Online courses vs. colleges for software engineering

There are many reasons beyond just weak character for why someone would not go to college and it's not up to you as an employer to make that judgement call on someone's personality until you've dissected their real reasons for leaving.

This is something that takes a lot of time, way longer than an interview has to offer, so it's best to not make assumptions.

I take graduate degrees seriously, because people tend to take those seriously and focus on the education more than the paper at the end. I don't take 4 year degrees seriously at all. If all you've proven is that you can survive with minimal effort for four years before losing patience then you certainly have more potential than the lowest side of a bell curve, but you haven't proven you bring added value.

Do you have a PhD, or did you give up? Do you have a high school degree, or did you give up? Do you still work at the first job you ever had, or did you give up?

In the middle of my senior year I got a job at a startup that demanded so much time I felt it was better to pause college, and the hard work I've done since has paid off tremendously. I am going back to school, but there is nothing I regret about leaving initially, there is nothing I am learning that I didn't already study on my own time.

For every story about engineers who dropped out and got a menial job and had no ambition to become a better engineer, there are stories of engineers who had that ambition from the start and the degree became a nuisance. You shouldn't hold it against them until you know why they chose the path they did

I call BS. I'd be impressed if you could even write metaprogram to answer your own interview questions.

There is an obvious and common answer to this: college is expensive, both directly and in opportunity cost of not working. It's an expense that few people can easily afford without significant family support or loans.

Filtering by college degrees is filtering by family wealth more than anything else (or otherwise someone's willingness to get into debt).

Did you not drop out? Why?

That's a genuine question I have of any interviewee. What was their thinking behind studying for 3–10 years at universities vs developing themselves through other avenues?

For someone with a master's degree, I'd like to witness their critical thought process. Their problem finding skills. Their ability to research outside their own field. Nothing would be a bigger red flag of mediocrity than someone who has spent several of their best years having gained no more than what mere vocational training would.

I never consider having a degree a "plus." It is only a plus if one has something to show for it.

I dropped out because it simply was not feasible to go any farther: I could not juggle full-time undergraduate pure math at Berkeley while working multiple low wage jobs in the SF Bay Area plus all the other responsibilities and commitments I had accumulated at 27, along with the stress of being able to afford my next meal, let alone rent.

I failed math thru high school. Barely graduated. Worked in grocery stores thru my 20s. On a whim I bought myself a trig book and self taught to calculus before deciding to go back.

After dropping out I taught myself to code. Night after night I learned SQL, built shit in Python and node and tinkered with Heroku and AWS and Docker while trying to fill gaps in my CS knowledge by reading SICP and the algorithm design manual.

The job hunt process was pretty brutal and lasted about a year and a half. Rejection after rejection after rejection. Take home projects to work on and technical interviews to study for after work when I was exhausted from super demanding physical jobs that time and time again wouldn't pan out

Finally I got hired into a remote position at a great company, and left the bay for a place where life is slower, cheaper, and less crazy making. Now I'm going back to school on a part time basis at a local university.

There are so many stages between where I was a few years ago and where I am now where I could have given up, and where I think a lot of folks do. You don't really read those stories in manic Medium articles about learn to code success stories, how one guy (with a trust fund and a credit card and a network of ivy league grad friends) learned to code and got offers from every FAANG. I don't blame the ones who give up.

And I think if you have access to financial resources, and have friends who have them too, it's also much more straightforward, or at least less frustrating and painful, to finish school, and get a job that will pay you fairly.

But otherwise it's a tough road to walk, one that's physically and emotionally exhausting, and I suspect the level of commitment involved to walk it isn't too different from that needed to graduate with a degree. I wouldn't know tho -- that's not me (yet)

I wouldn't hire; work with; or work for somebody who doesn't know how to manage the risk of Type I/II errors in their heuristic.

That signals to me "lazy thinker".

It acts as a social filter preventing a large number of people from persuing a given profession that they otherwise could do just because their parents couldn't afford to rent a flat to their kid in another city for several years.

I don't think that there is any relation between the type of education that someone has (online vs formal) and a personal characteristic like perseverance.

There could be many people that could not afford formal education, learned online and are still perseverant. The two things are unrelated it just sounds like prejudgement.

When person do not has clear target or reevaluate target when already in college, dropping is a kind of damage control

And it is ok to drop when you understand that it is a waste of time or effort

And we assume that college, profs and etc is good, which is not always true

This statement seems deliberately obtuse.

