On 2022-08-22 20:01, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> The question that was posed morphed into something about the value of
> CS degrees today. I don’t think they’re worth the time or cost to
> get one. Keith keeps trying to make my skills sound like I’m some
> kind of super-hero or something. Thanks, but things took weird turn
> around 2004 and nobody seems to care much today.
I met David about 15 years ago at a PHP meetup at what I seem to recall
was Walt's TV. And yes I think David is very knowledgeable and skilled.
>
> Early in my career (mostly in the 1980’s), the dominant attitude
> was, “Hey, you have a CS degree! You can learn anything!” Nobody
> cared much if I knew stuff already or not, they just expected me to
> LEARN NEW THINGS QUICKLY. For example, I left Intel after 5-1/2 years
> and went to work with Moto on the team porting Unix System V Rel 3 to
> the 68020; I had never seen or heard of Unix or C prior to that. After
> PC/MS-DOS hit the scene, the shells in Unix seemed like a breath of
> fresh air! Given the attitudes in hiring today, there’s no way in
> hell I’d be hired for that job even though I was great at it! (FWIW,
> I got laid-off at both Intel and Moto.)
>
> I went out on my own in the 90’s and was the primary architect and
> developer at four startups. The amount of research I had to do for
> them probably came close to qualifying for a couple of PhDs. I
> absolutely LOVED it, but the politics SUCKED. Two of the companies
> were imploded due to the egos of the investors; one had the life
> snorted out of it because of the founder’s drug habit; and one came
> so close to succeeding, but got unexpectedly bought up by Computer
> Associates who put our software on a shelf in a back room because they
> didn’t understand what made it different from other software they
> were already marketing. (The founders tried valiantly to acquire it
> back from CA for over a year, with no success. It was seen as
> worthless to CA, but they saw it as a threat if it were to fall into
> competitor’s hands.)
>
> In 2000 I took a job at the ASU BioDesign Institute and worked there
> for around 4 years. While I was there, I did get to take advantage of
> lots of my compiler-related knowledge because it turned out that half
> of the work I did involved writing import parsers for whatever crazy
> data files Biologists working on their Master’s Degrees created.
> They maybe had one programming class, and they were expected to write
> all of the software needed to support their Master’s thesis. The
> software I worked on needed to be able to import EVERY data file
> format that someone at some university somewhere in the world
> published as part of their thesis that was of interest to other
> researchers anywhere in the world.
>
> Pretty much all of the work I’ve been hired to do since then (2005+)
> was based entirely on the fact that I had 10+ years working with
> Delphi. (It could have been COBOL or FORTRAN.) Nobody gave a rat’s
> ass about my education, background, patents, or any of that. Nobody
> really cared what I had to say except as it related to
> customer-specific programming requests that affected their
> Delphi-based apps.
>
> At one place, something I was totally capable of doing in a few months
> was out-sourced at great expense to a team of peole at some company
> that spend over a year and finally gave up ... and the other guy on
> the team finished. (I had taken another job by then.) At another
> place, I found some patterns that turned up over 100 bugs in code that
> was easy to see once the code patterns were pointed out; but I was
> basically was fired because I kept trying for 6 months to fix them and
> was repeatedly told that only bugs reported by the customer can be
> fixed. Seriously. They were more concerned with getting ISO-900x and
> CMMI Level-3 certification than ensuring their code was bug-free. To
> them, their PROCESS was more important than the PRODUCT it was used to
> manage.
>
> I’ve been hired several times and told EXPLICITLY that one of the
> main reasons they were hiring me was to keep their asses out of the
> fire by letting them know if there was anything I might find them
> doing that was seriously in need of attention. I found plenty of
> things at different places, and nobody wanted to hear about ANY of it.
>
>
> At a few places, the code blew up and I was blamed. I later learned
> that a lot of contractors are hired specifically as “fall guys”
> for known problems that are about to blow up. Being able to blame the
> contractors gets the managers off-the-hook and their bosses then
> extend their budgets and schedules in ways they refused to do
> previously. Turns out this is an old game in the world of engineering
> contract work. Remember when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up
> during launch? A lot of the people trying to alert upper management
> about the potential problem were … contractors.
>
> I am honestly fed up with how software companies are being run since
> the whole "dot-com meltdown” in 2000.
>
> All of this is to say, I don’t think a CS degree has been worth the
> paper it’s printed on since 2004 or so.
>
> Compiler design is just a one-semester class. That, along with things
> like Database Design, Formal Automata Theory, Finite Math Theory, Data
> Structures, Analysis of Algorithms, and other core topics, are taught
> as part of every CS program in the world. NOBODY CARES ABOUT ANY OF
> IT TODAY!
>
> Nobody is building custom compilers or database servers or things that
> most CS degrees were designed to address — slow CPUs, small address
> spaces, small primary memory (RAM), limiited secondary memory (HDDs),
> slow computer-to-computer communications. NONE of it matters today!
>
> From the 90’s until 2005 or so, “client-server architectures”
> were all the rage. Today it’s REST-based micro-services being
> accessed by mobile apps running on phones and tablets, and the overall
> latencies today even over wireless devices to cloud-based storage than
> when the server was in the next room and they were connected with
> ethernet cables.
>
> If you need code for something unusual today, just spend a little
> while searching for it online, because it’s very likely someone has
> already solved the problem. Who needs a CS degree to search for stuff
> in Google?
>
> State Farm has hired thousands of people right out of college with
> only one programming class under their belt, and puts them through an
> intensive 6-month internal Java training program. These are the people
> they have writing and maintaining their software today. I kept trying
> to get hired by them and get put through their class. They said it was
> only for new college grads, not “senior developers” who they
> expected to have at least 5 years of solid java programming under
> their belt already.
>
> From what I’ve heard, they are not interested in people with CS
> degrees, or even a lot of programming experience. But if you go
> through Woz-U or a similar 3-month “boot camp", State Farm will very
> likely hire YOU as an entry-level programmer. That’s all it takes.
>
> -David Schwartz
>
>> On Aug 22, 2022, at 7:27 AM, techlists@phpcoderusa.com wrote:
>>
>> On 2022-08-22 00:17, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
>>
>>> Not sure what good a CS degree is these days. Seems like all
>>> anybody
>>> caress about today is “at least 3 years hands-on experience with
>>> xyz
>>> and abc” to get hired for stuff.
>>
>> I consider a CS degree as an engineer. Those who follow this path
>> can do things the rest of us cannot do like create parsers,
>> compilers, and interpreters. Am I wrong?
>>
>> I'm a programmer. I do not have the skills of a CS degree holder.
>> You (David) can do lots of neat things that I cannot. I think your
>> niche is smaller if you want to do engineering class work.
>>
>> I had a love/hate relationship with IT for a long time because I
>> struggled to find adequate W2 employment. I had to become a
>> freelancer to rise to my potential, and that could be a book.
>>
>> I bet you could spend a couple months learning Kotlin, put up a
>> website and do freelance Kotlin development.
>>
>> I have read articles that say freelancing will take over the world
>> in the future. As companies start to realize they only need a core
>> of employees supplemented by freelancers, then that will become the
>> norm.
>>
>> It has been my experience that small businesses mostly hire
>> freelancers and have no IT staff.
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