So no I definitely don’t think a degree is required.

I am compelled to add another aspect to this discussion, and that is maturity. I personally feel that college or university is where you go to get a piece of paper that indicates you have an ability to learn stuff and apply it. The piece of paper says “this person is trainable.”

College/university also serves as a platform for continued social interaction and development that couldn’t take place while living with the people that raised you. Enforcement of due dates and deadlines changes from high school to college and a student is held a lot more responsible for their work, or lack thereof. An attitude adjustment (pleasant or unpleasant - depending on the student’s disposition toward responsibility) takes place in that regard. In my experience, degree-holding programmers are generally more capable of working independently and meeting deadlines. They simply tend to mesh a bit better than the self-taught into the working world.

I think apprenticing is a nice idea that stirs up warm fuzzy feelings about how the world used to work, but I have concerns. The apprentice will likely be limited by what the mentor knows, understands, or is capable of. If the mentor doesn’t keep himself current, then the apprentice ends up at a disadvantage. Unless the mentor properly encourages or challenges the apprentice to surpass themselves, the apprentice may run encounter the joy of office politics as retaliation for learning material that is beyond the scope of what the mentor knows or wishes to teach.

The mentor is the most important piece in the apprentice equation. If they can be selfless enough to encourage the apprentice to increase their knowledge – or – if they can be receptive to, say, incorporating algorithms that the apprentice produced (by research or raw talent) that are more efficient than the ones the mentor came up with – and they can do these things without feeling threatened, intimidated, or undermined … then I think you’ve got something. However, people are people, and people have egos … other nifty things like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, The kind of selflessness that makes a good mentor is rare.

I have mixed feelings about certification, but in general, I am for them. I earned an MCSD in 2002. The exposure to architectural concepts and other constructs exposed me to information beyond what I was required to do on a daily basis and broadened my knowledge considerably. The experience instilled a habit in me, and this habit is to ask a question when faced with a task, “What is the likelihood that I am the first one on the planet to need to figure out this kind of problem, or build a program like this one?” If the answer is “low”, then I set out to read what other people have done to resolve similar issues rather than trying to build the whole thing myself and inadvertently reinvent the wheel. Without the certification experience, my view of programming would probably still be narrowed by whatever my job required me to know to get tasks done.

I don’t want to wave the certification flag too vehemently though. I have interviewed plenty of folks that have crammed for exams, earned certification(s), and can’t choose the correct (multiple-choice paper-exam) answer to a “fill in the empty bubble in this flowchart” question.

Truth be told though, I’m working on updating my MCSD certification. It has helped me on several occasions to open doors and get interviews, so it serves as a way to play the job market game.

Companies that hire entry level programmers are usually doing it with the expectation that the senior level programmers will provide some degree of mentoring. This doesn’t mean the senior guy has to sit over the new guy’s shoulder all day long, just that they review some of the code and be available to provide some level of guidance.

But for anything beyond an entry-level job, I’d suggest that it doesn’t matter much at all. Anything except basic theory that you learned 5 years ago is obsolete now, whether you learned it in college or on the job.

A prospective employer that puts more weight on a 20 year old college degree than the past 5 years of work experience is probably not someplace I’d want to work anyway.

We have hired MANY CS grads here. Most don’t have a clue and it takes them several YEARS to get up to speed to be able to work in a REAL programming department at a mid-sized corporation, and we have nothing “fancy” here (simple standards based apps).

I think it is really sad, and probably confirms to me that going back to school to complete an degree program would be a waste of time. Either you are a programmer or a hack, and I think that (MOST) schools are producing hacks!

I’ve worked with folks with degrees in geology, history and others - they were in the majority. What I’ve found however, is that almost all the good programmers had enough of an interest that they were interested in self-improvement outside of work. It’s how I continue to learn, even if I’m more of a Designer or Solutions Architect now. Degree or not, having a developer who is enthusiastic can be a real boon *as long as the developer respects the development process*. It’s the process that needs drumming into developers - coming off a related degree, I find graduates often have an unrealistic (ie optimistic) view of the real-world processes. If some devs are completely self-taught they’re often keen to thrown in niceties they think the customer will want without thinking of the requirements capture process or change code without realising the impact further on in the lifecycle.

The company I used to work for actively encourages people to come in on the equivalent of an apprentice scheme. They could start off on code support and from there move to be developers or one of the softer-skilled areas if they enjoyed the customer interaction. Effectively the company groomed the apprentice so that they fitted in precisely with the company culture. They didn’t have to unlearn development strategies used in previous companies.

There’s also the issue of expecting a professional to mentor a new learner. I don’t know what companies you’ve worked for where you had that kind of spare time and your managers would be cool with the hit to productivity while a new programmer gets up to speed.

This is not to say that universities are the pinnacle of teaching computer science and/or programming; they have a lot of room to improve. But your claim that even the best schools are twenty years behind is just plain wrong, and your insinuation that college is useless is pure arrogance.

Does this mean that self-taught programmers can’t excel? Of course not. But take a look a programmer that has a degree in field, a programmer that has a degree out of field, and a programmer with no degree, and you’ll find a clear correlation with a degree and success.

I need and respect street creds!

Thanks for the article!