Self-taught, but did go to college to study computer science (even though I didn't learn all that much in college). Currently trying to go back to programming after several years of working on other things...

I'm self-taught; I learned to program Basic on a TRS-80, asm, pascal (BP7), C++ on cast-off machines from my dad's business as a teen. Over the last year I've learned (and love) C#. I've worked for a IBM, a drug company, a law-firm, and audio-production company. For the audio-production company I built a point-of-sale, rental management, inventory tracking and messaging system. Since then I've always been able to get jobs relating to computers in someway, although right now I am mainly a hardware technician and help-desk support; which isn't really where I want to be. (Although not as bad as when I worked at a 24hour NOC, I get vacation time and normal-human working hours) I could blame the economy for lack of jobs, but the truth is whereas a few years ago it would have been easy to get a job on the merit of your work-portfolio and experience, now it is much harder to get an interview without a degree to your name.

I went to school for music, because it was my passion; it taught me a lot about how I learn and how to approach learning complex subjects and the necessity for academic rigour. Programming is also my passion, which is why I am planning on starting a CS degree next fall, if all goes according to plan. In some ways, I wish I had reversed the approach and gone to school for CS first because although I have always made my income from computers, my pay has not matched my skill set and the jobs have been under stimulating. If I had gotten a CS degree from the starting block, I would have had better jobs, more pay and more freedom now to pursue more education - which is my ultimate passion: learning!

As someone who has worked hard to build experience from boring retail jobs to even break into a computer-related field I can say in all honesty that getting a degree will make your life easier in the long run. I don't feel that I need a degree to get where I want, but I know for certain that it will help me reach my goals faster.

(I will say that it is incredibly frustrating that I work with programmers who are paid more than twice as much as me, who don't write multithreaded code, who don't catch&deal with exceptions, who don't unit-test, etc. That may be a cultural problem where I work though. The bottom line is that simple stuff breaks all the time here, and I won't get the opportunity to write better apps for our users because my experience does not equal a CS degree from 1978 in the eyes of the people that do the hiring; and because of the lack of accreditation to my name, my suggestions are not taken seriously)

One piece of advise I can give to anybody trying to work up without a degree is that if you see the opportunity to write some code, no matter where you work or what your job is, propose it to management. Demonstrate how your idea will improve things and try your hardest to get a piece of your code out there and running in a commercial environment. Once you've done that you have something concrete you can take to other employers to show that your competency exceeds the scope of your 'on paper' education.

Quote: Original post by djz
(I will say that it is incredibly frustrating that I work with programmers who are paid more than twice as much as me, who don't write multithreaded code, who don't catch&deal with exceptions, who don't unit-test, etc. That may be a cultural problem where I work though. The bottom line is that simple stuff breaks all the time here, and I won't get the opportunity to write better apps for our users because my experience does not equal a CS degree from 1978 in the eyes of the people that do the hiring; and because of the lack of accreditation to my name, my suggestions are not taken seriously)

Without knowing how old you are its hard to say but it could be a case of that bit of paper + expected experiance is considered greater than your experiance. Although, while experiance is all well and good it certainly shouldn't be the end of it; someone might have 20 years commerical experiance but if they haven't kept their skills up to date it could be next to worthless...

The other problem is that all degrees are not created equally; I'm a fan of people having a degree if only because it means you should be able to expect certain things from them. However, unfortunately, being able to code isn't one of those things. The two runs at an Software Engineering degree I took didn't teach me to code; they did teach me project management skills and filled in some of the gaps with my design skills, but programming as in using the languages... hell no.. simply because the time wasn't taken.

Concurrency was touched upon a bit, same with exceptions, but to no real depth. These are things you do need to pick up on your own it seems, which isn't a good thing in my opinion.

When it comes to degree vs no degree of someone at fresh out of uni age, then I'd prefer to work with the degree student if only because they will have been forced to at least complete things during their stay there and do such things as work in a team etc. which helps in the work place.

