Do you need a college education to be a programmer?

[Stefan_Lang]

What you need to learn depends on what you intend to achieve. Pure mechanical programming just requires common sense, an understanding of (boolean) logic, and a good book. However, if you want to write the most efficient cloud-computing libraries, juggle complex multithreaded applications, or develop new computer languages, then you pretty much have to know all those 'dry college classes'. Apprenticeship is probably a good middle ground. In switzerland there are IT apprenticeships, but they're more about IT infrastructure than programming. It's certainly possible to put a focus on programming and then get a job in that area though: knowing how to set up and fix your own PC is something specifically small companies appreciate.

[AHISDave]

I was a frat boy dropout at Kentucky in the early 80s when I got an opportunity. I started as a Junior Programmer back in 1983 when IT was called MIS and nobody had ever heard of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Since then I have fashioned an almost 30 year career in IT that has been quite successfull for me. So I'm not so sure a 4 year degree is necessary to be successfull. If I were a kid looking for a career in IT today, I would probably attend a 2 year school designed specifically for IT like an Ivy Tech.

[Matthew Graybosch]

I dropped out of college in 1999 and have since managed to make a living as a developer for twelve years, but it hasn't been easy. Many HR people will automatically bin a resume which doesn't mention having a BS in computer science or mathematics, which strikes me as a form of class-based discrimination in a country where college is only for the wealthy or those willing to sell themselves into indentured servitude by taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt.

When posting here, I do not represent anybody but myself.

[graeme m]

I am of the opinion that you don't need a college education to become a good programmer. Though from a hiring perspective I would only hire people with degrees. It would be too time consuming for most to take on an apprentice. Most people, from what I have seen, that work in IT already have a vast workload as it is. The college system is a good way to see how fit a person is for that industry while giving them a base to work on. Where I am from the drop-out rate is quite high, only about 25% that start the course actually finish it. If this were the same for an apprenticeship (I am sure it would not be this low considering interviews etc.) it would not be worth taking anybody on. When hiring if I had a choice between somebody that had 4 years college behind them and had somewhat proven their ability vs somebody that was self thought but not formally qualified I am afraid I would always have to choose the person with the degree.

[Anand Ayyappan]

A single line answer would be "ABSOLUTELY NOT". In college at least in India you are taught all sort of stuff which are later told that the previously taught stuff was proved wrong by some other guy and all this happened even before we where born. Why cant the teach the last and the latest? This type of contradictory style of education system and also the main purpose of learning is to get good marks / grades so that you must get a good job makes students ROBOTS which are fed with data and give back data on exam paper destroys the creative and logical talent of students. Learning is always good but it should in a different where first the aptitude of student is taken into consideration and then he is "helped" to learn according to his aptitude and not "forcing" him with data.

Thanks Anand Ayyappan

[Phil_Murray]

To be honest I have limited formal education within IT areas and I have been doing this for 13 years. I don't doubt that a college education gives people what they need to get a foot in the door but in my experience you have to knock graduates into shape and teach them real world skill. Education skills != Real life programming ability

[Fabio Franco]

I'm a self taught programmer since I was 15 years old and I can say that college made me a better programmer. I took Computer Engineering (5 year course) and there were several things that I learned there, which I wouldn't have if I did not go for the degree: 1 - All around skills at math and physics. This is very good, because there is a lot of math and physics (whether you like it or not) on the course. That keeps your mind sharp and could even be useful on programming some specific programming skills. And the only way to do it is in college (unless you're a genius). I had three years of specific physics and calculus each. And used knowledge from both during the whole course. 2 - Learn team play. During the course there were several group projects and activities. That was my first contact with team management. 3 - Specifically to the engineering course, there were several fun and interesting classes, including electronics, micro controllers, servo mechanisms, electromagnetism, etc. These add a lot and may not be required to programming, but it can get really useful once you start developing for automation. With this knowledge you can broaden the reach of programming to the lower level and out of the PC box. It's also a lot of fun to work with electronics and industrial automation. I won't forget how that was useful when I first applied it at a paid job. I had to automate label printing, based on the output of cable production machine. 4 - I've learned assembly at college, specially because the course has a lot to do with electronics and micro controllers. I wouldn't have learned that if I didn't go to college. With that I became a better programming because I actually learned what was going on under the hood. 5 - Learned how to present projects. During the course I had to present several projects in front of a lot of people. I kinda have stage fright, but during the course I could learn how to handle it. At first I would shake a lot and swallow many words, but college allowed me to practice and evolve on that matter. When I first had to do it oh the business scenario, I was much better prepared. 6 - Connections. Again, not directly related to programming, but you get the chance to meet and work with a variety of people on different fields during college. And this also adds the chance of learning from others, it's like learning from studying open source code. Even though not all these points are related to programming directly, I believe they are very important to become a successful profes

[Fabio Franco]

Phil_Murray wrote:

Education skills != Real life programming ability

I agree, but usually graduates have a good foundation and get up to speed very fast on real world problems. I don't think they would have if they did not have a formal education.

