligence and skill at the top level universities is truly very high. Moreover, people from that environment tend to be (mostly) pretty well adjusted and agreeable, especially since they've had enough experience with other very smart people that they realize they're no longer the only sharp fork in the drawer by any means. People who may have been bright but always surrounded by mediocrities can have a pretty arrogant attitude, like "the education system is really about handing out status to attempt to justify who gets jobs over who doesn't merit be damned".
I've now been on the other side interviewing for open positions in my company. In my group we typically take MS and PhD graduates in serious quantitative subjects from major research universities---that works quite well. However I have done some interviews with others who didn't fit that, but tried to convince us that they had the get-it-done-skill. It became apparent quite quickly that they didn't have the fundamental insight and intelligence that we want.
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Wow, I hope you pay well
In my experience, 99% of the tech industry is EXTREMELY mediocre. It's about paying the absolute bottom dollar, regardless of skill.
Being employed in this market is about charging less than the next guy, and the next guy shares a Soviet-era apartment complex with two people in the Czech Republic.
Sound bitter or cynical? That's because I've not only lost most of my educated and skilled colleagues to these people, I've lost the initial off-shore/outsource people (typically from Singapo
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Really, the degree MAY indicate those things, or may indicate someone who went through all the motions for 4 years or who has no idea how to apply what they've learned.
The skilled programmer without a degree either had aptitude so far over the top that by the time they graduated high school they were already qualified to go directly into the industry, or they at least had adequate self-motivation that they didn't need to be guided through how to learn. Of course, they might also have big holes in their know
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"I'm sorry but you didn't understand my post at all, I'm saying beyond a certain point, degree's are about status and NOT what you are capable of."
I understood that fine.
It might be somewhat true at the lower levels but I find that at the highest levels it is impossible to get a degree without a substantial level of achievement and capability. I agree that degrees are not only about what you are capable of doing, but what you actually did. That's not "social status" but willingness to work.
Lets calibrate
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Insightful)
I do. Most of my friends either have PhDs or are working on one. You don't need to be smart to get a PhD. Most people I know with PhDs, are not, in fact, what I would consider smart. Importantly, however, they aren't stupid. I haven't met any idiot PhDs yet. The most important factor in getting that PhD is motivation (or persistence, call it what you will), and that is what the PhD signifies. It shows you have what it takes to finish the job. If you can show that you can get the job done without getting a PhD (and I know some of those too), you can still be successful (though perhaps somewhat less so in research). Like you said, the degree only helps you on that first job.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
Cute, the old "they laughed at galileo" adage... Every crackpots favorite.
Folks, we all know about Wegener, Semmelweis etc. How they were ridiculed and later vindicated. Now, why do we remember these guys? Because they were the exception. They happened to be right. They were not your ordinary crackpot.
Remember they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:5, Informative)
since the "hurdle" set up by Human Cattle department requires a minimum of four years.
In most large corporations, (and I speak from extensive experience here), these requirements are set by the line managers in the actual departments themselves. The Recruiting people generally look for whatever the line managers ask for.
There are always exceptions, but I've found in the majority of the companies where I've worked, every time I've had to hire, they (Recruitment) ask me (line manager) what I want to see. The job descriptions are also written by line managers in most cases as well.
Re:It's about social status... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they wouldn't - I don't know what is your experience with HR people, but for me the HR people (when I was hiring people in IT anyway) were just a convenient tool to do the menial part of the process -- contact and manage the numerous sources of job candidates, appointments, etc. They were also a simple filter for whether a candidate's resume matched the basic skills required, and if it didn't I would still get the resume, but it would be flagged - i.e. the decision was all mine (or my department's). For positions for which we administered various tests, the HR people would generally help organizing and processing those, but that's about all they did.
So, had I said minimum 2 year associates degree, that would mean exactly that for the HR.
No, it's not. (Score:5, Insightful)
People who have a university degree are generally more likely to be smarter and more skilled. No, it's not a guarantee; there are plenty of stupid people with degrees out there and there are plenty of really smart people out there without degrees. But what is a guarantee is that if you get a roomful of people with degrees and compare their skill and ability to a roomful of people without degrees, all other things being equal, the people with degress will do a better job.
Also, keep in mind that rare is the job that is only about coding. When I was a developer, my job also entailed things such as writing documentation, holding training sessions for other developers and users, basic accounting and budgeting, and so on. Non-coding things I learned in college while earning my degree are useful skills that I do use today, not just how to write some subroutine. Yes, even social skills you seem to have disdain for come in useful, because I actually work with other people, not just holed up with a computer.