But lots of people do need programmers.

These "is college necessary" posts suffer the same problem as "why are programmers making 200K right out of school" posts. The job title covers everything from hacking out WordPress plugins, to leading a team building an MVP, to building large distributes systems, to designing the software that goes into medical devices and autonomous vehicles.

Some programmers really do need a CS degree with at least a few years of math and a couple years of physics. Sometimes programmers need to know a minimal amount of PHP and JavaScript. The job title captures a huge range of actual jobs.

Sometimes it is a good idea to give up, sometimes it is not. It is not a function of the individual, but a function of the circumstances.

So, is going to college and earning a degree the only way to do that? In fact most of the college education is not designed with the idea of inculcating learning as a skill, in fact college may be a bit late for that skill and as a consequence/side-effect earn a degree.

Should we reject someone who still can give you the signals (thinking, persistence) one could be looking for, but hasn't attended or dropped out of college?

There could be more optimal ways to learn to think, and solve problems and being reasonable enough in not giving up. Going to college, incurring debt, doing things where the dead end is a degree is not optimal.

I dropped out of college. There were a number of reasons, but really it just boiled down to the fact that I was not a mature adult at 20 years old. I was enjoying my life and my freedom living alone (arguably too much!). I don't regret any of it. I started learning to code about 3 years later and worked my way into doing it professionally.

At almost 40 now it feels absurd for me to be judged based on my 20 year old self. I know I'm biased here but, if anything I feel like the college you went to and the number of years attended say just as much about your level of privilege and rigidity of your upbringing than it does about your character.

I've found university to be somewhat of a bad predictor for whether people think for themselves. It is however from my experience a good predictor for following instructions and follow-through (which, as you mentioned, is not unimportant).

If I see somebody with no degree, but experience, he might also have follow-through though, and often more resolve to solve problems themselves.

I had a university education myself, and while I think it's not strictly necessary for programming, it does give you a good overview of related fields (mathematics, algorithms and maybe others) that often come in handy as part of solving a problem more elegantly or efficiently. And self-taught programmers often don't touch on these topics and have a big blind spot there.

How about "because it is really expensive, and not everyone is provided enough to pay for it, or take out the debt, and there are other ways of learning that stuff".

I make top-tier money outside of SV, I get to go to all the cool conferences, company-paid international travel. Most of my vacations all the flights are free thanks to the miles.

I might finish school one day, but it's mostly for the piece of paper and 0% for the knowledge. if WGU had a linux-track I would consider that as the path of least-resistance.

Relax, you have done well. You have a good "why". Now consider someone who doesn't have a good "why" and also doesn't have a college degree to at least prove they can complete something. It's not a perfect indicator, but it's an indicator.

Went to college, did my best until proper graduation. Dug my way into FP and semi advanced topics at the time. No job because I'm not mainstream (and barely insterested by REST and similar).

On the other hand some gigs can accept barely educated juniors, train them for one thing, they get a cute career and raises along the years and by the time they get to my age they're comfy and set (potentially, not every life is bluesky and easy)

There's no clear better path. Even if you consider college academic education, yes we had good classes (DB normal forms, optimizing compilers, computer graphics etc) but we also spent half the time on obviously horrendous 2000s OOP that led the world at the time and will soon be forgotten. So it's not even great on that side too.

I would use them for an introduction, but would definitely pick up a well recommended textbook after, or do a medium sized personal project after. Although the Coursera Cryptography class I took was just as good as my University one so I guess it really depends.

Motivated real world exposure > real world exposure > motivated self education > traditional education

As someone who mindlessly "self taught" through tutorials, then did half a bootcamp, then did a MSCS-- none of those things were anywhere near as transformational for me as a dev than my first year as a software engineer.

But of course, building AlgoDaily has probably taught me even more than the many years of work at this point, purely because there's been a strong impetus.

The "need to know" basis is huge. I think with a strong enough "need to know", any method works.

i will say that there is an interesting social component on-the-job, especially early on in a (my) career. more than once i had a colleague who would zero in on a gap in theory (almost always algorithms) and talk down to me. in one case i had someone jab their finger at my face and yell (yes...raised, angry voice in a large cube farm environment) "I got my masters from MIT and you dropped out of highschool". The fact that this person was, in the end, completely wrong is immaterial to my point. About a year post-conflict we were (and still are) great and supportive friends.

