

A CS degree is a waste of money? I disagree - mataug
http://mashable.com/2014/12/16/warning-college-may-be-a-waste-of-your-time-and-money/

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georgemonck
There are really two issues: the knowledge acquisition and the money. I have
made a good living in software for nearly a decade, without having a computer
science degree. Being self-taught was not a problem. My only problem is that I
never invested in learning some of the core material - writing my own
operating system, writing a compiler, learning 30 common algorithms, etc. For
most jobs, this knowledge is not required. But if I wanted to work for Google
or Facebook, lack of this knowledge might be a problem. When you work at their
scale, often operating system patches or crazy algorithms are needed, and the
base knowledge comes in handy.

That said, there is no reason for the base knowledge acquisition to cost
$100k. It merely requires an investment of time. There is no equipment needed,
professors are not that helpful. You just need to the work of reading through
the material and coding the implementations.

So waste of money, yes. Waste of time, no.

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MichaelCrawford
A CS degree won't teach you how to program computers. I realized that early in
my career, when I observed that I - with a physics degree - was better than
most young coders with CS degrees.

There are other kinds of degrees that are useful to programming. My Physics,
EE, linguistics for AI, say.

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fithisux
A theoretical CS degree is definitely not a waste of money.

