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Comment by stevenwadejr | Hacker News Reader

I'm 33 years old and have been programming professionally for 11 1/2 years, and I'm self taught. I'm considered "senior". I founded and lead a user group and I've spoken at a conference. I don't say this to brag, I say this to state that despite my success and that a piece of paper won't advance my career, I've always regretted not having my degree. I'm married with a kid and I just started going back to school to fulfill my wish. I say this from experience, go to school first. It's much easier the first time around.

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How do you deal with classes like "intro to web development", where you will learn what a GET request is, when you've been a senior web developer for 10 years? (Just as an example, maybe you've worked in something other than web development?) Is cleping classes realistic?

You just slog through it and use the free time to dive deeper in your other courses or to go above and beyond what's required for the course.

Do people really need to take an “intro to web dev” class as part of a CS curriculum? Is intro web dev included in the list of requirements nowadays?

When I was in college and grad school 10-20 yrs ago, and when web dev wasn’t as hot as it is today, the CS folks were taking classes like algorithms, data structures, operating system design, compilers, microprocessor architecture, etc.

Has this changed much in the past decade? Or are you talking more about a trade school type of degree (and do they still call that CS)?

He might not have any classes like that. I majored in computer science and mostly took classes like crytography, compilers, operating systems, automata theory, etc. They might have had some courses like intro to web dev, I wouldn't remember; I always wanted the "hardest" courses I could get. I could program before ever staring the curriculum (at 26). They had two mandatory weed-out courses early in the curriculum to bounce anyone who just didn't have the aptitude or likely ability to complete the program where I had to write some boring Java, but that's it. In other places in the curriculum or some classes, they did have some programming, but things that wouldn't bore most anyone (For one class, we had to write Tetris, for instance. In the operating systems class, we wrote an OS.)

> I've always regretted not having my degree

Why?

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