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by amichail 5492 days ago
I think the debate is more about self-learning vs a formal education.

Moreover, a CS degree is overkill for most of the programming people do.

2 comments

I would whole heartily agree. I'm a CS major working at a big company this summer. I've met people with no background in CS work in software development. Some people who should not even be developers at all. Others who are expert coders but shutter at the mention of a search algorithm.

In most places, I sense, CS is a ticket into a better position but for most people CS is overkill for the type of programming most .Net shops require. It comes down to learning basic control structures, syntax & utilizing libraries. It nearly becomes mindless & trivial for CS majors yet challenging and overwhelming to the kids taking C#/.Net classes.

You can go too far either way. On the one hand are the CS theorists with their heads in the clouds. On the other are those devs writing naive algorithms and arguing that you should just buy more hardware who wouldn't know big-O if it jumped up and bit them on the nose.
I agree, but without a CS degree then its likely what you're doing is a study of programming but not actual computer science.