Wordpress management? You can hire a Jr PHP developer and be fine. They don't teach PHP in school.

Need someone to manage your non e-commerce website? Web Developer. Again, not something they seem to teach CS majors but the title could say Web Developer or Front End Engineer

When I took a glance at the job market, most jobs didn't really need anyone who studied Boolean algebra, discrete math, how digital and analog interfaces work, big O notation etc etc

With the advent of companies like Weebly, Shopify and others you don't need to have an engineer with backend experience(which most CS teach) so you end up hiring a "developer" but the same title exists at Google and they want people who understand computer science.

So we're left with this fractured market where it's not clear from job posting to job posting what is actually wanted.

I've ended up going to University to get a degree because I was being screened out of job applications before my experience counted for anything.

I really didn't want to sit through a CS degree either learning stuff I know already or stuff I know won't be much use in industry.

So I chose a tangential discipline and am enjoying it thoroughly, being a bridge between Operations and IT provides real value to an organisation.

(not speaking to parent poster, but instead generally) Were you a foolish humanities student when you got your bachelors? Worse, did you take it seriously and actually learn something? Great! Now study a technical discipline and blend away. IT is increasing the depth breadth and profitability of these blends daily.

Yes :\

> Worse, did you take it seriously and actually learn something?

Yes :(

> Great! Now study a technical discipline and blend away.

This is a much better perspective than my usual one. Thanks!

Ironically, plenty of tech departments hire guys who are skilled first rather than having some intrinsic interest in the area they program for. Believe me, some old school companies will hire a CS grad who couldn't spell supply chain over you in a heart beat.

Maybe it's different outside the bay area, but it almost never comes up in interviews much about my passion/prior work experience for _____ they build. Reminds me of a guy who went to work for Tesla expecting a bunch of people pumped to expand green energy only to find guys who couldn't care less: they were hired on technical acumen first, enthusiasm for environmentalism last.

I am building direct industry experience rather than filling GitHub.

Let's seperate tech companies with an e-commerce side and straight up traditional vendors leveraging the internet to increase sales. Backend engineers are critical in the former and very useful mainly to those who have specific needs in ecommerce(many vendors don't even have a clue where to even start). Usually they just outsource the whole project to a third party web dev/design firm or some I.T. guy in-house.

It's worth noting, many older business folks are truly clueless about ecommerce....I tell every client to start with ebay or amazon or etsy but they insist a pot of gold awaits when their website goes live. THey'll need some type of web related worker(design, developer, etc.).

Generally, the degree is supposed to indicate some sort of sufficiency with development. Probably universities are dumbing down requirements for $$$.

I 100% believe this is true. When I was in college it was pretty staggering to see my fellow classmates receive passing grades and get shoveled through the programs despite never grasping the basic fundamentals of CS. These were people who, at the end of CS 101, still couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, who after CS 202 _still_ couldn't tell you the difference between a string and an int, and so on and so on. Yet happily through the system they continued.

I eventually became part of the lowly drop-out club (I found attending college later in life to be a maddening experience of pointless busy work, rather than a challenging mind-expanding one). However, those people who fumbled around randomly swapping out types until things compile are now CS degree holders.

It seems true even for the higher tier degrees too. It seems even a masters degree isn't a good indicator. In the past year alone I've watched several guys with masters enter and then promptly leave our startup due to having just absolutely no idea how to write software. :(

I went to University of Texas, and managed to do really well on all the tests and projects without learning how to code. But that wasn't because anything was easy. There were a lot of very tough math, and logic classes that some of my class mates who had been working on open source projects since they were 16 did terribly at. It's not easier skills, it's just different skills.

99% of software development challenges are how do you write/maintain large projects without getting totally crushed by the complexity. This is a skill that no one tries to teach, and is also very hard to teach. Similar to being a good writer, it is very subjective, and CS professors are very uncomfortable grading subjectively. It's also harder to create homework for students than just building out toy projects.

Just for the record, I don't approve of this. I'm all for standards, glad they exist, but I think some UC schools are pretty callous in how they treat students. I admire those who get through, but there are plenty of people who would have made wonderful contributions if they'd had just a bit more understanding and breathing room. I think Berkeley wastes people because they know there will always be another 10 lined up to take someone's place.

Can't say I love privates in every way, but really, it's a good thing to try to work with someone who is new to college and struggling rather than kicking them straight to the curb.

At the end of freshman year, everyone who wanted to major in CS had to apply to gain entrance into the CS degree program.

If you got a C in weed-out calculus, you were in troubled academic standing, and you would have to retake MATH 1910 until you got the B-, otherwise you wouldn't get accepted into the CS major.

Other majors had similar, and often less-stringent, degree requirements.

Perhaps ironically, don't academic types feel they are enlightened by their education? So requiring a degree for doing the same job one has done for several decades, an exclusionary act; seems to me to be at odds with their open, enlightened views.

I was contacted yesterday by a recruiter for a startup. He said, "you have over two decades of experience doing exactly what we need but our founders are graduates of <fancy place 1> and <fancy place 2> and I think they probably will require someone with a degree.".

I thanked him, I couldn't even remember applying there, I guess he just wanted to reach out and let me know how he felt.

Granted, sometimes you want to make the tradeoff - there are some truly toxic people with zero professionalism and beautiful code, after all. It's just obvious to me that I'd rather have better code than someone with a piece of paper from a university.

is this a problem with degrees or the interview process? How did they get the job without ever proving they knew anything about software?

The skills required for writing software only truly come about if set your own project at home and work through it and write it fully.

Because neither CS nor, especially, EE are "coding" degrees.

Now, if you want to code CS (and for certain domains, EE) can help you become a much better coder, but that's not really the central focus of the degree. So they aren't irrelevant as qualifications for coding work. But neither are they, on their own, qualifications for such work.

So a weak coder can get through the program as long as he can pass the exams.

Teaching group work for programming is great. Among other things, it gets lots of side benefits like promoting source control practice and distribution of code tasks. There just needs to be something that consists of "sit down alone and code".

Unfortunately this seems to be increasingly foiled by an active market in solutions. I've even seen people hire freelancers online to do their programming assignments for them.

The short answer seems to be: because they're allowed to.

The longer answer has to do with the "$$$" part. Fundamentally, universities aren't in the business of educating people; they exist to sell credentials. Which has some thematic overlap with "educating people", but is still a step and a half removed. And with the long-term transmogrification of universities from "institutions" to profit centers, the inevitable rush toward mediocrity (and widening of the gap between perceived value of said credentials, and their actual value) results.

I'd apply this to the other end of your argument too. The reason there's wild disagreement, i.e. "too many programmers, or not enough" is that they're talking about very different things.

There is no linear scale between "can't code" and "great programmer". Anyone smart enough to be a great programmer should understand very well that no system is that simple; especially one involving people.

On the personality side, you have pioneers, early adopters, people who are comfortable being in the wild, out of their depth... and you have town planners, who like to optimise systems they understand already... and in the middle settlers, who are best when taking innovations and promoting them to a wider audience. In a large software organisation you need ALL THREE types, because they all fulfil important functions.

There are similar differences in terms of learning style, ambition, network, experience, confidence, bias, and luck.

Putting people into buckets like this is ill-advised.