Dev Degree: Behind the Scenes | Hacker News Reader

Dev Degree: Behind the Scenes

engineering.shopify.com

80 pointsa-priori22 comments

Met some of the kids of the first cohort doing the dev degree as I majored in CS at Carleton U. It was right before an exam. It seemed to me that most of them were just gaming the tests the best they could because they had absolutely no time in between working & their course load.

Obviously this thing was an experiment, so I'm sure they're going to reevaluate based on the feedback. Also, this was an anecdote of only meeting them once. I did not see them in any classes because I wasn't going to any (was working full time). Their insane load hardened them for sure.

>20 hours a week for 3 course load

20 hours a week with 3 CS courses at carleton? If you're going solo dolo on everything it's much more time than that

> just gaming the tests the best they could

I am a recent grad and have lots of friends still in university. That really just describes a lot of students in general. We had resumes to build outside of class, so yeah, a lot of us are just reading past tests, memorizing the answers, pouring the answers back onto the test, and repeating for the next course.

I certainly would have considered dev degree were I applying today, but I am sure that I would treat that degree as no more than a credential to be won.

First, game the SAT. Then this. Then game leetcode.

I’m not sure what the criticism is here, it’s a lot for a person to handle? It’s a co-op program what do you expect?

Co-op programs usually have the students work and study on alternative terms. This has them do both at the same time, and as a result won't be able to get the full value out of a CS education.

Of course cause they’re putting a lot of time into getting work experience

Which is a suboptimal use of resources imo

What's the catch?

Are they legally obligated to work for Shopify after graduation? Are the grads forced to work for Shopify and accept whatever Shopify wants to pay them?

No obligation at all. I think many dev degree students will stay as they have had good experiences (from the friends I have in the program). I assume Shopify is getting the dev degree student's wages subsidized by the government as it is work integrated learning (WIL aka coop).

Source: Lassonde School of Engineering student at York University

if anything, the "catch" is that I believe they're only taking about 20 students a year, and that was after a recent expansion. They also standardize wages in the first year, so some students have to make a tradeoff between the program and making more money with more variety of jobs in the US. (tuition is covered too, but Carleton tuition is something like 10k CAD or 7k USD, usually 7k CAD with grants/automatic scholarships)

(disclaimer I worked at Shopify for a while, but this information is from when I applied for Dev Degree)

It’s a regular old software job while you work through college. Plenty of companies big and small have students working for them (not just summer interns, year long work, for years while they study).

It’s cool, but there’s a lot of PR here that’s dressing up a pretty common thing in the verbiage and marketing of ‘dev bootcamp’ stuff.

Great to see more dev degree info being shared. It has worked well for the students in the program that I know[1]. I think that this framework will be used with other partners at York's Lassonde School of Engineering such as IBM. Hopefully this can be expanded to the engineering program in the future as well.

[1] I study at the Lassonde School of Engineering at York U

Simple question: why would anyone need a degree to be in web development?

It defies all sense. This entire field is built upon online tutorials. Sadly, I predict a bunch of people who don't know any better wasting 4 years of their life and paying tuition to learn what can be had completely for free, studying from home, while working a part time job to support a ramen-basement-lifestyle for a year or two.

To be fair - most University degrees are equally worthless, so I guess all this does is speed up the inevitable collapse of University as an institution? People have really lost their way, even the ivory towers have rotted from the inside...

There is web development and there is web development. To be able to contribute effectively to systems at the scale of something like Shopify (or anything resembling FAANG levels), there's a lot of value to a good theoretical foundation. You obviously don't have to do a degree to acquire that, but it can definitely help.

Feel free to judge the tree by its fruits.

Feel free to tell me what FAANG has accomplished in the past 10 years besides monopoly status, global surveillance and serving ads?

All that good theoretical foundation - you mean leetcode for 6 months right?

All that good theoretical foundation - you mean React and Angular? What great accomplishments...

I'm not a fan of the Javascript front-end framework trendwheel, but the back-end and infrastructure of Facebook, Google, Netflix and Amazon is fairly impressive. Building those systems and scaling them to billions of users is no mundane technical feat.

Ah yes, the dev caste system. Python devs don’t like Java devs. They both hate PHP devs, and eeeeveryone hates Javascript devs.

Well, some languages are inferior while others are superior. It's not about the people, but the languages - LISP is better than all of the shit that people are using today.

You could absolutely work on Shopify without a CS degree. There's probably a 10:1 ratio of people churning out features versus people doing infra and tooling to support those devs.

Another important aspect of this is that a lot of talented high school graduates may not understand or fully believe that you don't need a in web development. Anyone who is involved in tech enough to believe and understand this can probably find their own way into the industry (though dev degree would still be a good option).

Was this translated, or is my reading comprehension just terrible right now?

I don't see a problem with the language; I'm pretty sure it was written in English by a native speaker.

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