> A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes.
This. Many years ago, our code was shitting the bed, a month before a major milestone deadline. Turns out that someone wrote an N^2 algorithm and only tested with N=5.
I don't have a CS degree--just a few semesters of combinatorics and graph theory. When I was programming, I always felt that was a huge liability. I'd confront a problem, and I knew just enough to know it could probably be reduced to some graph problem and solved using a known algorithm, but I didn't know what that was.
some CS degrees. From what I've observed, some CS programs are teaching "software engineering" at the senior/masters levels in order to focus on development and design over theory and math.
Yes but I've seen CS degreed developers with industry experience do that when deadlines approach and the test procedures don't keep up with the product specs.
This. Many years ago, our code was shitting the bed, a month before a major milestone deadline. Turns out that someone wrote an N^2 algorithm and only tested with N=5.
I don't have a CS degree--just a few semesters of combinatorics and graph theory. When I was programming, I always felt that was a huge liability. I'd confront a problem, and I knew just enough to know it could probably be reduced to some graph problem and solved using a known algorithm, but I didn't know what that was.