I have pondered this question since long before I graduated from University. I’ve worked with a mix of degree-qualified and self-taught people, and I’m still yet to nail the answer.
Being degree-qualified or self-taught both have their pros and cons, but at the end of the day I think that the person who has a good mix of both sides is the one that’s going to stand out. If you’re keen to make a go of your career then you should want to give yourself the best chance of getting work in the field by studying it formally at University. If you’re passionate about what you’re getting yourself into, then you’ll probably put extra time aside to learn the things that either don’t or won’t come up when studying formally.
I learned a lot from University, but not necessarily the things that I use while at work. I felt that Uni was a necessary step to give me a grounding and a level of understanding of things that I could build on when working professionally. I don’t feel that Uni covered every aspect, and I certainly don’t feel that the all aspects it did cover were covered sufficiently. I think that going to Uni helps by:
- Forcing you to study (and pass) subjects that you won’t like. Noone goes through Uni loving every single subject they studied, there’s always at least one that you just despise. Even though it’s a pain, you have to finish the subject and pass it to graduate. I think this is some proof to potential employers that you can face boring tasks and still finish them with a respectable level of quality.
- Teaching you to learn. This isn’t something that school teaches you very well (in my opinion - but that might just be the school I went to :)). I think that being bombarded with a hefty workload while at Uni you learn to manage time a little better, you learn to prioritise and you learn how to learn.
- Proving you can stick to something long term and see it through. Uni can be tough, especially if you’re working to stay alive during the course of your degree. Sticking at it over a period of years shows that you have what it takes to see something through to the end even though it can be quite challenging.
- Gives you a foundation of knowledge in areas you might not study by yourself. Bachelors degrees tend to try and give you a broad knowledge of your field, rather than just specialising in one area. Sure, when you get into the later years where you can choose your subjects you can select a few that allow you to specialise, but the point is that there are always some core subjects you are forced to take, and these expose you to some things that you might not encounter had you not attended uni.
Not everyone is lucky enough to get into Uni or college (for whatever reason), and so they put time aside to teach themselves the things that they need to know to get work in a certain field. Hats off to them 
This isn’t easy to do, and even when you do it it’s hard to find a company that will look past the lack of a degree and give you the chance that you deserve.
The problems with just self studying are:
- You only learn what you’re interested in. Let’s face it, when you’re doing things in your own time you focus on the things that you find interesting, and skip the boring bits. This tends to result in the person getting specialised knowledge in a certain area and not having a good coverage of other areas which would be required to get a job. I’m not saying everyone is like this as there are dedicated people out there who would force themselves to get through the boring stuff too :).
- Self-learning doesn’t necessarily allow you to get involved in group assignments. Teamwork is a huge part of a developer’s day job, and experience in this area is important. Working by yourself on all your projects doesn’t present you with the people challenges you’ll face while at work.
- If you’re unable to find a tutor or a mentor, you have a strong possibility of learning bad habits or practices which aren’t good.
- It’s much easier to get stuck in your ways, as you don’t have the constant nagging of a lecturer telling you that a certain practice is bad, and since it’s always worked, there’s no reason to change!
OK, I don’t want that to sound like I’m dissing self-learners, because I’m not. They have a drive that you don’t find in a lot of Uni students, and that’s one thing that I love about those guys. Unfortunately for self-learners, it’s getting harder and harder to find work without having a qualification. It’s becoming the “standard” to have a degree before you get a job in a lot of white-collar industries, particularly Info Tech. The only way to get round a lot of these issues for self-learners it to either get involved with an open-source project where they can work with other people to build some software, or to build something themselves. The key to this point is making sure that the project is finished. It’s very easy to start a million projects, it’s always hard to finish just one! So if you can prove to people that you can finish things you have started, then you’re already a step ahead of 99% of the contenders.
I do think that having a degree-qualified person who has made an effort to teach themselves other things that Uni doesn’t is the best option. From my experience, those people not only have the knowledge gained from the study, but they have the drive to see things through.
What are your thoughts and experiences?
September 27, 2006
However, the lecturers practices are not necessarily good practices to follow. In fact sometimes quite the opposite.
September 27, 2006
That is very true. I have had experiences with lecturers in the past who teach a certain method or practice because they like it, not because it’s a good thing to do. If you get yourself into a decent university then at least this tends to be the exception rather than the norm.
February 22, 2007
It’s an ordeal endured for four years at the hands of professional failures who have turned their complete unmarketability as human beings into a career. Instead of suffering in silence they seek teaching positions in order to corrupt the minds of innumerable young people with their own errors, mistakes, feeblemindedness and generally confused and deficient powers of reasoning.
