I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life.
As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free.
Universities (elite ones particularly) still give you credentials that have some value getting a job. However I wonder for how long that will still be true. Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it.
Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
You already have a lot of replies here and the comment is provably divisive. I'll toss in that while only you can judge whether it was truly a waste of time, a lot of that factors in how you used it. If it benefited you in interview material understanding, increased the probability that you could extend your network with someone, or other somewhat intangible signals then I'd say it wasn't as much of a waste as you say.
I have no degree and that is arguably worse and there are exceedingly fewer people with my background in technology on the coast. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my career writing applications that solved Software Operations problems. I spent a lot of time working in small teams rather than huge ones, I often did not have product or project support. I used to loathe that chapter of my career because of how toilsome it was in my memory. Lately I've come to appreciate it a lot more because I am much more self reliant and I often have the skills and familiarity to run much larger teams as a tenured engineer.
Long way of saying, the value of an experience or thing is often not immediately realized or appreciated.
Computer science is a weird degree because it was meant to produce computer scientists. Theory of computability, graph theory, discrete math, formal logic, etc. But the world just doesn't need as many computer scientists as it needs people who know JavaScript.
Over time, many CS degrees shifted toward producing software engineers, and it sounds like this person's experience was closer to that. But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing. You grab left-pad from npm and run with that. Or, now, Codex does that for you.
So CS is weird because it's what you're supposed to get if you want a job at Google, but it's also not very useful. It's a very inefficient and expensive way of testing if you're "serious enough", can complete assignments on time, etc.
My day job is relatively boring JavaScript components and SPA's, but even there I find things I learned in my Computer Science degree valuable. "Hey, this looks like a finite state machine.." "This could be a simple domain specific language, good thing I had to write compilers in college and I can easily make a simple lexer/parser.." "This other thing is easy to parse if I ingest it into a lexer-resembling state machine.." And I would think the value of understanding algorithmic complexity and so many other fundamental things is obvious, no matter what someone is doing. And you won't waste your time accidentally trying to solve the Halting problem, among other things. Obviously there's nothing a university can teach you that you couldn't theoretically learn somewhere else but I'm seriously not convinced that a Computer Science degree is useless or a poor signal even for someone doing run of the mill React apps.
> But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing.
I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.
The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.
TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.
I think the biggest thing is most software "engineering" jobs are in no way engineering and are closer to a trade like being a mechanic or (imo) a doctor.
It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything.
Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement dark mode. These are the things that everyone is doing at their six-figure tech jobs.
and yet, the collective industry has still continued to expand for decades because people overwhelmingly cannot consistently do these tasks without their code collapsing on itself.
imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.
I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.
Note to everybody: this is a very exotic position and the vast majority of people I've met during career would strongly disagree with that. I don't have a Master or PhD, but my Bachelor degree was absolutely worth my time and was essential to enable me to have a successful career where I earned millions and retired early.
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one.
I'm in Europe where education is mostly free or inexpensive so it may be different in the US, but it sounds like terrible advice. In most fields, it will be virtually impossible to get a job without a degree, and even in tech it'll be hard. I work in a big tech company, and as far as I can tell, most SWEs do have a degree of some sort. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are rare.
causality direction violation. is it because of the degree that people get jobs or is it because everybody tells everyone that they need a degree that they get a degree to permit themselves to apply to get the job?
the productive takeaway is that of course its safer to come with a degree but it’s hardly proof that one needs the degree. Nobody is going to risk their or their kids livelihood on being the variant for the a/b test though.
Antony Trollope says in 'Eustace Diamonds' that he feels in a lot of professions, experience creates more competent people than mere learning. (Rough paraphrase). In other words, you don't get to be truly competent unless you are earning that experience!
As my mother explained it to me, the point of the degree is not necessarily the knowledge you acquire, but to demonstrate to employers the fact that you are capable of completing a project that is multi-year and requires dealing with annoying bureaucratic obstacles.
I have always recommended people get an MBA and self teach the development skills. There is a value to higher education:
Bachelors - You can communicate in writing.
Masters - You can plan and prepare business documents for planning and proposals
Doctors - You can do research
To me uneducated people can still have skills, but their utility into management becomes questionable even though education certainly does not make anybody a better manager. I do however question the future value of education if most young people have never read a book or cannot write a simple essay without AI.
For me the ability to communicate is the most important skill, because programming is a form of writing. So, if I were hiring for a software team manager I would have absolutely no reservations about putting them on camera and watching them hand write a 5 page essay within an hour. It’s one of those don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours kind of things.
I got a math degree with mostly pure math courses, and did a few CS and data analytics courses on the side. I used to feel a little behind that I didn't do a proper CS degree, but I found math to be a lot more fun and less time consuming.
