If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
show comments
jdw64
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
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le-mark
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
show comments
bArray
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
zerobees
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
show comments
fasterik
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
analog31
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
teucris
There are two things you can get from a degree:
1. Knowledge and skills
2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
rippeltippel
I agree with the "what" but not with the "how".
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
show comments
jillesvangurp
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
show comments
KolibriFly
A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review
aatd86
Computer Science is still useful.
It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
show comments
bossyTeacher
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
alephnerd
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
mamidon
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
show comments
photochemsyn
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
If one is thinking about not getting a degree and trying to go straight to work, as someone who did so (albiet out of poverty rather than choice) but didn't end up like Zuck, please heed my warning:
Social capital matters more than just about anyone who has a degree can understand and tell you or mentor you about, because the majority of them have always had it, and they tend not even to interact with people without it.
It is a signal about your wealth (and your families ability to deploy it for you), from which follows your stability, your intelligence, your taste, your willingness to play the game, and your belonging in the club. These matter more than EVER in the business world - I've never seen a time when tech is less about engineering than right now.
Learning can be done without a degree, but building connections and securing funding is difficult without one.
A degree simplifies the cognitive resources needed to gain trust. Normally, gaining trust requires a lot of time. As a freelancer, it took me two years of very low-income work and repeatedly taking small jobs before I got my first real contract, simply because I didn't have a good degree.
But if you have a degree, you can skip that starting line quickly. I've done over 400 small jobs—work for college students, professors, and business owners. 80% of those were won with the lowest bid. And because I took those low-bid jobs, I eventually landed fairly well-paying contracts (about 35 of them) where I even drafted the contracts myself.
Moreover, while they say you can learn without a degree, it's much harder.
Why? Because a degree provides guidance through a curriculum. When you're just starting out, you don't even know what you need to learn. You have to ask around and figure it out piece by piece. A degree, even if you don't study properly, at least gives you the keywords to search for. Without a degree, you don't even know what it is you're trying to do.
I don't have a computer science degree, nor did I attend a good university. That's why it took an enormous amount of time to generate income from computer-related work. And even then, the vast majority of jobs paid below minimum wage, if anything at all.
> The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently placed unemployment for recent CS graduates in the United States at 6.1 percent, with computer engineering graduates at 7.5 percent. Compared to philosophy majors at 3.2 percent and art history graduates at 3.0 percent, those figures look alarming.
Alarming doesn’t begin to describe it. This is an existential crises for our industry. The situation for entry level has been dire for some time. Those of us who have decades experience have nothing to worry about; the companies who replace juniors with AI are doomed. It takes years to gain proficiency with art of software engineering. Who will replace us? Or what am I missing?
This article tackles the issue from a job opportunity perspective, but a bigger problem is the quality of students completing CS degrees is declining. UC Berkley are seeing it in their STEM departments [1] and I have seen the raw data for other Universities delivering CS degrees that is unpublished.
Currently the only method to stop students from cheating is to run strictly controlled paper-based exams, and with smart glasses with built in LLMs, this is becoming more and more problematic. Anything not run under strict conditions is entirely untrustworthy.
Management is slow to catch-up or react and the lecturers running these degree courses are under significant pressure to increase the results. I'm aware that many are doing class-wide weighted adjustments just to keep the numbers of passing students up. The quality of students graduating with CS degrees is declining rapidly.
[1] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...
It's always been difficult for new grads to get jobs. Most new grads are a net negative for the first year or two because they're just not good at much and probably don't have the domain experience for their role. This was true 10 years and and it's probably worse now as the field has been flooded with people who don't actually enjoy doing CS and are doing it for money.
Companies will still hire new grads, but are being much more careful because the quality of new grads is just so low now. Even "experienced" engineers are having a hard time getting hired because they're honestly not that good but got in when the market just needed bodies. I think hiring is broken for people with more experience due to this.
I do feel bad that people went down a route believing there will be a career down the road for them. I do believe what would help is some sort of licensing. It would add an extra barrier, but there really needs to be a gate to prove some sort of competence because there are now way too many people in the industry who just aren't that good tbh. It's ruining the whole thing for people who do have drive and passion that now can't get in the door due to the skittishness of companies.
