Have any of you out there without a bachelors had professional doors shut because of your lack of degree, even with experience?
CS is a fascinating subject and great fun to study. But, truth be told, most of the knowledge you gain will be completely useless in your day to day job, unless you become a CS Professor. Just think about it, you don't have a degree and you've already completed 4 years of software engineering experience: that should tell you everything you need to know about that.
If you do, do it, then just get one of those online degrees where you do the minimum amount of work: that way, you can decrease cost and maximize your ROI. At this point, it's just going to be a small line item at the end of your resume, mostly there for checkbox purposes.
There is one exception. If you get a chance to go to a top tier college like Standford or harvard or MIT, obviously, a lot of people are going to like that. And it may open a few doors for you that might not otherwise be open. It would probably give you a sizable advantage in an interview at Google or facebook.
OP might want to look at very specific applied technology types of Bachelor programs, like Software Engineering, databases, networking, etc. if he has no intent on a Masters/PhD.
There is also, of course, the learning experience.
That's interesting - I am in the same position (plenty of experience but no degree), and while being successful in getting most of the jobs I wanted; I hadn't realised there were other benefits.
I am not sure that applies in all countries, but having a degree (or some Tertiary qualification) is certainly good to be able to fill out sections in linkedin / job applications.
What letters can you put after your name after a bachelors? That seems weird to me.
https://extension.berkeley.edu/public/category/courseCategor...
(among others)
but my point here is just that college is... not vocational school. Which isn't to say it's worthless, there are lots of good reasons to go to college, and a lot of people feel they get a lot out of it; I'm just saying that if you want vocational education and you go to college, you are not really using the right tool for the job.
I don't have a degree myself, and I dunno, I do pretty okay. I probably would do better if I were the sort of person who went to college; but I do a lot better than a lot of people who are that sort of person, so who knows?
I personally want the non-monetary bits of college, but that's mostly... hobby, you know? I like reading. I like talking about books. It really does sound like a lot of fun.
Monetarily, though, getting a degree wouldn't get me a raise. It might help me twenty years out, say, or if I spent a lot of time unemployed, as a degree loses it's value much more slowly than a job at a prestigious place, but I don't think a degree has a higher value in the short term than a job at a prestigious place.
I'm not really looking for vocational training from a college. I have a bachelors in a non-tech field, and I've actually worked in the education sector for quite some time. I've become very disillusioned about the efficacy of higher education.
I was more just curious about people's experiences in the field, and whether the lack of a bachelors makes it harder for career advancement down the line. Thanks again!
1. You know that you're not getting hired because you don't have a tech bachelors. Not just for once job - I wouldn't go back until I saw a repeated pattern.
2. You decide that you need some things from the degree for yourself, not for credentials for others to look at. That is, you need the knowledge, not the piece of paper.
It's as though people want to write out of history the whole political movement to make education relevant to the masses during the industrial revolution.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university and: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Acts
Note, I think you might be using the word "revisionist" wrong. I was being ignorant or lying, right? (I mean, I was being ignorant, but you can't tell ignorance from deception at a distance.)
Historical revisionism is a different thing; and certainly not a thing you can do without quite a lot of knowledge about the subject and the historical context. It's not just making things up (any more than the rest of history isn't just making things up) Go read the wikipedia article on it :)
I would say it depends on what you want, if you think you'd be more comfortable having a degree were you to apply for a job on another company, either where you live, or in the same country but different place, or even abroad, you should go for it, you'll probably regret not getting the degree later on
if what you want is simply to become more marketable, maybe simply learning a sought-after technology or framework could help you achieve that more easily, or faster, depending on how much time you'd need to dedicate for the degree (there is a lot of legacy code in Cobol for instance, telecommunications uses erlang, these aren't all that popular, and BECAUSE of that, the few jobs that use them might pay higher than the average job in programming, just to give an example, though some people would prefer something other that better pay, like shorter commutes, better life-work balance, working on something they can truly get behind, etc.)
perhaps I'm biased, because I am in a similar position, I am "taking a break" from my college program for a semester, and working full time as a C++ programmer, and I fully intend on finishing my degree, so I personally would recommend you get the degree, as it might not only make you more marketable, but also give you the opportunity to get a scholarship to pursue a higher degree abroad, if that's something that might interest you (there are a lot of scholarships that get wasted because nobody knows about them)
Unfortunately for you, this is slightly less true for Microsoft-centric development environments. Government and big business still value the degree a lot.
Unless your A.S. or A.A. is in basket weaving, getting some kind of BSCS in five years of part-time distance ed would probably be both affordable and worthwhile.
I think I got lucky and latched onto Pascal at just the right time. I don't think Python or Java would've carried me as far as something about them is actively off-putting. I have no problems reading just about any language and I'm unsure how that happened exactly. I feel like it's likely the result of being mostly self taught with CS 101 bringing about a matrix moment where I finally started seeing the code.
I feel like some of the latter courses in specific languages may be a problem for someone like me but considering I've never completed any, I may be extremely biased. I've often wondered what I may be missing without completing my degree, but for me today that would just be a piece of paper. If I've lost opportunities for something that saddles me with more debt for very little extra return of investment, I'd rather ignore the opportunities that have passed me over rather than do something that feels like appeasement. I admit I could be approaching this all wrong but I've had no problems being gainfully employed for the last 8 years as solely a developer. I know the worth I've brought to the companies I've been involved in even if interview processes in the past have made me feel inadequate.
