This is BS, most of these companies are looking for snowflakes from top 10 schools, who have been programming since they were in middle school.
I have plenty of competent friends who had a hard time finding anything better than an IT desk job after graduating from Stony Brook, NYU-Poly and City College.
Most smaller tech companies don't even consider training their new employees. Instead they want a 'ninja' who is comfortable with their tech stack and can hit the ground running straight out of school. To make things worse 90% of them think their analytics platform or social network for cats is the next Google, so they put their candidates through ridiculous interviews that have nothing to do with writing CRUD apps.
I even know people here at Columbia University who didn't get any good offers outside of finance.
I don't disagree that companies are often looking for people who have resumes and skills far exceeding the simple, minor needs of particular jobs.
On the other hand, I have met many CS majors at local New York colleges, and even among the seniors who seem to be in the top half of the class, their knowledge of some basic things is almost universally absent. Such as software version control - they don't know what it is, they don't know the names of any version control systems, like git or perforce, and they don't know how to use any of them.
They study for class, mostly, but seem to have no interest in all of this outside of class. Not once in four years do you check a project out of github, fix a bug, and then send a patch and pull request? And that's among those who study and are in the top half of the class. Some kids don't even care about studying much and I don't know why they're even bothering.
Learning things like git are very doable on the job.
In university, one should concentrate on learning things that are impractical to pick up on the job - calculus, statistics, theory, quantum mechanics, dynamics, etc. Stuff that takes sustained, concentrated focus to learn.
For example, although I got an engineering degree from Caltech, my practical knowledge upon graduating was about nil. But I found on the job at Boeing that the practical stuff was easy to pick up, and pairing it with the theoretical stuff I learned in school made for an effective combination. Others who did not know the math/theory, never picked it up, they'd spend their career avoiding it.
I know what you mean, but I can't blame people for having other obligations or interests outside of programming. I went to a public high school here in NYC and have good friends who had to work their way through college, some of them even had siblings to support.
Knowing about git, tdd and etc is important but it's not something that can't be taught. It's as simple as pairing them with experienced engineers and pointing them to a few relevant books.
I'm taking Computer Architecture in grad-school this semester as a "make-up" from never having completed it in undergrad.
My partner for the programming projects had never seen git before, and proposed that we simply email each-other files. This is at Technion, the single best technical institution in Israel and one of the Top 50 in the world.
The fact that you find it strange that these students don't do much programming and related stuff outside of class seems to be part of these high expectations - if they don't do much of these things outside of programming, then they just aren't interested enough, even if they get high grades.
Contrast this to some other, hypothetical study/profession where you are judged by your grades and work experience. Not your grades, work experience, and weekend projects.
This is not to say that these standards are necessarily bad, but rather that it is part of the higher standards that programmers have to live up to.
I'm Canadian, but I always thought I was knowledgeable about American universities.
I'd never heard of Harvey Mudd college, and here it is competing with the two giants of US engineering, MIT and Caltech.
The take away from this seems to be that you shouldn't assume your interviewer knows that your degree is from a "name" school, or that the school you went to will influence any one in a positive way.
I remember someone here mentioned that they went to University of Texas Austin and that they thought that should ensure them of getting an interview anywhere and I wasn't sure if they were joking or being serious as I'd never heard of UoT Austin before as being a good computer science school.
I would imagine that most US employers are more familiar with them than most non-Americans because we're more likely to come across the less-well known schools when we were applying for college. Edsger Djikstra was a professor at UT Austin, by the way, so their computer science program is pretty well known.
Technical types in the US have heard of it, and (as others have mentioned) Rose Hullman, and hold them in high regard. They're just much smaller than their counterparts, and don't have huge grad schools, so they wind up lumped in with liberal arts colleges in the collective mindset.
UT Austin is one of the top few public Computer Science programs, up there with University of Illinois and UC Berkeley and maybe 1 or 2 others that I'm missing. When the oil money started coming in, they went on a hiring spree.
btw - I'm a big fan of the idea of more Engineering schools in NYC. Even with Poly, Columbia and the new Cornell school, there are more jobs than talented candidates.
