Does the industry now expect this? From experience, that is a "Yes". In reality, no, I don't think so. Personally, although I have been programming professionally for about 15 years, I have an Electrical Engineering degree, and took no computer science classes in college. I am 100% self taught. I am currently a senior C++ programmer, but have also done C#, Delphi, and even VB6 (egads, I know, but VB6 was used quite a bit for some business applications in the pre-DotNet days). Everything you need to know to program or architect software you can learn out of school. However, now comes the personal experience part. Most companies these days think that a degree means everything. Every interview I have to overcome my lack of a degree, especially the C++ heavy/exclusive companies. Thankfully I have been lucky and have only had to change jobs a few times in my career.
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Derek Altamirano
@Derek Altamirano
Posts
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Do you need a college education to be a programmer? -
Programming QuestionI still use .cmd files quite a bit (haven't done .bat's since moving to NT; I still use the term batch file, though I think the proper term for a .cmd is command file :-D). Although I am learning to use PowerShell more, I can still usually whip out a batch file much quicker, depending on what I am doing, though I expect that will change as I become more fluent in PS. I have written some pretty neat and complex batch scripts in recent years (man do I love that for command!).