If you can learn to program on your own and become proficient in it, build great projects, and keep up to date with the languages, why does it matter what major you are?

Granted I'm 20 and still in school, but just being a CS major doesn't make someone a great programmer. I like to think that employers care about projects you've worked on as that is the best way to see a true programmers talents.

Just realize that if you don't get a degree, you will always battle people who feel threatened by you. School becomes a core part of most people's identity, and they can be very protective of it in passive aggressive ways. People are told from a young age that people who didn't attend school are uneducated. At least that's been the case with me. I have a great career and no degree, and it's something I deal with constantly.

Yes, I'm in a similar situation and see the same reactions. People have a very irrational concept of post-secondary schooling. In many cases it's a very personal thing for them. Many've grown up thinking they'd be the first-in-family college graduate, holding that as a life goal, and listening to their parents and grandparents complain about how they never had the same opportunities as the college grads. Others have grown up with the expectation that they'll keep in the family tradition of graduates and not bring shame by failing to graduate. They've paid dozens of thousands of dollars for a degree. They've invested four years or more of their life, and all of that is epitomized in the "degree", when they're pat on the back and told they're a real grown-up now. And many seriously take this whole process to heart, and the less real value in a career, the worse this degree snobbery gets. They feel their degree has given them everything (and honestly it probably has, since their personal commercial value is often negligible). It almost becomes an idol to them. It is, therefore, considered a heresy if you speak evil of that system, and heretics are not well received.

Because of all this social programming, there are few who will admit that modern undergraduate programs, and often their graduate counterparts, are a horrendously inefficient, slow bureaucracy that provides a form of pseudo-independence for developing adults, cater classes to the lowest common denominator in order to pass more students, and occasionally have desirable network-building properties. But that's the reality.

We tie up adult identity in degrees very, very closely in our culture. Someone who never graduated college (or worse, high school) is automatically considered lower class by many. It is considered an essential of both personal and professional development in the white-collar world. Their whole lives people are told, "Go to college so you can get a good job." Is it any wonder those who've "paid their dues" and gone through these motions feel entitled to employment, even if they have no commercially viable skillset (and, this is critical to understand: most don't)? It's becoming a large social issue, but no one is willing to admit the real causes.

Just keep quiet about it.

I don't include 'education' on my resume, and I don't mention it to people. I can't recall the last time I was asked. Everyone seems to assume I have a degree because everyone else in the field has one.

I am not saying that a degree is not important! I'm just saying that just being a CS major does not make one a great programmer and likewise, a great programmer need not be a CS major. I believe a history major can become a great programmer...as said in the video, learning how to program just takes determination.

I was an econ major and learned html/css in a few short weeks pretty darn well. At least enough to land me a web developer position with a rising startup. I have decided to change my major to a more technical one purely because I enjoy learning both HOW to program and what I can do with it--which I'm learning is just about anything :)

> I'm just saying that just being a CS major does not make one a great programmer and likewise, a great programmer need not be a CS major.

I'm emphatically not saying this, I'm saying that a degree is good for employment. Many places will outright refuse to hire people without at least a BA in computer science (or computer engineering, I guess? I am not aware of the related fields).

Thankfully, investors care more about the end code than degrees.

Your first statement was that you need a degree to get a job. Having a degree gives you access to more jobs, but you can get a job just fine without a degree.

> but you can get a job just fine without a degree.

I have a few relatives who are well versed in computers but cannot find employment. I'm sure they would be reassured by your comment.

Being "well-versed in computers" is not the same thing as being a valuable programmer. If you are a valuable programmer and you still can't find a job without a degree, you're doing something wrong (what you're doing wrong varies individually, of course).

I have no degree, and have never gone more than a month without a job offer while actively looking for a position. One time it took two months to find a position with acceptable compensation, but I'd received a low-ball offer in the first month.

What exactly is a "valuable programmer"? It's about as vague a notion as being "well versed in computers".

Edit : essentially, you just re-defined bar without providing any real context.

Taken a step further (and perhaps in a different job market), someone might say "oh, well being a valuable programmer isn't the same as being a Rockstar programmer..."

The key lies in the word "valuable", which is completely situational and vague, whereas "programmer" is not.

I don't know exactly what a valuable programmer is, but I'll give you numbers regarding my situation, so that we talk about concrete things.

I do Python/Django work and I have 3 years of experience. I have a GitHub profile which I show when applying for jobs and my profile shows that I've made 359 contributions in the last year. I have a LinkedIn profile through which details the technologies I use and the experience I have.

Since the start of the year, I think I've been contacted by 10 recruiters with job proposals. I chose to work remotely though, with clients outside of my country.

A valuable programmer, in this context, is someone who seeks to get paid by a company to write code and would have a significant (as far as individual employees go) net-positive influence on that company's financials.

So returning to the statement "...you can get a job just fine without a degree..." comes with an important caveat.

Namely, that you can get a job "just fine" if you're a programmer of sufficient talent and knowledge to be able to be a net-positive influence on a company's financials.

YMMW, but that's a relatively high bar. Higher, at least, than the ease that "just fine" (IMHO) implies.

It's certainly possible, but non-trivial.

I'm pretty sure the concept of employment in general is that any employee is going to supply ample net financial upside to the employer. If you have the skills to be employable as a programmer, you should not need a college degree to find work.

This is changing though. Even in just the last decade, people's attitudes towards the job/degree relationship has changed dramatically. If the trend continues, I expect in another decade or two more it probably won't even be a consideration, except perhaps where the law still requires.

But degrees are a very strong indicator to most companies that you will do what you're told, have good "work ethic", etc.

I dropped out of college because I was learning very little, at a slow pace, and mostly in areas not related to my major. I love to learn and work on interesting projects, but I've never been the type to do things just because an employer/school/society expects me to. And I've definitely had to pay for it in many ways...

Dont take this the wrong way, but if you are a CS major you have an opportunity to be grounded in the basics of the craft . If you are not covering SICP, algorithms and implementing them in C code at your school, demand it or just stay at home and work on those. You have a n opportunity - work it - seriously dont think flash projects will help you here - take the education time to get educated.

It may be helpful to get you past the initial Catch-22, but if you can manage to get a few years of experience (let alone 20), I doubt the degree would matter much. Lots of job postings have "Or equivalent experience" after their degree requirements.

Thankfully you won't need one to start a company, and hire all of your CS-degree-less old decent programming friends.

Or when you find yourself in a new city outside of you network of contacts.

There are more programming/CS jobs every year than graduating CS majors.