I agree with you. However 8 years of university education did teach me to read hard, research and think on problems. Also to socialize with different set of people.
The main difference I've noticed between self-taught and those who have a degree is primarily in structure. However, I've noticed that the previous code structure generally has a bigger impact on how they write code than their education. In my case, I have a formal education, but I've learned most things while studying on my own and actually writing code. The formal education gave me tools to learn more, rather than teaching me those things.
Interesting subjective commentary video, but more data would have added value. As with all things, it depends, and the answer is a very personal thing. Depends largely on the school, and on how the student performs, rather than how much money or time was spent. Also, not all colleges in the US are tens of thousands of dollars, as there are universities that cost similar to what you paid...and let's not forget about the many grants and scholarships that make this even more affordable for candidates who work hard. My son's education was free, at a top university, and was based solely on grades and high level of classes taken. Though I've witnessed many gifted developers who do not have a formal education, I think being well-rounded from a good education adds much value to an engineer. While my son has a Bachelor of Computer Science and my wife has a Masters degree in Computer Science, I have no formal education and see firsthand the added knowledge I could have benefitted from. Meanwhile, they also see things they could have benefitted from by being self-taught. There are definitely two sides to every story.
University degree did not teach me programming. In fact I learned programming from books from the age of 14. But university helped me being more structured… and to be more engineering focused. Which would have needed lots of discipline to learn yourself by just reading books. Or by watching youtube One major issue with self learning is finding the best/correct material. An issue that a well structured university curriculum solves easily. I am still a self learner but I am better learner because of the structured approach i picked at college
Thanks for the interesting video. I never got a degree and would not recommend at all paying to go to uni if you want to be a php developer. I am a self taught php developer and the amount of free online resources there are, stackexchange, laracasts etc.. Having said that, I would love to have gone to university and got that whole experience. As for discipline, whilst teaching yourself php, you still need to pay the rent. I did spend time stacking shelves in the supermarket, which is a really tough job, working through the night for 12 hours at a time - much tougher than being a php developer ! That gave me a lot of discipline when it came to study - and I got promoted from supermarket shelf stacker to full stack developer !!!
100% of the developers I worked with in the last 3 years had a 4 year degree in computer science or software development. The only "self taught programmers" I knew were data cleaners IT support staff or QA and even they had engineering degrees
I studied in Belgium as well, but we only specialized in the last year to web. I recently checked the curriculum they give now and they specialise way earlier now. And I think that is key. If you want to become a good programmer in collage you need to know what you want to do and specialise in it as soon as possible so you really get to understand what you are doing and skip the general stuff
I definitely agree that most of the value from Universities are the structure and the frameworks that forces you to learn and be disciplined. Especially in the early years, i.e. a bachelor's degree.If you continue with a master's degree you can specialise a lot more and in certain fields it's very hard to learn on your own. Of all the fields in CS, Web development is probably the easiest to learn on your own. I'm pretty sure I learned a lot more in the first 6 months working than I did in the whole education(4 years) when it comes to things I actually use. It's also very different with CS compared to other fields. I also read economics and business management and the concepts there are a lot easier to apply when working than most things in CS. They also don't change much over time.
I am self taught and feel like what I trained most of all is to teach myself new stuff fast and in a ready-to-apply way. Now after working 10+ years in my field I feel like there are topics that I have missed by never have had a 101 course. And I am thinking about doing courses at a university for filling that gaps. But maybe I can just go for online courses instead of organisations. Courses of singular professionals who have hundreds of good ratings instead of an organisation that - as an organisation - has gotten approval as organisation - without knowing anything about the quality about the few courses I want to take. Still the idea of having someone with a list of exactly what education I should get is nice. But yeah - working in the field taught me that there is no list like that. It depends(TM) on what problems you want to takle
Im 2 years graduated from professional school but that taught me nothing about real programming, so i had to learn everything myself, im now senior developer, but degree is good for getting more money
My 6 years in college got me nowhere, and I've also forgotten about 95% of what i learned there. 3 years after graduating and I have no idea what I want to do, and feel too burned out from college to dedicate myself to anything in particular.
