Computer Science Degrees Aren't Returning On Investment For Coders, Research Finds (theregister.co.uk) 395
According to a new survey, coders with a bachelor's degree in computer science only earn 3,000 British Pounds (BP) more a year than those who don't have one. The survey of 4,700 developers in the UK was conducted by Stack Overflow, a community site frequented by developers for answers to technical questions. The Register reports the findings: This is despite the average degree now costing 9,000 BP a year in tuition fees alone. Average student debt is now more than 50,000 BP, according the Institute of Fiscal Studies. The research found that the median salary of those who did not have higher education was 35,000 BP per year, while those who gained a bachelor's degree earned 38,000 BP and postgraduates took home 42,000 BP. It found that 48 per cent of developers with less than four years of professional experience currently hold a Computer Science-related undergraduate degree, while 49 per cent had completed an online course instead. The research also found that JavaScript developers were most in demand, with almost 27 per cent of jobs advertised on Stack Overflow now requiring this skill, followed by Java (22 per cent), Python (16 per cent), C# (15 per cent) and ReactJS (9 per cent).
Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
You can learn coding in a couple of days. Computer science is something different.
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True, but these days people have largely forgotten the actual purpose of university and treat it more like a factory for churning out wage slaves. You really shouldn't need a tertiary degree for a lot of jobs. Hell for some jobs you'd be better prepared if you left half way through secondary school and did an apprenticeship. But I guess when jobs are scarce and people look down on the "uneducated" then it makes sense that people are spending longer and longer in school and not getting proportional benefi
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Blame HR departments and anyone responsible for hiring.
They all wanted an easy way to trim the hundreds of resumes they received for a job posting down to a handful. So the first thing they did was start making it necessary for a college or university education for EVERY damn job out there. No college....resume went into the garbage.
Luckily I'm on the downward slope towards retirement because I'm very certain that within the next 10 years, you are going to see those same people in charge of hiring raise
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CS : Software Engineering : Coders :: Physics : Mechanical Engineering : Engineering Technologists.
Having more head chefs in the kitchen doesn't get the food out faster.
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Long term matters. Do you want that stupid entry level job for the next 40 years? I suspect most people want to be promoted, lead teams, and especially be able to design stuff and work on new projects. That is much more likely to happen with a degree; CS or EE degree helps a lot, but any degree will help there. The field is already chock full of people who can just barely code, and have no clue whatsoever why their algorithm takes days to run even though they're using all the latest fashions in coding.
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That's like saying someone with a degree in mechanical engineering aren't getting a good return on their investment in the degree when they get a job doing oil changes.
More like getting a job as a technical draftsman or a CNC milling machine operator, but the intent of your analogy is good.
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You can learn to write sentences in a couple of days. Writing a book is something else.
There are a lot of people with programming jobs who are highly overpaid, they can only write sentences but not a book.
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Bachelor's degrees in computer science are absolutely supposed to lead to jobs as coders. But not as "code monkeys".
Masters and Doctorates lead to jobs as actual Computer Scientists.
A 4 year degree teaches you theory, teaches you to think rigorously (mostly the math), makes you well rounded (english, government, history), gives you good written and verbal communication skills (english classes), and gives you a good base in math- which you may never use (in which case it will rot), gives you better design
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Bachelor's degrees in computer science are absolutely supposed to lead to jobs as coders. But not as "code monkeys".
Not in real computer science programs. Strangely enough, computer science programs are supposed to teach you computer science.
Re: Makes sense (Score:3)
It may also be due to the selection bias. CS degree holders that are good might not be on StackOverflow and thus not answering the survey while simultaneously earning more money. They are ore-selecting based on people needing additional help or people with enough free time to give their time away in exchange for Internet Points.
More skilled people have other things to do, don't need the help, and probably make more money. Basing any major choices on the results from a self-selected survey is not a good idea
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you _cannot_ learn coding in a couple of days - why does drivel like this get +5?
You can maybe understand a few of the absolute bottom layer basics in a few days, but that doesn't qualify you for a job as a programmer yet - that takes years of effort and experience.
Who are you, Jason1729? Some manager type who really looks down on his employees? An academic who really believes coding is something you can learn in a few days, but of course you never bothered because it is for those of lower education?
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Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
You can learn coding in a couple of days. Computer science is something different.
Becoming proficient at anything takes time and dedication to gain the experience necessary in order to actually provide value.
