In my career, I’ve never seen any evidence suggesting a connection between formal degrees and being a good programmer. By “programmer,” I mean developer, engineer, or whatever term you use for people who create software. Whenever I see folks pushing this narrative—which is a thing in Spain—I am genuinely puzzled. I used to think that, as the discipline matured, a formal degree might eventually become recommendable in the distant future. But with the self-teaching possibilities introduced by LLMs, I’m incredibly skeptical. There will always be a market for exceptional courses and teachers, but I doubt universities, as we know them, will be the answer in the future.
I agree with you completely, and I am self-taught so I demonstrate what you’re saying also. However, among the top programmers I have worked with, several of them have a mechanical or physics engineering background. I think that is partly evident on the kind of people who are attracted to those degrees also being the kind of people that can think through good problems in architecture. And then on the other hand, there also could be something with the way that people are taught in the skills that they learn in those two engineering fields that prepares them better as a programmer than other engineering fields. Most of the people I’ve worked with that had computer science degrees were also great programmers, but they were more on the low level technical understanding of things versus the higher level. I am probably not explaining this well, but for instance, when someone with a computer science degree joined my mobile team and had no mobile experience, they struggled on iOS, which is very abstracted and did well on android.
This topic comes up a lot when I help companies with hiring. Having a degree does not automatically make you *better*, but it does make you *different*. My personal experience is that those with degrees tend have better grasps of fundamentals and better problem solving and sel learning skills. Of course, nothing is absolute, and I know plenty of seld learned devs with those skills. It always depends. That said, I have not worked with any LLM (and I use various of them daily) that I feel will be as useful a tool to learn as having good human instructors, or a good program from a respected university. The way those programs are structured are to teach you fundamentals then challenge you. No spoon feeding. Which I find too many tools and online courses do.
There is an underappreciated element of art and craftsmanship in software and product development. We would have the same dynamics of self learning and exploring in other fields if regulatory processes didn't require the formalization of education and certification. This dynamic has existed in guilds and other craftsman sorts of educational systems for most human history. The idea that you have to have a degree, certification and be "allowed" (by a government usually) to do a thing is the more recently created outlier. IMO the drive towards degree requirements in software is a form of lobbying by those whose tendency is a desire for centralized control and they will use all sorts of valid sounding arguments for it. It should be resisted. Our field benefits from maintaining its artistic side.
The reality is that the knowledge contained within the degree will always be functionally required at the leading edge of the field. This would normally result in almost every company forcibly requiring a degree prior to even interviewing you. This is the case in every other engineering field in existence. It’s currently being offset by the raw demand for engineers outstripping the ability of colleges to educate them quickly enough, and companies are left with the choice of either not hiring or somehow validating in the interview what by rights should be validated in a classroom — that you actually know the job, with or without the degree. As soon as that demand falls, for any reason, we’re going to see companies going back to outright requiring a degree for the work. Everything is based off money and economics, at the end of the day.
A couple of years ago when I looked at the number of developers over time, I found that every 3-5 years it doubled. At that rate everyone should have become a developer by around 2035. The trend obviously changed recently, but I also think, that part of it is due to more and more problems being accessible to non coders and even the ones developers come across are higher level and easier to tackle. In the everyone may become a developer in the sense that everyone will be solving customer needs that 20 years ago only developers could. These are fascinating times.
I went into university with this mindset, as a self taught engineer with some pretty talented self taught friends. Now I’m both self taught and “classically trained” (as I call it), and I’ve seen both sides. Brilliant self taught engineers doing “good practices”, but not knowing what it’s called, and talkers who know the theory behind engineering but not being able to execute. I think people whonare self taught are life long learners, and are more likely to be wells of knowledge and impactful. But there’s no denying the importance of standardization usually instilled by universities, especially when working in collaborative environments.
Tbh universities aren't all that valuable anymore, mostly they're just a means of making connections. I even see them being replaced with more on demand education for things like doctors and lawyers. I can see the pitch forks now. "Would you trust a doctor that didn't go to med school!?" Let's be honest, we all talk about how hard it is finding a good doctor and hear the horror stories of terrible doctors. Med school isn't a God factory. It's mostly just something that can't be replaced due to the highly regulated deadlock in place keeping any better alternative from being used. That's a great way to stagnate the value of the academic resource. And it has. Some of the information taught and used in practice, like nutrition, hasn't been updated since 1969. That's not a gut feeling, that's the last time the FDA adjusted that information, and by law doctors are not allowed to use non regulated updates. Notice btw that many do anyway just hallucinate shit to you anyway like ChatGPT. Med school did nothing to avoid that.
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11moI do agree that it’s possible to be a great engineer whether you go to college or not. I’ve worked with plenty who have and some who haven’t. I don’t think it’s the death of university education, though. The discipline, self awareness and talent needed to be a self taught engineer isn’t present in all people when they get out of high school. It’s probably the exception to have the ability to teach ourselves complicated topics (AI or not) rather than the rule.