"Jonathan M Davis" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On Saturday, January 21, 2012 19:14:41 Paulo Pinto wrote: >> Am 21.01.2012 04:48, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe: >> > On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote: >> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE >> > >> > Oh my, don't get me started on college! >> > >> > I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste. >> >> I guess this is a specific USA issue. >> >> In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if >> you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics >> or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the >> common degrees. >> >> At least if you are looking for a company job. In case you would be >> starting your own company then it is a total different matter. > > I think that that's frequently the case in the US as well, but it's not > impossible to get a job as long as you have decent programming skills - > especially in a good economy (which wouldnt' be right now) - even if you > don't > have a colleg education. And once you have a decent amount of job > experience > under your belt, it'll matter a lot less. But there are definitely jobs > that > will be closed to you if you don't have a degree - especially early in > your > career. I have at least one co-worker who's never gone to college and > whose an > extremely good programmer and has been at it for 10 - 15 years now. But > whether that route works and/or is a good idea depends on a lot of > factors. > You _will_ do better getting a job if you have a college degree, but it > might > be more economical to skip out on college if you can get a reasonable > programming skillset on your own and manage to find work. >
That reminds me: There's a *LOT* of people who told me "If two equally good people apply for the same job, and one has a degree and other other doesn't, the one with the degree will get the job." They always seem to think that's convincing, but there's three problems with it: 1. That's a fairly contrived scenario. 2. So...what, it's a $100k, 4+ year **tie-breaker**?? Sounds like a collosal waste to me. And probably most importantly: 3. If you take all that time and money that would have gone into a degree and put it into building *real* skills and experience instead wasting it all on taking exams, cramming for exams instead of *actually* learning, homework assignments instead of *real* projects, etc., then you'd have something far better than a tie-breaker: You'd *be* the better candidate, by far. (And hell, if the other candidate is a middle-class white male, you'd have *far* less debt and could undercut the them on salary while *still* ending up with much more spending money.)
