I've hired >50 engineer in the last 12-18 months. They are experienced hires I will grant you, but education is something I barely look at on a resume. In fact, I can't even tell you how many are self taught vs not, but I suspect it's 30%+.
It's a little different for junior engineers, as it can make a difference, but in my experience the only thing you can ask for from any engineer, which is especially true for junior engineers, is: attitude and aptitude.
For example, if hiring someone with a CS/MIS/CIS degree with 4 years experience. We'd accept 8 years experience in lieu of a degree.
If you find learning in college boring, what do you think this field holds for you? You have a world full of knowledge you could be learning if you're bored, no professor is preventing you from becoming knowledgeable across many programming disciplines.
It seems you don't even have a rudimentary idea of what goes into building software yet, you just want to skip ahead to the getting paid part.
If you can't build your project/idea already, why would someone pay you to work?
Keep learning, you've got a very long way to go. Good luck!
"...with 4 years experience. We'd accept 8 years experience in lieu of a degree."
Currently, I'm in process of interviewing with London Office of Facebook. They told me that they don't care about my degree. The only important thing is my skills. Also, I had conversation with Google HR, he told me the same. Ripple Labs has very advanced position for C++ developer and they don't care about your degree at all.
But I found that average tech companies care much more about degree than Google and Facebook.
So answer to your question:
Yes, top-tier employers in tech industry don't care about degree. But in order to get there you have to gain your first experience in average companies and it will be harder than with degree (but it's not impossible).
Degree is very important to getting work permit in USA (H1B visa), Canada and many other western countries.
I got my work permit in Sweden without any degree, but salaries here are low.
If you dream about California, you have to get your degree even if it's super boring.
Do startups accept self-taught programmers - definitely yes.
Do companies in general accept self-taught programmers - yes.
Do large fortune 500 companies accept self-taught programmers - generally no.
There are exceptions to this rule. If you're self-taught and have done something amazing, like created your own programming language used by thousands of programmers, or you've got years of experience in some area thats hard to find experts in, like realtime systems programming then they'll make exceptions and you can get in.
If you want to work in R&D you're going to need a PHD, the only exception here might be in startups.
But aside from the big players, you can almost always substitute experience over education. Given two programmers, one with 3-4 years experience and the other with a bachelors degree and no experience, its actually the case that exp will trump education just about every time, especially on general programming positions and in the startup community, where all that matters is what you can do and have already done.
Overall though, do yourself a favor and finish up your degree, you'll always have the advantage over candidates that don't have one.
Long answer: The long-term trend has been that it's becoming harder and harder to get by without a degree. It's just supply and demand in action. A long time ago, people with programming skills were hard to find, and companies had to settle for hiring whoever they could find.
But people with programming skills are becoming increasingly common nowadays. Supply is starting to catch up with demand. That's making it harder to find a job that doesn't require a college degree than it used to be. Now companies start having an incentive to add a degree requirement just to reduce the number of applicants they have to consider.
Even if there is not a degree requirement, it's only going to get more common that you find yourself competing directly with people who are similar to you in every way except that they have a degree and you don't. When that happens, they're likely to pick the person with the degree. It's just the safer option from their end.
We all said "Hire this guy."
Turned out he didn't have a degree, and a director said "Nope."
Okay, so that director is an asshole. Everyone says that he's an asshole for this decision (and he is an asshole for other reasons, too -- MS still hasn't fired him and I have no idea why not). I go to him and say, "Guess what college I graduated from?" and he mentions some place hifalutin' and crazy and a little embarassing. "Nope, I'm a drop-out from (certain cow college). Also, those really good engineers Greg and Frank? They don't have degrees, either. So why don't you give this kid a break, he'll be great."
And he was.
So . . . the results will be mixed. I can say that most of the engineers I work with do not care about educational background, they care about knowledge and experience, however you got it. The various and gormless filters you may have to go through probably do care, especially at larger companies.
Once you have sufficient experience, though, nobody will care.
A lot of them are now thinking about getting a bachelor's degree from some online program as a defensive move. Small companies go under or get acquired without much warning, and big companies can have managerial turnover without warning. Either way, not having a bachelor's degree leaves them at increased risk of being in a situation where they're getting overlooked for jobs or raises.
I think this is a really important trend to bring to the attention of any young person who is seriously considering dropping out of college to go into industry. It might be fine right now, but take a look at the long view and consider that this person is going to need to be maintaining their career for another 40 years at least.
Personal anecdote: My grandfather only had a high school diploma. He ended up being an extremely accomplished corrosion engineer, and invented some of the key tools and technologies that are used to maintain oil and natural gas pipelines. Does his experience imply that it would have been wise for my brother (also an engineer) to try and skip college? No, not in the slightest. The economic circumstances of the job market for engineers changed in the intervening decades, and the prevailing attitudes within that job market changed right along with them.