Persistence is a skill. By completing your degree, you have demonstrated that you are willing and able to achieve success with long-term projects, including handling things that, at the time, you might not be overjoyed in having to do. You've also demonstrated the ability to learn new things to at least some minimal degree (no pun intended) of competence that might be outside of your familiar bubble of knowledge.
A college degree doesn't just demonstrate what you've learned, it demonstrates the ability to learn. If I'm hiring someone, I certainly want them to be able to do the job I hire them for, but I also want them to be able to quickly and effectively pick up new things that I might have to throw at them someday.
I'm not saying that a college degree is the most important factor in hiring. Personally, I'll value experience any day. Given a choice between hiring a 10-year veteran of something versus someone who has only been doing it a year or two, I'll take the veteran any day no matter who has a college degree. But a college degree is important. If experience is more-or-less equal, I'd take the college graduate over the non-graduate every time.
proofreading for the college graduate? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:proofreading for the college graduate? (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree with acidfast.
Furthermore, Mr. Spiegel, you are keen to use cliche phrases without even putting in the effort to understand their meaning, or know their correct spelling. This helps you come across as a pompous idiot.
For example: "Queue awkward silence."
The correct spelling is "cue awkward silence." It comes from stage and movie production, where the producer will "cue" actors, lights, or special effects. How does one "queue" awkward silence?
I almost stopped reading there. But I kept going, hoping to find some redeeming value.
It was hard to finish your article, as your tone makes it clear that you are a cocky, holier-than-thou ladder climber. You provoke a regular guy eating his lunch into a pissing match, and then you claim to have said things like, "Everyone is making valid points," in actual conversation. Who does that?
God help any of us who may have to work with you, or even worse, for you. I don't care if you have Asperger's or not. You are a douchebag, period.
Re:proofreading for the college graduate? (Score:5, Funny)
You tell it to get in line behind nervous ball-scratching and red face.
Algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
The really good "untrained" programmers know where to look for the algorithms. I don't have a degree, but I can use doubly linked lists, sort algorithms, mandelbrot, etc., because when I needed them I learned how to use them.
You're not talking about trained vs. untrained, you're talking about stupid vs. intelligent, and not only do you not need a degree to be intelligent, you can be stupid while still having a degree.
Which I think was the OPs point, masked in a thinly veiled class warfare reference.
Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, the trick with the advance degree is that you learn in advance about them and when to know how to use them. It also depends very much on what you end up doing at the end of it all,if you end up in a job where traditional search and sorting are your bread and butter you'll pick that up quickly, but not all jobs are like that. Linked lists and sorting is a first and second year problem, Greedy algorithms, graph theory, (shortest path stuff), linear programming are 3rd year and so on.
I'm taking a grad course in machine learning, where we learn about the backpropogation algorithm (the first algorithm we talked about in class, in I think the first real lecture or maybe second). If in highschool someone had told me go look up and use the backpropogation algorithm for something I could have. But the guy with the degree is supposed to know which to use. Oh and you know all those big O notations... well we have a grad course in algorithms which is all about trying to calculate the numerical coefficients in front of the n^2 or whatever. In that case when they adverted the course to us, the prof gave this sample of two different implementations of the same O(n^2) sort, one had a coefficient of 1.7 the other was 2.something. Maybe important, maybe not. Maybe more education in this case is diminishing returns, but then you don't offer more education to that many people.
All things that of course you can learn on your own, if it's important, if you have time. The point of having the advanced degree person is they have taken the time, and may know other algorithms as well, and can direct the learning of the other people, who didn't have the time or if at the time it wasn't important. Just the same when you're actually at a company not everyone has time to read the literature, someone has to read, and understand a lot of literature and filter down to the important stuff which is then sent off the relevant people.
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Generalizations. The foundation of rational decision making with limited information.
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If the information is too limited the decision is fallacious.
Hasty generalization...
An inductive generalization can be valid but there has to be enough information for it to be considered so.
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Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because someone knows how to use a typewriter doesn't mean they can write a book just as well as an English major.
An english degree helps you write in the same way that a history degree helps you change the world.
Unless, of course, you meant edit, or perhaps write a book review.
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"An english degree helps you write in the same way that a history degree helps you change the world."
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to enrol for a PhD in History at your institution.
Preferably sometime with zeppelins.
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Just because someone knows how to use a typewriter doesn't mean they can write a book just as well as an English major.
I don't think that being an English major is going to make you a good writer, either you have talent for it or you don't. An English degree may improve your writing style and open your eyes to different schools of literature but it won't increase your ability to write good books that people want to read. Much the same applies to programming. I have met people with CS degrees from very respectable schools who wrote very naive code and others who were brilliant developers. Much the same goes for people from l
Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was 15 someone recommended the second book in "The Art of Computer Programming" series by Knuth. It was "Searching and Sorting". I read it.
