Do you observe a trend that your company hires a lot of new grads from non-cs (excluding ee/ce) backgrounds? How competent are they? Reference: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-tech-companies-hire-so-many-software-engineers-from-non-CS-backgrounds
I am non-CS. I think I’m pretty competent. ;)
They get hired to fix poorly written code by other non-CS majors, hence the cycle continues. Thanks LC. People learn, companies don’t.
Cs majors don’t to anything relevant to the industry at the university so it’s ok..
That's weird, because I did a shit ton of programming in college which happens to be exactly what I do now.
I am not CS, but worked in software engineering for more than 20 years.
Does a 4 year college degree, and more like only 2 years were specific CS classes, really make a difference to those employees with 5,10,15 YOE? I’ll be the first to proclaim I learned little of value from my CS degree. While giving me fundamentals yes, most of which I learned on the job anyways.
May be you went to a school where unfortunately you were not equipped with the cs knowledge you need. In the industry though there is lot of work which does not need CS fundamentals.
Amazing devs on my team who weren’t CS majors. They are razor smart though.
Did they change careers? How did they get through?
Yup changed careers or did MS in computer science.
Eh you don’t need a great deal of competence to work as an sde. The fact that a lot of non-cs grads are getting hired in these positions speaks to that.
Does English major followed by bootcamp count as CS degree? Lots of people on my team think so, though they are bootcamp grads.
Can they get an advanced degree in CS? No. So no it doesn't count. They'd have to take 2 years of courses just to start a master's program.
Funny you mention that. Everyone I talk to in that bucket thinks an undergrad CS degree is completely useless, let alone an advanced degree. Most just program in a single language, JavaScript, and consider themselves world class devs. None work on backend infra, or anything low level. And they are kind of right. It takes 6 months for anyone to become a JavaScript expert and requires no knowledge of recursion, DP, OS design, compiler design, algs or DS, etc
You dont need to be a CS major to do really well if you have the brains and passion. I know some 6s and 7s that never went through any formal studies
And I know a few 6’s and 7’s that I had a pretty good time with ;-)
Funny
Most of SDE positions are for mundane work. People learn.