Education and Web Developers Today
Posted by David Tucker in EducationNov 14th, 2007 | 8 responsesOk, I’m looking for your input. I was intrigued to read a post by Jesse Rodgers about a recent posting from 37Signals. The summary is that 37Signals states that “We don’t put much value in formal education when deciding who to hire”.
Here was my comment to the article (on Jesse’s Blog):
I have mixed feelings about this. I do value higher education – and I actually work for a university. However, I feel that part of this problem was caused by the universities themselves. Many comp-sci students come from programs that are more than outdated. Employers then get students that have to be completely retaught. Also, it seems the standards have become a bit lax. At least now, if you get a “self-taught” worker – you can assume that they are interested in the technology and are self-motivated. You can no longer make this assumption about students coming out of a university.
Personally, I value the time I spent getting my degree, but it was not in web development (or computer science). My bachelor’s degree was in Recording Industry Production (audio recording). Do you think that a truly great developer should have a degree? Do most of the developers at your job have degrees? In computer science? What role does / should higher education play in creating good web developers?
8 Responses to “Education and Web Developers Today”
About Me
David Tucker is a Rich Internet Application developer, author, and trainer. David currently serves as a Software Engineer at Universal Mind. In addition, David also blogs regularly at InsideRIA where he produces the Weekly RIA RoundUp podcast. David also recently completed the AIR 1.5 Cookbook (with a great group of co-authors) and the Lynda.com series, AIR for Flash Developers.
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I started programming mainframes back in ’78 when there WAS no such thing as a formal education in computers, much less programming. I’ve made my living programming ever since then (currently flex/flash apps) and have never had the opportunity for formal training in any language that I’ve ever used. I actually do have a degree in Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies that I’ve never used, but just *having* a degree was a plus for me in a time when it signified that you at least had the guts to stick out a 4-year curriculum in SOME discipline.
“My bachelor’s degree was in Recording Industry Production (audio recording)”
Heh, my former life too and apart from hearing distortion on someone’s digital audio work when they can’t, not all that useful in writing applications.
HOWEVER, you did stick it out and jumped over that bar. and that perserverance MUST be worth something, yes? Mind you, I actually don’t have a degree at all and so far haven’t suffered because of it – thanks to experience and product certification (eg ColdFusion).
What happens if you have created degree courses by analyising what industry needs and structured it with massive input of industry? Things like Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment – Majoring in Animation, or Games Prograramming, etc.
Having industry representatives (eg Games companies – the hirers of completing students) being active members of your advisory committees? Surely that’s gotta count for something?
Employers sit up an take notice then?
Part of the issue is relevance of the qualification, both as far as pushing students out to hit the ground running – and into the future. Qualifications are like fruit – they only stay fresh and nutritious for so long.
but here we are training students to take up jobs that haven’t been invented yet. Things like being an expert in content (story, dialog) for computer games – WOAH! when did that happen as a career choice?
David, what is a degree? what does the paper mean? is it recognition of hurdles jumped over? is it a skills certificate? is it proof of advanced thinking and analysis?
or can a person walk into a job with a pleasant disposition, good research skills, an eye to the future and a healthy portfolio of good work?
last point (related to above): is it about skills training or thinking? Would we be better off with Degrees in Ethics or other humanities and a fist-full of trade/product certificates?
first i would like to tell u that i didn’t read that article.
i do not see the different between education and web development.i think both are same. Both have common feature of achieving some thing or learning. We can map this in to class hierarchy. Just learning/education is the super class. The specific field is the subclass. what ever you do , you have to work hard. unless you can come to top level.so this is a superclass feature. other things are depend on your interest.Although you have the knowledge ,you cant be a web developer unless u have interest. so try to work on interest fields only.
my second point is, don’t depend on the degree.Although you have the degree,may be you are not the qualified person.I tell you my personal experience. I’m studying at a campus. but i still not sure that ” am i university student?”.this is my end the second year. special reason is my degree is on IT ,which related directly to web fields or IT industry. when i was coming to IT faculty, i didn’t know anything about the IT.now i have some knowledge about IT, but the thing is i didn’t get it from faculty studies.i gain it from myself only. what I’m saying that what you learn from degree may not be useful to own interest or knowledge,whether they have same name.
just learn for yourself only…..