I knew more about the common algorithms their order, and other details of when they were and weren't useful than your average college graduate before I even got to college. I wrote my own b-tree indexing system when I was 18.
When I was in and/or hanging around college I ended up helping a graduate level student with their AI homework. He didn't understand what a heap was or why it would be useful in an A* search. He didn't know how to code a linked list.
That stupid piece of paper is nearly meaningless. And when I've interviewed people it was only a minor data point. I usually used their time at college to probe how much they remembered about the stuff they did work on and whether or not they had a fine grasp of the details. I could care less about their degree or their grades.
Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
A degree certifies that you've read and to some degree understood, the book.
Re:Algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly. Experience is good. However, if you're going to hire someone who is fresh out of school and you don't have time to exhaustively test all the applicants, do you prefer someone who has taken and passed courses that are relevant to the skills you want, or someone who has not (but MIGHT have read a book on it once)?
Also, who is more likely to actually DO that "life long learning" thing? Someone who went to school for a year or two or someone who invested four years? Not to say that there aren't two year diploma holders who take professional development very seriously, but the degree holders have demonstrated that they both respect knowledge and are able and willing to invest their time in obtaining it.
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You _read_ books to get a degree (Score:3, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"There is a big difference between reading a book and having professors with years of experience teach you"
Of course you may have been taught by a graduate student that got his BS last year, but don't let that bother you.
Re:Algorithms (Score:4, Interesting)
Depends on what kind of developing you do.
If you are responsible for the GUI on a large project, then no. Calculus isn't gonna do you a bit of good. If you're optimizing DB calls for a project with thousands of concurrent connections, then yes, you do need that. Advanced math is needed for *some* types of development, not all.
Same goes for algorithms. Yes, you'll learn about all kinds of special algorithms in a formal class. But then you get to the real world, and 99% of the time you're gonna use quicksort, heapsort or merge sort depending on your needs (average vs worst-case sort time, stability, etc). The dozen special sorts you memorized are so rarely required that it is almost a waste of time to spend 16 weeks learning them. Yes, there are fields where those sorts are helpful, but for *most* development projects it is unlikely you would ever use them.
Re:Algorithms (Score:4, Insightful)
Academic programs often have an unfortunate tendency to turn out people educated like they were going on to be academics.
That said - Unawareness of the wider world of algorithms (and wider world of Computer Science, writ large) is a self imposed glass ceiling in the programming field.
The real key is not whether you went to school. It's whether you care enough about yourself and your career to learn enough to be proficient and eventually excellent. 4-year colleges, and in particular very good 4-year colleges and grad programs, work hard to get proficiency in what they think is relevant (with the above-mentioned proviso that they think a future in academia is more likely than statistics actually support) and open your eyes to the skills and factors for excellence.
I've known curious bright people who never got any 2 or 4 year degree or who got completely non-technical degrees who are world class programmers. They go to conferences, read journals, participate in technical professional development, etc.
If you assume just going to college is going to get you through, and not following up with conferences and journals and technical professional development, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that your m@d l33t code hacking skills will get you through and that you don't need to care about algorithms and computer science topics writ large, you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself. You will not excel.
If you assume that reading slashdot and a dozen more websites is an acceptable replacement for doing homework (reading actual tech journals, CS papers, etc), you're imposing a glass ceiling on yourself.
Grad students generally never survive to graduate degrees without understanding that, though not all succeed in the real world. A lot of 4-year students don't get that, even ones who went to good universities. Far too many 2-year university students and self taught people don't get it.
Put the video game down and go find out what researchers and cutting edge programmers are doing, what they see as the next hard problems, and find out what's going on which will be relevant to the work you're doing now, what you're going to be doing next year, and what you hope to be doing in your wildest dreams in two to five years. If you aren't actually going out and looking at the advanced stuff coming down the pipe your skills will erode over time, no matter how hot they are now. Widen your scope and look deeper.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you know what comes in handy for developing GUIs and interaction design? Cognitive Psychology. Linguisitics. Graphic Design. All taught at universities and count towards a degree in Computer Science or Cognitive science.
Need to develop an object structure or database schema for your application? At the most obvious, there's object oriented design theory. Database theory. Less obvious is analytic philosophy, such as symbolic logic, epistimology, ontology, and theory of language. They are directly a
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed, it can be useful, but that's really a fringe case. Let's face it: on how many projects do you really have the time to properly implement algorithmic layouts? The GUI is usually the area of an app that gets the least love when it comes to development time, which is partly why so many apps have such shitty GUIs.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's one reason I'm trying to get back into a four-year school right now. I was on the job, and doing what I still think is good work, for the better part of a year without understanding what O() notation even was. I still don't actually know what "NP-complete" means.
