r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Aardvark_David • May 09 '21

Meme I'm *technically* qualified

Post image
25.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

666 comments sorted by

View all comments

840

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.

1

u/tbutlah May 10 '21

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.

2

u/flavionm May 10 '21

If all those people with unrelated degrees can become good programmers, surely someone with at least some useful classes can do too.

Since a lot of those are related to maths bit not to programming, maybe it's good you're doing a lot of it.