CS Degree Necessity

You're missing the point.CS actually has very limited utility in the software engineering and web development industry at large. It's very rare that you'll need to work out the time complexity of something or pick exactly the right data structure to use.The value is in the fact that you graduated. That fact means you had the access to resources, the intelligence, the conscientiousness, and the interest in the topic, such that you could stick that out for 4 years without drop

A computer science degree isn't the only way to get a good software/programming job. In fact, I think doing a more quantitative major like applied math or engineering with a base education of 3-4 CS classes (programming, algorithms, data structures, maybe an applied high-level lab class) would serve many people better. If you have the mind for it learning a language and applying it to problems in your speciality isn't hard and can be done outside a class.

Programming skills is not the same as CS degree

My 2 cents on the computer science degree versus coding... (Full disclosure - I have a CS degree from a large public school)1) Many of the top coders, programmers and data scientists that I know don't have CS degrees. (The top coder I know never finished school. He could move from Assembler to C to Objective C effortlessly, and could do everything from games to operating systems. He wasn't lacking for theory or versatility)2) Despite this, a Computer Science is more difficu

Of 7 awesome developers on my team, only 2 have a CS degree. And 2 have no college degree at all.Granted, we don't exactly do bleeding edge research or anything, "just" web applications.A degree makes it easier to get your foot in the door, especially at larger companies where computers screen resumes for keywords and HR is on a different floor from engineering.A CS education will make it easier for you to learn and excel at the "hard" parts of software developm

The CS degree is not for the job, it's for the individual

Hiring manager here and I completely agree with this. In my experience there is almost zero difference between a junior engineer with a CS degree and a junior engineer who is self-taught or had a non-traditional CS education.In actuality the things you learn in a 4 year CS program that you wouldn't get elsewhere (algorithm performance, theory, etc.) don't apply to all professional engineering jobs (especially at the junior level). Triplebyte has some great data on how bootcamp grads

A Computer Science degree isn't a magic bullet.I have a CS degree, and although I managed all my programming assignments just fine, I didn't really feel that I "knew" how to program for a few years after that. OOP took a long time to "click" for me, and every year I can look back at code I've written and see terrible mistakes I've made.What's funny about that now is that I've built systems that are being used by millions of people, and desp

I graduated in CS. The education helped me in two ways:1. Getting an internship and then a job at a large enterprise company right after graduating.2. About 5 years in professional software development, I was starting to be included in architecture and system design discussion meetings with key decision makers on large projects. Where my non-cs colleagues with the same skill level could not keep up with the conversation.During the time in the between, what helped the most was having the

It depends a lot on your goals. If you want to work at a large corporation, many of them screen resumes based on whether you have a CS degree. On the flip side, I work at a startup where out of 7 excellent engineers only 3 have CS degrees and 2 have no college degree at all.A CS degree will help you get your foot in the door for your first job regardless. Once you have a few years of experience your degree matters much less - with a few exceptions (including the large corps mentioned above).