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For what it's worth: I run a 50 person development team at a Very Large software company (you've heard of it). I was a developer/operations grunt myself for many years prior. Also I am an old gently caress who's been doing this longer than you have been alive, walked uphill in the snow to school, etc. Doesn't make me right, just sharing my experience: Degrees can be good when you are starting out in that they open doors. Also nice if you want to rise up in management, though a business degree will help you a lot more there. That said, not strictly necessary in this field. As a programmer, your work portfolio and thinking skills are way more important. When I hire people, college education is something I spend little time on. Maybe if it is a degree from an Ivy League tech school like MIT I'll look a little harder, but that is as far as it goes, really. However if you really have 6+ years experience and can demonstrate you are good at what you do then what gets you or anyone like you the job is code/body of work. Even side FOSS projects you contribute to, whatever. How well you code and how diverse your work is carries more weight than a degree. That, and how well you do or do not get along with others - always a tricky proposition with developers (it took me years to sand off my own rough edges, trust me). The technical interview usually wins the day unless you are also a complete basket case in your interviews (and hell, when it comes to developers if you are good enough there's a fairly broad interpretation of what that means). I have a B.S. degree from 25 years ago which is worth jack-poo poo this far in to my career; running my own business from 2003-2008 is what got me in to management (for being able to read a P&L, manage a budget, having infinite patience dealing with people from all walks of life, etc.). Many of my peers in management have B.S. and MBAs. There's at least one who has neither and he's one of the better ones. If you are good at what you do and even better at selling yourself doing it then the sky is the limit in software development. I am not going to tell you getting a degree is a waste of time. You can learn quite a bit with the right school/major not to mention learn to deal with people under forced circumstances. I will tell you going for a degree if it means possibly taking on crippling student loan debt in the hopes it will magically improve your career chances is the wrong reason to do it. Building a solid portfolio of good code that tells a story - like, here's how I started out lovely (we all started out lovely) and here's where I've learned and am continuing to learn from my mistakes - counts for a lot more, even in Fortune 500 companies. Learn to sell yourself. Good developers are worth their weight in gold in a lot of places. Finally, don't go in to game development. I know a lot of current and former game developers and they are all burnt out wrecks. You'd think you'd be happier because hey, you love games, and do what you love, etc. except that isn't how modern game development works for most.
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May 3, 2017 04:37
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BarbarianElephant posted:You won't learn much about shaders in most CS courses, unless it's a dedicated game development degree, which I don't recommend. This is a thing you have to self-teach. Hit the online math courses. If you can't figure out math on your own, consider the budget option vs degree of hiring a math tutor for a few hours - a math graduate student looking to make some extra bucks. Fair enough. I am sure there are plenty of happy folks in the industry. I've just run in to too many who figured, well, I just love playing video games so being a game developer is exactly what I should do, who then figure out the hard way the difference between work and play. Also, unless you are starting yourself or going for a small shop most game devs start out on the low-paying, poo poo end of the stick. That isn't always true for other kinds of software development. If you are a a good developer there are better options, usually, is my point.
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May 3, 2017 19:21
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100 degrees Calcium posted:There's a pretty big chance my bread-and-butter professional work will always be web development, or something similar, but pursuing more complicated work on my spare time makes me feel like I'm investing in myself in a meaningful way. The flip side is that when I see programming concepts that are alien to me, I kind of freak out and wonder if I've been coasting just a bit too long on the shallow end of the programming pool. If you produce good results that clients like and you still think on the inside that you are a worthless dummy congratulations, you are officially a developer, and probably a decent one. Welcome to the club. Divide your study in to two simple disciples, scripted languages and compiled/runtime. Try to have decent proficiency on both sides though it is perfectly fine to be better in one than the other. Getting a little deeper in to database, like PSQL, won't hurt either. You can focus a lot more on front end design if you want but the lines get blurrier there.
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May 3, 2017 20:05
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I have personally, and now have employees, who have produced excellent, well thought out code that delivered who, through the entire process, thought they were complete frauds who had no idea what they were doing. I have also had employees who were 100% confident that whatever they were doing was the best way and woe the fool who contradicted them who produced complete poo poo. If you aren't pushing yourself in this business that is when you are coasting. Realizing you don't know everything and always trying to learn is what gets you places. Learning to live with the fact that you won't know everything and that knowing everything isn't the finish line anyway is what will keep you sane. Software development is a tricky business but it keeps the world turning.
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May 4, 2017 05:57
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