Requiring a computer science degree to apply for a programming job has always been bizarre to me and this blog post is a great example of why.
"The bulk of the effort was memorizing things that I normally would have Googled."
And given how memory works, in a few weeks you'll probably have to Google them again.
To earn my CS degree I learned a lot of stuff before starting my career that I never used. It would have been much more efficient to learn the things I needed on demand. I learned more about programming in 30 days on my first real programming job after graduation than I did in 4 years in school.
You know the things you learned exist, at least approximately what they're useful for, and what you have to search for to look them up. I think it's definitely not a perfect system, but having programmed a long time before I started studying computer science, it did fill a lot of knowledge gaps I didn't even know I had. If you're working in a team you might not notice this as much, though, as long as at least someone knows what they're looking for.
Going to college is this peculiar process where what you get out of it is commensurate with what you put into it, 100%.
I was a math major in college. A lot of my exams were open book - because exactly like you said - it's mostly about do you know how to think about something, do you know how to unfold something, do you know what to search for, and how it's useful.
Over the years I've had to help nieces and nephews with calculus homework, and it's been interesting to see this at play in the "real" world. I approach math a little differently now than a high schooler would, and usually my mind starts to wander around thinking, "you know, I'm pretty sure I remember xyz theorem that we can use here, let me look it up." Most of the time it works every time. From there it's easy to put it into the context of their current lesson and go over it in a way that makes sense with how and what they are studying in class.
When looking at job applicants, if someone has a degree, at the very least it means they had an opportunity to put a lot of effort into it and HOPEFULLY it means they got a lot out of it.
Sure, it's possible, maybe even most common, for it to just be a piece of paper - and that's OK. That's why we interview and a degree isn't the be all end all.
> Requiring a computer science degree to apply for a programming job has always been bizarre to me and this blog post is a great example of why.
What folks don't realize is that it's a signal to noise ratio issue [0]. It's not perfect but saves a lot of time down the line.
> "The bulk of the effort was memorizing things that I normally would have Googled."
That's missing the point. A lot of Engineering is being able to spot patterns and know enough about a subject to be able to research it properly and efficiently.
"is this a state machine", "can I represent this as a tree", "is this a regular language or do I need a more sophisticated parser".
1) most people who apply for programming jobs can't write FizzBuzz;
2) the traditional way to signal that you are not one of them will cost you 5 years of your life, and probably burden you with decades of debt.
Employers of course worry about the first one, because the costs of too much interviewing come directly from their pockets. Students worry about the second one, because they pay for that one directly with their money and time.
The fact that if you can learn in 3 months what the average student learns for 5 years, there is a possibility for you go get a signal that really only costs you 3 months of your time, and also proportionally less money, is a fantastic improvement over the traditional way where if you are faster, you just have to spend more time waiting... while still paying huge money for that time.
(The equivalent improvement for the employers would be like, doing FizzBuzz tests during phone call, so you would only spend 2 minutes per hopeless candidate, instead of scheduling one hour of your time.)
> The fact that if you can learn in 3 months what the average student learns for 5 years, there is a possibility for you go get a signal that really only costs you 3 months of your time, and also proportionally less money, is a fantastic improvement over the traditional way where if you are faster, you just have to spend more time waiting... while still paying huge money for that time.
The author did code professionally for 10 years before getting his CS degree. And he did have an Associates Degree in IT to land those jobs.
Yes, the author was not just an ordinary student. I still consider this a fantastic improvement for two reasons:
> many opportunities ... out of reach because I didn’t have the required papers
> From there, a Bachelor’s degree typically requires an additional 3 years of study.
1) The author had a problem he wanted to fix; the traditional way required 3 years and lots of money; the alternative required only 3 months and less money.
2) If, hypothetically, there is an 18 years old genius who could accomplish this trick right after high school (maybe not in 3 months, but 6 or 12 months -- still faster and cheaper than the traditional way), they can, and this is how.
Computer science is as relevant to most web developer jobs as quantum physics is to welding. You want job training to be a react monkey take a community college night course. If you want to study something truly fascinating and is not job skills training, study computer science.
"The bulk of the effort was memorizing things that I normally would have Googled."
And given how memory works, in a few weeks you'll probably have to Google them again.
To earn my CS degree I learned a lot of stuff before starting my career that I never used. It would have been much more efficient to learn the things I needed on demand. I learned more about programming in 30 days on my first real programming job after graduation than I did in 4 years in school.