Two out of three developers are self-taught, and other trends from a survey

If you get an internship with one of the big companies, you will very likely have a great career in Huntsville. If you don't, then you'll have a much harder time. There are only around 180K EE jobs in the US compared to a couple million CS jobs. The dropout rate for EE is huge and the pass rate for FE/PE exams is somewhat low (you have to become certified after graduating). Companies must take a risk to hire new people because the barrier of entry is so high, but even then, they are fairly picky about experience. How much more picky will they be about experience when they have more options?

The argument about having trouble with current school curriculum is a red herring. Just because they are already failing and need an overhaul does not mean that the overhaul shouldn't include an introduction to coding in middle school (and for the record, they need new curriculum, better teaching methods, and most importantly, parents who actually care about their kids enough to become involved in their day-to-day education).

I don't believe for a minute that everyone can code well enough to do it for a living any more than I believe everyone who takes English classes will make a living as an author. English is important for communication, math is important for calculating and thinking, and coding is important for focusing on creative logical reasoning (complementing math very nicely). Learning how to make a turtle go through an obstacle course will teach way more about logic than a thousand "word problems".

Most children will take such a course and walk away disliking coding, but hopefully with a little better logical ability. The rest will discover a subject they enjoy and increase their proficiency before college.

I agree that proper rigor is best avoided at that age. At the same time, a little bit of real code (especially in a language like scheme where there's not a bunch of syntax to memorize) won't scare away the people who gravitate toward coding.

What we don't need to do (in my opinion) is attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We need to find all the other good candidates rather than lying to the unqualified by saying "anyone can code". Give them a chance to fail or succeed and let nature take its course.

Probably the same reason passionate musicians take offense when lazy garbage tunes make it to the charts:

Gauging the quality of music is something most people can't do, and they feel robbed because they're not compensated proportionately to the amount of their effort compared to those other unpassionate musicians.

> Given a particular school a median CS major is typically always a better programmer/problem-solver than an equivalent Physics or Applied math major.

The highest scoring undergraduate degree for those who take the MCATs is Math/Stats. The second highest is Physical Sciences. Far and away, last place is Specialized Health Sciences, with Biology also lagging[1]. The reason isn't because "Math majors are smarter", it's because they are choosing to go into a field that isn't the directly assumed career path. A Math major HAS to stand out compared to the average CS major when going into a programming field, just as an English major HAS to stand out compared to a Finance major when going into finance. If I am interviewing a Math major and a CS major, chances are the Math major is "better" (whatever that contextually means), simply because they've already stood out above all the CS majors. All that being said, let's not pretend our undergraduate degrees are anything more than a rubber stamp.

[1] https://www.aamc.org/download/321496/data/factstablea17.pdf

It wasn't every middle schooler who reads a book on perl for leisure.

I've heard this advice a lot but that hasn't been my experience. I stay in contact with quite a few of my co-workers from the past but I haven't stayed in contact with anyone from my time at the University. I was working and providing for a family while attending school so I didn't really have a lot of time to do anything other than the difficult CS assignments.

Developers generally fit into two broad categories -- those who learned to program on their own at age 10 or so and those who decided to pursue a CS degree because the job pays well or they like playing video games. 7 years of experience beats 4 years of college and 3 years experience pretty much every time.

Unfortunately, a huge amount of CS degree time is spent dealing with those with no experience (We have remedial Math or English classes, why not remedial programming classes?). When I hit college (pursuing EE with CS on the side), I already had almost a decade of programming under my belt. I coasted through anything programming related (I'd already found and read books on the theoretical side of programming, so even those weren't that interesting).

At the end of the college road, the people with college only were mostly worthless. They may be able to parrot the big-O notation, but they couldn't tell if a function would be efficient. They could talk about design patterns, but they couldn't handle systems more complex than a couple files. That's nothing against them, I (and others who had been programming from an early age) simply had a lot more experience in thinking in that way (and over time, most of them have become much better).

We need to introduce programming to all children at an early age. Not because everyone can code (that's not at all backed by any studies I've ever seen), but because lots of kids don't find out that they have a knack for programming until college (or not at all).

