[ironman1478]

I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic. So much context is missing in this post.

Having a CS degree doesn't mean much, but I don't see how a lit major is going to learn how to be productive in an embedded environment for example. There is just too much domain specific knowledge that isn't based purely on intelligence and can't be inferred from first principles.

[filoleg]

> I just don't understand how this is true unless you're doing something extremely basic.

The same way it is true for people with no college degree at all. People can learn on the side. Some of them might have had a minor in CS, or worked on hobby software projects in the meantime. Those hires might become some of the best, but finding them is difficult.

Out of the two such SWEs I worked with at Microsoft years ago, one of them had no college degree at all, and another one had an entirely unrelated degree (with his previous full-time job being an air traffic controller at a nearby airport). None of the SWE work they did was trivial or basic even in the slightest.

[internetter]

I taught myself how to program as a teenager by… programming. While I didn’t have an academic background, I was perfectly capable of contributing to OSS and working. Rarely ever did I think “I wish I had a degree to do this.” The little bit of academics I did need I also self taught, like time complexity. The only case really where the degree may be helpful is leetcode type interview questions where you need to know the algorithm.

[theteapot]

And most CS grads forget all that after a few years because it's not relevant to what they're actually doing.

[ironman1478]

So you basically have a CS degree. I learned C in 7th grade and was completely self taught. I then got a CS degree because I just wanted to learn more about it and be around people who were also enthusiastic about CS.

There is something disingenuous about the parent post. Highly motivated people will always be good at what they want to do. I'm good at guitar, but never went to music school. Highly motivated individuals though are the exception, not the rule. If you take two random individuals, one with a lit degree and one with a CS degree, the CS degree person will know more in the domain of CS and be more likely to write useful software.

The parent post is conflating being highly selective about personality type and attributing it to the degree.

[elzbardico]

A lot of our industry was built by people without CS degrees. Actually, I doubt that there are too many newly minted CS graduates able to code anything using an assembler.