I'd err on the side of saying you're just not knowledgeable of American universities. But there's really nothing wrong with that, nor is it necessarily reasonable to expect someone not from the US to be familiar with US universities. At the very least, it opens you up to considering candidates based on their interview and not pedigree.
For what it's worth, Harvey Mudd and UT Austin are both very well-regarded schools.
I've been told to not bring up the interviewee's degree or university unless they explicitly bring it up. Typically, the conversation stays focused on recent projects and coding questions.
Why? Does the name of the school matter that much? If the person that is doing the interviewing is judging you by your skills objectively, they shouldn't care about the school you went. There are plenty of great engineers that went to state schools, and plenty of crappy ones that went to more known schools.
Also, after a couple of years of work experience (after your second job), nobody really pays attention on where you went to, so don't get too hung up if your interviewer is not familiar with your school.
Caltech is much the same way though, outside of engineering nobody has heard of it. Like Harvey Mudd, it's a small *private school that hasn't yet become a household name.
I went to a suburban high school in the southeast, and while I'd heard of Stanford, I literally had no idea where it was. I thought it was in the northeast. No one from my high school had ever gone there, and I'd never even met anyone who went there (not that I knew of, anyway). It's probably different now, that was the mid 80s.
I'd heard plenty about all the ivy league schools, and kids from my high school went to them.
I was very aware of MIT as THE best tech school (in the reputation I'd heard), but I also had heard of CalTech at the hardest school.
Other schools that were on my radar did include Harvey Mudd, though I had no clue at all where it was. Colorado School Of Mines too, for some reason. Probably more because of the weird name than anything else.
I did well on the SAT and had a large box full of brochures schools sent me, so I got exposed to a lot of lesser-known places that way.
There was one that had me utterly fascinated, Deep Springs College. It's a 2 year school out in the desert. You basically work a ranch and take a sort of custom curriculum, then transfer to another school to finish a degree. I was too chicken to go, but if I could change one decision in my past, I'd go. I think it would have made for a radically different experience.
You can also make an incredible ROI by not paying for an expensive degree and instead gain knowledge & experience through other means (teach yourself, free online courses, open-source projects, paid internships, etc). Just take a look at today's "Who is hiring?" [1] and you'll notice very few list degree requirements. Most are looking for a combination of experience and knowledge.
It sounds like you're talking about programming jobs and an education in computer science. In this area, it's true that you don't need a college degree.
But the article makes no mention of computer science or programming. Instead, it talks about engineering, a set of disciplines that may involve programming but often centers on a much different curriculum.
A degree in, say, mechanical or industrial engineering will unlock opportunities that would not be available otherwise.
Don't take this guys advice seriously. Not having a degree means you will get paid less than people you have proven to have better skills than, and many doors to many lucrative opportunities will be locked. You'll have a social stigma, and you'll constantly have to be proving yourself in situations where your coworkers don't.
EDIT: my comment was a bit angered, and I apologize for that. Just this morning I found out that a company i had a great interview with yesterday told me that despite liking me the company had a policy that they can't hire senior engineers without a technical degree. Its tough.
Everybody who has this problem should just get the dang degree. It's not very expensive and not that much work, assuming you've actually learned enough to justify one.
Some established licensed and accredited state schools that will grant a degree entirely by examination:
In some ways, that's a good filter. If a company is going to let "policies" stand in the way of the best choices, maybe they won't be a great place to work anyway.
Everyone does not have access to the link that you've just posted. Also in fields other than computing, you can't get hired (of course there are always exceptions) to design mission critical systems unless you have an aerospace / mechanical / chemical engineering degree.
Good luck studying on your own to want to work as a chemical engineer because MegaCorp will totally hire you to work with chemicals and there aren't many startups hiring ChemEs.
Also, kids are quite gullible and everything for most kids suggests that you need to go to college. The path goes somewhat like this:
born -> pre-school -> school -> middle/high school -> college
There are a lot of people that take 6 figure loans to study photography, or major in english. That I don't get.
I think adults seriously overestimate most kids' sense of long-term planning, commitment, self-awareness and grit. When I was 18, with 4 years of programming experience, chances were terribly tiny I would spend my time in a structured fashion continuing to improve my skills and then start a career early.
