Yeah if you put me in a spot where I have to hire someone, I'm going to easily bypass the college graduate with all the buzzwords, in favor of the high school graduate who's been producing finished works since he was 14.

It's true: people whose knowledge of these technologies comes primarily from reading will usually have a low ceiling to what they know.

Give me the kid who took a bucket of Legos and built his own things, over the one who built the models and followed the directions oh-so-precisely.

Show me you know how to think, not that you memorized Blub's syntax quirks for the test.

Generally, you're welcome to him (or her). Learning syntax and how to build something in a language is easy. Especially for someone that has already proven that they know how to learn by graduating a decent University program with at least decent marks.

Learning the right way to build stuff and how to think about proper design and architecture is much harder to learn. I don't think formal education is all that great at teaching these skills but much better than a high school student just hacking around on their own.

Obviously there are always exceptions - but there's a reason any serious company isn't looking to hire talent from high schools.

Because you never got fired for buying IBM, or for hiring the guy with the certs.

Yeah... that's absolutely not it.

As a side point (and I'm pretty sure this isn't what you meant) we looked at candidates that put certifications on their resume as a small negative.

FWIW in yesteryear folks were much more willing to take you on if you had a general knowledge of software development and the bar was quite a bit lower for relevant experience. From what I see now, the relevant experience is the crucial factor. Also getting $ seems a harder today (please tell I'm wrong about this ).

You learn by creating a long ass code-block that you are proud of, compile it, and see nothing happen. The real education comes from spending the next 2 days trying to fix the issue.

Seems like it depends on the cert. The more involved ones seems legitimate to me, though I have none. CCNA, MCSE, MCSD, (or whatever they are now) and so forth would indicate reasonable competency in those areas. Obviously you lol @ A+ and such. Thoughts?

In all the interviews I've gone to over the past year+, the salary ranges have been stable or slightly increasing. It's the assumed responsibilities that are increasing. No longer do they want a developer, they want a dev who is good with SSIS or R and can do multivariate regressions and so forth. Or at least are willing to learn. That's what I've noticed.

Well this is waterfall procedural garbage. The only thing you're gonna learn here is that you need to figure out how to write functions.

And by having 20 other issues come up that you learn from, each time.

The ancient concept of the apprenticeship had a lot going for it.

That's true. And if the certification is on the resume is directly related to one of the stated requirements - that's different as well.

Absolutely this. And this is part of the problem with the high school hacker or anyone thats just taught themselves how to code. Writing really clear/maintainable/tested code isn't something they focus on, because its way more fun to play around with something and getting it to work for just the common simple cases.

I was assuming Occam's Razor when I wrote that. Fair enough though.

I think this is why you have to contribute to open source projects and/or post your work online. A bunch of people telling you that your code sucks because of procedural bull**** is painful at first but is ultimately a good life lesson.

Ehh, I think degree worship is nuts, but hey, if you want to trust a piece of paper over being able to see what somebody's actually accomplished, so be it.

I mean, I think it's mostly silly. But those certs and a degree definitely mean something. And this is coming from a guy who has no degree and no cert.

I don't know what you mean by this. Do you not believe that developers with a degree in CS/CE/SE are generally better than developers without degrees, all things being equal?

The percentage of self-taught high school graduate programmers that write good code is pretty low. The vast majority of Software shops don't have time to code review every applicants code to see if they should get an interview. So instead, you go with the easy to verify data point (degree) when screening applicants.

Neil S., do you have a degree and if so, in what?

Just trying to get a feel for if your position is more from a "I know lots and didn't need to pay 30-120K to learn it" or a "I paid 30-120K for a degree and I didn't learn crap" position.

If you build the tests first, issue becomes a nonissue
Of course I rarely even use languages that need to compile these days.

Are you claiming that a university degree is not an accomplishment? It's actually more relevant in IT fields than in many other imo because it signals that you were good enough to get something done via selforganization and in many cases also signals that you're at least a decent teamplayer.
That's of course a lot more true if the degree isn't superstructured wih mendatory attendance and regular tests etc. (I think it's a lot more common to have the utter chaos degrees over here the US system seems a lot more "school like")

Translation: I'm seeking to make an ad hominem argument, but I don't know which I want to make yet.

Please. I don't think I've done anything of the sort anywhere in this forum yet (or in any other forum that I take at least semi-seriously - so... non-OOT).

But to be honest I'll take your opinion on this a lot more seriously if you actually have some experience with a post-secondary education. I think you have a really strong opinion on this, but I haven't really gotten a feeling like you appreciate what a post-secondary education offers.

Well I spent two years at Caltech.

[x]guy w/ the certs
[ ] buying IBM

$pike [former IBM employee-6 months]