Is going to college for CS even worth it?

Just curious, I am looking to start my career in Computer Science and I'm wondering if a CS degree is even worth it today. I seriously don't feel like going to college if it will drain my precious time and money away

NO NO NO NO NO
Don't make the same mistake I did.

Going to college to learn anything computer related is a waste of your time, money and energy.

If you go to a top 20 school yes.

Else, don't even bother

As long the college is well known, and not some for profit ITT tech copy.

I'm doing CS at a small, private rich kids liberal arts college, so I guess I'll find out

I don't think I can go to a well known college, I currently have a 2.5 GPA (I fucked up freshman and sophomore year) and I doubt well known colleges will accept a 2.5.

CS major is only good for mathematical shit and scientific computing that no one likes to do but mathfags and real CSfags

If there was more "Programming Associate" degree, the degree wouldn't have a bad fame around here and would be truly science

How liberal is your college, user?

It's okay. Some trump support, some transpolynesian dragonkin

It's what you'd expect at any college

Depends on several things:
Where you live is a biggie: Densely populated areas are more likely to be swamped with people all with CS or working towards it. Job prospects will be poor. Two, what job are you wanting. Some cases a CS degree is overkill, certifications can land you a decent job without the expensive cost a CS degree entails. Also you end up cutting out all the BS classes and focus on strictly what you need to learn in order to pass the certification exam. Note that hands on experience is always a plus, load up a copy of Windows,Linux, windows server, or all the above in a VM and practice with them. Build a pc from parts. Setup a windows domain network. you get the idea

Yes. You don't see "self taught" idiots making 200k at Google and Facebook in their early twenties.

Printer installer detected

I don't think you know what CS grads do

It's all normalfags now.

Instead of spending 60K on college, you could work on certs.

Comptia A+ and Net+
CCNA, MSCE, RHEL

Learn bash, power shell, and a basic scripting language like python or ruby

Congrats, you spent 1 year studying and 5K and can now start entry jobs making 50K+

And people with CS degrees make 3-4x that starting out.

Certs are worthless and a literal scam racket now that they expire 2 years after receiving them.
Technology doesn't move THAT fast.

Is computer/electrical engineering at ut Austin a good idea?
How about CS as my minor?

>kek
Keep telling yourself that. Not everyone who graduates starts google or Facebook. You're lucky to start at 40K anywhere outside of a city.

hahaha 'self-taught' idiots. some of the best programmers are self taught dude.

jobs for 200k hire talent talent != education.

are most talented programmers graduates of cs probably but that doesn't mean aself taught programmer isn't working at google or facebook.

I did CS at a college with a huge internship program with connections to Lockheed, SAP, and Oracle. I got a job in defense before I even graduated.

It's all about what college you pick.

t. neet

>t. NEET who can't even get his resume past automated HR filters

no it's ad hominem. you're literally realizing what you said is stupid you think justbecause you got a cs degree you're guranteed a 200k job?

only the best programmers get them jobs and trust me there's some good fucking self taught programmers who are out there getting that.

Don't listen to these people. Yes, it is absolutely worth it. Take on the student loans as you'll repay them easily with CS career money. Experience the university life. Have a bit of fun.

If not, good luck getting interviews. You're not getting in the door without a degree.

whatever you say pal
you're not getting any interviews without a BSc at a minimum.

The only way to achieve what you're suggesting is through nepotism, and this has absolutely nothing to do with your skill.

or, uh, yknow... a decent portfolio, which any self taught programmer would have..

Ahh yes, a decent github profolio which you can pay Pajeet to make under your name. That totally proves you know what you're doing well enough to spend time and resources interviewing you over Mike the MIT grad with a 3.9 GPA.

Pretty much this, although I'd say top 10 rather than 20. The top 10 offer unique opportunities for advancement. Everything else is just paying a lot of money for little other than what's available online and giving you little opportunity to network with anyone worth your time.

it'll get you past HR and then the onus is on you to prove you know your shit

i mean sure, if there's an MIT grad applying as well you're mostly shit of luck, but that will also apply in a situation where anyone with a degree not from MIT, so I'm not sure what you're getting at

is it better to have a degree? absolutely, this was never disputed. the original argument was whether or not self taught programmers can be great programmers, and that is absolutely true.

I got an job as an engineer at a Fortune 500 tech company with a humanities degree. This is one of the last industries left where skills matter more than degrees.

Dear Sup Forums,

How do I make money without investing time to learn skills?
I'm sure there's some simple trick to it, it's just that no one's
bothered to ask.

Sincerely,
O.P. Faggot.

