Published on: 16 Jan 06:16

Why is a degree in computer science no longer the highly revered 'honey pot' entry qualification into the IT industry like it was before now?

Mike replies

I’ve been in this space for over twenty years. I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for sundry IT roles. I never once looked at the type of degree, only that the candidate had one. Companies are looking for skills they need, not what you think they need. With that said, you either have the skills to do the job or you don’t.

Shalom comments

I agree. My brother recently went for a job interview in web development. All the candidates (over 300) were given a project to do at home and submit within a week. Only 3 guys were able to do it successfully. And weirdly, most of the 300 candidates had degrees in CS and some even masters. So, get the skills. A degree is important, but without the skills you are useless.

My reply

I kind of agree with that and kind of don’t. The thing about web development specifically is that its skills turnover rate has to be seen to be believed. It’s unbelievable. The specific skills the cool kids are making those most noise about in year N are mostly suffocatingly uncool and gathering dust in year N+2.

I am both a professional web developer and have a computer science degree. The idea of degrees isn’t to teach the most popular, highest-buzz techs in vogue at that precise snapshot in time. It’s to teach the foundations, the fundamentals, the bedrock of programming, and at that, the specific degree content I at least got taught succeeded really well. You don’t do compsci degrees to learn today’s highest-buzz techs.

Another thing is, web dev is huge. There are dozens of sub-specialities, each of which is its own self-contained career. I’ve specialised in … mostly Ruby on Rails, NodeJS, CSS2/3, various flavours of SPA Javascript frameworks, a few other foundational techs. I could build you a whacking great web app with those. I abandoned PHP ten years ago, and I’ve never gone near .NET or Java.

Every non-programmer is reading those techs and thinking “what the hell are all those?” Specialist jargon, man, I’m sure you’ve got your own workplace bread-and-butter at which I’d scratch my own head.

I find it incredibly plausible that someone could be a genius programmer with a compsci Bachelors/Masters and yet be unable to complete a specific coding challenge. These ain’t mutually exclusive, not one bit.

But … I’m absolutely not ruling out the opposite either. You also get large numbers of bachelors/masters alumni/alumnae who can’t code for shit. Many/most of those who failed your challenge could also be these morons. You honestly can’t tell either way. The coding challenge, just by itself, is inconclusive.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-degree-in-computer-...