At the end of the day though it's ultimately going to come down to how you feel. Do you feel you need this? Can you justify the downsides, the extra time and money spent on something you've proven more than capable of handling over the last 4 years? If you can handle the downsides, I say go for it. If you're someone that feels like me, it's probably not worth it.
However, now I am in China as a founder of a new company, and in order to self-employ and sponsor a work visa for myself, I either have to go finish my degree or set a ridiculous salary which is roughly 30x times country average wage.
So if you plan on working in other countries, lack of a degree may pose some difficulties.
They were split into two camps: One would study part-time over several years to boost the knowledge they already have. The other would use it as a "reset", in order to move into different types of development. Given our location near a bunch of defence contractors and big-name engineering firms, many of these developers were keen to get out of that world, and viewed getting a degree as their chance to jump from low-level development to working on web stuff, or in higher-level languages.
I remember one guy that flew through all of his programming assignments, and would spend most of his time chatting to lecturers about C. He was earning money that made student me's eyes water, but he took three years out and moved into building web applications. Within a few years he went from junior to technical manager at a large agency, and now he's heading his own startup.
On the .NET front, some of the best .NET developers I've worked with had no degree, so I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing skills-wise, but I do share your concern that you simply don't know what roles you'll have missed out on due to not having a degree. It's also another layer to throw onto the standard "imposter syndrome" that all developers face. Should you choose to do a degree, my only advice is to budget well. The adjustment from 9-5 to student life is hard enough without having to worry about whether you've got the money to afford that book you really need.
I went back and got my CS degree after 10 years of programming experience.
From what I've seen, degrees don't matter when the economy is good (as it appears to be at the moment), but the lack of a degree can become a "reason" to lay off, not to hire, or to assign to drudgework projects, when the economy is bad.
This also requires guessing what the economy will be like when you expect to get out, because it's hard to get a good job as a new graduate when times are bad as well.
Ideally, you want your degree and a couple of years of new, full-time, experience before the next recession. Your pre-college experience will become nearly worthless during the 4+ years you're "away" from day-to-day production programming.
What you learn in college is focused on theory, so won't generally be on cutting-edge languages, libraries, and APIs, or the sorts of equipment that will become available out in the world in the interim (Is cloud computing anything more than a specialty elective class yet?).
Longer term, having the piece of paper will show employers that you can stick to something for the years needed to complete it, and you'll vaguely-but-well-enough remember the algorithms that you'll call as existing libraries rather than ever hand-coding again, but mostly your degree will be a check in the box.
Will your dream job require that box to be checked?
Just my opinion, but from having worked both without and with a degree. All-in-all, I'm glad I have the degree, but it took several more years than I originally anticipated to catch up and surpass where I feel I would have been without it.
If you want to complete your education in case fundamentals or practical applications there are plenty of courses available online.
A degree would increase your salary significantly in the corporate world. It's worth doing if you plan to stay at your job or go anywhere similar. The alternative is to learn React/Node/Go (trendy tech) and release a bunch of side projects so you can get hired somewhere that doesn't care about degrees. You'll also need to get better at white boarding and understanding algorithms you'd never use outside of a tech interview.
I think the degree is the better choice if you want stability and plan to start a family soon. The trendy tech choice is better if you want to travel the world or do your own startup.
Without it, I would not have the position I have now. It was a struggle but I am more pleased with the results than you can imagine.
If it is not a top tier school, a degree might still be useful in these cases - there are companies that will filter out resumes that don't have degrees attached to them. Second and more important, if you apply for work visas in other countries, degrees matter as most countries have some kind of point system and you get points for age, experience, degrees etc. It will also be useful if you want to get into research later on.
One of my friends was making 60K or something, then he did part time MBA from a top tier school. His next job got him 150K, and it was a quick climb both in terms of money and responsibilities from there.
So yeah, degrees are worth something.
I think college has more to offer, but it really depends on what you want out of it and how hard you want to work.
At the moment, the economy is booming. You could always go back to school during the next downturn. When it's raining soup, put out your bowl and all that.
I have seen professional doors shut because of a lack of a degree, or a lack of a masters, or a phd. It all depends on what you want and what tradeoffs you're willing to make.
If you're interested in being the person who builds the tools rather than using them, I think you'll find yourself going further with a degree. In addition, you may get more out of it because you're not starting from scratch.
If your life plan includes any of these, go get a degree. If not, returning to school will be a waste of time.
Generally, the best way to make yourself marketable is to become ridiculously good at something.
I work(ed) with a lot of people that did not have degree and moved from the production to design engineer. However, it took a lot of time for them to get there. Also, I find that people with higher degrees tend to get promoted to higher positions. Another big drawback of not having a degree is that it's harder to move to the same position in a different company. I know many coworkers who started at a lower engineering position (and lower pay) because of the lack of degree. They'll eventually get promoted to their previous level because of their expertise but this usually takes a couple years.
Unfortunately, recruiters will never tell you why you missed out on a job, so it is extremely hard to determine whether your lack of a degree is the reason for missing out on a job or some other factor.
In my experience, solid experience trumps paper credentials. In companies where that is not the case, you have to ask yourself whether you would even want to work there.