As a result, I wonder if maybe software developers are a little more inclined, as a "profession", toward paths that are less formalized.
Yes (edit: accidentally said the opposite of what I meant!). What you need to be able to do is pass the exams. BUT -- plenty of people with math degrees fail these exams. It's a hell of a lot harder than learning how to hack together a RoR site.
See e.g., various discussions on http://www.actuarialoutpost.com
You can also e.g., fill a number of supporting roles around actuaries without a college degree and then demonstrate competence by taking exams.
> I wonder if maybe software developers are a little more inclined, as a "profession", toward paths that are less formalized.
I think the fact that everyone in software has the same job title makes a huge difference wrt medicine and engineering.
The guy hacking together cookie-cutter single server websites calls himself a software developer/engineer just the same as the Ph.D. hacking on compilers or ML algorithms. Everyone inside the field knows there's a huge difference between these two jobs, and that becoming the latter is basically requires a degree (perhaps even an advanced one) or really extraordinary dedication while the former probably doesn't even need a degree at all.
So when someone says "do I need a degree to become a software developer? / Is a degree the fastest path to becoming a software developer?", it's an ill-defined question. What do you mean by software developer? Do you want a good salary doing whatever in boom times or do you want to do really technically interesting work with job security even in bust times?
Conversely, most other fields tend to differentiate between job titles that require lots of skill and jobs that don't.
For example, the difference between various levels of non-doctor healthcare workers (the whole range of nurses, and then everything up/down from there) is very institutionalized. Something similar happens in engineering -- plenty of non-engineers do engineer-y things in engineering firms, but some things you'd be insane to delegate to someone who doesn't have formal engineering education.
I spent a little bit of time (less than a year) in upper management even, and hated it. I wouldn't be happy optimizing algorithms to serve ads better, or track financial systems. There's a place for that, sure... but it just isn't interesting to me.
There's fun in trying to keep current with new things... Hell, I've been sticking with node.js since inception, and that's been a very wild ride. I like web based applications, despite other people hating them. In the end, I like delivering usability and solutions to the end user. I started out as a designer/artist in a former life (been in software for nearly two decades now).
The conventional path was never the right thing for me. That doesn't mean I'm not able to do type of work being done at Google, Netflix and the like... And I've even considered it. Just because I don't have a degree does not mean that I haven't studied, and am not able to do "really technically interesting work."
I've spent the better part of twenty years studying, designing and developing software systems, with far more real experience than someone stepping out of college. To think that someone who's spent that much time is always inferior to someone with a formal education is simply ignorant.
As to engineering, take a look at where Radar came frome sometime. It wasn't formal educational engineers, it was guys with on the ground experience. There are a lot of truly great acheivments in humanity that didn't come out of a formal education.
Okay, going to stop now, I just found the parent post very arrogant and frustrating. Arrogance irritates me more than any other behavioral trait.
From what I can tell, none of the lead creators of PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby or JavaScript actually have PhDs. The original author of Turbo Pascal and chief architect of Delphi and now of C#, Anders Hejlsberg, didn't even finish his undergraduate degree.
It's not just a matter of similar titles, the paths are really less formalized.
For instance, the sentence right after the one you quote ends with: "...or really extraordinary dedication". The handful of people you mention in your post, I think, count as extraordinary.
To reiterate my point:
The IT guy who helps hack out some spreadsheets isn't an actuary. The nurse who changes sheets isn't a doctor. But in software, there's no distinction -- in terms of externally recognized job titles -- between the guy hacking on wordpress templates or apps that burn my phone's battery and steal my data for no reason, and someone working on a piece of critical infrastructure.
I can't really respond to your anecdata without starting a flame war, but suffice it to say that perhaps some people would consider PHP or Perl or JavaScript cogent counter-examples to the point you're trying to make.
Finally, lots of actuaries without degrees rise to the top of their organizations and get to work on really cutting-edge stuff. Those people are extreme outliers. The same exact thing is true in software. Literally the only difference is that actuaries don't have the same sort of blindness to statistics that software people do, and I think the reason is that there's a clearer distinction between "grunt work related to actuarial work" and "professional-grade actuarial work".
If we made that distinction in software, then I think the perception that you can do real software engineering without a degree would shift far closer to "Exceptional" than it is now.
You say they count as extraordinary, but by what measure? Reading the origins of those languages, they don't strike me as such. Unless you consider them extraordinary because they wrote languages and compilers without having advanced formal education, but then your claim seems rather circular.
I can't really respond to your anecdata without starting a flame war, but suffice it to say that perhaps some people would consider PHP or Perl or JavaScript cogent counter-examples to the point you're trying to make.
Well, no, because the point I'm making is that one can be employed to hack on some of the most used languages and compilers without having a PhD, and these examples strengthen it.
Now, it might be that these languages are poorly built and which is why many non-PhDs can get jobs building them, but that is an explanation, not a rebuttal.
And I'd point out that one doesn't have to be blind to fail to see statistics that aren't there. Would you care to provide them?
Of course. You can most anything without a degree, with very few exceptions (see: the article).
But the degreed : undegreed and phd : nonphd ratios in language design/compiler implementation are much higher than in software development more generally. The same is true of other technically challenging things. If you agree with that observation, then I think we're violently agreeing or you're reacting to the tone rather than the substance of my post.
> Would you care to provide them?
Anecdata, and bearing in mind that "originator of a language" is a very, very small subset of all people working on compilers / language design (and that even there, I think my observation holds -- especially for degreed : undegreed, and probably even for phd : nonphd). And that compiler/language design is only one very small segment of what a reasonable person would consider to be core infrastructure.
I don't have the time or the interest to run this study. Feel free to do so.
Yes, anyone can take the exams, there are a handful. And if you pass them all nobody really cares about your degree. But from what I gather you'd better be pretty sharp to pull it off.