Otherwise, you're just another idiot who assumes they know what they're doing after hacking away at it for a couple of days.
Name is a name is a title .... (Score:3, Informative)
I have designed and developed software and have had many different titles.
Programmer, engineer, analyst, systems analyst, software engineer, etc ....
And all of them had the exact same duties: take specs, design an algorithm when needed, and implement it in a programming language.
Some companies gave the title 'engineer' because that was how the pay grades worked.
Titles are also used to boost people's egos while the company gets away with paying shit. "It's not in the budget for a cost of living increase, bu
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And all of them had the exact same duties: take specs, design an algorithm when needed, and implement it in a programming language.
Some companies gave the title 'engineer' because that was how the pay grades worked.
My job title changed to "engineer" when my duties started to include things like:
- Going through contracts and turning them into milestones.
- Timeline and budget estimation, and tracking projects relative to the estimate.
- Managing a team and mentoring other people.
- Appraisal of and response to issues raised by professional ethics, safety, privacy, environmental impact, and other legal requirements and the public interest.
You know, actual engineering.
Re:Name is a name is a title .... (Score:5, Informative)
That all sounds like management rather than engineering...
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The key word here is "include". I still mostly write software, but now they make me understand everything from instruction timings to community outreach.
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True. I started saying engineer about myself periodically once I was a member of the engineering departments, and I get "must attend" invites to hardware design reviews. I'm not really an engineer, not having the proper certificate. However, I asked around, and apparently most hardware and RF engineers don't have such certificates, it's only necessary when a name is needed on some official documents.
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However, I asked around, and apparently most hardware and RF engineers don't have such certificates, it's only necessary when a name is needed on some official documents.
Exactly this. The certificate is important when one is called to testify as an expert witness in a court of law. But it has nothing to do with competence. It just means you have a certificate that lawyers have to accept. I'm a polymath, and while a lot of engineers and scientists want me on their teams, my testimony would never be accepted in court. That's not a bad thing, mind you.
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Did they give you an additional title when you learned all the meaningless jargon?
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Making things on time and on budget isn't meaningless,but it's surprisingly hard when you're doing actual research for a living.
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I was just kidding, man. No offense meant.
Certain buzzwords, like "milestones" and "mentoring" just bring me back to the bad old days when I had to work for a living. Those words are as good as any others, I guess, and I'm sure you're really good at what you do. I'll bet you have a high level of core competency and are able to adapt to shifting paradigms, thereby meeting strategic aims by standardizing infrastructure and facilitating supply-based consolidation while developing robust and scalable platfor
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I'm sure you're really good at what you do.
I'm not so sure, but thanks for the kind words anyway.
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Did they give you an additional title when you learned all the meaningless jargon?
When people ask me what I do, I tell them "I conceptualize, initialize and bring action items to fruition". The ones who think that gibberish is cool are permanently ignored
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Engineering is the professional art of applying science to the optimum conversion of the resources of nature to the us
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The question of whether or not software engineering is really engineering is an interesting question. It's certainly applying science, you're certainly using (and, at its best, accounting for) natural resources, and you're really building things that could really hurt people.
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My degree is in actual software engineering from an engineering college.
Not only were the courses tougher than the CS program (with more math, more science), the focus on software is slightly different and more towards creating systems and solving problems using existing software rather than the actual solution. But that is the fantasy they sell. In reality you end up sitting in a chair writing the implementation eight hours a day (most of the time) out of school, even if you've been trained otherwise.
It do
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I don't even work for a private company. Nice try though.
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I'd think that very few software engineering graduates are coders.
Software engineering teaches a very broad base of various coding styles, computer science, and tops it off with a lot of software design methodology.
A software engineer is training to be an architect, not a builder. An automotive engineer (design), not a machinist.
Stupid study (Score:4, Funny)
who gets paid in pounds lol
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who gets paid in pounds lol
I was going to say Civil Engineers, or maybe Tori Black...
CS degrees in job market aren't about pay scale (Score:2)
CS degrees in the job market aren't about the pay scale.
They're about getting past the bureaucrats in the HR departments. So they're about being hired at all.
You can make as much (or even more) if you're a substantial programming talent even without a degree. But that does you no good if you have no job and make nothing.
