Just graduated with a CS degree and starting work soon. I can't wait to rage with you all.

@busuu I went for 4 years. It was a heavy focus on theory for the general CS courses. Once you get to upper level courses you can specialize. I did the security specialization, so I took quite a few systems courses which were more concrete.

Not enough collaborative projects though. I wish they let us work in groups more. Overall a great experience in my opinion. I think you'll get a deeper understanding of actual CS. It's not just a programming degree.

I'd be happy to go into more detail if you'd like so you can make a good decision for yourself, since it's all just personal preference. Best of luck!

@busuu I don't really see those years as a waste of time. Maybe now what you're being paid sounds like a lot, but that might be nothing to what you could get by getting a higher degree or engaging in more complex CS branches like AI. Knowledge is never a waste of time. I'm in the 2nd year of software engineering and, having friends already working in software factories, I can tell you CS is way broader than programming. It's not the same being an architect than being a construction worker.

The sad part about having a CS degree is that most people are exhausted after 4-5 years of college and quickly need a steady working opportunity. That will pretty much lock them in for a good amount of time. Also, many students do not pursue any coding opportunities on the side, so after obtaining a degree they pretty much end up in a company where they have to refocus on a subset of what they had learned in university/college. Most of the theoretical stuff is really only applicable to the new emerging fields in CS (AI, VR) and even there you need to truly dive deeply into the subject in order to actually cut it in the field. My personal opinion about college/uni is that it's an approximate guide as to what to learn, the rest is mostly self-study which in a lot of cases you can do on your own. I have been to university and I found that in some subjects they merely scratched the surface and while it's helpful to get going, you'll still need to put in a lot of effort after the fact.

I agree that schooling is, for the most part, not the best route. I started at a Junior College, and then dropped out. Made some other career choices and continued programming as a hobby. When I finally went back to school to get some inkling of a degree I realized just how much my hobby studies had put me in front of the other students. No CS course provided me any learning opportunity (granted this was AA level stuff) and after I graduated and worked an internship I landed a job using nothing I had learned in school (all tech I had taught myself). They gave me a huge raise not to go back to school and I've only gone up since then. I now live in a pretty large tech city and make more than the median, and all of that on an Associates degree.