I agree with your comment on Jesse’s blog about the dedication and self-motivation of a self-taught individual. I feel many employers who still require a piece of paper for their IT professionals are still “old skool” in their thinking. They do not know what standards to look for when hiring nor do they know how to interview or what to ask an IT professional to take on a position. The majority of the time they don’t know the problem they are trying to solve by hiring an IT person or staff so they use the same “procedures” of what has been used for the last so many years.
My current position we can’t even find developers and are looking to the high schools for work permits and internships. Are we hurting these kids by doing this? They are getting one hell of an education in the real world but not attending a “higher education”.
I started down the path of a degree when leaving the military; major, MIS. The same core classes I feel have helped in the professional business world; however, when it came to programming any particular language I ended up leaving school as I ended up teaching my classmates more than what the instructor was teaching.
In short, yes it was beneficial to take the same old; statistics, public speaking, speech, group management, etc. but real world development experience is much more valuable than wasting your money on a piece of paper.
It kind of depends on the position requirements, doesn’t it? If the position is for full-time application development, I’ll defer to the applicant that has a Computer Science degree each and every time. They will (generally) know recursion, interfaces, class structure, and all the basics of good OO programming right off the bat. Once you know the CS basics, the learning curve for the fad-language-du-jour is generally quite small. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t hire someone without a degree, but I can guarantee you that their interview would be much more grueling. A CS degree is not all that easy to acquire and shows some serious dedication — more-so than picking up a book from Amazon and tinkering around with a latest technology.
But, in the end, recent relevant work experience really is the trump card that supersedes everything else.
@Shabbazz – I certainly see your point. I agree that a CS background helps a great deal. If I were hiring someone today, I would probably be searching for someone with a CS degree. However, I also would want to see someone with some quality portfolio items. After all, a degree isn’t worth much if you can’t prove that you actually know how to do quality development work.
The other problem is that CS students generally don’t have a good idea about the current state of the Internet and the Web. I had a CS student say to me the other day – “Why would I ever want to use a database for a website?”. I think the last time I built a site without a database was in 2001.
“A CS degree is not all that easy to acquire and shows some serious dedication”
It depends, it might he hard to get in some countries but not in each and every country. So just that someone has a certain type of degree means nothing ( it should, but at least around where I live, it does not ).
“The other problem is that CS students generally don’t have a good idea about the current state of the Internet and the Web.”
I totally agree but it’s a bit ironic. If you guys in the US are complaining about this then EU country students should all be crying by now… In my country, people get in touch with technologies like Flash, Flex, AIR only because they have foreign friends that work with Flash, Flex or AIR. Or because of they local friends but who too got in touch with Flash, Flex, AIR because of other foreign friends or accidentally ( Google, Forums, and so on ).
We are still learning C, Lisp, Prolog and by “learning” I mean a “We don’t do anything else” ( OK, except for Java and C++ ; these are the lucky situations ). I’m not saying that C, Lisp or Prolog are bad just that instead of focusing on languages that are “a bit” out of date is crazy. Not only we don’t do Flex or C# or whatever language you prefer but 90% of our teachers don’t even know what those languages are and that’s sad…
Ok, back on topic: If I were to hire someone, I’d definitely look at a portfolio ( if he has one; even if he was a freelancer for a long time with small projects ), ask domain related question, ask about design patterns, OOP and so on and choose based on his answers. I honestly wouldn’t care if he has no education at all, if the guy knows his thing, in my opinion, he deserves a chance “from life”. People shouldn’t judge based on appearance or on how many papers one has but on what one knows and how he behaves.
@Barna – Thanks for your comments – I think we pretty much see eye to eye on this issue.