After a few years in the workplace I don't feel behind at all, and I'm grateful that I have more potential back up plans and won't be just another unemployed CS major if there's a real contraction in the job market. I've been considering pivoting to being an actuary, or possibly teaching high school.
> I got a Bachelor, Master, and PhD in Computer Science, with a total of 11 years of education. It's the biggest waste of time of my entire life.
I disagree: I have fond memories of my university time. I also do really like programming. The problem rather is that there are hardly any job where what you learned and loved at the university (and why you studied - in this case - computer science) is of much use.
Keep in mind that your degree was a huge part why one was selected for the job.
I honestly ask myself quite often why employers are so fond of university degrees for programming jobs. If they put much less relevance on this criterion, employers would have a much bigger group of applicants among which they can select - and this means employers could use this to level down salaries.
I agree, the future looks very dim for tech degree grads. I would not even recommend a degree from an elite school. Grads'll be in debt for a long time.
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college.
I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, but the rationale behind going to a bachelor's college is that as someone else has said here: you all are treated equally and companies come to select you. So you are competing in a much smaller pool and are able to stand out much more.
Also, I get 4 years to do what I do best so much so that I did it these 2 years as well, I just can't resist myself because I have tried to do so I just love tinkering with computers and this also puts me up to an comparatively decent advantage.
Sure, there might be some rote-learning and some things which are a bit theoretical but they might also be practical. I was learning on my own a month ago IIRC about what the 7 layers are and I am probably going to read some on my own time before going to college the book of "networking a top down approach"
This has given me 4 years to do the things that I like, the job market right now is a bit not too good but reading books about history of the dot com bubble etc. I feel decently confident that its very cyclical. Just reading the book of "how the internet happened" made me realize all the similarities with things happening right now. Every 20 years, a new generation happens and we forget the old things which have happened (IMO).
That being said, I am unsure about 11 years of the free time at the same time but honestly, it really just depends upon your subjective nature and personal preference and for someone genuinely interested within research... it could be an interesting path. I am open to every opportunity that comes in front of me and wish to try my best :-D
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
Networking is a multiplier. You realize the ability of multiplier because you have the base-line. Were you able to form the base-line because of the time spent within those 11 years, partially yes, and other comes from your natural interests and curiosity judging from the fact that you are on Hackernews for the sake of it itself.
Would a person with the strongest of networks but failing to have the baselines of (technical & managerial?) tastes/intellect and just this feeling of learning be able to do something with networking. Absolutely, people are using these top grade colleges as just a way to network and so there is a lot of froth/hype in the market. Theo Baker (a 22 year old journalist who lived in stanford) has written a book about it ("How to rule the world")
I still think that its interesting that they get to become the startup owner at such an young age and there are benefits but also tradeoffs and realizing both of these is important and making the decision wisely is important. I do envy them in some sense as well but also not so, its nuanced! and I wish them all success hopefully :-D (and I think one should keep the options open), If an opportunity comes for me to open an startup say even within college and upon proper careful thinking I get the answer to be a serious yes, I will try to follow that as well :-D
but my main point is that after a particular point in life: the multiplier feels much more important than baseline but before that, the baseline is just as important if not more, so I will try to get good grades hopefully if interests align with the subjects which I think they do.
From my understanding of the world, the world is nuanced and complicated so there isn't one size fits all so its best to keep your options around and do what you feel rationally so but rationality can also only go so far so it also depends a bit on the emotions involved and many other factors but we can't also think infinitely in recursion for everything so we need to have good instincts and ability to think deeply when needed and basically being adaptable to the situation thus me suggesting that there might not be one size fits all.
These are the talks that I have had with myself over the conflict that I myself had over going to college or not and some reasons behind going to do so, so I do realize my bias in that and I am not entirely an unbiased source but perhaps a truthful source. It so much depends on the situation of the person to decide if they should go to college or not and all factors involved imo.
Have a nice day if someone has read it till here and take care! :-D
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one
This is horrible advice. Hiring is a zero sum game, and a college education is treated as a table stakes requirement which won't change.
When trying to get hired, you are competing against other candidates, and if a tiebreaker is needed, the less risky option will always be hired.
Additionally, where you get your degree doesn't matter too much, but getting one is critical. It can be a BSCS from WGU for all that matters, but getting one is important. Also, bootcamps are useless now. Don't waste money on them.
The only exceptions remain veterans from the armed services assuming they were trained in the right MOS.
> Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups.
I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging out. :p
So… obligatory not in HR and also not a manager. But I’ve helped hire a couple engineers over the last 5ish years. Seems that HR at my companies filter for college degrees, and basically require 2 - 4 more years of experience (sans degree) or pedigree at their last couple companies. Maybe this depends more on the size of the company, but, for <1000 at each of them, HR is strapped for time and shortcuts the interview process with filters like this. I work with a great data engineer who never finished college and is fully self taught, and we’re currently navigating a recent "degree’d" data scientist hire who appears to have lied on their resume and used AI in the interview. Note, they lied about experience and title, not the degree or the companies. So not something a background check would catch.