My impression is that in the past year or so, IEEE journals have been leaning pretty heavily into low-quality, AI-generated articles. And looks like this author produced not one, not two, but three career advice columns in a single day - impressive:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/u/brian-jenney
Hypothetically if LLMs were possible in the early 90s, what would the software ecosystem look like today?
Would it be 80s technology everywhere but widely deployed? Or would things have advanced further - better compilers, more ergonomic languages, better platforms etc? I don't know. But I suspect we'd still have needed people studying computer science to advance the state of the art.
Now looking forward 30-40 years from now, will everything still run on 2020s technologies?
Our culture has too much focus on landing a job and not enough focus on becoming the kind of person who can adapt and thrive in any situation.
Computer science isn't for everyone, and probably the people going into it for the money should look elsewhere. You should study computer science if you find it intrinsically interesting. If you fall into that category, it will teach you how to think about problems rigorously, how to find solutions and break them down into steps that can be stated unambiguously, and how to reason about the performance and real-world tradeoffs of complex systems. Those are skills that will never be outdated, even if programming becomes fully automated.
This is reminiscent of my field, physics. As I was finishing my degree in the early 90s, I joined the American Physical Society, and received their magazine, Physics Today. Every month there was an article along the same lines: The physics degree isn't dead.
There are two things you can get from a degree: 1. Knowledge and skills 2. A network and a reputation
While I don’t agree with “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - both are critical and just having one without the other isn’t going to set you up for success - I think we don’t do enough to tell young people about item 2.
I agree with the "what" but not with the "how".
The article essentially says that, for a junior to be hired, they should demonstrate the same experience as a senior: deploy real system that solve real problems, know how systems behave in production, etc. That is precisely the skillset that someone builds up in a professional environment, i.e. after being hired.
In my view and experience (20+ years in the field) the value of junior colleagues is not in what they already know how to do, but in the freshness of their ideas, and the ability to learn the skills required to bring those ideas to fruition.
So, I agree that the hiring pipeline is broken, but for a different reason: companies stopped looking at juniors as a long-term investment.
I can think of a few reasons for that. In any case, that mindset is to blame, not the "kids" and their education.
Get any kind of degree. A research degree is better. Not because people will ask you for your degree but because the effort of getting one teaches you how to learn new stuff. Especially a Ph D. degree. A few years into your career, you will have learned most of what you know on the job.
I know plenty of programmers with degrees other than computer science. Geologists, biochemists, theoretical physicists, etc. Most hard sciences involve some degree of programming at this point (usually Python). And with AI, system thinking is becoming much more relevant than deep algorithmic knowledge or math skills. Nice if you can do that stuff manually but not that essential anymore.
Related: Do You Really Want That Computer-Science Degree? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418782
Im quite bullish on CS degrees, they equip you with a network and the general "vibe" of being in a common environment with other smart passionate kids that push you to challenge yourself
also right now nothing is higher signal than a new grad who built a product with actual paying users
A degree was never supposed to make someone instantly productive on day one. It was supposed to be paired with junior roles, mentoring, code review
Computer Science is still useful. It is software development that is made trivial now that software can write software.
Saying X is dead, it is still possible with the one right approach, suggests to me that X is effectively dead as far as the mainstream is concerned.
Blacksmithing as a profession isn't dead either, it is still possible with the right approach. Just don't expect knights to come knocking asking you to make them the next Excalibur.
People can kvetch but the advice in the article is correct. The alternative of no degree is extremely difficult to succeed with unless you have a pre-existing network. And underemployment rates continue to remain lower for CS/CE/EE grads than other majors.
Additionally, getting into the best school possible is critical. The top 20 CS, CE, EE, ECE, and EECS undergrad programs in the US graduate around 15-20k students a years. That is a large enough pool to recruit from for NCGs. For diversity reasons, employers will often also recruit from Veteran programs and some respected regional colleges (eg. SJSU, CalPoly, or SCU in the Bay or UTD, UTA, or UTSA in Austin) and then call it a day, so where you go truly does matter.
This may be a cynical take, but as someone with 10+ years of experience why should I care if companies are too short sighted to value and train juniors?
If you’re going to get a CS degree, do it in a master’s degree program. Get your undergraduate degree in anything else that involves at least some mathematics, I’d recommend physics, chemistry, molecular biology, planetary sciences - probability, calculus, linear algebra. Engineering is somewhat more on the vocational side, but that works too.
Why? You don’t narrow your scope at the beginning!
First step is denial