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> Being self-taught is fun, but without credentials you end up having to work at companies that are willing to take chances, and as a result of that these companies have a propensity towards going bankrupt

This is one of the notable difference between my pre- and post-degree careers: a degree opened the door to jobs with stable Megacorps. I still get the opportunity to work on cool, cutting-edge stuff, while also having a good salary & health insurance with reliable raises, decent vacation, and a lot of intangibles (nice equipment).

Plus, if you enjoy programming, CS is an incredibly fun degree (when you take the right courses).

I mean, I work for one of the biggest tech megacorps now (not going to say which one but I can guarantee you've heard of it), so it's definitely possible to get the stable job eventually as a dropout.

That said, it was a rocky and scary road to get to this point; if you get your degree you can often start out immediately with some stability.

I never took CS, as I was a math major before dropping out. Honestly, math is still more of a passion for me than CS (despite me loving programming), and I consequently do have some regrets about how I handled school; specifically, I'd like to get a job doing research, but as it stands that would require me first finishing my bachelor's, then getting at least a masters, and probably a PhD. Doing night school for a bachelor's is definitely doable, but I don't think I've heard of a single success story of people trying to work full time (which I would need to do to pay my mortgage and support my wife) and doing a PhD. If I had finished school the old fashioned way, I could have conceivably gone straight to grad school before entrenching myself into my current (admittedly comfortable) lifestyle.

Not sure how helpful my reply is since I did my PhD in the humanities, but I absolutely did my doctorate while working full time and supporting my wife. Rare, certainly, but not as impossible as it once was. And this was at a legit, SACS accredited U.S. brick and mortar school, not some online diploma mill or anything like that.

> I don't think I've heard of a single success story of people trying to work full time (which I would need to do to pay my mortgage and support my wife) and doing a PhD

I worked full time during the second half of my PhD, paid a mortgage, supported a wife, and had a daughter.

I'm confused about what kind of wife support are we talking about? Is it not the default and expected behaviour, even in the US, for wives to be self-sufficient and perfectly capable of supporting themselves? Is it very different from European Common practice where for most educated employees and freelancers disability is covered by disability insurance and pregnancy + aftermath is covered by paid maternity leave until children are in child care?

> Is it not the default and expected behaviour, even in the US, for wives to be self-sufficient and perfectly capable of supporting themselves?

If your wife doesn’t have a paid job and so doesn’t have any income, in order to look after the children, then no.

We don't have kids, but my wife is still in school, and wants to be a teacher, which doesn't pay all very well (at least in the US). Because of this, it's unlikely that she would be able to afford the mortgage without my bloated tech salary.

Wow! I didn't really know this was a thing...if you don't mind me asking, what was the PhD in? How did you manage to make time for yourself to not go insane?

It was a programming language PhD. I didn’t say the experience didn’t make me go insane!

After a few years of experience I’ve not had a problem getting interviews at megacorps - it’s just too competitive right now trying to find coders.

>Plus, if you enjoy programming, CS is an incredibly fun degree (when you take the right courses).

And in some countries it's also an incredibly affordable degree. I was able to pay off all my student debt with part time jobs between semesters.

And in some others it doesn’t cost anything: I just have to pay a 300€ registration fee each semester here in Germany.

I'm on the opposite side.

If anyone asks me if they should go to school, do a bootcamp or learn by yourself I always tell them that "don't take my word for it but I'd personally never go to school to learn and get job as a programmer if that's what you want". Seeing as I've "made it" so to speak coming from a another field, without any kind of degree whatsoever, with no prior work experience in IT, I personally don't really see the value of going to school unless you really want that experience or if you're the type of person who needs a structured way of learning.

My career path is also strange to most people since I started out in sales and marketing, then went into finance as a glorified salesman and eventually got fed up with sales hussle and learned web development on the side. So from that I decided to learn how to code and web development to actually landing a job as a web developer took roughly two years.

I believe that with my soft skills from sales and finance and a decent portfolio made the decision to hire my over let's say someone straight out of college with no other credentials a no brainer.

