I'm hardly one to jump on the "CS degrees are useless" bandwagon -- different discussion, but suffice it to say that I believe they're a great thing to have and are generally a good stepping stone to a career in software.
I interviewed a man last week who had a CS degree from a good school and had been working in industry for two years, two different companies. Couldn't answer any of my technical questions. Couldn't describe, even in broad strokes, how his websites worked behind the scenes (as in "request sent to this server, server accesses DB, server sends this response, mail server sends an alert, etc") Couldn't answer basic questions about his own code (I believe he wrote it, but perhaps with a lot of copy/pasting)
I asked him why he majored in CS. He says that the recession had a big influence on him and he wanted to make a lot of money :-p Okay then! That explained a lot. I don't think programming is as hard as it's often made out to be on HN, but it's a really difficult field if you don't like it.
I interviewed a man last week who had a CS degree from a good school and had been working in industry for two years, two different companies. Couldn't answer any of my technical questions. Couldn't describe, even in broad strokes, how his websites worked behind the scenes (as in "request sent to this server, server accesses DB, server sends this response, mail server sends an alert, etc") Couldn't answer basic questions about his own code (I believe he wrote it, but perhaps with a lot of copy/pasting)
I asked him why he majored in CS. He says that the recession had a big influence on him and he wanted to make a lot of money :-p Okay then! That explained a lot. I don't think programming is as hard as it's often made out to be on HN, but it's a really difficult field if you don't like it.