There's two questions here.
  1. Does what I learned when I "earned" my CS/Math degree help me do my current (or any) job?
  2. Does the fact I have a degree help me get a job?
I would be willing to put forward that very few monks, or CS professionals for that matter, would feel that the answer to #1 is Yes. Everything job-useful that I learned in college was done by the end of freshman year. (This isn't to say that I didn't enjoy the other 4 1/2 years of college I took ... it just wasn't very useful.)

Now, the answer to #2 is a resounding YES. In fact, I wouldn't have a job without having a piece of paper. The one time I did get a Perl/CGI job without it, I was earning $7.50/hr doing basically what I do now for $25/hr.

Please, please think through the fact that I went from $15k/year to $50k/year solely because I have a degree. No additional knowledge/skills required. Just the degree.

In closing - the degree is useless (from a technical standpoint) but completely indispensible (from an economic standpoint).

In reply to Re: Formal Education Required? by dragonchild
in thread Formal Education Required? by mexnix

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.