Comment by Pete-Codes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pete-Codes | Hacker News Reader

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If you are facing minimum of £27k tuition debt in England which AFAIK gathers interest from day one I would probably skip it. And it's even worse in the US.

As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class.

Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free resources. College isn't the only place to learn things nowadays and I think a lot of people haven't caught up with that yet.

I used to think nothing could beat the college experience for bonding but I think the formula of lots of people doing the same thing every day in a niche environment they want to be in is easily repeatable. I'm still in contact with digital nomads I hung out with in Bansko two years ago and I was only there for a month. But it was an intense month of seeing each other every day, just like college.

Oh and don't worry about not finding a dev job if you don't go to college. Employers are coming around slowly and there are lots of success stories out there: www.nocsdegree.com

My concern would be whether people who take the bootcamp or self taught approach would have the grounding in engineering and CS theory that someone with a degree has.

I tend to feel that under-emphasizing these things are why the software industry has so much of a problem with poor designs, low code quality, and missed deadlines.

Maybe it would be possible to create a two year degree that would fill in those gaps.

Here are my opinions being in the industry through various roles as a dev, technical lead, and dev manager.

I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree.

Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself.

Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has.

I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value.

We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.

Yeah, 99% of companies that need software developers can (and should) get away with boring CRUD solutions using boring persistence like an RDBMS. You could probably go a little fancier on your choice of language, using a nice functional language like F# versus something like Java.

99% of those companies building boring CRUD solutions don't even need developers. They could just piece something together off the shelf and be done with it. There's tons of products out there.

It's not like people can't learn those things on the job if it's important to the company.

I think employers are coming around to hire more non-CS majors, which is a good thing. However, most people I know of who got into software engineering didn't just skip college, do a bootcamp, and get a job as an engineer. Either they started businesses (which comes with its own financial risk), worked in some other technical area (IT, wordpress administration, etc.), or did a bootcamp in order to switch careers (and thus had acquired a lot of important soft skills).

I would love more different avenues for people to come to software engineering, and I'm rooting for boot camps, but I'm also skeptical about how universal the benefits are. I think coding is much more of a learnable skill than many already in industry give it credit, but I also think it takes years, not weeks, to learn to do it well.

100% this.

If bootcamps were a valid pathway into the profession at the time after I left high school I definitely would have foregone my Computer Science degree and gone down that route.

I'm glad attitudes towards them have shifted in the last few years - most of my friends in the profession work in companies that actively seek out applicants from bootcamps.

Oh and this article could have been written 15 years ago.

think of the money they could have made writing the article 15 years ago, and then selling it with a few word changes and a new title every year.

Is a College Degree Worth It?

College Degrees are no longer worth it!

College Degrees - not worth the paper they're printed on.

A College Degree - what does it really get you?

And so on and so forth.

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