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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

I got some of these same bitter, angry, defensive responses when I posted my "how I became a developer" post a while back. I dunno what it is about programmers here but for some reason "programmer" is considered some sacred title you have to earn. Whatever.

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I wouldn't be happy with someone who only built LEGO bridges running around calling themselves an engineer.

A lot of it seems to be ego. People want the shortest path to claiming a title.

Ignore silly titles and categorizations. Just make good art.

If you read past the title you'll notice that the guy got a job as a JUNIOR developer. The email he sent out was looking for an internship/apprenticeship/junior programming position open in the area. Doesn't look like he is trying to run before he can walk...

Right on! The nerve of some programmers to think their profession is in the same league with the big boys that need college and university degrees! Who do they think they are, some kind of scientists or engineers?

</sarcasm>

It doesn't. It shouldn't. Our profession has progressed past that medieval method of instruction.

I know plenty of programmers without degrees, I was extremely surprised some of them didn't because they were so bloody good! The thing is with having an IT degree, this industry moves so quick how much of what you learnt is still relevant (aside from the OO and SQL)... You have to be CONSTANTLY re-learning new tech otherwise you're not going to be a very good/relevant programmer for long!

Obviously you can't stop learning, but the thing is that by obtaining an IT degree you'll often learn fundamental things you wouldn't learn otherwise.

You're projecting. I have no degree. I've taken the time to teach myself the fundamentals. Dueling anecdotes here obviously but we all know plenty of people with CS degrees who are worthless when it comes to tackling a problem, and plenty of people without who are credits to their profession.

Programmers program. If someone programs, they're a programmer. My daughter uses scratch to write software. She's 8, the software is not sophisticated but it's software. She's a programmer.

This sounds as serious as claiming your daughter is a civil engineer because she builds LEGO buildings or she's a biologist because she knows to feed her goldfish. At the end of the day we need some terminology that distinguishes the guy that took a semester to learn MS Access from the one that took 4 years to study CS in university.

It's an unfortunate common theme in HN but I can't think off the top of my head other white collar professions with such contempt for degrees and formal education. Are all the other fields doing it wrong or is programming so much easier than everything else that justifies the constant pat on the back for roll-you-own education?

But I've met plenty of people who come out of uni with a CS degree and don't know squat. I totally get the distinction, and there needs to be a distinction between someone playing around, someone who is a junior and someone who is truly brilliant. But it doesn't require a degree to reach that top level.

I only took some CS modules at uni, I learnt everything I know either on the job or off my own back, including OOP, JavaScript/OOJS, advanced HTML and CSS. They didn't teach you the difference between browsers either (I started back in IE4/Netscape days).

What this guys daughter decides that at 18 years old (and now having programmed for 10 years) it's not worth going to uni because a) it'll cost too much and b) might as well get a 4 year head start over everyone else. So by that time she'll have 14 years experience. I think that would count for a hell of a lot more than a formal education. There's nothing magical about programming that a google search will not reveal.

I'm almost afraid to tell you this given how important the title "programmer" seems to be to you... but the barrier to a stable, enjoyable, productive and well-paid career as a programmer is very, very, very low. Much lower than any other science or engineering field that I can think of.

Just because you have a degree doesn't mean you're good at something ...

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