On Sat, 29 Mar 2003, Arron Bates wrote:
Date: Sat, 29 Mar 2003 20:36:21 -0600 From: Arron Bates <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: Struts Users Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Struts Users Mailing List <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Does a degree matter?
Brandon,
If you can do the deed (which it sounds like you can), I would hazard offering my opinion in thinking that it wouldn't be the best use of your time. By education I'm a graphic designer, not a computer scientist. First job was web design, programmer ever since. Results... I've only had two places not take me on because it's not a computer degree. Two interviews of hundreds.
My personal experience (both for myself and for folks I have hired over the years) mirrors this -- indeed, my personal opinion is that a Comp Sci degree is worth less (to me as an employer) than a degree in some field that is more closely associated with the general needs of potential employers.
Why? A couple of reasons:
* Many folks who go for Comp Sci degrees obsess over learning the particular technologies being taught in their classes, at the expense of courses to improve your general thinking skills. Any specific technology you learn in your first year is going to be totally obsolete by the time you graduate from the program anyway, so why bother? The important skill to employers (at least from my viewpoint) is that you've learned how to quickly adapt your existing skills to new technologies as they become available. Also, the fundamentals of good architecture and design practices tend to change much more slowly than the favorite language de jour -- so if you decide to go for Comp Sci, focus on fundamentals like O-O, design patterns, and so on.
* Many folks who go for Comp Sci degrees are so focused on the technical things, and don't accumulate any domain knowledge along the way that would make you *more* valuable to potential employers than another Comp Sci graduate with similar skills. If you're building e-commerce systems, do you know anything about the fundamental accounting principles involved in tracking purchases? If you're building systems to introduce novices to the world of online information, have you ever studied any human factors engineering? If you're building trading systems for a Wall Street broker, do you have the slightest idea how stock and commodity exchanges work?
It may surprise some of you to find out that I don't have a Comp Sci degree at all -- instead, I got a BA in Business with a focus on Accounting. This was ***tremendously*** helpful in setting me apart from everyone else who was learning programming and systems analysis in those days -- I could immediately communicate with the end users responsible for the systems we were building, using their vocabulary, without having to be trained -- in addition to the fact that I was a fair-to-middlin' programmer :-).
If you are looking at going to college today (either because it's that time in your life, or because the job market sucks right now), I would suggest thinking about a primary major other than Comp Sci (with a Comp Sci minor to keep your hand in on all the technical stuff). The name of the game is making yourself more valuable, relative to everyone else out there -- and, quite frankly, there are more interesting things in the world than just computers and web apps :-).
Craig
As someone who has hired and been hired many times over the years, I have to agree with the main point above in terms of market value for a CS degree per se -- not a big differentiator. The most important question to ask, in my mind, is are you *interested* in computer science and will the programs that you are considering add value to you personally. If you really have an interest in CS, it can be an excellent field of study for developing the cognitive skills and discipline that really can make a difference in solving hard technical problems and learning new technologies quickly. So can math, engineering, business or virtually any academic discipline with an exacting technical component. In my experience, people who have mastered a technical discipline of some sort tend to be better at technical learning. Given the pace of technology change, technical learning ability is the most important quality in a technologist of any kind today, IMHO. This is what I look for when I hire people.
So...bottom line is that I would recommend pursuing a CS degree if a) you have a genuine interest in CS and b) you find a program that focuses on the foundations/fundamentals to avoid the pitfalls that Craig mentions above.
-Phil
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