[OT] destroy all software (was Programming language WATs)

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Sat Jan 21 13:27:05 PST 2012


"Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.661.1327176314.16222.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On Saturday, January 21, 2012 19:14:41 Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> Am 21.01.2012 04:48, schrieb Adam D. Ruppe:
>> > On Saturday, 21 January 2012 at 03:43:50 UTC, Caligo wrote:
>> >> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpZtX32sKVE
>> >
>> > Oh my, don't get me started on college!
>> >
>> > I'm so happy I dropped out of that waste.
>>
>> I guess this is a specific USA issue.
>>
>> In Europe you will hardly get a programming job as developer if
>> you don't have a degree in Computer Science, Electronic, Physics
>> or Mathematic applied to computation, just to name a few of the
>> common degrees.
>>
>> At least if you are looking for a company job. In case you would be
>> starting your own company then it is a total different matter.
>
> I think that that's frequently the case in the US as well, but it's not
> impossible to get a job as long as you have decent programming skills -
> especially in a good economy (which wouldnt' be right now) - even if you 
> don't
> have a colleg education. And once you have a decent amount of job 
> experience
> under your belt, it'll matter a lot less. But there are definitely jobs 
> that
> will be closed to you if you don't have a degree - especially early in 
> your
> career. I have at least one co-worker who's never gone to college and 
> whose an
> extremely good programmer and has been at it for 10 - 15 years now. But
> whether that route works and/or is a good idea depends on a lot of 
> factors.
> You _will_ do better getting a job if you have a college degree, but it 
> might
> be more economical to skip out on college if you can get a reasonable
> programming skillset on your own and manage to find work.
>

That reminds me: There's a *LOT* of people who told me "If two equally good 
people apply for the same job, and one has a degree and other other doesn't, 
the one with the degree will get the job." They always seem to think that's 
convincing, but there's three problems with it:

1. That's a fairly contrived scenario.

2. So...what, it's a $100k, 4+ year **tie-breaker**?? Sounds like a collosal 
waste to me.

And probably most importantly:

3. If you take all that time and money that would have gone into a degree 
and put it into building *real* skills and experience instead wasting it all 
on taking exams, cramming for exams instead of *actually* learning, homework 
assignments instead of *real* projects, etc., then you'd have something far 
better than a tie-breaker: You'd *be* the better candidate, by far. (And 
hell, if the other candidate is a middle-class white male, you'd have *far* 
less debt and could undercut the them on salary while *still* ending up with 
much more spending money.)




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