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Discussion on: Why Not Having a CS Degree is Awesome

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Elliott Miller

Having a CS degree for coding is akin to needing a writing degree to create content for a magazine. The underlying skill is pretty general and can be learned by anyone but the degree gives you highly technocal knowledge and experience that is hard to get anywhere else.

You can go really far as a developer without a degree. And indeed many practical and soft skills only learned on the job are almost more important. But the theory is still useful for certain applications, in particular those that require optimizations.

Me personally. I got a degree in physics. So I am confident I could learn all of the mathematical stuff. And I use a lot of math as a data scientist. Every now and then I crack open an algorithms book and I plan to go through all of RIT's (my alma matter) CS theory courses. I don't think this is necessary to further my career. But it will help.