As for my own history; langauges wise I'm self taught, design wise a lot of it has come from my time at uni. even if some was just reaffirming my way of thinking about things.

That said, while I feel getting a degree is worth while there certainly shouldn't be any hurry behind it if you don't feel you need to. There is too much presure on people to finish school, goto uni, get a degree then get a job; in fact it bothers me that we sometimes get 13 year olds on here worrying they started late and generally worrying about their futures... sure when I was 13 I was coding but I was also running about outside and not caring about the future. I did the school -> uni thing and got burnt out on it, it wasn't until I was 25 and had generally bummed about for 4 years having failed out of uni that I felt ready to go back and give it another shot completing it second time around.

But I'm rambling...

Quote: Original post by phantom
When it comes to degree vs no degree of someone at fresh out of uni age, then I'd prefer to work with the degree student if only because they will have been forced to at least complete things during their stay there and do such things as work in a team etc. which helps in the work place.

This was one of the major benefits to music school. I learned many techniques and approaches to practicing/composing/etc. while I was there, but a lot of what I learned was my own research; either gleaned from conversations with profs outside of class, or taking private lessons on the side etc. much of which I could have accomplished on my own, if I would have had a more comprehensive understanding of music before I went into the program.

What would have been much harder to learn on my own was networking, learning to work with groups of other musicians, organizing and conducting rehearsals; proper formatting of sheet music, theater set-ups, accepted professional conduct for musicians; i.e. you may not be Beethoven, but everyone who completed the program could be assumed to have a common level of competency. Now, if a gig comes along and I have to learn a bunch of material in a short space of time, I know with confidence that I can do it correctly and professionally. There are many great musicians that I love to play with for fun, but would not consider doing a gig with because they lackprofessional music skills, even if they are wonderful players in their basement.

Not that you need to go to school for that, but it definitely helped. Your personal skills are easy to upgrade on your own time, but professional skills have to be learned from other professionals.

Quote: Original post by djz
(I will say that it is incredibly frustrating that I work with programmers who are paid more than twice as much as me, who don't write multithreaded code, who don't catch&deal with exceptions, who don't unit-test, etc. That may be a cultural problem where I work though. The bottom line is that simple stuff breaks all the time here, and I won't get the opportunity to write better apps for our users because my experience does not equal a CS degree from 1978 in the eyes of the people that do the hiring; and because of the lack of accreditation to my name, my suggestions are not taken seriously)

I do a lot of interviewing and trust me there are a lot of Computer professionals with lots of degrees we come across that do not ever manage to get very simple basics right and then expect to get hired. A lot of resumes reach us after a lot of filtering - and HR's are rarely technical so they have a hard time getting us really good candidates. Unfortunately the common ideology is if the person has no degree then he probably doesn't fit here.

Regarding your frustration above - every junior programmer faces that frustrations. As a senior programmer in my company currently I still face those issues irrespective of paper degrees or your accredition. Many times these are management issues (management is not interested in what you say), sometimes its a time issue - no one has the time to spend on it. However the only way to show you are right or wrong or if it saves money is to do what you exactly said below(I have quoted it for clarity) - show the management how it saves money. I am pretty sure no one in your company is stopping you from doing those tasks yourself i.e. if you can find some free time within your schedule to do it.

Quote:
One piece of advise I can give to anybody trying to work up without a degree is that if you see the opportunity to write some code, no matter where you work or what your job is, propose it to management. Demonstrate how your idea will improve things and try your hardest to get a piece of your code out there and running in a commercial environment. Once you've done that you have something concrete you can take to other employers to show that your competency exceeds the scope of your 'on paper' education.

All you need to do is follow your own advise :).

Now coming to how I started - I started playing around with Logo when I was a kid and hardly had access to a PC. Then I did Mechanical engineering and then got into game development somehow. Was mostly self taught programmer but having another engineering degree than Computer Science probably helped a lot. Also did my masters in Information tech to fill the holes in my Software engineering skills. Worked a lot as a programmer to fill more holes.