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I got my degree at 35 because of this. Not that I actually learned much of anything in the program, I was there purely for the paper.

This is where schools like WGU excel for those of us just seeking credentials for what we already know. The terms are six months, you can do as many courses as you want during that six months. Over half the courses are just a final exam. You take a pre-test on day one of the course. If you score high enough, you can take the final exam the same day and be done with the course. If one were very determined and knew most of the material going in, you could complete a BS in six months for a total cost of under $4000.

Did you do WGU? How long did getting a degree take start to finish? Did you have pre-credits?

I did go to WGU. It took me way too long. Over 4 years because I put almost zero effort in and did most everything at the end of the 6 month term. I wasn't much motivated to do the courses as I was battling depression, dealing with a wife and child with health issues, and was the sole breadwinner.

I would estimate that I put in less than 500 hours total towards my degree. I had like 15 pre-credits.

You're a champion. Well done getting your degree while yoked that hard.

+1 for WGU for explicitly getting the paperwork done. I've recommended this to self-taught peers, vets, and those with uncommon backgrounds who had to deal with paperwork bias.

Congratulations on your degree, happy to see other folks take advantage of WGU. It's really good

"seeking credentials for what we already know"

Not about you at all in particular (quite the opposite), but this is what drives me into a frenzy of frustration about the world today. Seems like everything is about credentials and appearance rather than obvious potential or ability.

On the other hand, if you reek of obvious potential and ooze ability from every pore, and WGU can get you a degree in six months, why don’t you have that credential?

Credentials don’t really prove ability, but there’s a weird staying power that can come from the “minimum bar” it sets.

Easy, I don't want to pay $4000 to someone who provided me no benefit, gave me negative value because I already wasted my time just completing the exams.

In what world would you donate 1 - 5 weeks pay just for the honor of it? I'm not sure plumbers are around here to give you a plaque that says "My toilet is working" for your house guests to ogle at.

Yes, I understand that the credential is what removes us from candidacy in job applications, and I also understand that this has a cost benefit to the employee that may exceed $4000 on it's own. But should things be that way? My thinking is no speaking on the employee's side.

On the other end it is obvious that at minimum credentials proves to the employer that the employee is at least 4 years old and can read enough to fool another 4 year old. I guess it is also cheaper to filter through thousands of infants who otherwise do not have the same credential. So maybe I'm just pissing into the wind.

Pre college being a requirement there was still some sort of evaluation the company had to do to decide if you were a good candidate, from their perspective college graduates show more promise and potential. Just as someone applying to college shows more potential of being a good fit to the college if they scored highly on their SAT exam. Is it fair that someone who likely has all the other criteria also has to sit through the embarrassment of an SAT exam when they’re so obviously qualified? Yes. Because that’s a way that universities have found to fairly and easily find good candidates.

When I hired people at a former company, I secretly thought of job candidates like you as undervalued stocks. Just being honest, don't mean any disrespect — I mean undervalued in the sense of not being appreciated by other companies, not in how much we paid people.

I myself have degrees, but not in anything like software development, and I think engineers who don't have degrees but do exhibit all the other characteristics are just as talented, often more driven, practical, and reliable. Self-motivated, rather than something they fell into. Thinking of the five best engineers I've worked with, two of them didn't go to school at all, and two had degrees in things like music or political science. I've had poor experiences with people whose main qualification is an engineering diploma from a name brand school.

Of course there's a middle band in there where it gets more complicated, but generally I think smart, scrappy companies are eager to hire people like yourself, and I like working for that kind of company, personally.

The problem is finding those undervalued assets, sifting through a sea of unacceptable candidates.

A job opened on my team where I am working at as contractor. My boss told me to apply for the job.

I got an email back right away from HR stating that I didn't meet the requirements of having a degree.

Joke's on them, I already work there.

I had a similar situation where the lack of a specific degree algorithmicly sorted me out of a job where i was not only an expert in some extremely vertical tech, but a known person within the industry for the tech and probably the only person in my metro area with the ability currently looking for new opportunities.

After I got the rejection email i called their HR and asked to just lay my resume on the desk of the COO abd was told “no can do because i wasn’t qualified”

I got so frustrated that their HR dept was so tone deaf, I decided the org was a bad fit for me.

Later on had connected with one of the executives after I moved on to another org and an industry expo. Told him the story and he was horrified that they missed the opportunity.

The moral to the story is you need to get via networking if you don’t have a degree thanks to the rigidity of HR nowadays.

