College degree or not

[stryfedll]

Sorry this isn't directly concerning a programming language but I
wanted to reach real programmers. I am in college right now and am not
really interested in investing 3 more years of my life for a Bachelors
degree. I know that I can learn more about computer programming if I
spent the time over the next 3 years reading books and programming at
my own pace rather than an instructors pace, as well as not needing to
take so many electives, and courses unrelated to programming. I would
also save a ton of money and time. The benefits to not finishing
college and just learning myself a overwhelming, and there seems to be
only one problem.

Will I still be competitive in the job market without a degree? Would I
be less likely to succeed in the programming field without a degree,
even if I knew more than someone with a degree?

Can I please have your thoughts on this, Thank you

Shane

[ankitks]

don't judge college education with 1st year entry courses. My personal
experience is that 3rd are 4th year classes are where students are
actually really learning . If possible talk to students who are taking
computer architecture, alogrithum, software arch classes, operating
system or even programming language-compiler class.

[Phlip]

ankitks wrote:

don't judge college education with 1st year entry courses. My personal
experience is that 3rd are 4th year classes are where students are
actually really learning . If possible talk to students who are taking
computer architecture, alogrithum, software arch classes, operating
system or even programming language-compiler class.

How many job listings these days openly declare you _must_ have more than 1
year of industry experience before they will consider hiring you?

Of these listings, what fraction are for C++? Is our language
over-represented in this Real World Gap?

The conclusion might be that companies would rather you go thru your "extra
bugs phase" with some other company... and that the colleges aren't
preventing this.

--
Phlip
http://www.greencheese.us/ZeekLand <-- NOT a blog!!!

[Walter Bright]

stryfedll wrote:

Sorry this isn't directly concerning a programming language but I
wanted to reach real programmers. I am in college right now and am not
really interested in investing 3 more years of my life for a Bachelors
degree. I know that I can learn more about computer programming if I
spent the time over the next 3 years reading books and programming at
my own pace rather than an instructors pace, as well as not needing to
take so many electives, and courses unrelated to programming. I would
also save a ton of money and time. The benefits to not finishing
college and just learning myself a overwhelming, and there seems to be
only one problem.

Will I still be competitive in the job market without a degree? Would I
be less likely to succeed in the programming field without a degree,
even if I knew more than someone with a degree?

First of all, yes, you can succeed without a college degree. But it's
harder, and you'll have to constantly prove yourself over and over,
because people will assume you can't hack it if you don't have one.

Here's some advice from an old coot. College is the best investment in
your career you can make. You'll learn how to learn. You'll have fun.
You'll meet people who will later be invaluable contacts and lifelong
friends.

Don't duck the calculus classes. Knowing calculus will pay off for you
in programming skill.

Take classes in a variety of fields. A lot of great ideas come from
cross-pollination between seemingly unrelated fields. And besides,
there's an awful lot of interesting stuff out there besides programming.
I took a course in jet engine cycle analysis. It has nothing to do with
programming, but decades later I still enjoy knowing how those suckers
work. I once had the fortune of attending a dinner with the guy who ran
one of JPL's deep space probe missions. It was nice to know enough about
physics to be able to ask more interesting questions, and be able to
understand the answers. Carl Sagan once came over to our frat for dinner
and a long discussion about the possibility of silicon based life. I
attended a lecture by Richard Feynman on potato chip worlds.

I wouldn't trade those 4 years.

Walter Bright
www.digitalmars.com C, C++, D programming languages

[arnuld]

FIRST, it is OFF-TOPIC, try "comp.programmi ng" instead.
SECOND, my answer is OFF-TOPIC as well, but i want to help.

Sorry this isn't directly concerning a programming language but I
wanted to reach real programmers. I am in college right now and am not
really interested in investing 3 more years of my life for a Bachelors
degree. I know that I can learn more about computer programming if I
spent the time over the next 3 years reading books and programming at
my own pace rather than an instructors pace, as well as not needing to
take so many electives, and courses unrelated to programming. I would
also save a ton of money and time. The benefits to not finishing
college and just learning myself a overwhelming, and there seems to be
only one problem.