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson "Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction." ― Francis Picabia

[T M Gray]

As humans are further removed from the early stages of the hiring process degrees will become required more and more. Your resume is parsed by a computer before a human looks at it. It is assigned a score. People without a degree will get lower scores if the job requirement mentions a degree even if it is just as a "nice to have".

[Alan Balkany]

I know a number of programmers that are successful without a college degree. But in my experience those without a computer-science degree are more likely to have gaps in their knowledge. E.g. I've seen self-taught programmers that had never heard of hashing, or thought that pi was "defined as" 22/7.

"Microsoft -- Adding unnecessary complexity to your work since 1987!"

[Phil_Murray]

Again, I believe it depends on the individual. I have experience with graduates that wrote bad, poorly performing code where we had to re-educate them quickly and of the otherside where graduates were already there writing exceptional production ready code. I don't believe that a degree makes a good developer or even the ability to become a good developer. Its the person and the personal drive to improve that shows through. I am basically self taught and have to admit when I started professionally I had to learn on my feet which is not ideal but does give a developer an understanding of what makes the customer tick. Some developers never get this.

[Phil_Murray]

I thought pi was something you eat with cream :)

[Fabio Franco]

Phil_Murray wrote:

I don't believe that a degree makes a good developer

I agree, but I don't think anyone can deny that it helps. If we get 2 individuals with same drive and aptitude towards programming, one with college and other without college education, the one with college education will very likely perform better. In my case, I'd never have learned so well what goes on under the hood (at register level) if I hadn't gone to college. With college I actually learned where to look and I wouldn't have learned that if I stayed only with my self taught skills. I didn't know it existed or how it worked. That made me a better programmer, even on high level managed languages, so I knew how memory and processing works to make my applications perform optimally and don't hog on memory and processor like crazy. Of course this can be learned eventually, but I doubt anyone looks into that on the early stages of while learning how to program. I'm not saying that college educated programmers are implicitly better than self taught ones. I actually believe any good programmer must know how to self teach. But I believe college adds a great value. I know this because I was self taught before college and I know the effects of it. Skills you learn on the job are a whole different matter that no college, google or book will teach. Everyone needs to get the hands dirty to learn some stuff.

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson "Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction." ― Francis Picabia

[Sasha Laurel]

Yes, lets bring back Apprecticeships! It has been an excellent experience for me. While I had been taking the odd programming class since highschool, it took me a minute in college to realize what was my true passion. I first majored in Art, Business, English, before taking an Html refresher course, and a computer art class for Flash (both for fun) and realizing that I needed to get back into programming. I applied for the comp. sci program directly and studied at it for a solid year. Disaster struck (I got married), and my wife didn't want to live in my parent's basement while I finished school. I did the only thing I could afford to do (and remain married to my lovely wife). I dropped out of school and started working construction. It was definitely the worst 3 years of my life. Then, I got super lucky. I had a friend who had worked for me in the restaurant industry. He had gone a shorter route, and received a 2-year degree from a technical school based on programming. I was always telling him about my woes working construction, and eventually he was telling me about his woes dealing with unreliable programmers who couldn't not manage to focus, or do a decent job at all. I said "Hey, surely I can do that." He agreed to teach me on our own time, and I bought some books and would study in between working long hours at my construction job. He brought it up in passing to his boss that I had been learning the language, and he said "We should do an apprenticeship." Lucky, blessed, whatever you want to call it, that's what I was. I've been working with one of the best (though small) companies in the world, and I got to learn a bunch of the "tricks of the trade" from my good friend. Because of how good the boss was to give me my chance, I have an intense loyalty to those guys and am willing to work extra-hard so that we can all enjoy continued success. He told me in our interview "Anyone can get a programming book and learn from it, but what it takes in this industry is a passion for computers." Without that I certainly would have failed (or probably not have been interested in the first place). Anyway, sorry to ramble on a bit. I just wanted to share my story since I was lucky enough to have first hand experience. None of what I learned during my apprenticeship could be replaced by what I learned at the university, just as my acedemic learning cannot replace what I've learned through work experience. I still yearn to go back to school so that I can learn more about the theory, and t

[Phil_Murray]

I agree with what you are saying but do degree level courses still discuss low level memory management? Its been a while since I was in education :-D I do understand the benifit from understanding how a computer processes tasks but in the world of 4th generation languages and garbage collection I would imagine that most day to day developers rarely use it. What I believe college will help in is when cross skilling into new platforms or technologies a person with a degree should be able to understand the underlying concepts more quickly and avoid some of the obvious gotcha's that I personnally may fall into. In the end what makes a good developer? In my experience its the drive to become a good developer and the willingness to admit they don't know everything.