I think I'm still a decent programmer, and many of the classic algorithms and data structures can be abstracted away with modern tools. But I can see the holes in my knowledge.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But I can see the holes in my knowledge.
And with that one statement, you have separated yourself from the mere code jockeys. That statement on a résumé would pique my attention.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You sure these two quotes go together?
I will have no idea which algorithms have the best run time in O() notation
I'm leaps ahead of some of the "schooled" developers in my company
Your runtimes and/or program performance limitations will be pretty poor indeed if you don't have any interest in optimization.
Kind of like being the worlds best bulldozer driver, vs being a civil engineer. Claiming there exists at least one civil engineer stupider than the worlds best bulldozer driver proves nothing. Also claiming the worlds best bulldozer driver is better at digging a hole than any of the civil engineers proves nothing.
Oh come on... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh come on, since when did blue collar ANYTHING get paid more than the white collars?
Re:Oh come on... (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Electricians (median $22.32/hour - http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes472111.htm [bls.gov]) earn more than secretaries (median $14.41/hour http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes436014.htm [bls.gov]).
No. (Score:4, Interesting)
The short answer is "no." But by the very nature of asking if there is a stigma attached to something you're suggesting that there is.
Like - "Do you find that there is a stigma about work ethic attached to young men with mohawks?" I have just implied I believe there is and are asking for corroboration.
I don't care what experience someone has as long as they can write great code. Google on the other hand however won't hire you unless you have a Masters or PhD.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Google was all set to offer me a job and it fouled on a bit of bureaucratic stupidity. But I passed their technical interview. I have no degree, and my lack of degree didn't figure into the bureaucratic stupidity.
It took a lot of people inside the company recommending me for them to give me a serious interview. But it happened. So the idea that they only hire people with graduate level degrees is a myth.
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
So your evidence that Google hires applicants without degrees is the fact that you don't have a degree and Google didn't hire you?
Hmmm....back to Boolean maths for you!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm what you could call a "blue collar" coder (Score:5, Interesting)
.. but have somehow managed to break through the stigma, now working in an environment where most people have at a minimum a bachelors degree...
And as much as I hate to admit it.. I really regret going the vocational school route. While I always felt I could code as well or better than most uni grads (mainly because I got into it as a hobby long before making a career of it) I've found myself deficient in the algorithm and math stuff.
Now, in most programming jobs this isn't going to matter.. I just happened to land in one of the few jobs that is heavy in the maths. I've managed to "bring myself up" to the required level and found success.. but I think it would have been a lot easier if I'd gone the uni route.
Maybe ... (Score:3, Insightful)
PS. I am a blue collar programmer.
From an adjacent industry... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a hardware engineer. You want a real engineer for some design and most analysis tasks. History and sociology don't play a part, but dedication to the profession and experience with the underlying principles behind observations are key. A two year grad, or technician, is typically very good for a subset of design, along with a whole bunch of data acquisition.
I imagine code to be the same. If you want high level stuff, architectures, in depth analysis, a full discussion of repercussions of coding choices, a 4 year computer scientist or software engineer is called for. If all that stuff is already laid out and you just need someone to type in a pile of code to do a well defined task, a 2 year would be great.
It's not necessarily the stuff learned in the extra 2 years, but the level of person it takes to invest in their future like that. The 4 year colleges provide a different group of people to "run with" and compete against. College is rarely about the classes, although they're necessary and grades are the common barometer, but it's about the friends made and the level of competition -- you need to compete with people to learn better practices.
Of course, there are prodigies who can do excellent work with self teaching, but separating them from the chaff (and overcoming their egos) is rarely worth the time in my experience.
Re:From an adjacent industry... (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, there are prodigies who can do excellent work with self teaching, but separating them from the chaff (and overcoming their egos) is rarely worth the time in my experience.
This is basically what it all comes down to. There are risks that come with hiring employees. Narrowing your selection to those with 4 year degrees or more minimizes that risk as much as possible.
Re:From an adjacent industry... (Score:4, Insightful)
What you may not appreciate, as an engineering graduate, is that a computer science degree is a science degree, not an engineering degree. 2-year technical diploma programs are sometimes closer to engineering degrees than computer science generally is.
The (admittedly anecdotal) evidence I've seen is that at least at institutions local to me, engineering programs include training like project planning and estimation, teaching you to keep a log while you're investigating so you can double-check you covered all possibilities, as well as including several practical project courses. Computer science, on the other hand, while it does focus on math and the math behind logic, doesn't include all this practical training that's essential to your actual job as a programmer.