YES, you are right, you can learn much-more about progamming by
learning it on your own + doing OpenSource projects. college is really
a waste of time. 95% of the colleges & nearly 99% of the
education-system ruin persons of their talent & expertise. i did B.Sc
(with comp app.) in sesion 2000-03 & left this field entirely as i
hated what my college taught me like BASIC, DOS, Java, RDBMS etc etc. i
landed into "Selling" & became a salesman for Standard Chatrered bank,
after that i sold water-purifiers for Eureka-Forbes. One day, in 2005
after 2 years, i was watching "Hackers" at HBO & was very-much
impressed by the *individual talents* shown in the movie + the *group*
of friends shown there. i never had any friends in the college.
everyone was just pure selfish, doing his own stuff only & i did my
graduation on a single bench, alone, lonely, nobody liked me. i always
thought programming assumes no-friends. i knew very well that Hollywood
movies are not like "Indian" movies, they are practical men, they
reflect the reality of life e.g. watch "from hell", "the insider", "in
good company", "spy game", "the pianist", "the secret window", "the
unorganised crime" etc. what really hit me hard was that life of a
graduate was really very *different* from what i lived & most shocking
truth was the programming subjects they have shown.

that day, with the very-vague idea of what programming is, i left
"selling" & started to Google the word "programmin g". for the 1st time
in my life i saw the words "Common Lisp", "Scheme", "Perl", "GNU",
"String.h" (yeah, i did 'C' in college & they never told me what is
"String.h" :-( now it is the end of 2006, using Debian since Dec 2005,
now i have good knowledge of programming langugaes, learnt Common Lisp,
know something about softwares, Hacking, comfortable with Datbases &
Assembly & presently learning modern C++. i am in love with the Hacker
culture :-)

NOW, why the HECK.... i am telling you this? It is because i did not
get any Masters degree ( as i told you i left the field) Since i do not
have any Masters degree, i am feeling a lot of trouble in getting a
job. i can not apply for nearly 70% of the jobs in India, a Masters
degree is required for applying & if you do apply then employers will
simply reject you (except 1 or 2 who will take your experience
seriously). So i am left with 30% where they accpet a Bachelor's
degree, the one i have, + 2-3 years of project experience & i have
found only 1% employers do not require any degree, they want expertise
but remember that they are just 1% of the entire market, Hence you can
have an idead of where you will stand without a Bachelors degree. I
amnot aware of the situation in your country but most of the time i
have found this to be same across the globe. I know i will get a job
after doing some OpenSource projects but trust me that is really very
troublesome. i have seen here people getting 3000-5000 INR (INdian
Rupees) less than their colleagues just because they dont have a
Masters degree even though they are working together, even they have
same designation. NO, I am not scaring you away, if you have a
Bachelor's degree, then, it happens only in the beginning, after 5
years things go smooth. If you dont do any Bachelors then you will be
rejected by 99% of the employers. well, if you want to run your
business, then go ahead, you dont need a degree for that but you need
business acumen. i recommend doing a "Software Engineering" degree
rather than doing a simple Bachelors. it will increase the chances of
your employment.

Will I still be competitive in the job market without a degree?

If you go on your own you will know more than the person having a
degree but that is not what employers want at 1st place, they want a
degree at 1st place & they want your knowledge & expertise at 2nd place
:-(. i think industry has this fucking situation because of "pointy
haired bosses". (1)

Would I be less likely to succeed in the programming field without a degree,
even if I knew more than someone with a degree?

what do you mean by success here? i have 4 different meanings:

successful programmer meaning # 1: you are a successsful programmer at
a company because just after 2 years they raised your salary & after 4
you are project-Manager there. for this kind of success you deadly need
"Bachelors + Masters" degree. Pointy-haired bosses (a.k.a fucking
morons) take Masters as a measure of a specialised, more powerful &
focussed programmer. after 10 years you are the generl Manager drawing
6 figure salary. you are a successful programmer.

successful programmer meaning # 2: you do not have any degree but you
have run successful OpenSource projects & today, after 10 years,
because of your powerfull programming skills, you are known as one of
the precious Hackers & one of the most better Project Managers of Open
Source projects & you are still working as Sr. Software Developer at
XYZ as you never got sometime improve the skills nedded to surge ahead
on your job & XYZ is considering to put you on cost-reduction list. you
are a successful programmer.
successful programmer meaning # 3: You start a start-up with some of
your friends,do hell-lot of work, 70% of friends gave up in the middle
but still other & you work ridiculously hard for your software & after
4 years Google wants to purchase your software for only $40 million.
you are a successful programmer.
successful programmer meaning # 4: i will not explain it, i hope you
will get an idea. you do contract work with companies & also directly
with customers & fix their problems. after 4-5 years you are earning a
six figure income. you are a successful programmer.

