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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

This could be a temporary condition.

The principal value in my CS courses was access to systems and compilers (!) that I wouldn't be able to afford otherwise. Most of the people ostensibly hired to present the content didn't add much themselves (one was great, and we're still friends).

However, I've been really impressed with the depth and breadth of the coursework I've seen by way of close friends and younger relatives lately. A robotics class now seems like it might actually deliver on the promise of providing more knowledge in less time than designing/building/programming/etc a complex autonomous robot on your own (for example). You can still do it, but it's going to take a lot longer than just taking the bloody class, or you're going to miss out on a lot of depth/context.

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Entirely temporary. I was rejected by google from 2006-2012 because I didn’t have a degree. Suddenly they need more programmers and they drop that requirement. Never mind I have formal CS training, they required a piece of paper.

I would not be surprised during the next recession that employers fall back to arbitrary demands like degrees or obscene amounts of experience.

What is “formal CS training”, if not a degree?

Possibly attending but not graduating (Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind).

I spent time going to college but never graduated. I finished all the required CS courses and a bunch of optional ones plus a few grad level CS courses then left to migrate a Fortune 500 bank off of COBOL. My resume after that was a who’s who of fortune 500s and deeply technical positions but google said no degree, no job. I believe that was the founders attitude towards hiring which has since changed

Probably some. But competent employers will never fall back to degrees. They will always focus on... competence.

Not always true. For example, the AI/ML craze brought a lot of academics into industry and also brought a lot of their politics. For an AI/ML job at most places, prepare to be judged based on having the right credentials (good degree, school and publications) and looked down upon as scum if you don't have right ones.

Or again relevant experience. No one is gonna say no to a person coming out of e.g. Netflix’s search dept or Facebook or has decades of big data experience, regardless of their education.

Have you seen the actual coursework or just the end result?

To borrow from my graphics programming class from ~2008, we didn't actually do much. Every assignment, we were given an almost-working program, and the assignment was just to fill in a single function - the one I remember offhand was a simple linear interpolation.

Granted on the flipside, with my information retrieval and data mining courses, we weren't given any code to start with and had to implement everything completely from scratch.

that was a shitty graphics programming class.

In mine, which was pre 2000 (I'm old), we were doing matrix multiplication by hand to ensure we understood how the underlying transformations worked, building our own renderer's, and so forth.

Yes and no. One of the big problems with coursework at the undergrad level is you aren't typically actually practicing idea and model genesis. This is an important skill, and one that those hobbyists have practiced a lot.

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