I have contemporaries who tell me that beyond C++ 101 you can get through a CS degree without writing any code -- which is perhaps appropriate for an academic who's interested in group theory, but not for someone I'm going to hire.
So while I'd rather work with someone who's had that rigor and practical knowledge drilled into them, there's no guarantee that's what you're getting when you hire a computer science bachelor's graduate. Which is why I think we need 4-year software engineering professional degrees, but then while we're at it maybe I could get a pony too..
Why they make a difference? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, probably because computer science is one of the few places where you really go from build to design. Sure it happens that a construction worker becomes a civil engineer or architect, but it's not something that happens by itself. In most lines of work you'll often end up with people doing it some weird way because they've never learned that sort of thing, you can see it in computers too with people that never learned any design patterns and decided to invent their own - mostly poorly. Sure, proven experience beats all but if I was choosing between someone that's learned the theory and has a little experience versus someone that's been busy writing low level procedures all that time it'd be a tough call. If I could have both I'd probably ask the guy with the academic background to draft it and ask the other to sanity check it. Code can be "ugly but works" and it's not really important, people don't touch it much unless they're changing functionality. There's no such as "ugly but works" design, then it IS an ugly design that'll come back to haunt you again and again.
Wow, That's a Loaded Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, those aren't questions in the summary. It's a bunch of statements. When you frame your "questions" the way the summary did, there's not a whole lot for anyone to say. There's nothing else for me to say except to refute the basic premise of what the summary laid out.
I went to a four year college and got my degree in CS. My college is actually very prestigious but for its humanities, economics, and other non-CS related fields. I went there knowing that because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do when I started college. With that said, I did studied a lot of humanities and non-CS subjects because they interested me and my college encouraged me to explore. Nonetheless, I did study computer science rigorously, especially in the more theoretical areas such as graph algorithms and triangulation/localization algorithms. The way the summary is written, it made it sound like people like me don't know what a big-O notation means or what a pointer is. That's really unfair. If someone mistreats you because of your two year degree, the right approach isn't to denigrate people with four year degrees.
I've been in the industry for a while. The times when the degree matters is when the recruiter go searching for candidates. They search for skill sets but also for specific groups of schools when hiring interns or new college grads. Why? It's based on the perception that those who go to prestigious schools tend to be fairly intelligent because the schools themselves do a good job of weeding out bad students. It doesn't mean all students from those schools are good nor does it mean people who go to two year schools are bad. You have to think of it in terms of probability and inference. With that said, schools pay a role mostly when hiring for NCGs and interns. For experienced candidates, we usually don't even bother look at that. In fact, most candidates put that information last on their resume and we glance at it at most. The most important part is the ability to solve problems and write good code.
BTW, the article itself is pretty horrible. It doesn't even say anything of value. It's just a bunch of guys arguing and being judgmental. Grow up.
4 years of college not about piece of paper either (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't being a four-year grad about having gone to college for four years, not the piece of paper on the wall? Like you said, they study other things like history and sociology.
gotta filter the applicants somehow (Score:3, Funny)
[1] once observed: the best way to select a candidate is to throw all the CVs (american: resumes) into the air. The one(s) that stick to the ceiling get hired. After all we want "lucky" people working here.
Re:gotta filter the applicants somehow (Score:5, Funny)
Let me guess, you inadvertently also found the candidates who eat candy constantly while at their desks.
Please no... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the kind of story that will bring out the worst in Slashdot. It has it all:
Slashdot, what the hell happened to you? You used to be interesting and hot, but you gained 400 lbs and started smoking crack. You've really let yourself go. I don't think I can do this anymore. It's hard to say, but I don't love you anymore.
A real C/S education is priceless. (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a blue collar developer but I had some CS in college pursuing a degree in English. Somehow I managed to BS my way into a graduate class on computing theory which I have to say was the most valuable education I've gotten in my life. Even if you do not get a degree, you will be richly rewarded if you make an effort to educate yourself.
I would recommend:
a) learn classic data structures. learn binary trees, learn hash tables. throw away the pre-built collections you get and try building them yourself. You'll gain a better appreciation of what your libraries do and a real sense of which might be appropriate.
b) learn some formal information theory. Learn what Big O notation means and understand the difference between O(1) O(n) O(logN), and so on. If you want to be a real snob, try and learn some set theory, at least relational algebra, and then you'll really get a grip on how to use a relational database effectively, and understand why things are the way they are.
c) I would highly recommend dabbling in assembly language. Writing snippets of code in assembly language is not that hard. You just have to be organized about what you do and keep track of things yourself.
d) If you want to get into it a bit more, it would not hurt to read Turing's classic paper where he defines the Turing machine. The thing about Turing and indeed, a lot of the foundational papers by the greats in computer science, is that they are remarkably readable.
e) Have a crack at an NP complete problem, just write a code to solve one, then ask yourself why, it is so ridiculous, and then read up on that.
f) Try and do a little bit with fractals. Write a mandelbrot set generator... Everyone does it.