Can I please have your thoughts on this, Thank you

i will sum up & add some things here, step by step:

1.) *DO* get a degree.
2.) If you can, get a Software Engineering degree rather than a simple
Bachelors
3.) make sure you do at leat 1 Open Source project, to get a feel of
real-coding.
4.) C & C++ are different langugaes, you dont need the one, if you want
to learn the other.
5.) never forget "Common Lisp", it is the red-pill (watched "The
Matrix"?)
6.) today, right now, go, sorry.. RUN & order or buy Debian, Fedora
Core or one of the BSDs, install it, run it, live with it, eat with it,
dream with it. you will get a decade ahead from 90% your classmates &
professional programmers.
7.) check these links:

http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cclass/progintro/top.html
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html
http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/ca...acker-history/

8.) Learn Martial-Arts and/or Guitar
9.) Watch these movies (at least): "The Matrix", "Hackers", "Swordfish"
10.) Read SF (Science-Fiction) novels, e.g. to begin, read: "the man
who sold the moon", "altered carbon", "snow crash" etc.
9.) hey check my blog too :-)

-- arnuld
http://arnuld.blogspot.com

(1) for pointy-haired bosses see: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

[Bart]

Nobody wrote:

If I wanted to learn art history, or economics, etc. I would be in those
fields. As a college graduate from a well known, highly regarded university
in my area... I learned almost ZIP about real world programming in college.
Everything I learned about real world programming was umm... out in the real
world, or on projects I gave myself...

Really? You learned nothing? Perhaps you're saying this because you're
taking what you learned there for granted. I know graduates don't know
the latest technologies because universities can't possibly keep up
with that, but I take it for granted that every graduate knows data
structures, algorithms, and such stuff. I assume that every graduate
has a certain level of math and analytical abilities. University
teaches you a certain way of thinking about problems and gives you
tools to allow you to continue learning.

Yeah, I know how to write my own linked list class with zero reference
material, but thats not practical knowledge since every single class library
has a bunch of collection classes already written.

You still have to know how and when to use them. If you need efficient
random access you should use a different class than if you need
efficient insertions or searches. In order to know that, you have to
have some idea of the underlying data structures. Perhaps you never
write code that needs to be efficient, but don't dismiss this knowledge
as useless.

Just an example, but with
C# and .Net nowadays, people don't really have to know how to program...
sad, but true.

If you're into debuging spaghetti code then go for it and hire those
people. Things like design patterns have their applications in C# too,
you know.

Besides, .Net and other such "enterprise y" architectures let different
people with different roles work without interfering. I can write my
server code while someone with less experience takes care of the front
end bells and whistles. The HTML guy doesn't need to know how some EJB
running on the server connects to the database.

Regards,
Bart.

[Bart]

Nobody wrote:

Isn't your response off-topic as well, Mr. Netcop? This tells me you are one
of those types of people that walk around the office policeing everybody
when its not even your job. You'll turn in Bob from accounting because you
saw him surfing the net for 10 minutes during work hours, you'll turn in
Alice in marketing because you saw her come in 5 minutes late, you'll bash
your team mate Steve because he puts in a solid 8 hrs vs. your "solid" 10hrs
which really isn't solid since half your day is spent being the office
police.

I also think that you should Google a little before presuming things
about people you talk to. You may be surprised.

Regards,
Bart.

[Joe Seigh]

Nobody wrote:

"Phlip" <ph******@yahoo .comwrote in message
news:Da******** *********@newss vr21.news.prodi gy.com...

>>Noah Roberts wrote:

>>>Most jobs are open to those with a degree or "equivelent experience."

Yeah. And then they'l take someone with a semester of C# over 20 years of
experience in everything else!

;-)

Actually, they'll take someone with C#, ASP.NET & SQL over an experienced
C++ programmer any day of the week. This I know from a recent job search.

The job market has been tending toward job specific niche skills. Generalists
need not apply. This has been a trend from the last few recessions where
employers could find programmers with the necessary skills and not have to
do any training. Somewhere they forgot how to determine general aptitude
so I imagine the new hiring scheme gets them no few experienced idiots and
poseurs. But this has been part of a trend to marginalize skilled workers.

Part of what they filter on, as somebody mentioned already, is a degree. In
fact you need a Masters degree. It used to be a Bachelors degree was sufficient
but now a Masters degree is desired in most cases. The Masters degree is the
new Bachelors degree. No so much from knowlege needed as a form of experience.
You can pay entry level salary for "experience d" workers. Internships help out
here. There are lot's of job ads for "experience d" new grads and internships
are the only way of getting that I know of.

So the OP should go for a Masters degree. That won't future proof his career
but it will get him started.

Though on second though, he should drop out of school and save on the tuition
and be prepared to make a career change down the road. The tuition savings
will put him way ahead of the game on all the other unemployed idiots who
wasted money on tuition.

--
Joe Seigh

When you get lemons, you make lemonade.
When you get hardware, you make software.

[loufoque]

Bart wrote:

but I take it for granted that every graduate knows data
structures, algorithms, and such stuff.

Those are the very basics you learn in first year, that most people
already knew and that even if you didn't know you understand quickly
since it's so simple.

There is no need to have a MS for that.

[loufoque]

stryfedll wrote:

Will I still be competitive in the job market without a degree? Would I
be less likely to succeed in the programming field without a degree,
even if I knew more than someone with a degree?

