[pc86]

The fact that someone has a degree in Philosophy or Classical Literature doesn't mean that they're not qualified to be a developer, provided that they've proven they can do the work and know the language(s) in question.

There's no inherent reason you can't practice law or medicine without the appropriate degree outside of the ABA and the AMA saying you can't (actually, you need a license; it just so happens that the professional degree is a requirement to obtain the license, but that's just semantics).

I say this as someone with a liberal arts degree from a podunk school nobody has ever heard of, and I know for a fact I'm more knowledgeable than at least one or two of the "senior" folks who are multiple steps up the promotion ladder from me. I'm in the fortunate position that my actual supervisor is smart and technical, was a developer at a Fortune 10 company in his past and does zero direct technical work today. We have developers in my office who have degrees in Computer Science, Philosophy, Political Science, Accounting and one guy who doesn't have any degree or relevant certifications. Nobody here is what I would consider a bad programmer. Everyone can hold their own building an application or writing a SQL routine. Some are better than others, but I haven't seen any correlation between field of study and skill (or even domain knowledge).

I don't see how judging an applicant or coworker based on a degree they got years ago (sometimes decades) fixes any of the issues with our[0] industry, and I don't see how raw technical skill makes someone more or less able to lead technical people. To use an example from elsewhere in this discussion, debugging a VPN connectivity issue quickly doesn't mean you'd make a great manager of developers. It's a different skill set and it doesn't mean that "unqualified people [are] pulling the string."

[0] Because whether you like it or not, it is our industry even though according to you I don't have the "credentials" to be in it.

[j_col]

> provided that they've proven they can do the work and know the language(s) in question.

And that's the rub of it for me: you have to let them lose on your project in order to prove themselves capable, and you have to hope they work out, i.e. learn on the job and you guide them through it. A Philosophy or Classical Literature major has to start their IT career somewhere, right?

So we have the old apprenticeship model rather than the professional model, nothing new here.

This is fine for junior members, but breaks down hard when you move into leadership roles when the leader is unqualified (both in experience and on paper).