it does not guarantee you a job either
most people i work with today have either no degree or degree in some other unrelevant field
they're brilliant engineers, they bring lots of value to the table and i enjoy working with them
You are right, but it does show that you can stick to something and finish it, that you most likely have at least a baseline knowledge of the subject, and that you are committed to the field.
I'm not even saying that it has to be a CS degree, but having a CS degree is definitely bonus for an applicant.
IMO, CS degrees don't prove anything other than a) you had the means to attend a university, b) you learn best by having somebody else guide your learning, and c) you can survive the classes designed to "weed people out". Personally, I'm a lot more interested in interviewing people who may have come from more humble backgrounds, who learn really well on their own, and who don't entertain artificial barriers to entry.
Sure there are exceptions, but what about looking at the signal to noise ratio?
Having one candidate clearly not employable out of 20 from an engineering school/CS program is much better than interviewing 19 unemployable people from a bootcamp to finally get to the one that's actually a good hire.
I just need somebody who can do the job. New CS grads usually can’t - not without a ton of handholding. If I’m going to hire somebody and I’m going to have to provide a ton of guidance and mentoring up front, what difference does it make if I’m mentoring a CS grad or a self taught programmer?
A caveat: CS theory is useful. Given a choice between two otherwise equal bootcamp grads, I’m probably going to pick the one that has some deeper understanding of CS foundations (or potentially even better, an enthusiastic interest in learning that material). I truly do not care about the credential though.
That goes against my observations, but perhaps we're not hiring from the same bracket.
Idk. My conclusion is that hiring a software engineer is like hiring an artist: without a portfolio, the requisite skills are barely quantifiable and rely mostly on the word of the applicant. There’s really no way to determine the quality of an engineers work without actually seeing that work. Therefore, the most useful interview is to actually pay them to do something. I’ve had a lot of success with this approach and it eliminates the need to consider credentials at all.
Different hiring pipelines. I suppose the pool of CS grads has already been thinned.