I Need a CS Degree. I Don’t Need a CS Degree

Voice of the DBA

For a long time I’ve felt that my recommendation for people wanting to enter technology wasn’t to go to college and get a degree, but rather start to learn on your own and get an entry level job (help desk, tech support, etc.) and start to work in the industry. That’s a good way to both experiment and understand what you’re considering undertaking as a career, as well as limiting your investment. It’s also nice to get paid to learn something.

College is great, but it’s also expensive. I find that for many people, it can be hard to get a good ROI from college these days. The fast rising cost, not to mention the uncertain opportunities after college lead me not to recommend pursuing a CS degree, or really any degree, as a default view. There are exceptions, but for many people, I’d prefer to work and try to better understand where they should invest in education.

However.

Jerry Nixon has a great (long) post on Twitter on this topic, answering the question of whether someone should get a degree or not, mostly focused on developers and CS degrees. It’s a very nuanced view that you both should and shouldn’t get a degree. It really depends on what you want to do. There are cases where we might want someone to get a degree and deeply understand complex development. It’s one thing to build internal web apps or design a database used by internal sales teams. It’s quite another to design encryption for a military application or ensure a rocket can land on a floating platform.

Both things can be true together. You should get a degree to be a developer and you should not get a degree to be a developer, but the more detailed answer depends on where you want to work and what you want to achieve. A nice optimistic view from Jerry is that some people want to achieve something bigger than a paycheck, bettering the world with software, not to earn more, but to make life better in some way. I wish more people felt that way.

A great piece of advice from Jerry is to listen to those who you want to become, not the loudest people. I somewhat lament that so many of the very, very smart people I know or hear about are focused on tooling that generates revenue or income, and not necessarily pursuing improvements in the world. That’s their choice, and I can’t get upset about so many extremely capable technologists working in finance or FAANG rather than areas where they might change the world for the better. I can be though, and am, sad.

Read the post, and think deeply about what this means to you. And if you want to be a great software or database engineer, then do great things. Work hard at your craft and constantly sharpen your saw.

Steve Jones

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