what a linkbait article title ... sadly, if a company has a degree requirement for hiring, then no amount of self-learning can substitute for a lack of an accredited diploma.
i doubt that a hospital will hire you just because you read all the "books that will substitute for an M.D."
yes, i know that programming skills can be more easily self-taught than, say, brain surgery, but as long as companies hire based on degrees, there isn't really a 'substitute'
There are many examples of fantastic hackers with no paper to back it up. There are also many examples of awful hackers with good marks to back it up. The truth is in the code.
Absolutely! I once hired a MSc CS grad on a project and he produced some of the worst code I've ever seen, not even just a code perspective, which to some degree is understandable, but from a conceptual point of view as well. Some seriously bad stuff.
That said I still greatly value a CS degree (even a self-study one) simply because of the fundamentals it teaches. It's not an automatic indicator of ability, but having that level of understanding makes the difference between someone that can think conceptually about and around a problem and someone that has a set number of tools to solve problems with.
I don't think that getting a CS degree is the only way to get that kind of understanding, but I do think it's one of the easier ways. If you're a hacker on your own and you've got to trawl through the glut of bad coding books out there, it's tough to get a good education.
Though I firmly believe that if you're the kind of guy that has gotten that education without any help then you're probably better than the guy that got it with help.
I'm firmly in the camp that holds that an education is to educate you and provide you with skills and tools to operate effectively, not to obtain a certificate. Holding the certificate is not an indication that you have actually received an education, the only indication is your ability, ambition and results.
For what it's worth, I think the majority of the books on the list are must-reads for anyone in programming, there may be a few better ones (I'm a Tannenbaum fan when it comes to OS's as an example) and there may be areas that aren't covered, e.g. usability and CHI (Design of everyday things would be my suggestion there) and there is suspicious lack of anything web, mobile or distributed, but if someone internalises these, they'll definitely be better for it.
Um, Google might hire the occasional star w/o a degree, but you know that you're talking about a company who wants to see your transcripts in the interview process, right? So, Google's clearly not an example of the kind of company that doesn't treat degrees as a requirement (in the overwhelming majority of cases).
BTW, I agree that it's not a good hiring filter (I know a lot of folks who can't be bothered to apply to FB or Google because of the insanely long/tedious recruiting process), but it's pretty common practise, even in pretty high-performance tech companies.
a company who wants to see your transcripts in the interview process
Sure, if you have no work experience. That's the case everywhere.
(Google is highly hype-oriented; not everyone there is Guido van Rossum. I worked at a company that Google bought. I had a coworker who started crying when my boss and I taught him what database transactions were and asked him to apply it to fix a race condition in our application. He still works at Google.)
There's a big difference between "requirement" and "taken into consideration". Some companies will refuse to hire people without degrees (so I hear at least), but Google has no such strict rule. They do consider your transcript as part of the hiring process because it does have some non-zero amount of signal in it.
i doubt that a hospital will hire you just because you read all the "books that will substitute for an M.D."
yes, i know that programming skills can be more easily self-taught than, say, brain surgery, but as long as companies hire based on degrees, there isn't really a 'substitute'