I hated general college classes that weren't related to programming and sitting in rooms where after a semester people still didn't know how to add a image to a webpage. Now I've learned so much working 50 hours a week getting challenged left and right by so many real life issues.
There are plenty of jobs open to self tought programmers around me they simply want you to master your language and stack whatever that may be and my problem was trying to be a jack of all trades like trying to learn Ruby 3 days before a interview.
Since you're bored get some experience while in college and that will help out immensely, also the most important language to know is English, from your writing I'd really recommend brushing up.
Lots of sites like elance / remote programming jobs to find freelance work, don't burden your studies with the pressure of a full time gig.
5,308 jobs posted http://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=%22in+lieu+of+degree%22&l=
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I think every programmer is self taught to a certain degree. You learn very little in tertiary education when compared to working 40+ hours a week as a programmer - in my opinion of course.
I learn by doing things, whereas others learn better in different ways.
Good luck!
Spend some time working on your idea outside your studies. If you are already in college, you've already made a huge investment. Take advantage of the resources (including professors) and the network you have available to you during this time.
Do extra work, especially if you don't currently have a job or are raising a family right now. So many people piddle away this time and skip through college as if it doesn't cost thousands of dollars a semester (even if you didn't pay it, someone had to), or if it's some magical job-providing mechanism.
Get back to your studies and start your projects!
What matters most is to show competence. If you can make someone interested in some things that you've built, you can probably make do without a degree, but you'll have a tougher time getting through the door.
My two cents is try to stick with your formation, while you build yourself something impressive. Chances are you'll pick up something useful and the social network of peers will help you at least as much as the formation itself.
Best of luck whatever you choose!
Programming was my biggest interest since I was a child. So started with Basic, then moved to ASP 3.0, then C, then web programming with PHP and now, at the age of 32, I am still working as a full stack developer and getting paid well.
The hardest part of self-education is to learn best practices and how to do things on a large scale. So learning the syntax is easy but getting the principal and methodologies will take some time and practice.
Now I'm a web developer and after having worked in one of the most interesting design studios in my country I'm pretty sure my previous choices helped a lot broaden my horizons.
But I wouldn't suggest you to quit college and seek for a sw developer job. In most cases those (usually talented) developers have knowledge gap when it comes to algorithms, data structure or deep understanding of the HW / OS. Thus, you might be able to find a job right now, but in time you will need to catchup or you will have hard time to compete other developers with formal education.
Interviewed a few self-taught programmers. Some kind of test task and an interview says more about candidate than line with degree in resume.
Many very attractive jobs will be outside Indonesia. Immigration without a degree can be very tricky...
A little bit longer answer: I'm from Germnay, I've studied architecture but I've decided last year I want to make my hobby my job, and I've applied for a few jobs and got some offers. On a sidenote our (sofware) architect did never finish school.
But I have a huge knowledge gap compared to my coworkes who have studied CS. I personally feel inferior to them. So I'm going back to university to study CS. I would suggest you shouldn't drop out.
Answer to your Question - "It depends".
A question to your question - Can you make company feel stupid enough to even think about a college degree?
Studying is still very important and valued by a lot of companies. I'd recommend to study in something else "complimentary" that passionate you and learn/improve in software engineering outside school to have a more diversified skillset. That's what I did 4 years ago, landed my first software engineer job and now had the opportunity to move to London because of that!
I don't like or agree with any of the above, but that's how most of the world works. Put in the time, get it done. 10 years from now you will be very happy you did.
Learning C++ course on college may not do much to enhancing your problem solving capabilities in programming because when the classes are not fun itself (as you mentioned), I can assure you that you will not learn much but detest the programming classes itself and I regret to tell you this but you may end up renouncing programming itself, which you just said you want a job in. Albert Einstein said that after a year or more of mind-numbing classes in highschool that did nothing to excite his creative potential, he found that the same scientific concepts that fascinated him in the past felt utterly distasteful for almost a year when he entered college.
Finally, after reading half of the Internet's how-to on "how to code" and "how to be a skilled programmer", one answer was always common in all of them:
- THINK OF AN IDEA AND WORK ON IT.
They mention that if you don't have a purpose to learn to code, you shouldn't learn to code at all. So, let me link to eye-opening articles that debunk the myths of programming I found in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9823985.
- http://fourhourworkweek.com/2013/11/03/productivity-hacks/ - http://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/ - http://norvig.com/21-days.html - http://www.invokemedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/venndi...
When you build apps or websites that do something you wanted, only then you gain the confidence and skill to work for others on their projects, isn't it? And that time will come when you will be overwhelmed by the number of jobs you can apply to. So, "no skill, no job". :-)