In America, college is generally overrated. Like some of the other commenters have pointed out, there are plenty of professionals who are self-taught.
I'm one of them; in fact, I actually train college interns, coordinating directly with university professors at two major local institutions, despite not having a degree myself. Even the top professors at those schools agree: in programming, your college-learned skills are worth absolutely nothing in the industry at large until you combine them with workplace experience. That's equally true of self-learners, which makes college moot for many programming jobs.
Of course, in this country, college is seldom free for anyone. You're usually incurring a significant debt that will follow you around for the next decade-plus of your life. If you can go for free in your own country, by all means, do it.
Further confusing things, many jobs do consider a degree to make an applicant more attractive. However, I notice many companies often only use degrees to distinguish between people of roughly equal experience and qualification. Between two mid-level developers with 5 years of Java and SQL, the one with the degree has that "something extra"; however, between a BSCS candidate with 2 years Java and SQL and a self-trained candidate with 5 years Java and SQL, 5-year-guy will usually win. Thus, if you lack a degree, you can almost always overcome that bias with sheer breadth and depth of experience, such as with a vast open source portfolio.
(P.S. If an HR department is too dense to see past the $30K piece of wall art to consider industry experience, you don't want to to work there anyway; you're bound to work with Wally, Asok, and the PHB.)
I usually tell people to look at it like this: if you prefer guided learning, college may be a good investment; if you can learn independently, don't waste your money.
NOTE: The above doesn't apply to scientific and academic branches of the computer industry: true computer science (a branch of mathematics, only tangentially related to programming), computer engineering, systems analysts, network architecture...these generally require degrees, and for good reason.
I absolutely agree. It's frustrating when most interview advice can be boiled down to spend months studying your algorithms and theoretical engineering concepts. Suggesting CodeWars to "brush up on your language skills" really means "solve the problem in as little lines of code as possible to reinforce knowledge of obscure algorithms."
If a candidate can write good code but not use the right phrases in an interview, they'll be passed up. College will teach those phrases, but work experience will teach using it in practice. I'm mainly thinking of Big O and stuff like that since formal engineers will toss around phrasing like N+1 and go on and on about performance only using Big O phrasing when a self-taught dev will know not to use nested loops but is less likely to know how to say that. It's things like that that end up gatekeeping positions to only people with degrees, which then continues the cycle of only valuing employees with degrees.
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In America, college is generally overrated. Like some of the other commenters have pointed out, there are plenty of professionals who are self-taught.
I'm one of them; in fact, I actually train college interns, coordinating directly with university professors at two major local institutions, despite not having a degree myself. Even the top professors at those schools agree: in programming, your college-learned skills are worth absolutely nothing in the industry at large until you combine them with workplace experience. That's equally true of self-learners, which makes college moot for many programming jobs.
Of course, in this country, college is seldom free for anyone. You're usually incurring a significant debt that will follow you around for the next decade-plus of your life. If you can go for free in your own country, by all means, do it.
Further confusing things, many jobs do consider a degree to make an applicant more attractive. However, I notice many companies often only use degrees to distinguish between people of roughly equal experience and qualification. Between two mid-level developers with 5 years of Java and SQL, the one with the degree has that "something extra"; however, between a BSCS candidate with 2 years Java and SQL and a self-trained candidate with 5 years Java and SQL, 5-year-guy will usually win. Thus, if you lack a degree, you can almost always overcome that bias with sheer breadth and depth of experience, such as with a vast open source portfolio.
(P.S. If an HR department is too dense to see past the $30K piece of wall art to consider industry experience, you don't want to to work there anyway; you're bound to work with Wally, Asok, and the PHB.)
I usually tell people to look at it like this: if you prefer guided learning, college may be a good investment; if you can learn independently, don't waste your money.
NOTE: The above doesn't apply to scientific and academic branches of the computer industry: true computer science (a branch of mathematics, only tangentially related to programming), computer engineering, systems analysts, network architecture...these generally require degrees, and for good reason.
I absolutely agree. It's frustrating when most interview advice can be boiled down to spend months studying your algorithms and theoretical engineering concepts. Suggesting CodeWars to "brush up on your language skills" really means "solve the problem in as little lines of code as possible to reinforce knowledge of obscure algorithms."
If a candidate can write good code but not use the right phrases in an interview, they'll be passed up. College will teach those phrases, but work experience will teach using it in practice. I'm mainly thinking of Big O and stuff like that since formal engineers will toss around phrasing like N+1 and go on and on about performance only using Big O phrasing when a self-taught dev will know not to use nested loops but is less likely to know how to say that. It's things like that that end up gatekeeping positions to only people with degrees, which then continues the cycle of only valuing employees with degrees.