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Discussion on: Thought experiment - Create your own degree

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Thorsten Hirsch

Having my own workplace in mind, I would split my answer in 3 parts:

  • Translating business requirements into code needs a lot of people / communication skills. I guess David and Ben nailed it already, and I especially liked Gregory Brown's tweet. There really doesn't seem to be any correlation between CS degree and skill-on-the-job, as long as one has a scientific background and is used to structured thinking & planning.

  • Building libraries & frameworks for other developers as well as setting up coding guidelines requires quite a bit of CS stuff. You better know the complexity of your algorithms and some systems theory. Here I see a correlation between software quality and a CS degree. But you don't need as much communication skill, because your customers (the other developers) pretty much understand you right away.

  • DevOps stuff, capacity planning, cloud deployment. I'm not sure about the correlation here. You need to to know a bit about hardware, more about operating systems and probably also containers. But you can compensate knowledge about software / algorithms / systems theory by just doing a lot of testing. I would say it doesn't matter if you've got a CS degree as long as you excel at scripting and automation. However communication can be really tough between development and operations, if politics in your company pushes both departments in different directions.