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I was in a similar situation to you. I found myself working as a software engineer for almost 10 years with no degree, but I was going to school part time during the whole thing. I always felt like I could never transition to another programming job and that I was locked into the very narrow thing I was doing because I had no background knowledge and no degree to give myself any legitimacy should I need to switch to a different job. I ended up going a different path, I changed my undergrad degree to electrical engineering and went on to do my PhD in the same area, but I still find myself spending more than 50% of my time writing code anyways. I think that programming/software engineering/development/whatever you want to call it is the ONLY field of "engineering" where you don't need a degree to get a job doing the work. With that said, a degree gave me an immense amount of security in that I would at least be able to pass the entry-level hurdles and not be immediately screened out for most jobs. That's mostly irrelevant to me now, but that's how I felt at the time. Now that I'm on to my PhD and I have spent an enormous amount of time learning every aspect of the theory of my research, I feel that having strong fundamentals that an undergrad degree provides is extremely important. If you self-study, you may not want to spend your entire weekend beating your head against compiler theory because you have code due on Monday, but this knowledge may become important to you later in providing you a solid foundation. Not being on a schedule and accountable to someone else (your grades) makes it easy to bounce around from topic to topic without struggling through the details, but some people absolutely don't need this kind of motivation and will do it anyway. e: there are legitimate universities that can give you an online degree in CS and this was originally my plan before I switched to EE. Florida State University, for example, is a state school with their entire CS degree online but you would have to pay out of state tuition if you aren't in Florida. Look around your state's universities and I bet you could find something similar. I feel like the number of these programs is increasing all the time. This is the best of both worlds, you get the degree and you don't have to quit your job. IratelyBlank fucked around with this message at 01:21 on May 7, 2017 |
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May 7, 2017 01:19
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 14:20 |
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