If most CS students had been programming since middle school, CS could drop a bunch of the remedial classes and focus on the finer parts of programming. Many so-called masters classes are within easy reach if you have some programming time under your belt. Companies would be a lot more willing to hire a dev out of college if they knew college was worth something. Until that happens, I don't think a degree is actually better.

One point people make is the best programmers without degrees are better than the worst programmers with degrees. This is true but does not mean much.

I took courses in Java and C++, and self-taught programmers tend to know as much as I learned in those classes. What they tend to skip is the theoretical foundations. Calculus, graph theory, theory of computation, mu-recursive functions.

I took two classes (one was elective) which dealt with mutual exclusion, race conditions, critical sections etc. I spent months studying them, writing complex homeworks dealing with them, being quizzed on them etc. This came to be helpful, sometimes very helpful for me. Obviously people are not learning about this as I run across race conditions in code far too often, and I have heard others say this as well. I had to sit down and learn to deal with this for some months and some programmers never do.

I don't understand the comments from people who say they already knew what was taught in class so it was a waste. Class is one fourth of the time, then you're supposed to spend three hours studying for each hour in class. So if you know 100% of what was taught in class you just saved yourself three hours to do something else. I was a Unix sysadmin for a long time and yes, the class where we learned "ls", "cd", "pwd", "chmod" etc. was not that educational. But the next class our homework was to study the process scheduler for Mac, Windows and Linux. I had always put off doing this, so I finally sat down and studied how Linux's completely fair scheduler worked and learned a lot. I learned what actually happened in full when an add instruction came in for two registers on a processor, and what logic gates they would go through. So even what I specialized in was filled out.

Another thing - often it is not what you know you don't know, but what you don't know you don't know. If I know a heap is a good data structure to quickly find the highest number in a list, then I can learn about heaps. If I never heard of a heap I might use a slower method. Or a real world example - in class I learn about Goedel numbers. Then a year later at work I have to take a (short) list of (small) numbers and make them into a hash. But how? Then I remember Goedel numbers. Again, it's not what you know you don't know, it's what you don't know you don't know. To learn by yourself, you have to know what to look for, and you often don't.

As I said, I worked a while as a Unix sysadmin. I went back to finish my BSCS. I'm not rationalizing a decision I made at 18 by talking it up, I realized how important it was to filling in gaps of knowledge, as well as to getting a job, especially when one is needed. A lot of people reading this are too young to have been working when most of the startups and dot-com's folded in 2000, and the few IT positions at traditional companies were flooded with applicants, many with college degrees. Things can turn on a dime, and having 4 years experience in RoR or Node.JS can quickly go from meaning a $120k job to meaning next to nothing.

Are those entry-level jobs? For those I can see it. If you're hiring somebody with 5+ years of experience, though, only considering those with a CS degree is pretty short-sighted.

Theoretical CS is very important, but also quite academic. 99% of developers won't ever delve into that theory and will instead reach for a library based on that theory. The biggest issue in programming is managing large amounts of information that changes over time. This is not only completely avoided in most courses, it is also close to impossible to teach outside of gaining years of experience because every decision is a tradeoff and it takes time to build up an intuition for such things.

By the time he was 20, he was out of school and working fast food. Programming on various projects in his free time. Making minimum wage.

I begged him to start looking for programming work, but he always told me that he wasn't qualified. How could he compete in the job market with all those professional coders?

Finally he tried. Of course, he got a job -- at a startup. He ended up being the go-to guy for both coding and infrastructure.

He's done a lot of things since then, but I'll always remember him looking at me, rolling his eyes, and telling me that what I was saying was impossible.

Yes, there's a huge role for luck, for having good parents, for being born in the right country, and for networking skills. But this is still an industry where if you love it, you can make terrific money just by being passionate about it.

Of the best developers I've worked with/know, only 1 has a CS degree. One has a liberal arts degree IIRC (works at Netflix), another is a college dropout (works at Google)...and the one with a CS degree has a tendency to overengineer systems with great flaws that the others I know wouldn't do (tries to be too clever). Myself, I have a MS in math from a top 15 program (PhD dropout).