More likely I would just sit around playing video games and reading interesting-sounding wikipedia articles, and maybe coding up the occasional fun toy or two until I got bored and ditched it.
Until I started starving, and then go "Well f*&k. Should have thought about that." And I probably wouldn't think about that unless someone is dragging my ass into a college/job.
Right. I could even see someone spending months to learn Java in a structured fashion. But how many people are going to sit down and spend months studying in a rigorous fashion things like the theory of computation, or complexity theory, or lambda calculus, or graph theory? Recently I had to make a hash from a list of numbers, and thought to use a Gödel number for the hash. How many self-taught programmers will do this? I mean, how many self-taught people really sit down and learn a decent amount about even slightly complex things more immediately practical than pushdown automata, such as about critical sections and mutual exclusion?
It's not work if you tackle a problem you actually care about.
Getting a child excited about data structures, algorithms, and coding conventions will be difficult.
Have them dream up a guide, and let them fumble through the implementation while seeing the fruits of the labor unfold before them. Now that's excitement. And learning. Without ever feeling the need of forced discipline.
> Just take a look at today's "Who is hiring?" and you'll notice very few list degree requirements. Most are looking for a combination of experience and knowledge.
Key word is today. Yes, today, with the DJUSSV up 150% over the past five years, and billions being shelled out for Oculus and Whatsapp and so forth, no degree is needed for many jobs.
What happens when the economy takes a dive like in 2008/2009, or 2000/2001? You get laid off from your company and then send your resume in to open job slots on Craigslist. Except they are getting dozens, maybe hundreds of resumes. Even after culling for relevant experience, companies might have dozens of good looking resumes to choose from. The next obvious way to cull resumes is get rid of the pile with no degrees.
In bad times, CL job ads dry up, especially those not requiring a degree. Even if it doesn't state it explicitly, HR will probably grill you on your education background and plans.
As far as an expensive degree, people can go to a good state school and get Pell grants and the like. As far as people teaching themselves, most good programmers are always teaching themselves. They need a basis to work off of though and a BSCS is that basis. If you're going to spend four years studying the basics you need to know, why not borrow/spend the $50k to go to a very good school like Berkeley or UIUC, down to the $25k for state schools with decent CS programs?
Relevant for computing, but not so much mechanical, chemical, aerospace, etc. The engineering world is big, and software development is just a small part of it.
Yeah, it is troublesome to me that they always do these comparisons across professions. What would the numbers look like if they evaluated people with engineering degrees vs. people with other degrees (or perhaps no degrees) in the same jobs? Would the ROI of an engineering degree still come out so far ahead?
Which is fine if you are both good at and interested in something wherein you can do this. I have a BSEE and am trying to get back into an EE-oriented position. For EEs, things have gotten to the point where me just having a BS is tolerated; they really want an MS+. Professional licensure is going that route as well now, unfortunately.
I invested a little cash in '97 when I went to college. If I'd invested 4-5 times more I might not be working right now. Or I might have gotten excited, over extended, and lost it all. Who knows.
I also wonder how the typical ROI compares to just buying a condo in a college town instead?
The gotcha with that comparison is that people will give you 100k in student loans at 18 years old, but you'll have a hell of a time getting 10k to go margin trading with.
The world is not a meritocracy, and so we must not underestimate the value (ROI?) of the various social connections one makes at different schools and degree programs.
The value of a lot of things in life including an engineering degree cannot simply be reduced to a dollar amount, unless the moment you set out to get a degree, your only and final goal was how much that degree would fetch you down the line.
Unfortunately that isn't really up to us, since in our society you have to work to survive until you die or retire. Until having no job means a livable lifestyle, most people have to consider real dollar values when considering education.
Looking at the ROI on a college degree is very tricky even if you are just using to to compare schools. I clicked through to the original data set (http://qz.com/193400/here-are-the-american-colleges-and-majo...) and it shows that they used a net figure for calculating tuition that assumes average grants and loans. I don't believe this includes a TVM calculation for the loans though. This can really add up if you have 70K in student loans...
