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Comment by miguelrochefort | Hacker News Reader

Author here. I'd be happy to answer your questions.

Congrats on the degree! I took almost exactly the same path as you, and I also finished my WGU degree in 3 months.

I got my BS to meet the admission requirements for GATech's OMSCS program, which I'm doing now. Do you plan to go for a masters next?

How's GATech's OMSCS? I'm thinking about applying.

The OMSCS material is great! I'm really enjoying the challenge of learning new things (I didn't learn much of anything new at WGU. That's not a knock against WGU's materials, which seemed good. It's just a reflection of my having worked in industry and self-studying for 15 years before applying).

I do think GATech could learn a few things from WGU. I found WGU to have much better administration. WGU was 10x better about enrolling, being able to get support, and such. Overall, WGU had less bullshit than GATech. I also really loved the ability to go at my own pace at WGU.

GATech uses a semi-synchronous model in that you're on a deadline for each assignment and exam. I don't like the subjective grading of the assignments, and sometimes they're ambiguous about what they want exactly. Seems to very a lot from class-to-class. I loved that at WGU you could have redoes - even though I never took advantage of that it was a lot lower stress knowing I could redo an assignment or exam. At GATech there are no redoes short of dropping a course.

Overall, I think WGU is the best value for a BS CS, and GATech is the best value for a MS CS right now - and really there aren't any close seconds.

If you want to discuss further, let me know, and I'll send you an email.

Also, off topic, but did you get any scholarship at WGU? Their scholarships are basically coupons. I thought everyone got one, and I was surprised to not see that in your accounting.

Thanks, that's very comprehensive.

I wish I didn't have to wait until Fall 2021 to start studying at OMSCS. If I prepared early enough, I probably would have been studying there already. I also wish the program could be accelerated, like at WGU. 2-3 years seems far compared to 3 months.

Given that we both finished the program in 3 months, I suspect that we have similar skill-level and study habits. Do you find courses at OMSCS to be as difficult as others claim? How much time do you study in a given week?

I didn't receive any scholarship at WGU. I didn't know they were so easy to get. How much was it, $500/term?

Email me, I'd like to stay in touch.

I'm very impressed with your tracking of effort on each course. How did you track the hours? If you were doing two courses at a time, how did you split your time tracking?

He specifically says:

"During my time at WGU, I focused on a single course at a time and made sure to complete it before starting a new one."

I've been tracking every minute of my time (to a 15-minute resolution) for the past 24 months using Google Calendar. It's part time-blocking, part time-tracking.

Here's what my "Study" calendar looks like: https://i.imgur.com/BBLeYmy.png

In green are events I created manually. In orange are predicted study sessions based on tracking data from ActivityWatch [1], which tracks my desktop, laptop, phone, and even my Chromecast usage. I get roughly 80% coverage with it, and 100% coverage with manual time tracking.

In fact, I built a "WGU Time Tracker" for my capstone project, which attempted to automatically classify my ActivityWatch data into study sessions using NLP, machine learning, and heuristics. I might write a post about it.

[1] https://activitywatch.net/

It's a very comprehensive and detailed post. Thanks for sharing it.

Any luck finding an online PhD? I've been looking for those. As much as I'd love to do a formal PhD program, I cannot with family, but the qualification (from whichever accredited university) would open up a lot of opportunities.

> but the qualification (from whichever accredited university) would open up a lot of opportunities

I'd caution about this - if you think you can apply to jobs requiring a PhD I would think that when you apply the first thing they're going to do is to ask you who your advisor was and what you did.

Unlike a bachelors just having a PhD isn't worth much - they will want to know what you actually achieved. If you have a PhD on paper but didn't really achieve much they're going to say 'huh but I've never seen your work in the community?'

> from whichever accredited university

I'd say the single most important thing on a PhD is where you did it and who your advisor was, so I would caution about this as well.

Having said all that, I did all my PhD remotely, and I did it while working mostly full-time for half of it, and while buying a house and building a family and serving part-time in the military on top of all that, so it can be combined with other things.

Totally agree. This is definitely the case for places where the PhD actually matters. Except for a large number of jobs in NY (finance) and in DC (government), it is just a binary flag used to whittle down the candidate pool. In Government it is especially bad as some of these credentials are used for pay increases.

I have heard exactly the opposite from people who work in the administrative side of academia. If your future job prospects are research-based, sure it matters. But if you just need to hold a doctorate to apply to be a president of a local college, or to get a leg up on a superintendent job at a school district? Any doctorate is fine.

> But if you just need to hold a doctorate to apply to be a president of a local college, or to get a leg up on a superintendent job at a school district?

Ok I'd never heard of such of thing.

This is the entire purpose of the Ed.D. degree, as a box ticking exercise for promotion purposes. A JD will work as well, and that doesn’t even have the pretense of being a research doctorate the Ed.D. does.

