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Re: Autodidact

by Boots111 (Hermit)
on Apr 18, 2002 at 00:07 UTC ( [id://160055]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Autodidact

Monks~

Let me start by saying that this entire dichotomy feels artificial. Whether or not someone has gone to college/grad school tells you nothing about how capable she is of teaching herself. There are good and bad sides to learning from a teacher, but the truth is that each programmer is responsible for her own habits.

Now, the question is how does an employer look at it. A degree proves that you are capable of completing assignments on deadlines. There are in fact many economists who feel that schooling does not increase a person's worth in the job market. Rather schooling proves that she is a less risky investment for her employer, thus encouraging the employer to offer her more.

Of course once you have worked in the "real world" for a little while, jobs stop weighing your education so heavily and value instead previous employment. This only makes sense, since the information is more recent. Once this stage is reached, the formally educated person has the same chances as the self taught. The only time such a difference matters is during the first few experiences a person has in the job market.

If you were a manager and were presented with two people, one who had a degree in CS with a focus on designing real-time computer vision systems and another who claimed to be a very quick learner and self taught. Who would you choose? I suppose in a more perfect world, you would ask for code samples from both of them and provide a problem you wish them to solve. That said, the odds that only two people are applying for a job are slim. More likely there are many applicants and you need a way to triage them quickly.

While a degree may not contain a lot of intrinsic meaning, it does provide more of a guarantee than just a person's word.

Matt
---
Computer science is merely the post-Turing decline of formal systems theory.
--???

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