The issue boils down to a need to "prove yourself" to certain people when you lack an undergrad degree. If you bounce jobs, regardless of reason, the process starts all over again. Someone stepping into most of the environments I've worked in with a fresh BSCi in CS/EE/whatever have not been placed in the same position to justify their existence.

For me, it resulted in a multi-year personal issue of harshly judging engineers with degrees from well-known schools like Stanford, MIT, and so on. I would think to myself "why can't you do this? I dropped out of highschool, learned on my own while working crappy paying jobs as a teenager before getting a shot...mommy didnt send me to a fancy school...i worked my way up from the assembly line to the engineering team" and other such toxic inner monologues. Harsh judgements based on the fact that everyone has a different melange of life experience. Super unhelpful.

As time went on I realized that a papered engineer, especially one who was only a few years out of school couldn't possibly have covered all the things in their coursework...there is enough volume of knowledge it would take decades to learn it all in school...assuming that was all you had to study!

By now I have been around the block so many times that my lack of a degree is less of a barrier, outside of passing the resume-gatekeepers at larger tech orgs. It resulted in my career focus being in the startup-SMB sized orgs. Mostly people seem surprised I didn't go to college, maybe a little amused by the fact they took on a debt load to be sitting next to me.

I hear a lot of "damn, i could have saved so much money". My reply tends to be along the lines of "...yeah...but it took almost 10y for HR to stop trying to low-ball my pay based on my lack of a degree...so i think it may be closer to a draw than either of us realize".

Keep up the good work!

1. Online coaching can be provided through video conferencing or similar. An online course perhaps could have the added benefit of allowing students to experiment with a subject. If they need to be forced into staying on track then they're probably not interested in the subject to begin with. They could also come back to the course at a later time when they're more motivated.

2. Adaptive algorithms can solve this problem and do it in real time.

3. A well crafted examination/certification can do the same for less money. See the accounting industry's certified public accounting exams or the legal industry's BAR exams.

Ultimately though, I see a hybrid system being created. If you want to take the traditional class, you can, for a fee. If you can self-study then you do the online course and only pay a much smaller fee plus any supplemental services you buy. Overall everyone wins.

A US Bachelor’s is not 48 months, at most 9 months a year is spent officially studying, the rest is holiday. That would be 36 months. If we pretend the average student treats it as seriously as a full time job, ignoring all research on how students spend their time, we can still cut that 36 months in half, because half of the average US Bachelor is general education with no professional impact. That’d be 18 months.

If we want to look at the real world for examples we can see the UK, where most Bachelor’s are three years, with the extensive breaks and holidays you have in the US, but two year, full time, non stop degrees exist, or at Lambda School, which takes nine months to turn people into software engineers. They also demand more and more consistent work than well over 90% of university courses.

Oh man, I wish this was an accurate measurement of programming skills :D

I learned all of what you enumerated online, usually practically applied too. This is not something you have to go to a university to learn.

Granted, I wasn't following a MOOC or a bootcamp - I just kept reading, and digging in deeper, and asking questions and practicing on my own.

I don’t agree with you. I don’t think you need a four year degree for these concepts. I think many of the concepts you outline are very critical especially as you work on larger and more complex systems. However I’m not even convinced college does a good job at teaching these concepts. College introduce me to some of them but didn’t actually help me build any intuition at all. I regurgitated the things my professor said and that’s how I pass through my courses with straight A’s. I didn’t really understand distributed systems until I worked on them. I didn’t really understand them well until I read about distributed systems not from a textbook but by other people who had worked on them and this was mostly online papers or YouTube videos or conference videos where are companies presenting on their lessons learned.

I think the course of the classes you need for a computer science curriculum such as data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networks, languages and compilers, databases and distributed systems - These can all be self taught. I’m not convinced a four year degree that’s full of fluff with various elective courses adds any value.

This is definitely not true across the board. I have multiple peer-reviewed published papers (in pretty solid journals) in a field I never formally studied, and am a college dropout to boot.

The broad understanding I came to was, it's important to make your own conclusions, and not take anyone else's conclusion for granted, whether it comes from universities, courses, or even blog posts like mine. In reality, however, it's difficult to devote that much time to personally research everything. So you should at least do it with the things that matter the most to you in life.

The difference is in the number of subjects that you can take per semester, and that also adds to the difficulty. Also, I’m not entirely sure but some courses are bound to be labs heavy. Those courses probably are not available on omscs.