As a 30 year old software developer who's now considering going back to school for the next 3-4 years to get a degree, I wonder if I should blame these kinds of resources for making me believe that I could learn everything on my own and that a degree was unnecessary. Having learned this material in school would have made my life so much easier...
For context, I recently received a lot of pressure to get a degree, despite years of experience and good knowledge of CS fundamentals.
I wish I had known about them years agob. I have applied last week, but I'm still waiting for their decision (they don't officially accept international students).
I'm doing that right now at 32, but more for personal enrichment than anyone pressuring me.
I feel like I'm getting much more out of my degree than I would have if I went the traditional route because I understand the context for the material, and because I've seen much of it before through self teaching, so I can focus more on consolidating my knowledge of the fundamentals rather than struggling to absorb all of these hard and often poorly justified concepts for an exam.
Georgia Tech has an online MS in CS or Cybersecurity. The CS degree is a little cheaper, classes are roughly $650 each, cyber are around $900. You're looking at around $7k or $12k for the entire degree. I'm currently in the Cybersecurity program if you have any questions.
I have a hard time believing that an employer ever cared about my degree in CS from 24 years ago from a no name state college when they decided to hire me.
I’m sure my classes in COBOL,FORTRAN, and data structures in Pascal made any difference. Well, I did take a course in C and 16 bit x86 assembly.
It was different times back then I'd argue, you could basically do 5+5 in a shell and get hired and shipped of to New York, but they where also forced to be constrained enough by the hardware to become clever after getting the job.
2018 Apple had 20 million registered developers and it has only increased since then.
It's still very easy to become a developer right now (sambo found it to be the easiest path forward for example, from no experience at all), but the trend is quite scary. I have frankly no idea how it look when I turn 60.
I’m saying once you have experience even now, as the original poster has, most companies don’t care if you have experience.
In the immortal words of every in r/cscareerquestions “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG”. No I didn’t do that to “get into a FAANG” but it is a much easier route than the one I took.
If you want to go the enterprise route, if you have experience and do enough resume driven development and can answer basic techno trivia on a company’s chosen stack, it’s even easier.
> despite years of experience and good knowledge of CS fundamentals
Have you considered majoring in something other than CS? If you're adequately self-taught and need the degree, then might as well learn something new and useful.
This is what I'm considering. I'm relatively content having been programming long enough. If I go back to school it probably won't be CS.
On the flip side, unfortunately CS is one of the few useful degrees that's had enough schools create a worker-friendly program (i.e. online) so many other degrees probable mean dropping out of the workforce.
For context, I recently received a lot of pressure to get a degree, despite years of experience and good knowledge of CS fundamentals.