I'd like to see a better comparrison with public schools in the engineering field across the entire career of an engineer. I went to a good state engineering school for mechanical engineering. Cheap in state tuition (and a 529) meant no debt post graduation. That's huge when starting out. Additionally my classmates and I had offers inthe 60k-80k range. That might not be as high as people right out of Stanford but I can't imagine it has a large effect over the length of someones career. When you factor in that many of the graduates from more prosetgious colleges carry debt for 5+ yrs after graduation.
The annual % ROI on my degree is basically infinite, since the state of Florida paid for my entire BS. Sure, Florida Atlantic is not a place most people have heard of, but I still managed a Fortune 500 EE job right out of school, in late 2002 no less.
I would suggest you still have opportunity cost to consider. Assuming a four year program, you could have, on average, earned $120,000 during that time. If you then invested that at 5% until you reached retirement age, you could have earned right around $1,000,000 over your career above your regular income going forward. As such, your ROI should really be calculated on what you are able to earn in your career above that.
To add, I would suggest that someone who has the determination and mindset to successfully complete an engineering degree should be able to earn even more than $120K during that initial period, but there are lots of variables that could be considered. It is impossible to narrow down exactly what opportunity you lost during that time, but it is almost certainly not zero.
I argue that mathematics and physics degrees are more valuable than engineering degrees. It prepares you for one of the most fundamental of skills for white collar jobs: critical thinking.
Much of the other stuff can easily be self-taught given a strong/exceptional foundation in critical thinking ability, and it can be used to great advantage in differentiating yourself from your peers.
Depends. While I haven't studied mechanical engineering myself, a lot of my friends who have, seem to have spent a lot of their time learning to use steam tables and working with lathes (something I personally would love to do, btw) instead of racking their brains to solve problems in physics/math.
Personally, I think everyone should learn at least the basics of modern Algebra (not high school stuff, but: groups, semigroups etc.), Topology etc. (Note that I did not get an education in either Physics or Math, but am jealous of those who did)
Not anywhere near as rigorous in engineering than the pure disciplines. "Discrete math" is often the baby version of "Elementary Number Theory"/"Introduction to Higher Mathematics" type of class for example. The Physics 101 type class engineers take is often the baby version of the general physics classes given to those who intend on or are considering becoming physics majors. Engineers almost never see anything like real analysis, abstract algebra, or topology unless they go to graduate school, and the challenges in working your mind around the concepts, language, and proofs founded on hard logic. Physicists often don't see those topics either (a good portion do though due to necessity), but physics tests problem solving ability at a level engineering doesn't typically match.
Not to say that engineers are necessarily inferior - there is a foundation that I'd say most don't have though in comparison.
A degree in math or physics requires much more math than that which engineers study. Likewise a degree in physics requires much more physics than engineers study.
At most US schools, Engineering is just Math, Physics, and perhaps Chemistry, with a lot of problem solving thrown on top. All good for critical thinking. And hard.
Unfortunately many employers don't think so. As a mathematician/physicists, you'd have to sell yourself as a engineer at the same time as convincing your employer that you're more qualified than someone with an engineering degree.
Employers rightly think so. There's a lot more to engineering than being good at math and problem solving. The "other stuff" that Bahamut so flippantly dismisses as easily self-taught involves a lot of domain knowledge and best practices. Engineering curricula also includes project-based courses in which you have to apply your knowledge to produce an actual product, sometimes working in a team with your peers. This builds a lot of the skills necessary to effectively tackle real-world engineering challenges and is not something that you would get from a math/physics degree.
I've found that once I proved myself as a programmer, I've become a highly sought after engineer due to my extremely high ceiling - my education is heavy in math & physics (math & physics undergrad, math grad education).
It does take some self-investment, but you have a flexibility not afforded by most disciplines - math & physics best prepares you more generally if you apply the lessons. I feel confident innovating/performing in many other aspects as well, but I chose software engineering & the developer crunch chose me.
I am a Mechanical Engineer, and almost every Mathematics student and most Physics students that I know could do what I do. But I could very rarely succeed for a week in any of their lives. From this I can only conclude that they are smarter than me.
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I have plenty of competent friends who had a hard time finding anything better than an IT desk job after graduating from Stony Brook, NYU-Poly and City College.
