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Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

> First one to award real degree credit per course wins, I suspect

With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.

Then the whole cycle is complete. You have a place to learn, and means to show what you've learned to get yourself employed. What else do you need?

(well, maybe the social part of universities is missing, but that can be fixed with hackatons I guess)

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> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree? You only want a degree so you can get a confirmation that you know what you know, so employers will hire you. But why don't you just link to your github and stackoverflow accounts? These online courses could incentive you to build awesome stuff and put online for this purpose.

Github and a degree show different things.

Github shows that the person can write code. It doesn't show that he knows how to decide what code to write. Did he consider alternative algorithms? Did he chose based on understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms? If you see an O(N^2) algorithm used somewhere instead of an O(N log N) algorithm, is it because he didn't know better, or is it because he determined that for the inputs in this particular project the O(N^2) is actually faster?

A degree in the appropriate field from a good school goes a long way toward showing that the person can do that kind of analysis.

I'd say for most developers a degree shows that you can stick with something, and that you were at least smart enough to get through a CS program.

However, most of the people I know have forgotten just about everything but the very basics from their algorithms class within a few years.

When I was teaching myself to program, I knew 3 guys who were seniors in CS at Georgia Tech. With only about 3 years experience myself, I could code circles around all of them.

At the time they may have had more theoretical knowledge than I did (definitely not true now though since I've caught up on the theoretical side), but I would have been a much better hire for 95% of programming jobs.

Not because I was some kind of rockstar, but because I'd had more practical experience actually writing real programs. Sure if I was working at Facebook, or trying to scale something truly massive (or working with resource limited embedded systems), they would have had an edge on me, but the vast majority of programming that happens each day doesn't require that level of computer science chops.

There are definitely jobs that require a "Computer Scientist", and if you want to work on interesting problems a CS degree is extremely beneficial. However, a CS degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for most programming jobs.

(That being said, I'm currently in the process of finishing a math degree.)

> With github and stackoverflow. Do we really need a degree?

I can't speak to the effectiveness of github and stackoverflow as signals of programmer ability, but I know most other disciplines do not have such services, nor will they anytime soon.

Even if you can demonstrate your skills to an employer, what are your chances of an admissions committee even being willing to click the link? I have an A.S. in graphic design, a few years into a B.Arch, and am finishing my B.A. in Philosophy, Art History within the next two semesters. Unless there's some sort of scheduling miracle, I won't even be able to get minor credit towards mathematics or engineering– outside of architecture and philosophy, graduate schools wouldn't want to touch me with a ten foot pole.

My primary goal over the next semester is to compile all of my notes and certificates from these courses and scrap with hell to get credit for them. Otherwise I'll be 21 with three degrees and still need to go back to school for two years, just to get my engineering degree so I can go to graduate school for CS/eng.

--typed quickly from my ipod so apologies if my argument got funky and rushed

I would argue that the focus on certificates, degrees, and grades are a competitive disadvantage. Rather than providing useful analytics, they introduce friction in the learning process and a reduced user experience.

An educational system that finds alternatives to these artifacts will have an advantage over those that rely on them.

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