I agree with comments that the degree is worthless in the technical sense. You can and should learn by yourself using the available resources instead of being fed the mainstream ideas of software and software development that make so many people stumble and get stuck. Nevertheless it has some worth when you want to get a specific job. As much as I dislike that fact, this has to be accepted.

Coding is important but only in an absolute sense. Relatively speaking I allow myself that you can actually ignore it. To develop software, that is to truly understand the problem to be solved, the separation into ever smaller sub features, the evaluation of effort and functional risk are always by far more important. Because these things are hardly taught and most of the people are not aware of how important they are, people try to find salvation in ever better coding … which they will never find.

Having at least a basic understanding of software development will make people in general actually very wary about coding. They will ignore the noise, not swayed by the hype and only go for the one thing that is important, produce results. It does not matter how.

Who needs to pay tens of thousands of dollars to sit in a gigantic auditorium while some postdoc reads from the textbook, in an accent so thick I can barely understand? That’s what most computer science classes were — I can’t imagine what an ‘average’ school is like.

I won’t say that a degree is worthless — every degree has value — but I do believe I would be exactly as good a developer today if I had gotten my major in mathematics or physics or engineering or Attic Greek. Most of the best developers I know don’t have degrees in computer science, and most of the computer science I know didn’t come from computer science classes.

I would advise anyone going to school today to not get a degree in computer science, even if they want to be a computer programmer. Get it in physics, or mathematics, or linguistics, or Mandarin literature, or whatever excites you. It won’t stop you from learning programming or computer science, and there are a million possible programming-related side projects in every department. Sure, take a couple computer science courses, if the course happens to be something that especially interests you, and if it’s being taught by a full professor who is recommended for their teaching ability.

But do yourself a favor and don’t waste any hours of your college years sitting in an auditorium listening to some postdoc try to read “CLR”, and being unable to answer any questions about it. And whatever you do, don’t lock yourself into a degree program where you have to waste 50% of your college career in such nonsense. Maybe at MIT and Berkeley it’s better, but you don’t have to go down the list of schools very far at all to get into truly terrible CS teaching.

Eh, I’ll call myself whatever I want, thanks. And plenty of people would agree that if I design integrated circuits, and my job title is “electrical engineer”… then I’m an engineer.

You can easily tell between java monkeys and java people with degrees/ experience.

Everybody knows this , everybody that have worked in big companies at least.