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Comment by alexashka | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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).

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