Back in the late '60s (Minsky's "first period") a 4-year CS degree actually HURT employability. The schools were teaching a lot of stuff that wasn't really useful on a job (for instance:
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Back in the late '60s (Minsky's "first period") a 4-year CS degree actually HURT employability.
This was true all the way through the '80s.
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A CS degree helped employability for _military_ work in that period. The money for leading edge research involved military work, such as guidance systems and cryptography.
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Pounds? (Score:2, Funny)
only earn 3,000 British Pounds (BP) more a year
Can someone convert this to something I understand, like Dogecoins per fortnight?
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I think with the current Brexit exchange rate this equates to a large bag of candy. Higher skilled employees require more sugar for cognition and literally gain pounds.
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Current exchange rate 1 UKP = 1.35 USD ...
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£ or GBP are far more commonplace than BP or UKP - I'd never heard of BP or UKP in the context of British currency until today.
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Faulty comparison (Score:2)
Comparing the salary of a coder with a degree, to the salary of a coder without a degree, is apples to oranges. You want to compare the salary of an unemployed person to a coder without a degree. Most people go to school to learn the skill. A degree is nothing more than one type of proof-of-skill. Not every industry needs proof-of-skill to be hired.
It was worth it (Score:5, Insightful)
I often hear that "I'd rather have a self-taught English major, because they show dedication and adaptability", and I respect that, but I this attitude also sort of dismisses the fact that CS students can be just as dedicated and adaptable, and also have a large amount of relevant knowledge on the subject. I have worked with people with and without degrees in the relevant field, and those with seem to lean on me far less than those without. Just my personal experience.
I wouldn't say that I'd be lost without my CS degree, but I doubt very much I'd be able to get where I am today as quickly as I did, without it. Plus, I really did love my classes, so even if it isn't a "positive return on investment" (which I still kind of doubt is really the case), I do not at all regret earning the degree.
I've got karma to burn (Score:2)
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If I may disagree? A CS degree may be a poor return on investment, but it generally _has_ a measurable and positive return on investment.
So do liberal arts degrees (Score:2)
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Yes, the degree is highly helpful. It's just that today there is a very strong anti-elite element out there that is actively encouraging people to skip all education. I really don't know what the motivation is.
Re:It was worth it (Score:5, Interesting)
I noticed the same thing. In the CS area, I think the mechanism is pretty clear though, all those no/wrong-degree coders are trying to make sure they are not seen as inferior (which they are, often grossly so, with a tiny number of exceptions). I run into this all the time with personnel of customers.
The really problematic thing is that you usually only understand the worth of a degree several years after you have gotten it. That allows the anti-degree people to claim that those with degree are just lying about it and do not want to admit having wasted their time. In actual reality they are simply blind because they lack that experience and they are unwilling to believe otherwise. A Dunning-Kruger type of effect is at work here. Also, as they would have to acknowledge being wrong and possibly being inferior in the relevant skill space, it is quite understandable that many are unable to come to grips with that. Hence they claim "degrees are worthless" and such things.
This is strong with self-taught coders here on /. as well. They are blind to their limits and claim these limits are irrelevant or do not exist. Do not listen to these people! Sure, a degree will not turn a dumb person into a smart person, and hence there are quite a few incompetents with degrees out there, but a lack of degree will severely limit even a smart person and that is a real problem.
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The issue with low wages is that the UK in general is a low wage, high cost, low productivity economy.
In the UK a lot of jobs do list a degree as a requirement. It's actually something that people without degrees complain about a lot because it locks them out, and that people with degrees complain about because it cheapens their expensive qualification when the assistant manager in a shop needs 3 years of full time study just to apply.
Degrees are also insanely expensive in the UK. That's only going to get w
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I teach on the side, and my current Software Security course is about half students that actually work 50-60% as....coders. Why are they going for a CS degree while already having a reasonable job? Most answer that they found they have trouble understanding the theory behind the stuff they work on and that this decreases the quality of their work and limits their future options.
In other news ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Telescope Builders are often only mediocre Astronomers.
Big surprise!
Math (Score:2)
Well, I have a computer science degree, AND a math minor. I detect a math problem here.
Average salary with degree: 38,000
Average salary without degree: 35,000
Difference: 3,000
Cost of a degree (according to the article): 50,000
Divide 50,000 by 3,000, and you get 16.67.
So in 17 years, a degree DOES pay for itself, even if one accepts all the numbers as fact.
