Degrees and Certificates are a rip-off. The field of Computer Science/Software Enigneering/Information Tech. changes too fast to make a 4 yr degree that valueable and certificates a complete jip.

First off, let me say that this is in no way a condemnation of rbc personally, just that this subject is one that keeps irritating me more and more each time I see or hear it.

To all of you who believe that finishing a degree is a waste of time: what do you think that tells a potential employer about your personal committment to long-term projects?

I grow more and more tired of hearing people say that 4-year degrees are a waste, have no bearing on "real-world" jobs. Did you actually enter a university thinking that the only reason for being there was intensive, exclusive training in one field? A 4-year degree program is more than just job training, or at least is should be. It covers a good deal more than just the chosen field. But most of all, it represents a committment followed through to the end. And when you are interviewing with someone who would potentially be your project manager, I would think that you want them to believe that you can finish the long-term tasks you start.

The belief that anything taught in your field-of-study classes is hopelessly out-dated also amazes me. The fields of Finite-State Machines (regex's, lexical scanners), Push-Down Automata (parsers), Algorithm Analysis (sorting, anyone?) haven't changed so much since the "invention of the Internet"¹. You wouldn't learn everything there is to know about those topics, but you aren't supposed to, any more than you would expect a singe page of results from a Google search to cover any of those topics in a comprehensive manner.

Education is not just a good idea in the general sense, in my opinion it is critical. It's more than the sum of the classes you take, it's the skills you develop along the way (study habits, teamwork) and the way it disciplines the mind itself. Some years ago, there was an article at Salon.com (I think) talking about how the "new generation" of computer professionals had a large contingent of people who felt that they were best served by skipping college and going straight into industry. They even interviewed a prominent Red Hat employee for the article. But think in terms of the high-schooler who thinks he can blow off education because of his surety that he'll take his football or basketball career straight to the pros: For every one of you who has managed to get a good job without education, how many people are there who failed to?

My time at OU (the University of Oklahoma) wasn't just about CS classes. Those amounted to less than half of the semester-hours I took (not by design of the degree program, but because I took a lot of extra classes in the music department). I'll grant you that the wider pervasiveness of broadband connectivity and higher profile of the Internet mean that more information is generally available to you than was available to me in 1986 when I graduated high school. I entered my freshman year thinking that the thousand-line Pascal program I had written as a senior project the year before was a serious piece of code². If I were a high-school senior today, I'd know better. But I'd still benefit from the other things that skool taught me-- wanna know what an ant feels like? Be one member of a 300-piece marching band, performing in a stadium in front of 76,000 football fans. But if you think than being so ant-like means you are insignificant, see what happens if you don't turn where you're supposed to!

My point is: education, like so much in life, is exactly what you make of it. No more, no less. And I while I feel some sense of sympathy for those who did not find formal education to be of any benefit, I also have to wonder what their expectations were when they approached it. As for me, when I evaluate a potential programmer candidate, I am of course going to be looking at his job history and code samples first and foremost. But if I am looking at two otherwise equal contenders, the person with the shingle gets the job. That person, I know, has finished at least one project that took 4+ years.

--rjray

¹ Of course I'm being facetious here. And Perl is a lot older than the WWW, too, by the way.

² This particular self-illusion actually lasted almost 3 days into my first semester, until I befriended someone who showed me his previous-semester's Compiler Theory final project. That shit haunted me for weeks...