Most smaller tech companies don't even consider training their new employees. Instead they want a 'ninja' who is comfortable with their tech stack and can hit the ground running straight out of school. To make things worse 90% of them think their analytics platform or social network for cats is the next Google, so they put their candidates through ridiculous interviews that have nothing to do with writing CRUD apps.
I even know people here at Columbia University who didn't get any good offers outside of finance.
On the other hand, I have met many CS majors at local New York colleges, and even among the seniors who seem to be in the top half of the class, their knowledge of some basic things is almost universally absent. Such as software version control - they don't know what it is, they don't know the names of any version control systems, like git or perforce, and they don't know how to use any of them.
They study for class, mostly, but seem to have no interest in all of this outside of class. Not once in four years do you check a project out of github, fix a bug, and then send a patch and pull request? And that's among those who study and are in the top half of the class. Some kids don't even care about studying much and I don't know why they're even bothering.
In university, one should concentrate on learning things that are impractical to pick up on the job - calculus, statistics, theory, quantum mechanics, dynamics, etc. Stuff that takes sustained, concentrated focus to learn.
For example, although I got an engineering degree from Caltech, my practical knowledge upon graduating was about nil. But I found on the job at Boeing that the practical stuff was easy to pick up, and pairing it with the theoretical stuff I learned in school made for an effective combination. Others who did not know the math/theory, never picked it up, they'd spend their career avoiding it.
Knowing about git, tdd and etc is important but it's not something that can't be taught. It's as simple as pairing them with experienced engineers and pointing them to a few relevant books.
My partner for the programming projects had never seen git before, and proposed that we simply email each-other files. This is at Technion, the single best technical institution in Israel and one of the Top 50 in the world.
Goddamnit.
Contrast this to some other, hypothetical study/profession where you are judged by your grades and work experience. Not your grades, work experience, and weekend projects.
This is not to say that these standards are necessarily bad, but rather that it is part of the higher standards that programmers have to live up to.
I'd never heard of Harvey Mudd college, and here it is competing with the two giants of US engineering, MIT and Caltech.
The take away from this seems to be that you shouldn't assume your interviewer knows that your degree is from a "name" school, or that the school you went to will influence any one in a positive way.
I remember someone here mentioned that they went to University of Texas Austin and that they thought that should ensure them of getting an interview anywhere and I wasn't sure if they were joking or being serious as I'd never heard of UoT Austin before as being a good computer science school.
UT Austin is one of the top few public Computer Science programs, up there with University of Illinois and UC Berkeley and maybe 1 or 2 others that I'm missing. When the oil money started coming in, they went on a hiring spree.
btw - I'm a big fan of the idea of more Engineering schools in NYC. Even with Poly, Columbia and the new Cornell school, there are more jobs than talented candidates.
Caltech is pretty small, just under 1000 undergrads. When I attended, it was around 750.
http://admissions.caltech.edu/about/stats#student
For what it's worth, Harvey Mudd and UT Austin are both very well-regarded schools.
Also the downvotes must be from Harvey Mudd alum.
Deleted Comment
Also, after a couple of years of work experience (after your second job), nobody really pays attention on where you went to, so don't get too hung up if your interviewer is not familiar with your school.
I'd heard plenty about all the ivy league schools, and kids from my high school went to them.
I was very aware of MIT as THE best tech school (in the reputation I'd heard), but I also had heard of CalTech at the hardest school.
Other schools that were on my radar did include Harvey Mudd, though I had no clue at all where it was. Colorado School Of Mines too, for some reason. Probably more because of the weird name than anything else.
I did well on the SAT and had a large box full of brochures schools sent me, so I got exposed to a lot of lesser-known places that way.
There was one that had me utterly fascinated, Deep Springs College. It's a 2 year school out in the desert. You basically work a ranch and take a sort of custom curriculum, then transfer to another school to finish a degree. I was too chicken to go, but if I could change one decision in my past, I'd go. I think it would have made for a radically different experience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Springs_College
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507765
But the article makes no mention of computer science or programming. Instead, it talks about engineering, a set of disciplines that may involve programming but often centers on a much different curriculum.
A degree in, say, mechanical or industrial engineering will unlock opportunities that would not be available otherwise.
> "The three majors with the highest ROI in America are Computer Science, Computer Science, and Computer Science."