All of those things are great things for any developer to do. Indeed, whether you finish college or not, your education in computer science should be a lifelong thing. Like any field, challenging yourself with problems solved and unsolved will not only make you a better programmer, but also, to some degree, a better human being. Your formal training is only the beginning of your obligation to educate yourself, lifelong.
Not a perfect system. (Score:3)
It's not a perfect system. There are some wonderful blue collar developers out there and there are some crappy white collar developers. This is like any other situation where you're trying to sift through garbage to find gold, and yes most developers of either type are garbage as it's a young chaotic discipline that is poorly practiced. The task is monumental and you need to take any statistical boost you can to lower your odds of failure. So managers use things like 4 year degrees and certification, and world of mouth and interview and 100 other things into account trying to limit the field. Does that mean they throw away some great candidates or underpay/value others yes but it's the only strategy they believe is available to them given the amount of garbage out there? Sure. I would in fact argue that our selection techniques are so inadequate that most places ensure they're going to have below average IT because it is about limiting risk of failure in most places. Additionally since most developers are crap you're getting below average developers from a pool who's average sucks (even the really smart ones have so many issues such as being arrogant about their ideas, being socially inept with the customer, not wanting to consider time and money as part of technical decisions, believing if they didn't invent it it's useless, etc)
That said, I do think that the GOOD 4 year degree does serve one important function in CS. It teaches how to think at a conceptual level about problems rather than just coding/programming where as training generally just teaches you the mechanics. Hence hiring good developers with a classical style education has it's benefits in that it increases your odds of finding a conceptually talented person who may one day serve as an architect or senior developer. None of this says a person who doesn't have a classical education can't do this just that fewer do.
Our field is not the first to have many of these questions asked and it won't be the last. It's the classical difference between education and training. Education is supposed to teach you how to think while training is supposed to teach you what to do (or think). Our education is broken and has become mostly training instead of education unfortunately which leads to the value of an education being lessened and sometimes nonexistent and hence conversations like this arise. That doesn't mean that there isn't some seeds of education still buried in there and that does give the 4 year graduate a statistical advantage across a large sample of them.
So I guess it comes down to the following. Would I use it as a measuring stick on which person to hire into what job? Probably because I can. In the absence of an exceptional candidate (and by definition exception doesn't mean every slashdot member who thinks they are the heir to Donald Knuth) for a job I think requires conceptual level thinking and problem solving I'll take the statistical boost.
On the other hand I don't think I would use it in any way to manage performance of those I had hired. At that point I believe I have far more relevant data related to actual job performance and an unlettered developer who shows he is much better at the conceptual pieces has a much better chance of filling my next open architect role than a lettered developer who is unproductive, bad at conceptual thinking, or just all together useless as a practical matter and the current state of our educational system will ensure I get my fill of those guys too. I'll also get my fill of "I learned it myself and I'm better than those who didn't" cowboys too and they're usually just as bad as the others. In the end you do your best in job hiring but the real place you have leverage is in performance management, training, and culling of folks after the hire and managers who don't understand this are setting themselves up for failure..
What stigma? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have a four-year degree, in CS or anything else. Most of my time working as a programmer, I've worked with people, most of whom had degrees (usually CS or math or physics, sometimes something else). There was a time when I was a team lead, and both people working under me had degrees.
I never found it to be a problem for my career, or when interacting with my teammates. Judging by everything that I've seen, the general perception in this industry is that good experience and knowledge always beat formal education.
Or speaking from a systems perspective (Score:3)
Give me someone who can understand systems beyond just lines of code on a page. I come from the systems arena. It surprises me the number of CS students, with 4-year degrees, that can't set up a simple web server. I've had the best luck with folks who had a 2 year degree, had worked as a technical grunt for a couple years, and then are going on for a 4-year degree. They tend to have the right combination of experience and motivation. For whatever reason, they seem to enjoy toying around with systems, and when they learn something in the class room they can apply to their job, they're excited.
Not only stupid, but wrong and offensive (Score:3, Insightful)
I am in my later 40s. I have been in "high tech" since the early 1980s.
I do not have a degree.
I built my first computer in the 1970s.
I learned the concepts of computer science from an old navy programmer in high school. (in the late 70s)
When I entered the software industry, computer science was considered a math. In many ways, it is just an expression of a series of non-linear calculus equations, only with a different set of languages to express it.
