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Most "computer-science" graduate jobs are jQuery hacks.

The self driving car would do perfectly well built by a group of physics + maths PhDs who were self-taught programmers. We managed to build self-driving flights to the moon that way.




That is also crazy wrong.

Google and Facebook, between them, employ somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 engineers. Look at the entirety of the two companies' web presence (ie their jQuery hacker designed stuff) - that's work that could be done by a very small percentage of those 15,000 people.

The real challenge for both those companies is scalability and algorithmic complexity. They both do things like tweak well-established open source packages, implement machine learning, build programming languages/operating systems, influence technical web standards, etc. Stuff that decidedly is NOT the realm of your average hacker who decided to skip college because the curriculum wasn't "revelant".

If you don't believe me, feel free to try to get hired at either company without a college degree. Unless you've done something VERY notable, it's not gonna happen.


You seem to equate their requiring a degree with a person being able to perform the task. Just because they require a degree as a filter it does not mean that it is a constant that a person must hold degree X to perform task Y. This is not the case, what is the case is that Google requires a degree as a filter, nothing more nothing less. There are many people lacking degrees or degrees in that specialty that can competently perform the task.

For example I can hack a Bosch Common Rail onto an older diesel engine and build a custom ECU for it. I have no formal experience in EE or Mechanical Engineering but I am confident that I could work on the self driving cars at Google. Would they hire me, no because I don't have a degree in that field, does that mean that I cannot do it, no. I am confident that I could get a job tomorrow with a performance diesel product vendor, that is doing just as complicated development in their niche, should I chose to. Some companies, specifically smaller companies have the time to deeply investigate the candidates, larger companies on the other hand many times have to rely on filters. But don't mistake those filters as an indication of quality or superiority, they are rather administrative processes, nothing more nothing less.


excuse-me is just saying that you don't need a CS degree in order to be employable in the field. Which is true, even at places like Google and Facebook - I know plenty of people with math, physics, and other science degrees, and most of them have never had any trouble finding programming jobs.

Especially if you go after jobs that actually involve your area of expertise. When a company needs a programmer that's awesome at statistics, they're going to choose the math major that can code over the CS major that can do math, all else being equal...




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