[patio11]

I'm not sure where you're physically located, but if you were a young cousin of mine on either the US or Japanese sides of the family, I'd tell you get the degree. If you feel that college is too easy mode for you, feel free to take more difficult or eclectic courses, or throw yourself into extracurriculars. (It's a great time to learn a foreign language.)

Why get the degree?

1) Because there is no circumstance where having an undergraduate degree makes you worse off than not having it.

2) Because now is the easiest and cheapest time in your life to check the degree box.

3) Because the opportunity to be a college student may, if you take advantage of it, give you the option to ease into parts of being an Honest to God Adult (TM) like, e.g., resolving conflicts with people who aren't family members or keeping a budget or juggling multiple priorities at once. It can be easier to get adjusted to this sort of stuff when you are not also getting adjusted to the wild world of working.

4) Many employers in our line of work do not strictly speaking require a degree. Unfortunately, you will occasionally in life be called to deal with people of good will who have irrational requirements. For example, governments and future mothers-in-law may have absolute requirements for college degrees. Check the box today, avoid a heck of a lot of stress in eight years.

You've got the rest of your life to work on the career thing. Trust me, it's plenty of time.

If you drop out, are you condemned to being a bum? Not in the least. Recommendations at this point would differ based on where you live, but they're probably going to sound like some variant of "Find a clueful company which has room for a young engineer to both learn from more experienced engineers and also meaningfully impact the organization. Work for them for 3-4 years then reassess."

[67726e]

> Because there is no circumstance where having an undergraduate degree makes you worse off than not having it.

Depending on where you live, one could make the argument that there is some opportunity cost associated with spending 4 years in school along with the debt that would possibly come with it.

I went the route of quitting school and becoming a developer full-time as I felt the experience was more valuable than sitting through pre-requisites I wouldn't ever use, the standard "Rocks for Jocks" geology courses for example, or sitting through a CS lecture and hearing things I learned as a young teenager.

At the end of the day, the OP has to weigh his options and determine what is best for him. However, as someone who took the option of not attaining a degree and instead went straight into my career: It is possible, it just isn't for everyone.

[ludoo]

Great advice.

I might add that another option would be to study something totally unrelated in college, to broaden your horizons. Literature, arts, architecture will teach you how to understand and enjoy culture, at a level that is difficult to acquire as an amateur. The old "study Latin and Greek to better understand life and humanity" thing is still valid.

[re1ser]

I'm in similar situation, and from neighbor country, Serbia. 24 years old, and with 2 classes left to finish college. I've started with freelancing 2 years ago while I still had tons of classes left, then job just went upwards. At the moment I work for a monthly salary that would cover atleast 8 months of living here, but this reflected negatively on my motivation and time for last extra push to finish remaining 2 classes. What I can tell you is to not give up, as majority of other people mentioned here, college degree may feel not-needed in your CS career, but it doesnt really hurt to have one. I actually renewed my college year today, and plan to finish it by July, while working fulltime. I also recommend you to not focus fully on college, IMHO, better use your time to develop your skills on whatever you want to do in future and look at college as a place to make connections with other people and try to finish it with minimal effort involved in classes that won't help you at all in your professional path.

[coolsebz]

Thank you for your response! I'm living in Eastern Europe, Romania; not exactly a tech hub, which is why the college level is so low :/ Most of what I've learned is from free available resources (books, lectures, you name it) Thanks for the points on why I should get the degree, they make sense!

[pyduan]

Here are two other arguments in favor for college on top of patio11's:

1) While you may be worried about the depth of the content in your field, be aware that college is also a great way to acquire breadth: this is the best way to be exposed to ideas you wouldn't have encountered before, and I'd encourage you to take courses outside of your field. Economics, philosophy, or political science come to mind as topics that may not be directly useful to you in your career but do help tremendously in understanding the world around you and being a more complete individual in general. This is also a great time to live and study abroad, which is a great life experience in general. This will also be very useful if you ever decide to branch out and work in a different field, where you may feel your lack of degree much more than in tech.

In addition there is nothing wrong with getting "extra coursework" in college. Unlike high school, the goal here is to learn for your own sake and there is always the possibility to dig further if you're interested in acquiring highly specialized knowledge.