I am not sure which is more amazing: that someone informed you in a timely fashion that you were no longer under consideration or that they told you why.

I hate to say this but you were probably an unfortunate bait for a labor certification of an existing employee on an h1b visa.

That is generally the only reason companies will stick to the bscs requirement. Normally if you have requisite experience the degree - especially bscs is not needed.

Eh, there is plenty of h1b nonsense, but asking for a degree is hardly unusual.

Just like quizzing people about sorting algorithms. People love to imagine the core of their job is difficult, intellectual problems that need super-smart people - so they don't have to admit the main challenge is maintaining motivation in the face of corporate BS like SOC2.

Asking about a degree isn't the same as requiring one for the role.

Every employer will ask, but at this point for software devs, it's only ever used as an excuse to disqualify someone for other reasons (e.g. h1b stuff) if they don't have it.

Maybe at software companies, but if you're looking for corporate IT jobs (which can be pretty cush, referring back to the thread about that), a degree or sometimes even a masters is a requirement.

When I was a middle-manager in Bank IT, I would fight with HR about it, but they still used to filter out people without degrees or the "right" degrees.

I had a reverse filter - there was no point bringing someone with a CS degree in, they'd be bored to death in three months; but for people coming from helpdesk/tech support it was a huge step up in their careers/salary and they were fine with the "writing/supporting boring CRUD apps for 40 hours a week" trade-off.

I can't speak to other industries, but many of the companies that I've worked for the last two decades as a software engineer required or at the very least strongly recommended a BS in computer science.

Hate to say it, but this is why I'm incredibly glad I didn't drop out of college even though I had a solid gig ready to go.

I knew I wasn't cut out for being an perpetual founder and that I'd definitely encounter greater challenges not having a degree than the challenges standing between me and my degree at that point in time. ($7k and 1 year of my life with classes I wasn't sure I could stomach).

Wish you the best, but for those considering this always assume you maybe aren't the best - think about what comforts you're giving up. I will say, anyone you talk to on the college / dropout risk/reward problem are highly biased. Dropouts who have achieved success are susceptible to survivorship bias and will vehemently tell you college isn't necessary. PHD's will always espouse college as the only route because they burned their entire 20's in college.

I completed my BSCS at a state school in my 30s after already being a freelance/amateur programmer for many years. I can honestly say I did not learn a single new thing about programming. In fact, almost every single bit of the programming I learned was completely wrong by todays standards, and rife with mistakes.

Sounds like you attended a bad school. I earned a MS in CS at age 30 atop my BS in zoology and 6 years of work as a programmer. My MSCS program introduced me to many new and useful concepts and techniques that have informed all the nontrivial computing tasks I've undertaken since, now 33 years. That degree has proved to be the best investment of my life, by a large margin.

Why are you comparing a BS program to an MS program?

It certainly wouldn't be a program that I would recommend to anyone that wanted to actually learn how to program.

I would argue that it's not necessarily the job of a computer science degree to teach you programming, which is more about the craftsmanship and likely should be practiced and learned individually. Computer science is about the theoretics. I greatly value the CS education I received in linear algebra, discrete mathematics, etc. which I decidedly would not have learned on the job.

If you just want to learn programming you may as well just enroll in a code camp.

There were some decent courses that I got something out of, mostly business-related courses. Even those seemed pretty outdated, though.

If I was spending my own money on a 4-year degree in Computer Science with a focus on Software Development, I would certainly expect to come out of it with some sort of foundation of proper development.

Yeah, that's a bummer. Statistically speaking you're better off finishing it if you want to maximize the number of places that would be willing to hire you. That said, it can also work in your favor not to finish since it might weed out companies you wouldn't want to work for anyway. I'll say anecdotally of the half dozen or so places I've worked and been involved in hiring software developers--a college degree would only be relevant if you had no other experience to speak of. When I look at a resume I'm looking for "stuff this person has done". Even for entry level, I'd rather talk about a hobby project they spent some legitimate time on that whatever a candidate did in college.

Larger places tend to have blanket requirements in part to protect themselves from hiring lawsuits, discrimination, etc.

I look at education when I hire but I’m more interested in experience and I never use a degree as a requirement. I am probably more likely to have the recruiter put the candidate into the pipeline if they have a CS degree but don’t have much experience or experience that doesn’t seem 100% relevant. But that’s not super common.

Whatever your opinion may be, degrees are often seen as a heuristic for "can complete a long, hefty commitment".

Check out uopeople.edu. you should be able to transfer most of credits and finish it off in your own time. If nothing else, to not have these stupid questions from hr