November 4, 2024 at 1:19 pm
In my career I've seen very little difference in ability between people with a degree and people without; still less between those with a CS degree and those with a degree in something else. However, there are still a lot of companies where you won't get an interview if you don't have a degree - often this is regardless of experience. It seems daft to me that a company would pass over someone with 10+ years of good experience just because they don't have a degree.
November 4, 2024 at 3:42 pm
In my career I've seen very little difference in ability between people with a degree and people without; still less between those with a CS degree and those with a degree in something else. However, there are still a lot of companies where you won't get an interview if you don't have a degree - often this is regardless of experience. It seems daft to me that a company would pass over someone with 10+ years of good experience just because they don't have a degree.
I completely agree with you, Chris. In fact, I am at the receiving end of such discriminations. I live near one of the USA's national labs. I tried, for years, to get hired into that lab, however, they had a litmus test that if you can't pass, you will never be interviewed. For them, you must have at least a Bachelors degree with a GPA of 3.8 or higher. I'll be dating myself, but for purposes of this thread, here goes. When I first started as a software engineer, I worked with other other software engineers in a manufacturing plant on VAXes. One of my colleagues was the gal who had a Masters degree in CS. She applied for, and was hired by this national lab. A month after she left our boss had a meeting with the rest of us, where he asked if anyone knew about a program the recently left gal had worked on. Our boss informed us that the app had been running, non-stop, during that month. That for the most part it was doing nothing. Occasionally it produce a little resume, but basically it was just stuck in a loop or something. We looked at her code and discovered that it was horrible. GOTOs here and there, jumping around to random places in the code, it was too hard to understand what in heck the code was doing. If Wikipedia had been around at that time, we would have submitted her code as an example of spaghetti code. Based upon that application's coding, we said she couldn't program her way out of a paper bag. And yet, there she was, working for one of the USA's most prestigious national labs and we were making significantly less. All due to an arbitrary rule that said she could code better than the rest of us. Not!!
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
December 13, 2024 at 7:12 pm
I don't have a degree and I am near the end of my career as an IT person. I recognise myself as more of a doer than a deep thinker and there has obviously been a huge market for people like myself. Someone who is prepared to turn up and do the job to the best of their abilities but won't set the world alight.
This is me too. My lack of a degree has meant that my job searches have taken months longer than they would have if I had a degree, but those months of zero pay (times the number of job searches) wouldn't nearly add up to the cost of a degree, even over 40 years. However, I would have likely benefited from classes on algorithm design and other fundamentals. But I made it this far without them, so...
There are companies that hired me despite the lack of degree that would have used that to keep me out of management, but they never had a management job I wanted become available anyway.
My current employer wanted to promote me into a management job, but I declined. At my age, the extra aggravation and overtime would not be worth the extra money. Ten or twenty years ago I would have jumped at such an opportunity.
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