People supposedly go to university to learn. In fact, they go to be indoctrinated in Marxist drivel. It doesn’t matter what subject is on your degree, you’re guaranteed to be completely incompetent in it upon graduation. On the other hand, you will be able to recite a bunch of nutty socialist agitprop like a coin operated fortune teller from memory at any moment. As for an actual trade, when I was going through college they emphasized Pascal for object oriented coding, which left a generation fit for nothing but a deadend tool like Delphi.
I blame Rational Rose on the academics. Like Goebbels my first impulse is to reach for my gun when I hear somebody called an academic.
I pride myself on the fact I deliberately omit my qualifications on my resume at all times. Qualifications are for frauds in the modern university system. It wasn’t always true but it is most certainly true today. People with degrees are a lot like a**holes with legs running around waving a doctor’s note they claim proves they don’t stink. I don’t believe it and neither do they.
February 22, 2007
Hello Cleve, thanks for your comment!
This kind of topic can really bring about passionate conversation. I see that you’re squarely against degrees as far as practicality is concerned, and I have to say that for the most part I do agree with you.
Unfortunately university degrees are a dime a dozen these days, and hence not having one makes you look like an idiot in the eyes of a lot of people (who, imho, are also idiots). But if Joe Bloggs who struggled to get through school has a Bachelors Degree and you’ve only got a high school grade then people do ask questions. The general masses feel that it’s the next step in the life of a student when they finish high school and think that you’re nothing without that degree.
It’s crap, but that’s the way it is.
Cleve, I’m guessing that in the past you’ve had to deal with quite a few individuals who have managed to get themselves qualified but haven’t in any way backed themselves up in the work place by being good on the job. Is that the case? I have had my fair share of experiences like that, and I have been extremely frustrated. 99.99% of the people who graduate from University these days walk into the work place with chips on their shoulders. They expect to be treated like God despite them having no experience, and at the same time expect to be paid as if they run the whole show. It’s just going to get worse over time as well.
Rational Rose is the tool of Satan
Thankfully I’ve only had to use it once in a previous position and I found it incredibly painful, and it had a huge impact on the performance of the team. I hope that I never have to touch it again.
March 23, 2007
In the early 90’s maybe one in ten people was a complete fraud in IT and spent all their time trying to conceal it. They posed no real threat in business because it was 9-to-1 and if they had any sense at all they knew to keep quiet and not interject anything in the workplace in an attempt to always remain under the radar.
By 1995 it was two out of ten people. Still no big danger to good practice and the rule of judgement and experience. Even two of them together backing each other up did not make a consensus. So they bided their time and waited.
By 1999 it was five out of ten people, mostly from the artificial demand created by Y2K. These are the charlatans and fakes who created the demand for Rational Rose and filled that company’s coffers with million dollar seat licenses. Most people thought the subsequent crash would handle these idiots in Darwinian terms. They were wrong. They were stunned like mullets for a while and some of them returned to their real callings in food service or sanitation roles, but as soon as the market picked up they began to flood back in.
They constituted a majority in the workplace by 2003, often 7 out of 10 people were professional actors playing at the role of IT Developers.
By 2005 the entire industry was becoming more and more like a Monty Python skit by the hour. The average workplace might have two competent actual software developers faced off against 8 cagliostros and total flimflam men. This was a losing struggle. Despite frequent claims of “conversion” to agile methodology (actually the only process ever advocated by real IT people in the past fifty years) the productivity and failure rate of projects told another whole story and it wasn’t the public meme.
It’s now 2007. I’m not even going to describe the situation today.
I’m a very lucky guy because I have stayed self-employed working on real projects throughout this entire era and making good money at it, serving clients who wanted to cut through the crap and get working software delivered without all that other stuff. Some people might think I lead a charmed life and they’d probably be right.
As for anybody else who is thinking of going into IT as a developer nowadays because they have enthusiasm and natural aptitude, I should warn you. This ain’t your momma’s IT industry. In my experience, most workplaces are incapable of achieving even the smallest tasks with less than 500 people working weekends to do stuff I can write in my garage working alone in a day.
The very worst people are those who flout “qualifications.” It’s be hilarious stuff, like a Dilbert sketch, if it weren’t so very real.
In conclusion, I believe the current IT industry to be completely unsustainable and destined to lose most of it’s business to hungry, up and coming nations of most sober and competent people like India and China. Nowadays in the West it costs a million dollars to fill a pothole and takes ten road workers a year to do that. You don’t even want to ask how long it takes these idiots to deliver a simple application. It takes forever or never, with forever being the optimistic outcome.
March 23, 2007
Whoa dude!
