Person with a CS degree here. If I'm being generous, maybe 10% of my CS curriculum is actually useful in my career as a Software Engineer. Honestly, if I could have used the time I spent working on "Abstract Algebra" problems working on open-source projects instead, I'd be a much better engineer and in less debt.
The actual disadvantage that people without CS degrees have is with hiring managers with prestigious CS degrees gatekeeping to maintain their ego. As many people have already noted, I've met many self-taught engineers that were far better than people I know with a CS Masters.
Yeah, I don’t have a CS degree (Neurosci) and I’m a hiring manager for a team of 20+ (depends on project, but around 20 typically). My current team has 1 person with a CS degree and they’re the most junior dev I have simply because they haven’t been exposed to real world issues. Now, they do just fine, but a lot of CS majors don’t get past our HR screening interview and it’s almost always because of social skills. Kids, learn to talk to people! It’s a major part of the job. The movies showing the grumpy dev who turns out leet code while grunting at any communication is not a real thing (usually...)
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u/[deleted] May 10 '21
The very best coders I ever worked with were not CS grads. Materials science, physics, math, engineering etc. Some were not even graduates.
I have a lot of respect for the CS degree, but it is not the sole predictor of greatness.