Just out of curiosity, who is offering remote PhD’s? The only online PhD’s I’ve ever seen have been in nursing related fields.

Lots of schools, and not just in Nursing. Google “remote phd”

I did a regular PhD just didn’t ever go into the office. (I did at the start for a few weeks and did every now and again.)

And I guess every PhD is now a remote PhD for at least the next year?

A PhD is about your research and publishing far more than your actual degree. I can't see how an online doctorate would work with today's remote learning options so would not imagine it would have much value

I totally see this viewpoint for Tech/Bio/etc R&D and teaching...but I'd love to hear whether this viewpoint applies at organizations which uses PhDs just as an entry filter.

So many people I've worked with both in Gov/Intel/Finance had random PhDs.

I did mine based far from the University (a very good one) but travelling down every few months to meet with my supervisors. I learnt tons, and it has helped my career. It also meant a lot of work over 6 years (part time). Time well spent! I effectively swapped TV and movies for statistics, and have no regrets. Over the period we had 2 kids.

You could probably do it faster / easier with a pro forma type place, but it would be a debasement of standards - it might tick a box but you probably wouldn't learn the skills. What I really like about the author's post is that they are detailing it all, and it is about getting a formal qualification to recognise the knowledge they have.

Did you find any other schools that offer a similar opportunity?

Not really.

You might be able to cut your time/cost to graduate by half by earning credits on Study.com, Sophia.org, Saylor.org, StraighterLine.com and transferring them to a traditional university. I've seen universities allow up to 50-75% of a program's credits to be transferred in.

why bother getting the degree?

Not the author, but I will say that in my experience having the paper has helped open a lot of doors, especially early in my career, that I otherwise would have had to push harder to get through. It gives you a bit of default credibility. Perhaps unjustified, that's a matter of opinion, but it's definitely real.

Just seems like a competent GitHub serves the job better, at lower cost...

Hardly. The only people who care about your GitHub are technical people. Most of the gatekeepers at any decent size company are not going to care one bit about GitHub, but they will recognize the degree. By the time you get to the hiring manager the degree doesn't matter. It's getting to that level that's the obstacle.

And frankly, when you have more experience, GitHub is also useless, because your network matters 1000x more than your portfolio.

That I get. Habitus is important. But, here, there was no transmission of habitus, due to the online courses.

> Habitus is important.

Agree, though I think the value will depend significantly on the person. For some folks this will be the majority of the value, others it'll be wasted on.

It really seems like an a society, we should just offer habitus reform schools in deficient precincts..

There are still a lot of jobs unfortunately that won't even look at your impressive github account if you don't have a degree.

I built my career for 10 years without a degree. It is doable. But having a degree (got it at 32) made life A LOT easier.

The first people to look at your CV probably don't know what Github is.

The degree is a checkbox for recruiters/HR who are looking to match a job spec before passing you onto the engineering team.

- To be able to work abroad.

- To be allowed into graduate school.

- To stop having to explain why I don't have one.

The older I get, the more I worry about ageism, and whether the absence of a degree might make that worse.

Degrees certify habitus.

Thanks for writing this is up!

I've been thinking about enrolling at WGU for their CS degree and was just chatting about it yesterday.

I'm also self taught but with only half a degree completed. I think about moving abroad especially for retirement reasons. Having that paper makes all the difference. Without it it's much harder to live anywhere outside a home country permanently.

These are all excellent reasons.

People that want to follow in your footsteps should also think about why they want to do it and to only do something like this if it makes sense for them.

My brother in law did a degree at WGU too, but not in CS. It was to finally get the job he wanted and had always been qualified for but was unavailable without the degree. And yes, he made up the cost in less than 6 months of his new job. It was 100% worth it.

Working in software I've only found 2 cases where a lack of a degree got in my way. Getting a work visa to some countries is going to be much much harder without a completed undergrad. And continuing education with a master's level program will be very difficult to do without a completed undergrad. This is what finally motivated me to go back and finish my undergrad.

I don't have a degree. I feel that not having it has cost me some opportunities. Someone once said that when someone has put in years to get their degree they want the candidates they interview to have done that work as well.

I've had a successful career without a degree, and while I'm unaware of any opportunity I've missed out on, there's no way to be sure. No one's ever mentioned it at an interview, but there may very well be interviews I never got because I didn't have the credential. At this point, it's not worth the time or money for me to get a degree the traditional way. If I could have done it in six months for a few thousand dollars, it would have made sense earlier in my career.

OP is Canadian. If they want pursue an opportunity in the US- a degree is a requirement for the TN Visa (technically you can get the visa with "equivalent experience" but that is much more cumbersome and unpredictable where as the process is a breeze with a CS degree). Since he mentioned in the article something about "overseas opportunities", I am guessing that is part of his consideration.

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