Why in 2017 it's still so important for companies that their candidates have a motherfucking CS degree?

Most people I know with a CS degree are less skilled and knowledgable as I am in technology, and they tell me that all you learn in CS degree is a lot of irrelavant math and a lot of theory, with some rare places actually teaching you relevant courses.

What's more prefarable to a company, someone with a diverse tech experience or someone with a CS degree?

That's why I'm a freelancer. Nobody's asking you for a fucking degree.

Good filter for weeds I guess.

Some people might apply just because they know what words like "php" and "database" mean. Or they have thorough experience in Wordpress or something.

A CS degree boosts the probability that the person knows how to write code that's not horribly wasteful. He will have an idea about complexity, development cycles, information theory, etc.

@AndSoWeCode And now back to reality, please :)

@tracktraps dude, don't buy into the availability heuristic.
Just because you know of a few cases that stand out as good examples of people without degrees kicking butt, and people with degrees sucking cock, doesn't mean that degrees are worthless.

There is a very good correlation between a degree and professional abilities.

It's like a search in a search engine. You could just write "curl ignore certificate", and look for a result that shows how to do that in PHP, or you could just add "php" and "https" in the query, which shows much fewer irrelevant results.

I've interviewed enough candidates to get some pretty clear rules:
Degree doesn't mean ability.
Lack of a degree most often means lack of ability. You can find exceptions, but there is always a trap in there somewhere.

@AndSoWeCode Okay, you're basically right.

But in my experience, fresh graduates consider themselves to be the best developers in the world. "Experienced" developers with a degree unfortunately also.

The company I am currently working for as a freelancer doesn't even ask for a school degree. Instead, there is a probationary period. If he's got it, he'll be hired. If he's not, he'll be fired.

In my opinion, schools teach far too much bullshit anyway, which is probably never needed in real life - especially universities.

Especially big companies get a lot of candidates and "by degree" is a simple and statistically useful filter.

@tracktraps after 10 years in the field, I've come across many instances where my studies were insufficient. I am seriously considering a postgraduate degree because of this.
And yeah, I've tried online, and it's quite useless in most of the cases.

Studies matter. If they don't - the university is just bad.

@tracktraps if I could kill to get a time machine and urge myself to get into engineering and learn programming, I would (in a completely hypothetical way of course...). The first 3 years would be hell learning stuff I hate and don't care about, but the last years I would have been learning a lot of cs. I would have had the opportunity to learn AI in a strict academic environment. I would have had the opportunity to learn with the best computer scientists of my country. I don't regret choosing History as a career, considering that at that time I didn't know shit about programming and I loved history. But if I could get back in time, I would choose to get into a cs degree while trying to get freelance jobs in parallel.

I agree with you on a CS degree not guarantying hiring good developers. It's also not universities' job to give someone a proper job training.

Of course you might get morons with a degree but no technical skill and experience whatsoever when "just hiring someone with a CS degree".
(German has a wonderful word for that: "Fachidiot")
But, if such people pass your technical interview, it's in some way also your fault as a company.

However, in my experience people with CS degree mostly have already a lot of experience through either being interested in various kinds of technology and doing side projects in their free time or working in a dev-job to finance their studies or both and more.

Also, having a degree in CS shows a certain commitment to your field of interest - it's not that easy and it can really suck sometimes - and that you're able to learn some very theoretical things or programming languages (e.g. for assignments) pretty fast.

@nin0x03 Ditto. You can have a CS degree and suck or be wonderful. You can lack a CS degree and suck or be wonderful. It's an independent variable as a relation to skill.

Now as for dedication to your field, it shows you will give up 4 years of your life so I guess it might correlate with being serious or a good employee. I don't know.

I know my cs professor once said, "anyone can program. You can teach a monkey to program. It's solving the problems that actually matters." Which I think he's correct. Most of programming is trivial "make this input accept characters but not get a SQL injection" type stuff but as far as genuinely interesting learning, CS is where it's at.

All that said, I'm in a leadership role though and if I need a programmer (with no formal background, no crazy math), I would take the best programmer with or without a degree. A data scientist or something more formal, I'm looking for advanced math and that's one thing a CS or engineering degree holder would have

@codePatrol I agree.

Also, regarding hiring a Data scientist, I'd like to add that one doesn't get exposed (that much) to other sciences and/or actual research anywhere but at university.

As far as I know, only the bigger companies are able to actually do the "R" in the R&D department. Having someone with a degree who knows how to work scientifically if need be can really be an improvement in a smaller company.

@nin0x03 Yeah, that was where I started out was at a big multinational manufacturer doing r&d. It's cool and weird to do nothing more than write papers for a living. Everyone in that department had a degree in CS or engineering as far as I know. But that company was a major manufacturer so engineering and a scientific background are important.

@demiko I think I'm from one of those countries. My colleagues were so useless that I had real worries for them: how will they survive in the real world. Apparently such countries also have corruption at the work place. It was their fault, and not the university's though. They cheated every exam, didn't care for any topics, were oblivious to anything CS-related.
But I am still far better off with those studies than without. Even if I wasn't even close to being the best student (I almost dropped out because I was already working in the field. I barely graduated).