My anecdotal evidence, looking at both my own career and a lot of developers I've worked with over the past 17 years, is that having a degree, or not, isn't a big deal.
Many are working towards abstracting schooling out of a being a developer, great.
That also means we're moving towards making being a developer a blue collar job rather than a white collar job. We're also making private businesses now the trainers of labor.
The time to be a dropout rockstar developer was in the 2000s but we're moving towards 2020 now.
The real question is meant for the generation of 13 yo now in the next 5 years. They can study software development on their own but in 10 years time, will they be better spending half of that with expensive college education or nah.
Everyone in this thread are giving out answers based on their own experience surviving the past 20 years as if what happened the last 20 years in the tech industry is where we're at right now or will be going forward the next 20.
I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated and highly specialized people. It's incredulous to think the future is only going to be built by Lucky Palmers and 16 yo hacker geniuses.
Software as the future is yesterday's news.
This will never happen, the majority of the population doesn't have the dedication and/or intelligence to be employable as software developers. I've given numerous people resources to learn how to code and none have stuck with it.
Fair point, but I still haven't seen much - if any - evidence that it's any more necessary for developers to have degrees now, as opposed to in the past. But, as always, it's going to vary by (company|geography|industry vertical|etc ), so my sample data is almost certainly not broadly representative.
I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated
True, but FWIW, I would argue that "highly educated" and "highly formally credentialed" are not the same thing.
We're going to make software development into a job involving manual labor?
Maybe a lot of that useful hardware and software was not written or designed by people who own a sheepskin?
> It's incredulous to think the future is only going to be built by Lucky Palmers and 16 yo hacker geniuses.
Does a sheepskin enable that type of high quality condescension? I guess it's good for something, eh?