I have no degree and that is arguably worse and there are exceedingly fewer people with my background in technology on the coast. On the other hand, I spent a lot of my career writing applications that solved Software Operations problems. I spent a lot of time working in small teams rather than huge ones, I often did not have product or project support. I used to loathe that chapter of my career because of how toilsome it was in my memory. Lately I've come to appreciate it a lot more because I am much more self reliant and I often have the skills and familiarity to run much larger teams as a tenured engineer.

Long way of saying, the value of an experience or thing is often not immediately realized or appreciated.

Over time, many CS degrees shifted toward producing software engineers, and it sounds like this person's experience was closer to that. But the problem is that as an engineering discipline, software engineering is just profoundly underwhelming. There are basically no universally-respected design best practices, no governing bodies, no calculations of safety limits, no nothing. You grab left-pad from npm and run with that. Or, now, Codex does that for you.

So CS is weird because it's what you're supposed to get if you want a job at Google, but it's also not very useful. It's a very inefficient and expensive way of testing if you're "serious enough", can complete assignments on time, etc.

It's fairly rote - you need good judgement and to stay current in latest state of the art but generally speaking you're not researching (nor should you be) cutting edge algorithms or anything.

Add a new button, add some parameters to this analytics call, implement dark mode. These are the things that everyone is doing at their six-figure tech jobs.

I'm in Europe where education is mostly free or inexpensive so it may be different in the US, but it sounds like terrible advice. In most fields, it will be virtually impossible to get a job without a degree, and even in tech it'll be hard. I work in a big tech company, and as far as I can tell, most SWEs do have a degree of some sort. I'm sure there are exceptions, but they are rare.

Bachelors - You can communicate in writing.

Masters - You can plan and prepare business documents for planning and proposals

Doctors - You can do research

To me uneducated people can still have skills, but their utility into management becomes questionable even though education certainly does not make anybody a better manager. I do however question the future value of education if most young people have never read a book or cannot write a simple essay without AI.

For me the ability to communicate is the most important skill, because programming is a form of writing. So, if I were hiring for a software team manager I would have absolutely no reservations about putting them on camera and watching them hand write a 5 page essay within an hour. It’s one of those don’t waste my time and I won’t waste yours kind of things.

After a few years in the workplace I don't feel behind at all, and I'm grateful that I have more potential back up plans and won't be just another unemployed CS major if there's a real contraction in the job market. I've been considering pivoting to being an actuary, or possibly teaching high school.

I disagree: I have fond memories of my university time. I also do really like programming. The problem rather is that there are hardly any job where what you learned and loved at the university (and why you studied - in this case - computer science) is of much use. Keep in mind that your degree was a huge part why one was selected for the job.

I honestly ask myself quite often why employers are so fond of university degrees for programming jobs. If they put much less relevance on this criterion, employers would have a much bigger group of applicants among which they can select - and this means employers could use this to level down salaries.

I am a teenager and I am currently going to college. I am not going into a world class one college but its a decent college.

I think that you might be right in terms of pretty much everything in tech is on-the-job learning, but the rationale behind going to a bachelor's college is that as someone else has said here: you all are treated equally and companies come to select you. So you are competing in a much smaller pool and are able to stand out much more.

Also, I get 4 years to do what I do best so much so that I did it these 2 years as well, I just can't resist myself because I have tried to do so I just love tinkering with computers and this also puts me up to an comparatively decent advantage.

Sure, there might be some rote-learning and some things which are a bit theoretical but they might also be practical. I was learning on my own a month ago IIRC about what the 7 layers are and I am probably going to read some on my own time before going to college the book of "networking a top down approach"

This has given me 4 years to do the things that I like, the job market right now is a bit not too good but reading books about history of the dot com bubble etc. I feel decently confident that its very cyclical. Just reading the book of "how the internet happened" made me realize all the similarities with things happening right now. Every 20 years, a new generation happens and we forget the old things which have happened (IMO).

That being said, I am unsure about 11 years of the free time at the same time but honestly, it really just depends upon your subjective nature and personal preference and for someone genuinely interested within research... it could be an interesting path. I am open to every opportunity that comes in front of me and wish to try my best :-D

> Nowadays I wouldn't recommend anyone to get a tech degree in a university unless it's a world class one. And even then, I would focus on networking and finding like-minded people rather than necessarily getting good grades.

Networking is a multiplier. You realize the ability of multiplier because you have the base-line. Were you able to form the base-line because of the time spent within those 11 years, partially and other comes from your natural interests and curiosity judging from the fact that you are on Hackernews for the sake of it itself.

Would a person with the strongest of networks but failing to have the baselines of (technical?) tastes/intellect and just this feeling of learning be able to do something with networking. Absolutely, people are using these top grade colleges as just a way to network and so there is a lot of froth/hype in the market. Theo Baker (a 22 year old journalist who lived in stanford) has written a book about it ("How to rule the world")

I still think that its interesting that they get to become the startup owner at such an young age and there are benefits but also tradeoffs and realizing both of these is important and making the decision wisely is important. I do envy them in some sense as well but also not so, its nuanced! and wish them all success hopefully :-D and I think one should keep the options open, If an opportunity comes for me to open an startup say even within college and upon proper careful thinking I get the answer to be a serious yes, I will try to follow that as well :-D

but my main point is that after a particular point in life: the multiplier feels much more important than baseline but before that, the baseline is just as important if not more, so I will try to get good grades hopefully if interests align with the subjects which I think they do.

This is horrible advice. Hiring is a zero sum game, and a college education is treated as a table stakes requirement which won't change.

When trying to get hired, you are competing against other candidates, and if a tiebreaker is needed, the less risky option will always be hired.

Additionally, where you get your degree doesn't matter too much, but getting one is critical. It can be a BSCS from WGU for all that matters, but getting one is important. Also, bootcamps are useless now. Don't waste money on them.

The only exceptions remain veterans from the armed services assuming they were trained in the right MOS.

Kinda sucks that the first barrier to interviewing at most companies is HR, and they generally are the least qualified or motivated to properly assess candidates. I don’t fully blame them, as there are just too many resumes and interviews to go through for the limited time we have in a work day, but great candidates can come from any background and demographic. Edit: Sample size of 1 here, so take with an appropriately sized (whale?, school bus?) grain of salt.

OP would just put "BSc Computer Science from Goldsmiths, University of London" on his resume and LinkedIn.