A CS degree is a waste of money? I disagree(mashable.com)

A CS degree is a waste of money? I disagree

http://mashable.com/2014/12/16/warning-college-may-be-a-waste-of-your-time-and-money/

3 comments

There are really two issues: the knowledge acquisition and the money. I have made a good living in software for nearly a decade, without having a computer science degree. Being self-taught was not a problem. My only problem is that I never invested in learning some of the core material - writing my own operating system, writing a compiler, learning 30 common algorithms, etc. For most jobs, this knowledge is not required. But if I wanted to work for Google or Facebook, lack of this knowledge might be a problem. When you work at their scale, often operating system patches or crazy algorithms are needed, and the base knowledge comes in handy.

That said, there is no reason for the base knowledge acquisition to cost $100k. It merely requires an investment of time. There is no equipment needed, professors are not that helpful. You just need to the work of reading through the material and coding the implementations.

So waste of money, yes. Waste of time, no.

MichaelCrawford11 lat temu

A CS degree won't teach you how to program computers. I realized that early in my career, when I observed that I - with a physics degree - was better than most young coders with CS degrees.

There are other kinds of degrees that are useful to programming. My Physics, EE, linguistics for AI, say.

fithisux11 lat temu

A theoretical CS degree is definitely not a waste of money.