Is a Computer Science Degree Worth Getting Anymore? 630
snydeq writes "Self-taught technologists are almost always better hires than those with a bachelor's degree in computer science and a huge student loan, writes Andrew Oliver. 'A recruiter recently asked me why employers are so picky. I explained that of the people who earned a computer science degree, most don't know any theory and can't code. Instead, they succeed at putting things on their resume that match keywords. Plus, companies don't consider it their responsibility to provide training or mentoring. In fairness, that's because the scarcity of talent has created a mercenary culture: "Now that my employer paid me to learn a new skill, let me check to see if there's an ad for it on Dice or Craigslist with a higher rate of pay." When searching for talent, I've stopped relying on computer science degrees as an indicator of anything except a general interest in the field. Most schools suck at teaching theory and aren't great at Java instruction, either. Granted, they're not much better with any other language, but most of them teach Java.'"
Re:Mercenaries (Score:5, Funny)
Pay your employees decent ages and treat them well? That's fucking communism! GTFO.
Re:Poor article. (Score:5, Funny)
Poorly written and full of absurd sweeping generalizations.
Agreed. I've found most Slashdot articles (well, over 98% of them) have absurd sweeping generalizations. And some of them use odd-sounding comparisons for no reason at all, which is like putting pants on a dog.
Re:The answer is simple.... (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this the same as every Jedi building their own lightsabre?
Re:CS != Coding (Score:5, Funny)
"If you want to understand how English works and how it came to be, linguistics is for you. If you just want to be a writer, it's probably not."
That's exactly why Languages and Literature departments in universities are opposed warring camps.
You Philistines over in Languages only care about the mechanics! You have no soul! Literature has as much to do with brute words as... as computer science has to do with telescopes! Besides, it's all about the deconstruction of the articulation of the biopolitics of the transgressive post-post-ironic feminist inter(de)mediation now. You'd never understand.
Huh. Buncha latte-slurping coffee-shop hippies. Lets see you guys trek into Kazakhstan to catalogue the Indo-Ayran migration drift of the Mongolian antelope herders' nasal pluperfect tenses, or construct a crude field-expedient LL(R) parser for their iconographic system out of sticks and dead beetles. I did that last week. Had to kill a buncha snow leopards that got in my way.
You think that's hard? Over in Library Sciences we had to convert our whole stack from Dewey to Library of Congress classification. At midnight. By hand.
Hey guys! I'm the visiting speaker from the fiction writing workshop over in Adult Education! I've been writing professionally all my life and I just made a million bucks from my latest novel! Can I join in?
(all turn and glare)
Re:I'll take getting a job Alex (Score:5, Funny)
>Of course, the fact that he had an awesome and EXTREMELY memorable last name didn't hurt matters either (name withheld for obvious reasons).
Tip of the Day: Legally change your name to Edsger Dijkstra Tanenbaum Knuth.
Junior.
Re:And it can keyword match (Score:2, Funny)
Hold the phone.
"...that doesn't speak well for you."
I don't think you meant that as a pejorative but the statement comes across to me as groupthink. Plenty of perfectly capable people resent being made to jump through pointless hoops to appease people who (rightly or wrongly) want to treat them as just another number.
So I think what you mean to say is that they aren't a good fit for your company (or their company for you) and HR is doing everyone a favor.
Re:And it can keyword match (Score:4, Funny)
I covered such situations by adding "also specialize in DeLorean time machines."