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they pay back 9% of everything they earn over 21k. all remaining debt is cancelled after 30 years. So ignoring wage inflation and government rule changes, they'll only pay back 45,900 and inflation will take a bite out of the real value of that.
In other words, they'll earn 3k extra and their degree financing will cost them 1530 so they are 1470 up on the deal every year.
Now if you assume they could have been earning 35000 per year instead of attending university then that opportunity cost starts them $105k
Not making less due to paying back the loan(s). (Score:2)
We can do better than that. Any recent UK graduate who took out the loans for going to Uni will be paying it back directly from their wages. You can use a site like https://listentotaxman.com/uk-... [listentotaxman.com] to work out what this means for their income.
If I put in 35k without any student loan it comes out to 27,081.48 per year (2,256.79 pcm), after all deductions. For 38k with the 'Plan 1' (higher %age paid back per month) student loan repayments it comes out to 27,301.23 per year (2,275.10 pcm). Note that the a
when coders don't have a broad understanding (Score:5, Funny)
A degree guarantees a broad understanding of computing related issues. Of course some people without a degree may have this, but these are a few of the things I have seen:
A business rule that had been modified a number of times by requests from the business; "do X when Y", "do X when Z but not A", "Assume A is false when not Y", and so on for many years. The result was a huge condition with brackets that could not easily be understood. Writing it as a boolean expression and simplifying it revealed that several of the variables in the conditions were not relevant (it did the same thing when they were true or false), much of the complexity was because some test was being applied in multiple conditions and the whole lot simplified down to a short clear expression.
A coder had produced a phenomenal amount of code, counted by lines. In peer review it turned out he didn't understand how to call library classes, and copied the library code into every module which used it
A coder defined a macro defining the boolean "or" "|" as "and"! It turned out that he was totally confused by an expression opening a file as F_READ | F_WRITE, and thought that the compiler writers and everyone else in history had got "or" and "and" the wrong way round.
A definition which was obviously a finite state machine written as spaghetti code, where all that was needed was a table of state, event, action, new-state
This is a legend in our company. An Array copy function defined, despite one being available as
# This function only works on arrays up to size of three elements
A[0] = B[0]
if (B.size > 1)
A[1] = B[1]
if (B.size > 2)
A[2] = B[2]
if (B.size > 3)
A[3] = B[3]
And yes, the language had loops and a built-in array copy function.
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Yes, I have seen numerous similar things from non-degree coders as well.
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Yep, good computer scientists need very broad understanding of software development. Unfortunately many companies prefer a very specific understanding optimized to the current job and dropped as soon as the job is complete for someone else with a very specific understanding of the next job.
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Not having that degree basically assures really bad coding, in more hidden form for the smarter non-degree coders. The converse is not true, i.e. a degree does not assure good code.
That you apparently do not understand the direction of the implication is a pretty sure sign you are one of those without a degree.
Currencies (Score:3)
BP my arse.
"pounds sterling", "GBP" (that's the ISO code) or just plain old "pounds" are all acceptable.
You could use the symbol (the one that looks like a curly L, not the one like a sharp sign), but slashdot would probably convert it to [(*Ä*)] or something.
Chunter chunter comprehensives chunter chunter Wilson.
On the minus side (Score:5, Insightful)
Once, management finally realizes to that coders without a degree are in most cases actually far more expensive due to lack of skill and limits in what they can do, those without that degree will find themselves unemployed pretty fast and pretty permanently. The funny thing is that the coders without degree do not realize what they miss. Sure, as long as it is simple business logic, almost anybody could do it. But as soon as it gets more complicated, I have yet to find a coder without CS degree that actually gets it and that is really expensive in the long run.
The UK broke their colleges too? (Score:3)
I guess it's good to know it isn't just us, but it's also sad to know it isn't just us.
That's because most often CS is the wrong degree (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority of the time, you don't need a CS degree to write a business application. These days it's mostly CRUD operations using some web stack and database, governed by some business logic. You don't need a CS degree to effectively do that.
We need to take a lesson from the material world. We have materials scientists who invent new materials and do some engineering when an extremely deep understanding of the underlying physics and chemistry is needed. But 99% of the time, a structural engineer is the one who designs how to build a building/bridge/whatever. And typically that structural engineer has a much better understanding of how to put the pieces together in a far more practical way.
