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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

One possible answer: you can learn computer science without needing a degree at all, and subsequently prove that you've learned it by just writing a program that works.

That makes a CS degree inherently less valuable than almost all other degrees out there. Why would employers request a degree saying you know your stuff, when they can just ask you to prove it directly?

I was recently st a meetup and met a guy I went to school with. When he was in the process of acquiring his masters degree in physics, he was contacted by Google, who wanted to employ him. He went to an interview (which, apparently, was several interviews by different people all working for Google), and he got the job and moved to Ireland to work for them. Moral of the story: get a degree which offers the greatest value for money, and learn CS in your spare time, for free.

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That is not "computer science" any more than spotting constellations makes you an astrophysicist.

I don't really understand the point of this comment.

Are you suggesting that those developers who lack a CS degree but can program effectively nonetheless don't really know "computer science," and therefore are weaker applicants?

By extension, are you suggesting that most developer jobs have a need for applicants well-versed in Turing machines, automata, language parsing, trie data structures, and so on?

You seem to be saying that demonstrating strong coding ability doesn't correlate to strong academic CS ability, but I can't imagine why you would bother to point this out unless you felt it was strongly relevant, in which case you must also be suggesting some variant of the above arguments.

'Are you suggesting that those developers who lack a CS degree but can program effectively nonetheless don't really know "computer science"'

In the formal sense, pretty much - most actual CS is pretty irrelevant to day to day development as it's pretty much a specialized branch of maths (note that the CS department I did a degree at is now part of a maths department so I'm perhaps a bit biased).

"strong coding ability doesn't correlate to strong academic CS ability"

Again I would agree with this - I had a supervisor who never wrote any code but he was very well regarded in his niche area - his area was purely mathematical.

The OP stated

you can learn computer science without needing a degree at all

Then proceeded to give an example of programming, which is not the same thing.

I agree with the assertion that one can be a successful programmer without a CS degree but let's call a spade a spade.

That's not even remotely a fair comparison.

I'm not arguing that the ability to write computer programs makes you a computer scientist. I'm arguing that companies aren't looking for computer scientists, they're looking for programmers. And also that compilers (combined with running the program) make it a lot easier to verify whether or not someone knows enough about programming to be useful.

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