Kinda sucks that the first barrier to interviewing at most companies is HR, and they generally are the least qualified or motivated to properly assess candidates. I don’t fully blame them, as there are just too many resumes and interviews to go through for the limited time we have in a work day, but great candidates can come from any background and demographic.
Edit: Sample size of 1 here, so take with an appropriately sized (whale?, school bus?) grain of salt.
If you like math, this is the best advice. I did math with a CS minor, had a great time in college, and I seem to go in the same pool as people with a CS degree for hiring on any team I would actually want to work with. It also opens up a different set of backup plans or potential career switches if you don't want to or can't stay in software long term.
> Further to this point, it's quite common to favour a candidate with a strong STEM degree who has learned to code as an adjacency.
... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly.
In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(
As I progress in my professional career I'm more convinced that pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, and universities are little more than a social club. Nowadays you can learn everything you do at university and far more online and for free.
Universities (elite ones particularly) still give you credentials that have some value getting a job. However I wonder for how long that will still be true. Learning by doing and building a portfolio sounds like a better way of getting in the industry today than getting a multi-year degree with nothing or little to show for it.
Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
I have no degree and that is arguably worse and there are exceedingly fewer people with my background in technology on the coast. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my career writing applications that solved Software Operations problems. I spent a lot of time working in small teams rather than huge ones, I often did not have product or project support. I used to loathe that chapter of my career because of how toilsome it was in my memory. Lately I've come to appreciate it a lot more because I am much more self reliant and I often have the skills and familiarity to run much larger teams as a tenured engineer.
Long way of saying, the value of an experience or thing is often not immediately realized or appreciated.
Over time, many CS degrees shifted toward producing software engineers, and it sounds like this person's experience was closer to that. But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing. You grab left-pad from npm and run with that. Or, now, Codex does that for you.
So CS is weird because it's what you're supposed to get if you want a job at Google, but it's also not very useful. It's a very inefficient and expensive way of testing if you're "serious enough", can complete assignments on time, etc.
I somewhat disagree: there exist a lot of deep questions in software engineering, and there do exist some (very, very partial) answers.
The problem rather is that most people don't want to listen to and/or do deep literature research about the few answers that we do have, but rather want to aggressively push their private political agenda about how they want software to be built. With some literature research, it is often not too hard to disprove the "foundations" on which this political agenda is built. But this does not make you admired because you showed serious knowledge about software engineering, but rather near to an outlaw.
TLDR: the problem is not software engineering, the problem is organizational politics.
- If it's about manipulating people, it's politics.
It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything.
Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement dark mode. These are the things that everyone is doing at their six-figure tech jobs.
This is choose your own adventure. You can be writing any kind of code you want, including stuff at the frontier.
imagine if people regularly had tires fall off on their way home from the mechanic. or regularly having to get bones rebroken to set them correctly.
I can agree that much of the work is not true "engineering" but most of what I've seen produced over the years is closer to fraud than anything else.
I'm in Europe where education is mostly free or inexpensive so it may be different in the US, but it sounds like terrible advice. In most fields, it will be virtually impossible to get a job without a degree, and even in tech it'll be hard. I work in a big tech company, and as far as I can tell, most SWEs do have a degree of some sort. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are rare.
the productive takeaway is that of course its safer to come with a degree but it’s hardly proof that one needs the degree. Nobody is going to risk their or their kids livelihood on being the variant for the a/b test though.
Bachelors - You can communicate in writing.
Masters - You can plan and prepare business documents for planning and proposals
Doctors - You can do research
To me uneducated people can still have skills, but their utility into management becomes questionable even though education certainly does not make anybody a better manager. I do however question the future value of education if most young people have never read a book or cannot write a simple essay without AI.
For me the ability to communicate is the most important skill, because programming is a form of writing. So, if I were hiring for a software team manager I would have absolutely no reservations about putting them on camera and watching them hand write a 5 page essay within an hour. It’s one of those don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours kind of things.
After a few years in the workplace I don't feel behind at all, and I'm grateful that I have more potential back up plans and won't be just another unemployed CS major if there's a real contraction in the job market. I've been considering pivoting to being an actuary, or possibly teaching high school.
There are other options for online CS bachelor's programs (WGU is the most famous).
I disagree: I have fond memories of my university time. I also do really like programming. The problem rather is that there are hardly any job where what you learned and loved at the university (and why you studied - in this case - computer science) is of much use. Keep in mind that your degree was a huge part why one was selected for the job.
I honestly ask myself quite often why employers are so fond of university degrees for programming jobs. If they put much less relevance on this criterion, employers would have a much bigger group of applicants among which they can select - and this means employers could use this to level down salaries.
