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> Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.

I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it's becoming more and more fiscally irresponsible for most people to attend higher education, taking on the mountains of debt necessary to make it possible.

So the sensational stories of survivorship bias about the one-off people making exorbitant amounts of money can definitely go... but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical, and I expect it to get much worse.

Maybe is the US the college debt is a problem but they are a lot of countries where education is not as expensive. I attended engineering school for 200€ a year plus help from the government for accommodation.

That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.

> but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical

In the US*

All that means is that either alternate methods (eg: trade school) will become much more sophisticated, or that the US will fall behind countries that have solid, but much cheaper CS degree programs (helllllllo Waterloo)

This is turning into a "I'm self taught and I can code juste as well as the next CS graduate" debate.

I totally agree with that proposition. The degree is not a sine qua none condition of competence.

My point was that success stories about kids making a lot of cash on a self taught developer skillset are pure and simple lies. They hide the truth to those who really want to get into the IT industry and make a living with it. That truth is : work your engineering skills if you want to build cools things.

I said make a living. Not get crazy rich. Engineers don't get crazy rich. Salesmen (and salewomen) do.

People that did not have the ressources or desire to go to uni would get a lot more encouragement and from real developer tales : stories about smart engineering, beautiful UIs, dedication to a craft and passion, or even sly hacking.

Instead they read stories about skilled salesmen. The stories are not even that good. Glengary glen ross and the wolf of wall street are much better.

"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. "

What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university?

(lack of formal education, money, time ...)

And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success stories, so thats why you see such success stories much more ..

Of course encouraging people to try and get in the IT industry even without a degree is good too. I thought I said so in my comment. I am in no way a college elitist. I know not everyone can go to uni.

My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.

I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.

I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.

You see success stories of people becoming actors, musicians, or popular YouTubers but not once in a million years would I encourage a kid to pursue that path full time without them knowing what they're getting into. I feel like there are too many success stories in programming without enough stories of failure or hard work.

At some point the saturation for (entry-level) programmers with degrees will be enough that (entry-level) programmers who are self-taught will be in zero demand.

This assumes that a) the number of CS graduates keeps growing at a steady rate, and b) that the market puts a significant amount of value on a degree. Personally, I don't think either of those is true, especially the latter. With the cost of education continuing to rise in the US, I actually believe the value of a CS degree is trending towards zero, considering that the cost of the alternatives (code school and self-teaching) is much lower in terms of both money and time. And anecdotally, I've noticed that software engineers are in such demand right now that even companies that officially require a CS degree are easing that requirement, opting to instead focus on the potential of the candidates at face value.

Doubtful, you're ignoring the fact that self-taught (entry-level) programmers cannot simply be replaced by (entry-level) programmers with degrees (or vice versa).

Both have their up- and downsides, and treating them like equals is ignoring that which makes them each of them unique.

There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.

What do you mean? Why don't you enlighten the rest of us about what makes a self-taught special?

As an employer, I want the best. All other things held equal, someone trained from some kind of institution will give me more confidence for employment than someone self-taught. Self-taught shows initiative, but institutional learning applies a baseline training employers can trust.

What does make a self-taught special?

Agree 100%. Not to mention, having a degree opens up a lot of opportunities in case you ever want to leave the field. Many people get sick of coding after doing it a while due to its highly repetitive nature. Having a degree essentially gives you a pass to enter a myriad of fields that still require one.

I'm not sure that makes complete sense. I don't have a degree in CS as I was self taught and actually bothered to follow online courses and read documentation. If I get sick of coding and want to move elsewhere I still have the option to go to university.

I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.

In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.

In my situation I thought I learned to code at a young age. That's a great way to phrase it too. If one (cough, OP's article) is using phrases like "learned coding [in x months]" then they have the same misunderstanding that I did when I packed up and went off to college thinking I was hot shit at 16 with 4 years of BASIC and PHP web dev under my belt. In my case it took college to expose me to a whole universe of new ideas and really get the point across that "coding" isn't a thing you can "learn" in some number of months. Given that nerdy teenagers are notoriously both cocky and stupid, I suspect that this is a common experience.

Of course there are the Peter Deutsch wunderkinds and the people who get a really good secondary education and can jump into CLRS on their own without hand holding from college, but I don't think there are very many of them out there.

And adult learners are a whole different matter for whom the decision to go to college for CS is radically different.

It's also called burn out. Often times you will spend years slaving over one program, making improvements and changes for different cases while simultaneously maintaining it, installing it, documenting it.

After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.

You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.

There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.

It also helps in immigration. And if you want to do a PhD etc. In most cases, it is better to have a degree (even a crappy one) than not have one

> You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.

Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process.

Job security is a thing of the past, whether you went to school or not.

The "ideal" developer isn't some kind of monk who dedicates his entire life to one firm.

Making money doesn't mean your product is bad, useless or badly designed. It also doesn't necessarily mean you're the best salesman.

Sometimes experienced developers without a CS degree and without sales skills still get paid a lot because:

A) the requirement doesn't call for advanced computer science knowledge

B) the requirement does call for a significant amount of practical experience and business knowledge

C) it's a highly profitable industry and the specific work being done will generate the company profit and/or cut costs

It can be perfectly legitimate to perform jobs like this without having a CS degree or ever intending to get one.

It can be perfectly legitimate to work your way up the ladder of such jobs and jump from job to job in the process.

Some of us want to raise a family and/or be able to retire one day. Why should we put our careers on hold to pursue a degree?

Everything you wrote is true and in no way disagrees with what I wrote.

I think you mistook my A => B assumptions for a no B => no A which is a flawed logical reasoning.

>Congratulations, you're making money by manipulating someone into giving you their money. Awesome ! Thanks for playing, please leave.

It's not manipulation. It's always a sales proposition, but you're either doing it well or you're doing it poorly.

Obviously, there is no external, impartial arbiter of what makes a "good" programmer (or products, or services). There is only perception.

I used to drift around but I've learned the importance of selling myself so I can be sure I get the value I deserve.

I think an undertone point might be that sales is manipulation.

The difference between manipulation and influencing is whether or not something underhanded has occurred. You can sell yourself while being totally honest.

So many things in business are sales transactions, and it's better to come to peace with that early on. Sure, we're engineers but if you want your value to be recognized you have to learn to be a businessperson too.

Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.

This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.

Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".

That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.

The older I get the more this truism rings true: 'fake it till you make it' and 'perception is reality'.