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5y

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

rant

college

college sucks
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  • 14
    5y
    Again with this nonsense. The more y'all continue to chant that "yoU dOnt NeED a DeGree" bullshit the more its going to bite you in the ass.

    Y'all need to understand that development != building websites only.
    Some jobs out there requiere a high level of academic understanding that you will obtain by talking to, learning form, and dealing with in an academic environment.
    Try getting a job written software that will help make a plane land with no degree...yeah good luck. Same for higher data analytics etc.

    Shit, let's stop needing doctors to obtain an MD and proper credentials to be able to deal with patients because you can learn everything in a book...
  • 3
    5y
    If you don't feel like sitting at uni, you won't feel like sitting through advanced algorithms / database efficiency / distributed systems / ... online courses. And if you don't do it, you'll simply never learn to quickly estimate time complexity of a solution and whether it should be done better so it doesn't take twice as long when a new item is added, how to speed up database lookups, or how to write your code so it can run simultaneously on multiple systems.

    Serious online courses take just as much time as attending uni, and anyone who says "oh but I did it without uni" either lacks a whole bunch of knowledge (rants about incompetent seniors are way too common here), or ultimately spent countless hours of their own time to get that knowledge elsewhere.
  • 5
    5y
    @AleCx04 not to pull on OPs chain, but I don't have a degree.
    But I do agree, there are things that a degree will teach you up front, you will only learn after many years of dev by accident unless you get lucky with niche business's.

    As AleCx said, there's more to dev then web, and there's more to web then a shitty 5 page website your grandma could have built.

    Companies will throw your CV into the bin if you don't have a degree, even when you have been in the industry over a decade.

    That degree isn't worth the paper it's printed on - IMO, but it's something you don't have, the industry wants. So expect a rough start to your career without it.
  • 6
    5y
    I still remember the EE prof in the first semester telling us that the main thing the studies would do was making us think the engineering way. Back then, I didn't understand what he meant, but he was right.
  • 2
    5y
    I can only tell you this: if you plan to temporarily work at different companies in order to get experience and start your own business, you dont need a fucking piece of paper. If you plan to work at companies for the rest of your life until you retire, you will probably need that retarded piece of paper
  • 4
    5y
    @b2plane Sure, as long as your company will be yet another web agency...
  • 2
    5y
    @hitko I like this presumption, that non degree devs can't have high end jobs, this is by far from the truth, but they can be quickly looked past at a CV level so I'll give you that.
  • 2
    5y
    @C0D4 To run your own company you need to properly understand your field, know where a better implementation would get you significant cost savings, understand security risks, keep up with trends to remain relevant (not just in "fancy" way, but in "this new trend reduces operational costs by X while improving stability"). You need to sit down and learn these things.

    The only kind of business where this doesn't matter is where you code something and deploy it to some shared hosting before forgetting about it.
  • 1
    5y
    @Nanos Nobody thinks you can't learn outside uni. The thing is when you make a solution that works somewhat satisfyingly, you won't go looking for books etc. to learn whether you can improve on it unless you really need to, and eventually that solution will become a part of your "that's how it's always been done" mantra.

    To prevent that, you need an idea where to look for new knowledge, and motivation to actually stick to it. You can get that from work, from your own desire to learn more, or from people at uni.
  • 2
    5y
    @hitko now, explain to me how a degree keeps you up to date, it's a one off purchase, Generally with out of date tech and standards.
    It doesn't teach you to stay up to date, that's a personality trait to continue to better ones self in relevant areas.

    To run my own business... well now I need another degree in business management do I?

    I'm not going to argue this out, but at the end of the day, a degree is an education, an education gives you a starting point to start with, but this is one industry that you can learn on your own if you are the kind of person willing to keep learning as you go - which as you said is a requirement anyway, the only different is a degree says you should know what's your talking about, without you have a to prove it.
  • 1
    5y
    @C0D4 "Working a few places to get experience" is quite far from "spending your time to learn things beyond the tasks you work on". There's also an important difference between telling someone they "have plenty of ways to learn and improve their skills even without going to uni", and telling them they "don't need a degree, because they can learn and get a good job much faster online" - first one clearly states the importance of knowledge, while the second one basically states that as long as you can do your job, you don't need to waste time learning how to do it better.
  • 0
    5y
    Thanks everyone to share opinions and thoughts about the rant.

    But at so far reading about reason to have degree X don't do it and study by our own.

    I still at my opinion, have to agree that degree is a good way to have a entry point in area, but it's quite ivy call a outdated 4 years college a degree is enough to you get finished to face a real world and the market and most of them don't do any internships while studying.

    I read something related about doctors in MD, but this a very unhappy comparison. I'm a nurse with degree and first of all the colleges will teach the latest cutting-edge knowledge in the field because healthcare usually is a not monkey business and you'll gonna take care of people life. Second all healthcare degrees you have to do 2 years of residence which will gonna throw you on a real hospital with real sick people to care of.

    There's no comparison between a MIT fresh graduate with a doctor.

    The focus is our field and field I'm talking about in the rant.
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