Sure, I run into those "blind spots" from time to time but so far everyone I've ever talked to who has been in tech and specifically in development positions says the same thing, they all have the imposter syndrome and it won't go away.

The average annual out-of-state cost for a bachelor program in Computer Science is $41,992, with an estimated average four year degree total cost of $167,968.

You have to ask yourself what would be more effective: 4 years in college (spend $170k) or spend 4 years learning on your own (free), working on open source projects (free), and/or getting an entry level job (earn 120k or more)?

I don't know what entry-level job for a dropout is going to pay 120k/year; my first full-time job as a dropout paid 35k/year (in 2011). Granted, this was Orlando, FL, not Silicon Valley, but even still I have a hard time believing that the average entry-level salary is that high.

Also, why the constraint of "out of state" tuition? In-state tuition for CUNY schools is ~$7,000/year. 4 X 7,000 = ~$28,000. Is that a lot of money? Sure, but it's less than my first year's salary as a dropout, even without your inflated numbers.

I agree with just about everything you said but you still have to ask yourself if 28,000 dollars a year is worth it. There's a lot of people coming out of school who just don't really know how to code, you can fumble your way to a CS degree but if you can't put any of that into practice then you wasted a lot of money.

I mean ideally before you entered school you should have had some type of idea about programming. I know many people who started writing code very early but even if that wasn't you you should have at least gave it a shot before you dedicated a major to it right?

Therein lies the problem, if you're intelligent enough to start learning on your own, at what point does the opportunity cost of college outweigh the benefit? If you don't have the initiative or desire to start on your own, then you probably won't make it very far in this field anyway because it requires constant learning and experimenting on your own.

I guess that's why so many companies look for "self-starters"

> Being self-taught is fun, but without credentials you end up having to work at companies that are willing to take chances, and as a result of that these companies have a propensity towards going bankrupt, or being run by scumbags who will run away with all the investor money (true story).

Systems Engineering is what you want my friend. Companies are totally willing to be adventurous in their hiring when staffing roles like SRE, since SRE requires skills that schools haven't figured out how to teach.

In my case I kind of fell into functional programming for similar reasons.

FP has been academic for most of its life, but until semi-recently they didn't teach it much in undergrad. My interest in it more or less coincided with the advent of MapReduce and as a result suddenly FP is all the rage, which worked out well for me.

I guess that would be the advice I could caveat my previous comment with; if you decide to not go to school, try and find a current blind-spot in the current education system and fill that.

Just to be clear, my advice was that Systems Engineering is the blind spot. There are a couple companies that use functional programming, but pretty much all companies need Systems Engineers. They're so hard to find. It pays just as well as Software Engineer. It doesn't require higher education. Systems Engineers also tend to have a lot more power than Software Engineers too, since they control the means of production. Totally worth considering.

Please note the SRE book has been raising awareness of these facts with the public, so the opportunity window is likely to shrink over time as more people try to get in.

After going and getting (most of) a degree this describes exactly what I saw. I taught myself to program in my preeteens and avoided university for a long time because it seemed like a scam to me ("why should I pay someone a significant fraction of a million dollars to read a few poorly organized books to me?"), after going through all the classes I've realised just how easy it is to underestimate how important certian abstract ideas are.

What blind spots? Algorithms 101 etc?

Dumb example; I had been doing concurrent programming full-time for a few years with threads and whatnot, but mostly using abstractions in the language like STM and F#'s async monad and whatnot. Eventually someone used the term "mutex" and I didn't know what they meant...only to be embarrassed when they told me it's a lock, and I just didn't know the name of it. I felt like an idiot.

I know enough algorithm stuff to pass a lot of whiteboard interviews (and I certainly know a lot more now than I did during that anecdote), but I'm not sure I could write a min-heap or merge sort without looking a bunch of stuff up first. I don't think I'm stupid, it's just that I don't typically write explicit merge sorts or min-heaps in day-to-day code, and it hasn't been sexy enough for me to write my own, but I do think having an understanding of the mechanics is useful and important.