I wish the industry were heading in a different direction, but stupid people who think a degree means "learning" have infiltrated the profession. Here's the problem: 25 years ago, you had to be smart and know your shit to work in the industry. Smart people understand that learning is a personal process and no piece of paper can substitute for innate curiosity and a drive for learning. It is the stupid people who barely get through college, barely retain anything they've learned, but managed to acquire a diploma, think, like the strawman from the wizard of oz, that they are now smart. It is these people that become the gatekeepers in the industry. It is the childish and oblivious value they put on the meaningless diploma that harms the industry. Smart people who know what they are doing are passed over for frat boys. The more of them there are in the industry, the more the industry will tend to go in that direction.
It should be sobering that most of the most meaningful developments in computer science have come from smart people who never learned anything about computers in school.
When I interview guys from supposedly good technical schools, and ask them how hash tables work or what a "call gate" is, I get a blank look and the response: "Why do I need to know that?" Anyone that has ever uttered that phrase, "why do I need to know that," is an idiot and should not work in any profession that requires knowledge.
When I was younger, computer science was the science of solving problems on actual computers. It is an interesting science as "real" computers have limitations. Understanding the limitations and operation of the computer allowed you to come up with interesting algorithms. The most used algorithms of our time have come from this type of thinking. These days, you'd be hard pressed to find a computer science grad that actually has any sort of clue about how real computers work. They don't understand why there are signed and unsigned integers and think that pointers are "bad."
So, blue collar or white collar? It doesn't matter. The idiots are running the industry. Moronic MBAs are coining buzzword phrases like "AGILE" development, and generally making the software industry a hopeless idiocracy.
'Maturity' of CS causes change in education (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm as old as dirt. When I went to college, there weren't any computers available. By the time I got to grad school, colleges were enamored with computers. I actually took a course in BASIC in grad school, something they MAY do in Elementary School today--or not. I learned BASIC via punched cards where ">" was "GT" but, hey! (It was a CDC 6000, same computer as BG used as a teenager.) I thought it was SO COOL!!!! So when the Commodore PET came out I held fire, and when the Trash-80 came out (I loved the wafting plymers of its smell) I just waited, and when the Apple ][ came out, I splurged and by the time I got rid of it, I had spent $7,000 on it with the CP/M card, and all that stuff. And when my boss said, "I think we ought to investigate computers," I humbly suggested an Apple, and she gave me $5,000 to do it. The rest, as they say, is history. I bought one of the first IBM PC's, and by the time I retired, I had purchased several minis and probably on the order of 700 PCs. Also, I might add, I paid my mortgage writing about them for 20 years.
I say this to give background. The point is that when the computer revolution happened, I was there. I lived in it and I loved it, but I was largely self-taught. No one else had a computer at home, and so when our business needed to 'automate,' I was salivating at the head of the line saying "Me! Me! Me!" Who else could they possibly have chosen? Besides, by that time I had learned some Pascal, some dBase, some Fortran and COBOL, not to mention Visicalc. I did the CNE shtick just to try to keep up. And I did. I put in our first Frame Relay Ethernet network, then went to the class to see if I did it right. So that's how I became an IT guy.
But nowadays with the background I had, I could NEVER become an IT person because my industry, when they need an IT person, recruits for one with that amount of knowledge in education. This is simply the maturity of the industry. The same thing happened with electricity, with airplanes, and with any number of fields that simply did not previously exist. They turned from hobbies into professions. Once there was enough background material and a 'recognized body of knowledge' to turn IT into a profession, we folks who learned by doing and pulled ourselves into the field with our bootstraps, and, if I may say, BUILT IT FROM SCRATCH, became outmoded. As someone said, "any profession is a conspiracy against the laity."
I consider myself very lucky to have been able to participate in this field. When I first started there was a computer on one desk: Mine! By the time I retired there were twice as many computers as employees. My work here is done. I am grateful to a lot of people, including BG, for making my career possible. I am now happily retired with no network responsibilities at all, but still addicted to /.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Me going back to school (Score:3, Insightful)
I got a Commodore 64 around 1983, and got a modem soon after. I learned BASIC on it. In 1989, a friend of mine had a dial-in account on a local university's Unix and I began calling that. I always had Unix access since then. I began a job as a Unix Systems Administrator in 1996, at which time I began learning some Perl, and later, some PHP. In 2000, I had a lot of free time and sat down and shored up my C knowledge more than I had already.
In 2006, I went back for my CS degree. I have learned a lot that I had not learned in the proceeding 23 years. I learned C++. Despite all my experience, I had no idea what a constructor was before taking a C++ class. I learned Java, to where I have sent implemented patches to some major free software Java programs. I learned assembly language and programmed in it. I learned computer internals, DeMorgan's Law and how to create a two's complement binary calculator with AND, OR and NOT gates. I learned about big-O notation. One of my teacher's is an old-timer, and he really showed us how recursion and back-tracking could be used on a whole host of programs - it was really impressive how powerful these tools can be on a whole host of problems.