2) A degree is not simply useful for convincing old-school employers. You work in tech, so I assume there is a probability that you may want at some point or the other want to check out the scene in the US. If this is something that interests you, be aware that it is tremendously harder to get a work visa to the US if you don't have a higher education degree. Most work visas will require a degree or equivalent work experience; for the US bureau of immigration, "equivalent work experience" generally means 3 years of work for each year of school, which means you won't be eligible for a H1B for another decade. I do not know how it is for other countries but I assume many have similar requirements.

tl;dr: a degree will allow you to hedge yourself against the future. If you're bored, there are always opportunities for you to diversify your interests, seek more specialized knowledge in your field, or work on your own side projects.

[ThePawnBreak]

In Romania, you don't choose your classes, the classes choose you. The way it works is that you are admitted directly at a faculty, not at a university, and just take the classes they decide you should. So if you're a CS major and want to take a class on economy, tough luck.

[nevvvermind]

Romania, eh? Well, let me "enlighten" you about this one. Romania IS a tech hub. I don't know how much you've been in the field, but the market here exploded some years ago. We've become an outsourcing paradise. Good, cheap work. Demand is pretty high. So don't worry - you'll get your share. With or without college.

Now the not so cool part: just get that degree, one way or the other. Especially if it's related to the field you want to work in. The govt has some strategies to facilitate graduates into the work market: as a graduate, your employer pays 16% less taxes for IT graduates. You'd LOVE the faces of the HR people when they hear you're not a IT student/graduate.

The above is just one of the more "direct" implications of you having a degree. There are more. As employing goes, the "upper-class" languages (Java, C#, C++) tend to require it. PHP, HTML/CSS, Ruby - not so much.

Another advantage is that the employers here voraciously search for IT students and they grab them even from the second year. They invest in degrees, as those at the very least, guarantees them a basic knowledge, on which they can build, as the student is perceived as a long-term investment.

Then there's the human nuances - future prospects, getting employed outside the country (if you're into that), self-perception (if you're into that, too).

Do you want me to continue?

You are passionate, I can respect that. But college is not about passion or destroying it - it's about market placing (in Romania at least). Sooner or later, you'll think about that. Oh and I heard that IT college can be a blast when it comes to same-minded people. My bet is you'll find lots of passionate people in there.

I'm a Romanian ex-"bum" (wanna hang out?), philosophy and maths college drop-out, now a passionate programmer, having a hard time getting into a Java - mainly because of the degree. I should know.

[tomp]

I was in your position a few years ago (living in Slovenia) - I've too learned programming at an early age, and although I didn't have industry experience, I didn't want to go study CS, because I had a feeling I wouldn't learn anything. Instead, I studied math, which was interesting, hard and very useful (can work in finance, understand statistics, get into AI/ML/big data, ...).

Also, just a few days ago I was thinking what I would change if I was 16 again - I would (1) start meditating - meditation has given me very good emotional control, which is one of the most useful things in life, (2) learn languages - Spanish, French, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, ... I had the most time in high school/college, and looking back, wasted most of it, when I could be learning at least one language a year (to a decent conversationalist level), and (3) get into computer security - it's a perfect job for a consultant, allows remote work, and seems to be becoming more and more relevant with each passing year (bonus: you know how to secure your own devices).

TL;DR: don't start working yet, after college you will be starved of free time, use it to better yourself.

[patio11]

Don't feel like you're missing out too much -- the engineering classes at e.g. top-flight universities in Japan and the United States are also typically not superior to free information floating around on the Internet.

[samsonr]

Greetings from Romania too. I'm 24 and I've been actively working as a programmer for the past ~3 years. I have graduated from ASE - Cybernetics (Bucharest) at the age of 22 and been working in the area since then. Despite the fact that I felt college wasn't teaching me so much as the real world, it surely shaped me and changed my view of things. The biggest gain for me probably was that college showed me how little do I know about programming in general and motivated me to keep learning every day.

While the college level is arguably lower than other parts of the world, you'll still get the chance to interact with smarter people and that can only help.

I've also had the chance to work with people without a CS degree (people around my age) and I think they are finding it harder to learn new concepts without a proper (academic) foundation.

Go for it, you will not regret the choice.

[JoelOtter]

I'm at an engineering-focused uni here in the UK (studying computing), and there are a LOT of Romanian guys in my year - all of them very, very good. The level of mathematics you guys get taught at high school far exceeds that of the UK, let alone the US.