Can I please have your thoughts on this, Thank you

I think you should try to get some kind of technical degree (not from
university) that allows quick entry in the professional market, since
this is what you're interested in.

University is only good if you want to work on more advanced stuff or
are interested in theory.
Still, the first two years of the BS are boring as hell, they teach you
basic algorithms and programming (only the math classes are worth going
to), the third year is rather entertaining, and the two years of the MS
can be interesting depending on your chosen specialty and university.

Even in a good university, though, your teachers won't be gurus and
won't know about all techniques and practices in programming.
In C++ especially they're rather bad.
I personally encountered severe incompetence in my studies.
So very often you'll have to learn personally for topics related to
programming -- and other domains possibly ; I would advise to do some
personal research at the same time you're studying something in uni to
compare and be more objective about what's being taught.

[Greg Comeau]

In article <11************ **********@i3g2 000cwc.googlegr oups.com>,
stryfedll <st*******@gmai l.comwrote:

>Sorry this isn't directly concerning a programming language but I
wanted to reach real programmers. I am in college right now and am not
really interested in investing 3 more years of my life for a Bachelors
degree. I know that I can learn more about computer programming if I
spent the time over the next 3 years reading books and programming at
my own pace rather than an instructors pace, as well as not needing to
take so many electives, and courses unrelated to programming. I would
also save a ton of money and time. The benefits to not finishing
college and just learning myself a overwhelming, and there seems to be
only one problem.

Will I still be competitive in the job market without a degree? Would I
be less likely to succeed in the programming field without a degree,
even if I knew more than someone with a degree?

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain

I understand how you feel. And I'm not going to try and sway
you one way or the other. However, I'd like to mention some
things I think you may not be considering.

There is one view that one purpose of college is to keep you
out of the job market. Whether that is true or not I don't
want to get into. But it is that case that you can use that
time wisely. Time you have not have if you don't go to college.

Even though college is no panacea, it is at least some
minor way to authenticate yourself.

I know some of the courses can be a real drag.
But then again, since you are young, you may not yet
realize their full potential.

Even if you know what you want to do, there are other
aspects to it that make a lot of sense. It has been mentioned
in this thread about getting theory from school, and that is
actually important in the long run IMO.

One aspect of college is networking yourself.
When I either speak or go to conferences, I often find
one of the most education aspects is not the courseware
at all, but the discussions and gathering that happen
over lunch or dinner or a beer. View college the same way.
Get to know the professors. Ask for an additional account
to study on your own. Finish each assignment on time,
but then do another version where you add something to it
and bounce that off your teacher. Join the school's ACM student
chapter, and if they don't have one, you start it. Set
yourself up as the volunteer in a student help desk for their
programming questions. Try to get your dept head to establish
a lecture series once a week or so with outside invited speakers.

Time is what you make of it. When you finish your classes,
go but a computer magazine or computer books to read, even
if you disagree with the author. Go find another computer
language to learn. Or try to learn a new OS.

See if you can't become a volunteer on some research project
that the school is doing. Or, often, some teacher has
a grant going on that needs programming that is beyond
the capacity of the instructor (for instance, I help my
psychology professor with some behavioral research, or my
English teacher who was trying to analyze Spanish poetry,
or another teacher who was trying to analyze the US census, etc).

There is also the issue of aspects such as documentation,
presentations, etc. Few companies are probably willing
to send you to a English 101 course. And if you're figure
on doing your own company, then having some english and math
etc course under your belt will be to your benefit especially
if the school not only offers say English 101 but stuff
like technical writing, etc.

You may also want to see if it is possible to be able to
substitute course which are more interesting to you
when it comes to electives or even some of the base
bachelor's classes.

There is of course downsides to many of the things I've mentioned
but they are still food for thought.

This is important: whether you get a degree or not,
you need to figure out how to distinguish yourself from others.
At some level you are a commodity, and dilpoma or not,
what make you "worth more" than somebody else.

Also, you mentioned that "the benfits to not finishing
college and just learning myself a[re] overwhelming".
But another way to look at this is that the two are not
mutually exclusive but complementary.

You also mentioned "there seems to be only one problem."
What is that problem? That you feel most companies want to
see the degree? Unlike other here, I think that's a red
herring argument, although I completely agree that some
companies will indeed require it.

You can still be competitive w/o a degree. And, you can
still succeed w/o one, may people do. But, I don't believe
this is the bottom line issue.
--
Greg Comeau / 20 years of Comeauity! Intel Mac Port now in beta!
Comeau C/C++ ONLINE == http://www.comeaucomputing.com/tryitout
World Class Compilers: Breathtaking C++, Amazing C99, Fabulous C90.
Comeau C/C++ with Dinkumware's Libraries... Have you tried it?