Just as I’ve seen incompetent developers without a CS degree I’ve also seen quite a few developers with degrees who have either simply not had “it” when it came to understanding computers, had never really bothered to learn the subject matter while in school (and had little interest in it outside of work/school even if they had potential) and finally those who seemed to think that their degree made them infallible (these would be the guys Joel refers to as “architecture astronauts” and who tend to love premature optimization).

Sure, there may be plenty of incompetent non-degreed developers out there who couldn’t explain the difference between a linked list, an array and a binary tree if their lives depended on it but there is no shortage of incompetent developers with degrees either.

If, on the other hand, you pig-headedly decide that everything you taught yourself out of “C++ in a Weekend” is enough to get you going for life and that anything they say at a University that doesn’t conform to your pre-conceived notions of how to do things is worthless… in that case, a CS degree is a complete waste of time.

I think the big problem with CS that you don’t get with a lot of other fields is that it’s so easy to start writing code when you’re a dumb little kid, and you grow up thinking you’re so awesome because it’s a fun and ego-boosting experience… and then when old people try to tell you that there’s a better way, you just can’t handle it.

IMHO, one of the most important parts of a CS degree is the math. Not just the math classes, but the math you get in the CS classes. In my eyes, a person who can write a decent proof is in a different league than someone who cannot. I know many CS majors who cannot write decent proofs. I know several who can. I wonder whether or not the people who say that college is unimportant for CS think that mathematical ability is worthwhile for software development.

(and Physicists are terrible programmers, but good problem solvers. I, for one, would restrict a physicist to coming up with algorithms, rather than doing any implementation or architecture at all. Jeez…)

I am one of those ignorant dolts without a CS degree (well, I was until I recently took time out to get an MSc in GIS – not sure if that even counts as CS) but I’ve been working mainly as a database programmer for about 20 years. I got into IT on the back of a few CS classes at university in the 1980s, plus an aptitude test that alleged I might be able to write programs. But my major degree was in languages. Go figure.

So far, I’ve had a pretty good run, enjoyed the work, learned a lot, and worked with a lot of interesting people, some with and some without CS degrees. And with all respect to those of you who are real CS experts, I have to say that most IT jobs (even careers) really don’t need a CS degree, and I’ve seen no correlation at all between successful programmers and CS graduates in the places I’ve worked. Some CS grads are great and I’ve learned a lot from them. Others are simply too academic in orientation to grasp the practical needs of their clients/customers. Equally, some of the best developers I’ve worked with are people who got into IT simply because they loved it or discovered to their surprise that they were good at it, rather than via the academic sausage-machine.

Of course, there are important areas of IT where the detailed understanding of computing theory provided by a CS degree is invaluable e.g. I’d never get a job at Google because I don’t have the paper (or the brains). But most IT jobs are not like that – most of us are not “computer scientists”, we’re just software developers of various kinds, perhaps with a background in CS, perhaps not, and maybe some of us need to recognise that we should take pride in our work for its own sake, rather than trying to cast it – somewhat awkwardly – into the class of “Science”. Software development is at least partly a practical craft, albeit one informed by science.

But what everybody in IT needs is the ability to go out and figure stuff out for themselves, resorting to colleagues, books, online material, whatever they need to keep learning their craft, because the pace of change will wipe you out otherwise. And it’s fun anyway.

Dipping back into my language background, I see most programmers as being a bit like translators, whose job is to translate the user’s requirements as best they can into elegant, accurate and efficient computer code, using whatever tools and knowledge they can find to make that job easier.

True, there is also a need for the equivalent of academic linguistic scientists – people who can analyse language itself and give us more insight into what we do, and perhaps point us towards ways of doing it better. But I’m not convinced you need a detailed academic understanding of e.g. tranformational grammar in order to translate elegantly, accurately and efficiently from Userese into Computerese.

Of course, unlike most working linguists, we have to be ready to become literate in a new language every year or two at least, learn new grammars, new vocabularies, new ways of thinking about what we do. A CS degree is one way to gain a headstart on that process, but it’s the process itself that makes you a better programmer, not the paperwork.

But don’t get me started on the inane buzzword-bingo approach of many employers, who would rather recruit somebody with a grand total of 1 year’s experience, all of it with version 9.9.9.9 of some fashionable software package, than recruit an “old-timer” who has 20 years’ experience of IT but has only used version 9.9.9.8 of the damned “must-have” package. Your CS degree doesn’t make any difference at all to these people – as Andreas says, in this market it’s all about having the right buzzwords on your application form. Bah.

Anyway, that’s my very biased low-level view from the trenches. Now I’d better get back to learning some new stuff!

My conclusion is that without any practical skill or experience in a mass market your DOOMED.