March 23, 2007
It’s a simple fact that the Western world is dying. All the people flooding out of the former manufacturing and blue collar jobs which no longer exist have to try to get work somewhere and nobody wants to mop floors for a living with the resulting drop from the middle class … so what do they do? Go into this “IT thingamajiggy.”
All the men who used to make fun of bright kids back in high school now find themselves having to figure out how to pass for nerds in the workplace. It’s an odd interpretation but it works once a lot of other people around you are also faking it. You can both pretend to be fake intamallecktual types and who will call you out when you both need your act to keep food on the table!
Now, everybody is a nerd and a way cool lateral thinker who likes to reason outside the box. At least, that’s their story.
The reality is … most of these people don’t even like computers. They *definitely* don’t like thinking. This means they will never be able to even comprehend agile process, just use the buzzwords like it means something to them. IF you can’t learn from your mistakes, you’re just a typical human being, because most of mankind never learns from their mistakes. Unfortunately, although they are normal they are not qualified for IT jobs.
What the average joe who has pushed his way into IT really wants in life is to fart, drink beer and watch spectator sports. If they have to sit through 8 hour meetings a day of gibberish with a lot of other fakirs then so be it.
March 23, 2007
I just wanted to add, I’m sure some of you have had a think about it and said, “Hey, Cleve, if your nutty assertion were true … that the Western world is a just a hollow used-up condom of a civilization where the primary ‘growth industry,’ is in reality just a bunch of morons pretending to be IT people … I mean, if this incredible claim had any substance to it, it would mean that Western society is on the verge of popping like a soap bubble and completely collapsing in a hellish scenario almost overnight. Like the Great Depression as directed by Wes Craven, with all the requisite geopolitical fallout that would entail … fallout, literally … I don’t think anybody could take this fellow Cleve too seriously. If what he claimed were true, we’d all be utterly screwed to the Nth power.”
Now you know why serious negotiations are underway at Microsoft to move their entire corporate infrastructure to India permanently. You’d also understand why Bill Gates said recently he just doesn’t know if the United States is going to provide the kind of people that Microsoft will need to continue leading innovation in the future. That’s Bill Gates tactful way of saying that the Western world is a giant Dilbert cartoon consisting of employees who can barely remember to close their fly when they come out of the restroom, much less design cutting edge software.
At the last place I worked, about half the staff didn’t bother washing their hands when leaving the lavoratory and one of the “Chief Architects” on the project apparently had never bothered to learn about the security, reporting, communication and data storage features of the software he had been advocating for three years. He had plenty of qualifications, though. He just could not speak in complete sentences or remember to close his mouth after speaking.
March 23, 2007
Wow
I’m guessing from the strength of your assertions, and the depth in which you’ve covered the topic, you’ve thought about this issue a fair bit. Your blog also backs that up 
I do agree with the majority of your statements regarding the quality of the individuals that we find in our industry. I find it a shame and, most of the time, a total disgrace, to find the kind of ineptitude that I end up seeing. The I.T. crowd is supposed to be a collection of professionals who are skilled enough to provide quality solutions to tough problems. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.
As far as the state of the Western world and it’s possible future collapse, that’s a bit off topic for me
March 27, 2007
Everybody concedes this is our last remaining primary growth industry outside of service jobs. Service jobs cannot be staffed by people who are supposed to pipe their income into paying for services. It’s a Ponzi scheme. So we have to believe that the IT industry is going to continue as the main generator of middle class incomes and first world prosperity. This is the reason unqualified people who have no aptitude are flooding into the industry. Their definition of “qualified” is pretty much equivalent to grotesquely incompetent.
Bill Gates and several others in a position to know are telling us that this last remaining linchpin of the West is not going to be able to compete much longer against competition from developing nations with far better standards and higher native intelligence like India and China.
If events unfold according to historical precedent, this means the West is going to have to rustle up war and lots of it soon to stave off economic class by generating demand and jobs with a wartime economy. Sound too far out? Remember I was predicting this back in 1999 before America and her allies declared War on Everything.
We’re “at war” presently not because there is really any enemy to fight, but rather because there are no other options left. Although the West may only be trying to tread economic water by dropping bombs, the reality is that this “war” is going to turn into a real war, 21st century style, very soon. That kind of war you don’t read about in the papers, you get it as radioactive fallout downwind.
Wait and see if I got this right. Won’t be long.
May 22, 2007
Maybe you should rename your blog from OJ’s Rants to Cleve’s Rants.
May 22, 2007
Nice suggestion, but I don’t think I will
Cleve’s obviously quite passionate about this topic, and it’s good to see someone who’s happy to express their views.
Arguably, they’re quite intense, but hey!
January 31, 2008
Hey, looks like the village idiot got that prediction pretty spot on in May 2007 when he foresaw a massive economic collapse in the cards for the United States.