I have interviewed people, and have been interviewed, dozens, maybe hundreds of times. The world is full of programmers and administrators who know the basics of how to code, and only learn minimally when they have the job. Once in a while you meet people who really want to understand everything and almost seem to actually understand everything about what we're doing. Amidst a whole bunch of interviewees they really stand out - if they are somewhat normal and seem like they'd do the work, they're almost a guaranteed hire.
Also, on the other hand, do you want to look at yourself as a wage slave who knows the minimum to get by, or a craftsman who understands his work, even if he happens to be a wage slave? You can get caught in a trap of thinking that spending time learning is only benefiting your boss, but really your bosses will win either way, if you just consider yourself a cog in the machine, they've won in another way. People should take pride in their craftsmanship, even if the management doesn't.
A bit of a simplification... (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who has taken both a 4 year CS degree at a University and gotten a 1 year certificate at college I can offer the following perspective.
It depends on the school. The university I attended wasn't exactly well known for CS, but I think did a decent job. Some with more of an emphasis is CS will defiantly do better, while others will be much worse. College or vocational schools whatever you call them, are they same way. If you go to one that its focus is CS, it will likely be pretty good, if it isn't, well it will likely be very very bad. It depends of people. People are different, some are smart, some are not, others are lazy, and some have good work ethic. A 4 year degree gives at least some reassurance to an employer that the person is not dumb and lazy. It is by no means a sure thing, but it will weed out a lot. A challenging college or vocational school can do the same thing, in a short period of time, but I would say that you would have to know specifically which schools, and they would be few in number.
I found personally that University taught me how to write good code correctly, and college taught me to write code. Mind you the college was not a CS college. They were concerned about memorizing syntax (C++ and VB in this case) and getting your code to work than anything else. In university I might get marked for how optimized my code was, or if I used things like recursion properly. They also stressed the little things, like commenting, documenting, and planning (though I remember like many making my pretty little charts AFTER finishing the program). In college, so long as it worked there were pretty happy.
So I don’t see anything out of the ordinary that people with 4 year degrees generally get paid more or hired more than people that don’t, its pretty common sense. Does that mean that they are better at coding? That depends on you definition of "better at coding". That also assumes that all they ever want you for is coding. If they are looking for someone for the long term, as a company asset it is one thing. If they are looking for someone to fill a "job" then that is something else entirely.
Anyway, I think everyone should do both, though I know that can be a tall order.
Because of human resources crap. (Score:3)
they cant define their place and use in modern business structure, they cant tell you exactly how reliable are their methods, there arent even any widely accepted and practiced accurate methods to use in that field.
instead, they invent various stuff to justify themselves, apart from the salary handling job they do. one of these is the hirings. because this 'department' lacks valid tools, the foremost thing they rely on is the 'education' history. they determine 'requirements' to be eligible. degree from this, degree from that, this much experience, that much shit. in the end they end up refusing usable employees, and stacking up on 'career' people, who take their own careers and their own personal standing more important than anything else.
a friend of mine here, a software engineer himself, had just completed the year 2000 transition for the systems of 2nd biggest insurance company, and then set out to look for another job. he applied to the nation's largest insurance company. the company's it manager went berserk - he was exactly what they were needing ; there was only a month till year 2000, much work to be done, and the person who he was interviewing (my friend) was the person who did exactly what he needed just a few days ago.
BUT.
the insurance company belonged to a big bank. and, the human resources department they were using was the bank's. (it was central to all subsidiaries). so, as a formality, he had to send him to the hr of the bank.
but thats not all there's to it. that bank im speaking about is the largest, biggest bank in my country. and its insurance arm is the biggest insurance arm, insuring a lot of business fields and individuals.
if a single glitch happened in the insurance company's systems, due to the work not being done in time, due to the self justification needs of the MORONS in that bank's hr department, it would be a major crisis in the country, causing god knows how much damage. leave aside the public image of the insurer and the bank.
in another similar example, just look at microsoft. they value degrees, titles, credentials there. that's part of their company culture.
and look at how this works for them. look at the innumerable, half assed done stuff in their products, as if the programmers just wanted to do the bare minimum to get through the tasks, and get their salary and promotions. and look how this is working for a lot of our friends, relatives and our business circle, where their products are used.
that should be a good example of a monolithic, dinosaur minded, old corporate culture hampering everyone including themselves.
Yes it's true... (Score:3, Interesting)
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As would realising that nowhere is one word.
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The most common reasons for sl