PS: I suck cocks

The HR drone skimming through resumes doesn't even know what a github is, they'll just see you lack the minimum number of keywords and trash your resume.
There's a reason why you don't get a rejection email most of the time, you didn't even make it past the initial pruning round to where an actual HR person would look through your resume and start making some phone calls.

i did my undergrad in a social sciences program and concurrently in a CS program so you could say that when i was metaphorically offered soup or salad i panicked and asked for both. the upside is that i can answer anonymous questions on Sup Forums, so it was all worth it. for a bit more context, right now i'm a PhD student in a good, CS program you would know, but i spent some time in industry first.

you haven't explained what your alternatives are, but my hunch is that you should study CS. the over-under on a CS degree is good. you're very likely to make all the money you spent on university back within a few years, provided your program isn't garbage.

if your alternative proposition is to study something like sociology or linguistics or something, really really strongly consider finding an application of these fields (like computational social sciences or NLP) that involves computers. then at *least* minor in CS, preferably double major, so you can show up to some place and say "i'm a linguist, but it also happens that i can pass the technical interview your straight up software engineer applicants have to pass". if the company is doing NLP stuff, that's extraordinarily compelling.

if your alternative is to study another STEM field, the real question is which one you enjoy more. whether you're doing Mech Eng or EE or CE or CS, you're *probably* going to make enough money to make mortgage payments, pay for food, and find an expensive hobby like travel, photography, paying hookers for sex, or some combination of the three. the key is to just find something that you enjoy enough that you won't be burnt out. otherwise you're not going to get to that point where you make enough money to travel around the world taking photos of women you pay to have sex.

and if you don't get there, then it was all a fucking waste.

For every 100 people who claim that they are "self taught" programmers there's probably one who is actually competent. For every 100 people with CS degrees, there might be 20. Good companies have plenty of quality applicants, they don't need to waste their time and resources interviewing people with no real certification of their skill.

Fucking Zuck was self taught

ya but what if you made a highly recognized piece of software.

you programmed your ass off you know these languages inside and out you made complex software all by yourself.

you're better then someone who just graduated with a cs degree. you're probably more easily trainable if you even need trained.

>degree
you're not refuting anything I said

>Not putting your cock sucking passion towards a lucrative career in sucking more cocks

And you think that people who study CS at a top university just circlejerk to automata and monads for 4 years?

Yep, he developed facebook at harvard while he was visiting his friend and definitely not attending

i think the numbers are higher, but the spread is actually generous. i'd say self taught is probably 10 to 1 odds, but university graduates are usually 2 to 1. on a hundred scale that's 10% chance vs 50% chance, which is way more generous than you gave for either, but the delta is even greater.

i don't know i've never studied computer science but i heard many people say when they graduated tehy felt they didn't even know how to build software so.....

i went to a university ranked in the 30-40 range in the world and had no trouble after university.

i think the tolerance for non-US universities is extremely poor, but the tolerance for US universities is high. if you go to a place outside of the US, it should be among the 10 best universities not in the US. that's not quite as bad as it sounds, because most rankings put like 5-8 american universities in the top 10 (so my requirement frees up some room), but it's still not good odds.

Certs are way more relevant, don't do a degree.

>50k
lol

not the guy you replied to, but i want to point out that your anecdotal experience doesn't mean a whole lot. your circle of friends probably doesn't capture competent programmers, and whatever you see on the internet would be people complaining. and nobody's going to complain that they feel too comfortable doing something. you're just going to hear people bitch about how ill-prepared they are.

if you're not a project manager or even an engineer, you're probably just not getting a sufficiently large *random* sample to make any conclusions. and it'd be dangerous to make decisions based on your data.

You need to know how you learn. I'm not very disciplined, and I struggle to find the creativity and curiosity to force myself to self-teach concepts.

School keeps me accountable. Also, it is good for networking, which matters. Autists on Sup Forums might say otherwise, but it can important to getting your foot in the door.

If you go to college for a degree separate than CS, and then self-teach CS, that could be good. But then you might be swamped with that work to do, meaning you might not self-teach.

Just know yourself, my guy.

>self taught
His dad has him privately tutored as a child.
That's like saying Tiger Woods is self taught.

If you had the skills required to stick to rigorous self-paced, self-driven learning you probably wouldn't be asking this question. Go to an accredited school and you should be fine.

>tfw self-taught neet
>applied to at least 100 different companies this year
>described some projects on my resume instead of adding software job experience because i have none
>nobody replies to my resume
>nobody send me rejection letters
>24 and too late to start a CS degree
i'd be competing with 22 year olds in my 30s im so fucked
i'm seriously considering just getting a CDL and becoming a truck driver like my old man, at least he could nepotism me a job or something.

the "rigorous" bit is key. whenever i meet "self taught" programmers it always turns out that they just skipped some concept that they didn't grok. it's always something different, but everyone has a thing (or two or three) that just took them longer to understand.

if you're self taught, you just ignore it. you find workarounds or quietly avoid stuff that taps into that knowledge. like if you don't understand recursion or something, you don't fuck with recursive approaches.

but if you're taking a course, you'll start to tank in that course. you'll fail at some point unless you go and either make someone explain it to you, or really put your nose to the grindstone until you get it.

it's that outside assessment that even autodidacts don't necessarily get.