We should be aiming for a similar split in computers. We need computer scientists who advance what computers can do and deal with very hard problems. But the vast majority of the time we need a software engineer to assemble what the computer scientists invent into a business application that is secure and just keeps working even when the shit hits the fan.
For example, a computer scientist would generally not need to worry that much about things like failover and automatic recovery since they're primarily building prototypes and testbeds. Just like a materials scientist doesn't spend much time considering "what if a hurricane struck my lab during this test?".
But a software engineering degree could focus a great deal on writing software the just keeps working in very adverse conditions just like a structural engineer has to consider a natural disaster striking the building.
Over my 20 years doing this, I've come across a lot of very elegant systems that are wonderful computer science....and they instantly exploded as soon as they had to deal with something slightly outside what the developer considered.
Re:Degree (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? You listed them in increasing order of incompetence. The only people who write shittier code than EEs are mathematicians.
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Re: Degree (Score:3)
No this is not the case. Most people write shitty code, because they are lazy, fall victim to not invented here etc. However, natural scientists are not trained in modularization and abstraction. They usually are taught analysis and less discrete math. In EE things are a little different, but they still have limited knowledge of programming pattern and modularization beyond their duplication of structures.
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Oh, yes. Mathematicians are the worst. Sure, their code will usually do what it should, but it will be bad in any other respect. Quite often you cannot even read it and forget about trying to modify it. That makes it unusable for anything besides run-once-then-throw-away projects.
There are exceptions though. I personally know one mathematician that can code really well. His problem was that his last employer did not allow him to code (a large insurance), because they made extremely bad experiences with math
Re: Degree (Score:2)
Re: Degree (Score:2)
That is remarkably true.
I'm a mathematician, albeit retired. Trust me, you do not want me to program. With a very loose definition, I can program. In fact, I've done a whole lot of programming, all of it horrible.
Eventually, I was able to hire competent programmers, skilled professionals, and those sorry bastards were forced to work on my code base. It was so horrible that they rewrote the entire thing and, quite literally, forbade me from pushing any of my code to production.
Me, the boss and owner, was tol
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That's because they're taught MatLab is the end all of everything you'll ever need. It's the closest thing to programming that they know and MatLab has just enough functionality to hobble along as a general purpose language (it might be turing complete?).
Re: Degree (Score:2)
No the issue is that they do not know what architecture is and they have limited skills in modularization. Yes EE people are better than natural scientists, but still they did not get the complete set of pattern and processes necessary to be good in that particular department.
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^ Person who has never had to maintain software written by a biologist detected.
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^ Person who has never had to maintain software written by a biologist detected.
I've had to maintain code written by physical scientists and I can attest to the fact that they write code using empirical testing and not thinking about what they are doing.
For example, one math guy wrote a bunch of code in Pascal that I had to translate to FORTRAN. After doing that, I noticed that he wasn't initializing any of his arrays, and that starting with all-zero entries resulted in all-zero answers. Well, he said, he didn't initialize them to anything because the random values they started with
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Probably because it was some complex mathematics/statistics/image processing algorithm that had to be converted.
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First of all being an X major is not the same as completing a degree in X.
Secondly completing a degree in X at some shitty for-profit scam school is not the same as completing a degree in X at a reputable university.
Thirdly, what do you think computer science is? I'll give you a hint, it's not coding for the same reason electrical engineering isn't soldering.
Re: Degree (Score:2)
They all write horrible code which does its job but become incomprehensible after month (including the author).
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Good luck with that if your code needs to be maintained, be secure or needs to have good performance. Sure, a lot of CS grads are not engineers and do not understand engineering. But to find really good coders, they need to be both engineers (which is a state of mind) and CS grads. The non-CS grads stay limited in what they can do. The non-engineer CS grads can do, but the engineering may be really bad.
Hence you need CS grads for anything more advanced, but you need to select pretty carefully which CS grads
Re:Money this, money that... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Money this, money that... (Score:5, Funny)
It probably IS hard to explain to relatives who have engineering degrees why you're called an "engineer" when you're not an engineer.
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PE is a bought title. Your peers and co-workers suffer your input because you're the paid-for scapegoat.
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Re:Money this, money that... (Score:4, Funny)
It probably IS hard to explain to relatives who have engineering degrees why you're called an "engineer" when you're not an engineer.
Please, this is 2017. If someone chose to identify engineer-sexual, we don't question it.
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Yes, it is. Most places require a degree and professional certification of some kind before you can call yourself an engineer. North Korea may be an exception.