[Member_5893260]

Back in the days (and I'm talking 30 years ago) having a degree in computer science actually made it harder for you to get hired: I remember, then, wandering around to different software houses in London, most of which stated that they wouldn't hire programmers with computer science degrees, because the process of taking the course had fixed their minds too much, and thus they'd rendered themselves unsuitable to the real world. I still agree with this, and try to shy away from hiring programmers with degrees (unless, of course, I can look into their eyes and see that the degree doesn't matter). With one such example, I asked him what he'd studied at college. "Computer science, of course," he replied. "So did you learn anything?" I asked. "Nothing," he replied -- at which point I hired him on the spot. I think that the requirement in hiring for programmers to have degrees is something invented by management who never really understand what their programmers do for a living: for them it's some kind of touchstone which says, "Well, the guy must know something -- he's got a degree..." whereas I still believe the reality of it to be that the best programmers teach themselves. The only thing I'd recommend is taking some kind of course at some point, if only to learn the commonly-accepted names for things you've already figured out for yourself: for example, it was years after I wrote a program to design printed circuit boards that I found out I'd recreated Dijkstra's Route-Finding Algorithm... it's kind of handy to know how to say these things so that other people understand.

[Fabio Franco]

Phil_Murray wrote:

I agree with what you are saying but do degree level courses still discuss low level memory management?

Well, at least good colleges do. It least the one I attended to is still doing it. :)

Phil_Murray wrote:

I do understand the benifit from understanding how a computer processes tasks but in the world of 4th generation languages and garbage collection I would imagine that most day to day developers rarely use it.

If they don't, it's because they don't know about it. It's how college education can come in handy. Many people mistakenly think that because we get garbage collector, we don't need to worry about memory or how it works. I once had to debug someone else's code where I could only find the solution because I understood how pointers work. Like it or not, even on managed languages, an instance of a class is still a pointer to the heap.

Phil_Murray wrote:

In the end what makes a good developer?

I'm not saying that it makes a good developer, but a better developer. The good developer is about the individual, that's certain. I've also seen many graduates that don't have a clue too.

Phil_Murray wrote:

willingness to admit they don't know everything.

That's very, very important. To me this is at the same time a curse and a blessing. It's a curse because can lead to frustration (sometimes I have this feeling), since you can never learn anything everything about something and need to always be chasing for knowledge, no vacation from it. It's a blessing because this keeps you inside the loop of improvement, making you a better programmer everyday. That's what drive and make good developers.

"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" - Homer Simpson "Our heads are round so our thoughts can change direction." ― Francis Picabia

[Alexander DiMauro]

Tom Clement wrote:

I agree that nowadays, it does seem like you need a degree to get in the door.

Yes, but not necessarily a CS degree. My degree is in Molecular Biology, believe it or not. And, one of the best programmers I worked with in the past was a former chemist.

Tom Clement wrote:

Is the system that does require this now the optimal one?

It depends on the situation. If you want to go into academia, then yes, a degree is essential. But, academia is very different from real-world business programming. Not to put down scientific computing, not at all, I find the science behind computing fascinating, but a lot of it doesn't come up in day-to-day programming tasks, especially for me as a web programmer. If you are working more in low-level programming, and developing compilers, for example, then I think that academic work is more important. But even then, you could probably get a lot of that from sources like the MIT Open Course Ware classes online. Degrees are nice, but, especially in the US, it has gotten to be FAR too expensive these days. I'm still paying off my student loans, and I'm not even working in the field that I studied. Then again, most of the jobs I've worked required at least a Bachelor's degree. I think that most self-taught programmers are more likely to fall into the 'real-world' side rather than the 'computer scientist' side. Apprenticeships are a great idea for anyone, not just for the 'entry-level', but I imagine the demand would far outpace the available positions.

The world is going to laugh at you anyway, might as well crack the 1st joke! My code has no bugs, it runs exactly as it was written.

[crazedDotNetDev]

Absolutely not… In fact, I believe those who need college to be a programmer do not have what it takes to be one. Every 3-4 years I’m doing something new for my job. (I’m not even considering my personal projects.) If one’s 3 ½ years into a 4 year degree, he/she is at least 1 year behind current technology. Coders must be in a constant state of learning, college is optional. That said, the best (and the ones I advise hiring) have experience and a degree. Basically, the best have both.

[snowman53]

Self taught or apprenticeship people have a number of advantages from a practical stand point. However they are generally not accepted by large companies. Part of the problem is a requirement by the US Government that professional positions must have a college degree. This applies to certain forms of government contracting where they want to make sure they are not being charged “Engineer” rates for a “Draftsman”. Many big companies have simplified the book keeping by making a blanket requirement that professional roles are only filled by college graduates.