| I'm not sure. So I'm going to ramble on about myself a bit... I have a mediocre degree in an unrelated subject (History and Philosophy of Science) from a good school (Cambridge). I learned to program as a child by messing with 8-bit computers. My first job was very much an apprenticeship, I found a small company that was willing to employ me based on some level of aptitude, a modicum of demonstrable programming ability, and a willingness to work for very little (£12k in 94) Three years later, I was able to move to a more interesting, still not brilliantly paid (£23k in 97), job at a startup, which was acquired by MS a couple of years later. I spent 14 years at MS, and was a Principal Engineer by the time I left. My experience since then is that there are no doors closed to me. There are two places where I got lucky, 1) finding a company that was willing to make a bet on me. 2) joining a top tier company through an acquisition. but with regards to 1, over a 9 month period in 93-94, I applied to over 100 companies, and had three job offers in the end - so it was good luck to find a job based on my resumé at the time, but the jobs were out there And with regards to 2, not everyone who joined through that acquisition was successful at MS, regardless of education. Some hated the idea of working for MS, others weren't suited to a large corporation, and many other reasons. Comparing myself with peers, I find that their CS degrees possibly gave them a 3-5 year head start on me, they could go straight to better jobs, but the value of the apprenticeship type job, is that I was already pushing 10000 hours (or equivalent) by the time I was ready for the better job. |