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Wrong.
https://www.nspe.org/resources... [nspe.org]
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You don't need to become a PE in the US. In fact, it is highly unusual unless you are signing off on certain documents. I took the exam straight out of school, but in my company of hundreds of engineers only one is a PE - and he works for facilities! So I don't have my PE because there is a apprenticeship requirement that I can't meet. (Technically there is a way around that requirement, but it's simply not worth the effort.)
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Engineer is a job. Not an academic title.
Higher education is not a job training institution so for most professions you job title isn’t tied to your degree.
Re: Money this, money that... (Score:2)
Boiler operators are also engineers. Steam engines were used for more than trains.
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- Serenus of Antinouplis
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Pretty much. What an employer wants to know is if you are skilled enough for the position. A degree provides assurance of at least a minimum level of skill, but demonstrating the required skill through through experience is just as good (or better, if the candidate is a recent grad. They always need additional training.) That's why most jobs ask for a minimum degree "or equivalent experience".
Generally speaking, if you have serious experience then a degree is of minimal or no value. If you have a medium lev
Re:Code monkeys don't need degrees (Score:5, Interesting)
A degree provides an assurance of a *very low* skill level. Some people are very highly skilled at getting degrees they definitely don't deserve.
That said, the degree is not worth very much. Ideally the knowledge gained on the road to getting that degree is very valuable. Many people don't actually retain (or never acquired) this knowledge, and therefore are not getting a good return on investment.
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A degree is supposed to guarantee an at least halfway decent skill level and a versatile foundation to build additional skills on. If a degree doesn't do this, then it's clearly not worth even the paper it's printed on.
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Instead of "very low", perhaps "very broad" is a more appropriate guarantee from a school. Companies on the other hand often want a very specific set of skills for the job they want. Too specific to make sense to teach in a school, without making, say, 1000 students with skills specific to 100 jobs.
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Or a degree tries to prove an ability to learn complex skills. On the job is when real skills are actually learned and it takes someone who can learn them to do the job.
Of course many companies want to hire people who already have the skills these days, rather than training people up. This despite the fact that few to no colleges can give a student years of experience with ARINC 429, MIL 1553, military GPS or TACAN radios to name a few possible things I've seen companies looking for experience on.
Re:Code monkeys don't need degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
A degree provides an assurance of a *very low* skill level. Some people are very highly skilled at getting degrees they definitely don't deserve. That said, the degree is not worth very much.
If two fresh faced rookie developers with next to no experience walk in off the street one with a certificate that he has been made to work like a donkey for four years to acquire a certain basic skill level by a trusted training provider while all the other one has is his ability to radiate confidence and recite the mantra 'I taught myself to code, degrees are useless, trust me I'm an expert'. I know who I'm going to hire.
Ideally the knowledge gained on the road to getting that degree is very valuable.
Well, duh....
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Consider: what's the big O efficiency of a particular algorithm?
When I do interviews, I have a couple of "sanity check" problems that I use to try to weed out the candidates who may be great at crafting code, but not great at designing software. A big-O problem is one of these.
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How are a CS major and understanding big O efficiency related? A smart person will quickly grasp this concept. End of story.
If you NEED a CS major to get such a simple concept, I really don't want you writing code.
Re:Computer science is not programming (Score:5, Interesting)
How are a CS major and understanding big O efficiency related? A smart person will quickly grasp this concept. End of story. If you NEED a CS major to get such a simple concept, I really don't want you writing code.
You might think so, but in my experience this is simply not true. I've met many many many people who write code that purport to understand these topics (who can answer simple interview questions about this as well) but then write code that clearly indicates that they don't. CS majors with experience is the best filter I've found for understanding this topic and even that's a bit weak depending on the school. My hypothesis is that there is a certain number of iterations you need to do before you understand most topics and being self taught somehow doesn't ensure those number of repetitions. I do know however that the most efficient large pieces of code I've ever seen were all written by people with CS degrees and experience.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed. It is a good sanity check.
Re: Blame Open Source. (Score:2)
The problem is the permissive licenses. I've made that mistake myself in the past.
Now any Free Software I write is released under the Affero license (AGPL). Akaik that license is the most viral and the least prone to capitalist exploitation.
Re: (Score:2)
Coders exist on many different levels. Depending on the work, a highly qualified engineer may well be coding his own software.