I really love solving fun and interesting problems with software. I am a full-time software developer with over a decade of experience doing a bit of everything…Android, web, backend, scripting, etc.
As an employer, you know the strongest teams are the most diverse teams. If you had 100 engineers and every one of them had a CS degree and had been an engineer since the day they left college, I would argue you don't have a very strong team.
I went to college, in the early 2000s, and majored in computer engineering, which was mostly hardware focused. I actually got 90% of my useful experiences for writing code after college. I only refer back to a few classes, Discrete Math and Algorithms & Data Structures. With that said, college was a necessity for me because I come from an underrepresented background (black). I would have had an extremely difficult time getting into the industry without some sort of credentials at the time I entered the workforce in 2007. At that time, coding was not nearly as accessible, to someone like me, as it is now.
With that said a CS degree is only one of many signals that indicate whether or not an individual would be a great developer. It should not be exclusionary if you lack one and at the same time it can be useful to have one, but there should be much more that goes into the calculus for making an entry into coding. I thought the author did a great job highlighting those other signals.
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First and foremost, this is a great article.
I especially, 100% agree with this:
I went to college, in the early 2000s, and majored in computer engineering, which was mostly hardware focused. I actually got 90% of my useful experiences for writing code after college. I only refer back to a few classes, Discrete Math and Algorithms & Data Structures. With that said, college was a necessity for me because I come from an underrepresented background (black). I would have had an extremely difficult time getting into the industry without some sort of credentials at the time I entered the workforce in 2007. At that time, coding was not nearly as accessible, to someone like me, as it is now.
With that said a CS degree is only one of many signals that indicate whether or not an individual would be a great developer. It should not be exclusionary if you lack one and at the same time it can be useful to have one, but there should be much more that goes into the calculus for making an entry into coding. I thought the author did a great job highlighting those other signals.