I don't disagree with you but the context of this publication is absolutely about CompSci.
EDIT: my comment was a bit angered, and I apologize for that. Just this morning I found out that a company i had a great interview with yesterday told me that despite liking me the company had a policy that they can't hire senior engineers without a technical degree. Its tough.
Some established licensed and accredited state schools that will grant a degree entirely by examination:
http://www.excelsior.edu/
http://www.wgu.edu/
Getting a degree can be a good thing, absolutely, but it's by no means a requirement to success.
Good luck studying on your own to want to work as a chemical engineer because MegaCorp will totally hire you to work with chemicals and there aren't many startups hiring ChemEs.
Also, kids are quite gullible and everything for most kids suggests that you need to go to college. The path goes somewhat like this:
born -> pre-school -> school -> middle/high school -> college
There are a lot of people that take 6 figure loans to study photography, or major in english. That I don't get.
I've always attributed this to
> kids are quite gullible and everything for most kids suggests that you need to go to college
They're doing it because someone told them to do it, no?
More likely I would just sit around playing video games and reading interesting-sounding wikipedia articles, and maybe coding up the occasional fun toy or two until I got bored and ditched it.
Until I started starving, and then go "Well f*&k. Should have thought about that." And I probably wouldn't think about that unless someone is dragging my ass into a college/job.
Getting a child excited about data structures, algorithms, and coding conventions will be difficult.
Have them dream up a guide, and let them fumble through the implementation while seeing the fruits of the labor unfold before them. Now that's excitement. And learning. Without ever feeling the need of forced discipline.
Key word is today. Yes, today, with the DJUSSV up 150% over the past five years, and billions being shelled out for Oculus and Whatsapp and so forth, no degree is needed for many jobs.
What happens when the economy takes a dive like in 2008/2009, or 2000/2001? You get laid off from your company and then send your resume in to open job slots on Craigslist. Except they are getting dozens, maybe hundreds of resumes. Even after culling for relevant experience, companies might have dozens of good looking resumes to choose from. The next obvious way to cull resumes is get rid of the pile with no degrees.
In bad times, CL job ads dry up, especially those not requiring a degree. Even if it doesn't state it explicitly, HR will probably grill you on your education background and plans.
As far as an expensive degree, people can go to a good state school and get Pell grants and the like. As far as people teaching themselves, most good programmers are always teaching themselves. They need a basis to work off of though and a BSCS is that basis. If you're going to spend four years studying the basics you need to know, why not borrow/spend the $50k to go to a very good school like Berkeley or UIUC, down to the $25k for state schools with decent CS programs?
Deleted Comment
I also wonder how the typical ROI compares to just buying a condo in a college town instead?
I'd like to see a better comparrison with public schools in the engineering field across the entire career of an engineer. I went to a good state engineering school for mechanical engineering. Cheap in state tuition (and a 529) meant no debt post graduation. That's huge when starting out. Additionally my classmates and I had offers inthe 60k-80k range. That might not be as high as people right out of Stanford but I can't imagine it has a large effect over the length of someones career. When you factor in that many of the graduates from more prosetgious colleges carry debt for 5+ yrs after graduation.
To add, I would suggest that someone who has the determination and mindset to successfully complete an engineering degree should be able to earn even more than $120K during that initial period, but there are lots of variables that could be considered. It is impossible to narrow down exactly what opportunity you lost during that time, but it is almost certainly not zero.
http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/best-scho...
Much of the other stuff can easily be self-taught given a strong/exceptional foundation in critical thinking ability, and it can be used to great advantage in differentiating yourself from your peers.
Right, because they certainly don't teach that in engineering school.
Personally, I think everyone should learn at least the basics of modern Algebra (not high school stuff, but: groups, semigroups etc.), Topology etc. (Note that I did not get an education in either Physics or Math, but am jealous of those who did)
Not to say that engineers are necessarily inferior - there is a foundation that I'd say most don't have though in comparison.
It does take some self-investment, but you have a flexibility not afforded by most disciplines - math & physics best prepares you more generally if you apply the lessons. I feel confident innovating/performing in many other aspects as well, but I chose software engineering & the developer crunch chose me.