I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college.
I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, but the rationale behind going to a bachelor's college is that as someone else has said here: you all are treated equally and companies come to select you. So you are competing in a much smaller pool and are able to stand out much more.
Also, I get 4 years to do what I do best so much so that I did it these 2 years as well, I just can't resist myself because I have tried to do so I just love tinkering with computers and this also puts me up to an comparatively decent advantage.
Sure, there might be some rote-learning and some things which are a bit theoretical but they might also be practical. I was learning on my own a month ago IIRC about what the 7 layers are and I am probably going to read some on my own time before going to college the book of "networking a top down approach"
This has given me 4 years to do the things that I like, the job market right now is a bit not too good but reading books about history of the dot com bubble etc. I feel decently confident that its very cyclical. Just reading the book of "how the internet happened" made me realize all the similarities with things happening right now. Every 20 years, a new generation happens and we forget the old things which have happened (IMO).
That being said, I am unsure about 11 years of the free time at the same time but honestly, it really just depends upon your subjective nature and personal preference and for someone genuinely interested within research... it could be an interesting path. I am open to every opportunity that comes in front of me and wish to try my best :-D
> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.
Networking is a multiplier. You realize the ability of multiplier because you have the base-line. Were you able to form the base-line because of the time spent within those 11 years, partially yes, and other comes from your natural interests and curiosity judging from the fact that you are on Hackernews for the sake of it itself.
Would a person with the strongest of networks but failing to have the baselines of (technical & managerial?) tastes/intellect and just this feeling of learning be able to do something with networking. Absolutely, people are using these top grade colleges as just a way to network and so there is a lot of froth/hype in the market. Theo Baker (a 22 year old journalist who lived in stanford) has written a book about it ("How to rule the world")
I still think that its interesting that they get to become the startup owner at such an young age and there are benefits but also tradeoffs and realizing both of these is important and making the decision wisely is important. I do envy them in some sense as well but also not so, its nuanced! and I wish them all success hopefully :-D (and I think one should keep the options open), If an opportunity comes for me to open an startup say even within college and upon proper careful thinking I get the answer to be a serious yes, I will try to follow that as well :-D
but my main point is that after a particular point in life: the multiplier feels much more important than baseline but before that, the baseline is just as important if not more, so I will try to get good grades hopefully if interests align with the subjects which I think they do.
From my understanding of the world, the world is nuanced and complicated so there isn't one size fits all so its best to keep your options around and do what you feel rationally so but rationality can also only go so far so it also depends a bit on the emotions involved and many other factors but we can't also think infinitely in recursion for everything so we need to have good instincts and ability to think deeply when needed and basically being adaptable to the situation thus me suggesting that there might not be one size fits all.
These are the talks that I have had with myself over the conflict that I myself had over going to college or not and some reasons behind going to do so, so I do realize my bias in that and I am not entirely an unbiased source but perhaps a truthful source. It so much depends on the situation of the person to decide if they should go to college or not and all factors involved imo.
Have a nice day if someone has read it till here and take care! :-D
This is horrible advice. Hiring is a zero sum game, and a college education is treated as a table stakes requirement which won't change.
When trying to get hired, you are competing against other candidates, and if a tiebreaker is needed, the less risky option will always be hired.
Additionally, where you get your degree doesn't matter too much, but getting one is critical. It can be a BSCS from WGU for all that matters, but getting one is important. Also, bootcamps are useless now. Don't waste money on them.
The only exceptions remain veterans from the armed services assuming they were trained in the right MOS.
> Group projects were also a common complaint. You were randomly assigned a group, but it was often unclear if the participants were even doing the course - many people were in completely ghost groups.
I see that nothing has changed in 20 years. Even when attended the courses physically in person, group project usually had 1 or 2 people doing all the work and the rest nowhere to be found, or just hanging out. :p
Then it's almost trivially easy to cheat with a VM, or, failing that, a KVM switch with real hardware.
Writing detailed blog posts about the experience is rather usually a signal that the person is an annoying self-promoter. :-(
Kinda sucks that the first barrier to interviewing at most companies is HR, and they generally are the least qualified or motivated to properly assess candidates. I don’t fully blame them, as there are just too many resumes and interviews to go through for the limited time we have in a work day, but great candidates can come from any background and demographic. Edit: Sample size of 1 here, so take with an appropriately sized (whale?, school bus?) grain of salt.
OP would just put "BSc Computer Science from Goldsmiths, University of London" on his resume and LinkedIn.
... because they know less about programming, and thus think much less deeply how a novel abstraction could look like which solves the problem much more elegantly.
In other words: these applicants more obediently do their work instead of regularly questioning whether there could be a better way and thus rocking the boat too much. :-(