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With Covid prevalent in the United States, I don't know what the situation would be for students looking to take the fall 2020 semester. In college, we were told to spend at least three hours studying for every hour in the class. So I am not sure what people mean when they talk about "DIY degree". Over 75% of a standard BSCS degree is already "DIY". What we get in the other 25% is lectures, office hours, discussions with the professor before and after class, discussions with other classmates, access to a library with many volumes on math and computer science, access to computer labs. Also verification that someone had learned these things. We can look at their GPA and transcript as a loose indicator. I have worked with programmers who went to boot camps, did "DIY degrees" etc. None of them would be able to tell me what a pushdown automata was, or how to deal with critical sections, or had ever written programs in Lisp, or could derive 8x, and so forth. I am sure there are a few out there who could, and there are certainly a number of people who somehow got a BSCS and who don't know these things. Nonetheless, people without a degree usually don't learn about the pumping lemma, or > you’ll end up with a very impressive “DIY degree”. As a hiring manager, if I saw this on a resume (I haven’t yet) - I would be very impressed. Well, with the US unemployment rate, this is a great time to test this hypothesis. From personal knowledge, only one of the college graduates in IT I worked with is unemployed (he has a specialized role, does not live in a major tech hub, and his job search has locally been in his local area), several of the boot camp grads I worked with are not working in IT at the moment. In times like these, when you're sending your resume in to the position alongside one or two dozen people who have a degree, it is better to have a degree. |