On 9/28/2011 11:13 PM, John Coryat wrote:

There are relative levels of "good". Huge ranges of good, in fact -- at
least a factor of 20, according to the literature, and in my experience
there are skill levels that, if you haven't reached them, there are some
problems you can't solve no matter how long you take, and the problems
you take longer to solve won't have nearly as good of a solution.

And some of those things you don't tend to learn without having a
degree. Yes it's POSSIBLE to acquire any skills you want without a CS
degree (I don't have a computer science degree myself, fyi, but I took
most of the upper division CS class sequence), but finding someone who's
the level of good I'm looking for (video game development, high
performance code, generally can do anything) who doesn't have a degree
is extremely rare. And it tends to be obvious in the few cases someone
is self-educated to that level, because they will have tons of
accomplishments they can point to.

I'm not looking for someone who can just code a UI in Java. I don't even
use Java on Android -- everything I'm doing is C/C++ and Lua, so it can
also run on iOS. When I'm hiring, I look for people who can not only
program in straight C if necessary, they could drop into assembly
language if they needed to. Which is pretty much how you need to be able
to think if you're ever going to write, say, a pixel shader or vertex
shader.

Unless I'm just looking for a game scripter. In that case, degrees are
irrelevant to me. It all depends on what kind of programming you're
really talking about, and I think a lot of people will debate with each
other endlessly about how to hire "programmers", when each side is
talking about people with completely different skill levels. I wonder if
we wouldn't benefit from some kind of "certification level" so that when
someone says they're a Programmer Level 4, say, you can know whether
they're capable of copy-and-paste JavaScript/HTML development, or vertex
shader and high performance/real-time code development, or somewhere in
the middle.

A well known blogger disagrees:

"By the way, it's because of this phenomenon—the fact that many of the
great people are /never on the job market/—that we are so aggressive
about hiring summer interns." [1]

Honestly, I was a better programmer fresh out of high school than many
of the people I've worked with since then, "real" experience or not
(having coded entire games in assembly language by that time, since
BASIC wasn't fast enough for me). But I learned a lot of important
things in college that made me even better. YMMV.

Tim

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html