Comment by richo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by richo | Hacker News Reader

As a developer (These days, DevOps engineer) without a uni degree I can tell you absolutely that for better or for worse you're probably still better off with a degree. Note that I'm saying this is how it should be, but just that to say "your degree is holding you back is absurd".

You may choose to do stupid things to justify the money you spent at uni, but in the last 24 months:

* I was unable to secure a badass job as a pen tester, due entirely to an upstream policy of not hiring people without degrees. I was told that an exception could be made, but I'd already been screwed around for 2 months by them and needed work.

* The process of working or moving over seas is diabolically complicated already, and made borderline impossible if you don't have a piece of paper to prove that you do what you do well.

My take on the article as that any barriers that a degree imposes are psychological and self-imposed, whereas there are still realworld issues you can't get past without one.

I'd be curious to hear your perspective as someone who didn't do college: do you feel you missed out on anything (other than the credential piece)? For me the experience was probably more valuable than the credential... at least in terms of values that this article is espousing: 'finding myself' etc. My degree was valuable in terms of money too...but for me the quality of life I had in college became a real ideal, an almost idyllic vision of cooperative living, good and bad, that has stayed with me. I'd never give up that experience, not for the world. In fact my feeling is college is the beginning of a trend whereby we're going to all start living lives of greater freedom and less hand-to-mouth... that is if we can find a way to share in the plenty that our times have created.

Not really. Some odd stuff you don't think about like how to structure a meeting or how to write a research paper.

Generally speaking, I spent the equivalent time a) gainfully employed and b) writing fucktons of code. This certainly isn't general advice and I don't know that I'd recommend doing this to other people, but for me specifically it seems to have paid dividends.

I advise you to look again re: pentesting. Most good firms do not require qualifications of any kind as long as you can pass their entry test.

In theory yes. In practice, this was a specific job that I wanted for reasons I probably won't go into here.

It was devastating to be turned down for such arbitrary reasons, especially considering that everyone on the team was behind hiring me, it was the parent company (who ultimately had to pay me) that veto'd.

Sorry to hear that, that sucks :( Just wanted to let you know that most consulting outfits aren't like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com