| CS education is not useless, but less used. And it is also used-less by the same people who teach it. There are exceptions - but that number is way too small than it should be. If someone wants to learn coding or programming - screw the CS degree, there are better options. I know CS degree holders who can't code more than a few lines or can't debug a large program. And there are better programmers who don't have a CS degree. YouTube will teach better programming than a CS degree class. Apart from programming, if one "also" wants to learn the mathematical aspect of CS and want to work on core-stuff, go for a CS degree. And those skills do not come easy from some tutorials - a academic rigor is probably the best way to earn it. But if you use the O-notation at some jobs - you could become an outcast in the team. When I got into a top college for a CS degree, I had high hopes from it. For the first 1.5 years, I wanted to quit, quit and just quit. It was hopeless - they were teaching few subjects that I was way better at. But for some reason they would not allow me to just give exams and get promoted. I already knew programming, patterns, electronics and even dealt with basic robotics before I joined college. For one example - when they started teaching operating-systems, my expectation was that they will at least give a hands-on on writing a pretty basic OS. No - they were just doing theories. Ultimately, I ended up writing a pretty simple version of a custom OS without any mentoring (and used Google) - because the professors had never even written a boot-loader to start with. I also ended up helping weaker students get upto the mark. In one of the semester assignment evaluations, I was told by a senior professor " you copied programs from the internet - how come they are so well written". I lost trust in them. I did learn some stuff in the later years and came to peace. While I knew programming, I did not have a strong math background - stuff like probabilities, numerical methods, theoretical computer science and bit of advanced algorithms were the things I learnt and explored further. The most important thing was getting introduced to AI which turned out to be a huge area of interest for me. However, all of that bad experience has turned me sour towards academia in general and I do not recommend spending a lot of money and more-important-time learning "used-less" things - unless you are expecting more than programming in CS. And when it comes to CS, the learning never stops. |