You sound like the kind of person who probably sailed through high school and likely has great exam results from there. Combined with the fact that you've got tonnes of experience and have taught yourself, you'd have a great shot at studying somewhere abroad, if you think you'd like to do it. I learned a lot online and from working on open-source projects, but for me personally, formally studying computing has broadened my horizons massively and opened a huge number of doors.

[coolsebz]

I'm actually considering that! Where exactly do you study? I feel like around here they teach us too much math, but no practical stuff and I would like to give it a shot and study abroad

[JoelOtter]

I'm at Imperial College London. It's great for me because the course is very hands-on (I'm in second year, and so far we've built a compiler and an operating system). If you're into the more theoretical stuff elsewhere might be better, but we're pretty highly ranked at the minute so it's a good degree. Lots of industry links too!

[coolsebz]

Now that sounds interesting! Thanks for this, I'll be looking for some more info!

[tezza]

Scotland heavily subsidised their courses for EU peeps such as yourself.

Edinburgh University Computer Science: £1820 PA... now that is a steal

http://www.docs.sasg.ed.ac.uk/fees/undergraduate_2014-2015.c...

[harmont2007]

A good university to get into (that I had gone through) is National University here in the US. Not only is it in a great city (Sunny San Diego, California), but also you learn some really useful tools in the programming field. There are a lot of international students from different parts of the world (India, Romania, Irag, Iran, China, Japan, etc) at National University. If you are not able to do that, check around your area for someone that is an expert in the field you want to be in and see if him / her can mentor you. Also, check out Matthew Moran's book called "Building Your I.T. Career." It is a great resource book.

[coolsebz]

I didn't know there were such opportunities to study there! I'll be looking some more into that!

[danielweber]

If you ever want to move to the US (and I'm not saying you should, but many people do), getting the degree will make you one less factor of "weird" to US employers.

[luch]

If you're from Romania, did you consider taking a year to study abroad using the Erasmus program, to see how stuff is taught elsewhere ?

[coolsebz]

Actually yes, but it's the kind of subject that at my college is kept like taboo :/ I'm by far better off starting college again-ish at another college abroad

[BSousa]

Try another European university? Or maybe doing a year or two of Erasmus could help.

[ThePawnBreak]

Hey! I'am also from Romania.

Where do you study?

[coolsebz]

Hey! :D Timisoara, UVT

[ThePawnBreak]

I'm at ACS Bucharest, in my second year. It's pretty bad here as well.

I suggest you finish your degree (nevermind the grades, just get a 5), and spend your free time learning what you're interested in. The good thing is that there are a lot of good internships available, especially in Bucharest (Adobe, Intel, Ubisoft etc.). You can find them on stagiipebune.ro (check out VMware in Bulgaria, too).

[bjrnjs]

This. Plus, even though it might feel like it doesn't give you enough - it will give you education in fields that you don't learn so easily at home.

I dropped out from a university program (non-US citizen, we don't have colleges as you guys do), because I felt it didn't give me enough compared to paid work. However, I regularly wish I stayed for my degree - not because I have a hard time finding employers, but because I actually feel like I'm missing some education. There are many courses which I would love to have read to the end, from mathematics to algorithm theory and finite automata.

[ttty]

What exactly is stopping you to learn what you want? If you are really passionate about it, you find a way, even without college.

[ColinWright]

Sometimes you don't know what you want. I listen to broadcast radio because I'm then exposed to things I'm not used to and didn't realize I'd like or be interested in. Likewise, I'm now finding that I'm using topology in odd places, and I was never interested in that when I did my degree. It wasn't cute fun about twisting bits of paper, it was hard work and deeply unintuitive. But now it's turning up repeatedly as I compress images, compute optimal representations, and work out why the various bits of algorithms aren't working the way I thought they would.

My colleagues think I have superpowers because I have this bizarre collection of things apparently immediately "to hand." But I don't. I remember seeing them in passing, ignored because I didn't care, but now I know what I'm looking for and can find it.

The auto-didact route rarely gives you that. JIT learning tends to leave you without overview and with areas of ignorance you don't even know you have. If you knew you had them you'd fix it.

But you don't. And don't.

[bjrnjs]

Yes, I didn't say it was impossible to learn stuff on your own -- it's just not as easy as if you have scheduled time to do it (during school hours).

And if you are referring to me and my situation, I'm trying to learn as much as I can on my own. But it gets tougher the older one gets, and I have a hard time to find the time.