Why haven't your projects made you any money? If they made you money, that's a programming job, you just happen to also own the company.

Making shit for people that people are willing to pay for is always a job.

And if you haven't been making things that are worth something to somebody, what the fuck have you been doing?

This is the only reason to do formal education.

If your school isn't in a city with the industry you're interested in then you're fucked.

Are you Indian?

No,

Lol good luck

>If they made you money, that's a programming job, you just happen to also own the company.
not him, but it's not a company if you have something on the web that happens to generate ad revenue or even subscriber/donation revenue. it's just a source of income. that's not a job.

there's a (maybe subtle, but important) difference between any random source of income and a job.

>considering just getting a CDL and becoming a truck driver like my old man, at least he could nepotism me a job or something.
you should talk to your dad. i'm not sure that commercial truck drivers have the pull with hiring and firing that you think they have. and given how aggressively uber and others are pursuing self driving cars, i really don't think now's the time to dive into a career involving driving.

there will probably be people behind the wheel of a truck, but those people will be marginalized to the point that a fraction of the people doing it now will be able to make a living doing it in 20 years. it's one of the worse bets you can make.

What he's describing could also be "Imposter Syndrome". It's really common in programmers - especially good, diligent programmers who know a lot of stuff.

Yes, absolutely true.

Most of the CS grads I've interviewed don't know their asses from a hole in the ground. It's not that hard to follow instructions for four years and get your piece of paper. Teaching yourself to the point that you're able to make a significant contribution to a real-world project requires a lot more initiative and says a lot about the person who did it.

Some CS grads really know what they're doing, but a lot don't, and universities don't make money by failing people. Universities spend more money on marketing to convince you that your degree is worthwhile than they spend on educating you, and it's in their best interest to keep as many people in the programs as long as possible.

The biggest disadvantage self-taught programmers tend to have is lack of breadth. They may be experts in one particular topic, but may not have come across the full range of topics a CS grad has. On the other hand, being a specialist is usually fine in industry, and a lot of the more theoretical concepts in CS don't come up in day-to-day work.

>self-driving trucks
Nobody is going to want to share the road with autonomous 18 wheelers careening down the road with NO DRIVER.
There's tons of nuance involved with interfacing a huge fucking truck alongside regular traffic.

And have you ever interviewed someone who claimed they were self taught? 99% of the time they can't even write a FizzBuzz.

Are you in the US? If so, nobody cares how old you are for a tech job.

Yes, and true, but 99% of CS grads can't either.

What do y'all suggest for someone with a math degree that is self teaching atm?

No. The number is much lower for CS grads, especially if you filter to only respected universities.

>Certs are worthless and a literal scam racket now that they expire 2 years after receiving them.
they're expensive when you don't have a job
when you do have a job they're an easy write off along with countless other things

that's absolutely true. but i really feel like there's a sampling bias on the web where people draw these conclusions by the amount of complaining that they see, which is useful for gauging the amount of complaining there is, but not necessarily much else.

Why would you get a cert when already employed?

Whatever you say. All I know is I've seen plenty of CS grads who have no idea what they doing, and more than half of the people I work with do not have formal backgrounds in computer science.

i specifically said that they would be supervised. that's what "behind the wheel" means. but given that their responsibilities will be curtailed (e.g. to overriding and pumping the brakes and little else), the requirements on them will be vastly diminished and compensation will scale back considerably.

You get out of college what you put in.
If all you do is the bare minimum of classwork, it definitely is not worth it.

One thing college does offer is a lot of free time, so if you use that free time to build up a portfolio of projects, you'll have a really nice resume when you graduate.
Combine that with some networking (yes, I know) and you'll be in a pretty good place.

>Combine that with some networking (yes, I know) and you'll be in a pretty good place.
you say that like you have to put on a suit and tie and stand around in an auditorium making small talk with people. "networking" in college is literally just making friends with people who aren't train wrecks. if you really want to blow people away, go to a career fair or two, apply for a bunch of internships, do 1 or 2 over the summers between years, et voila.

if you do all 3 of those things (make friends with non-train-wrecks, go to career fairs, and do internships) and you DON'T have multiple viable job offers right out of college, i honestly don't know what to say.

and before anyone posts the
>internships
>working for nothing
joke: tech internships pay around 8k per month. my internship at MSR paid closer to 9k and returning years would pay more.

Because you work at a shitty company that values certs. Government and consulting love that shit.

>"networking" in college is literally just making friends with people who aren't train wrecks.
not sure if you were in a CS program or not, I wasn't, but I did take some CS courses and "train wreck" is insufficient to describe the magnitude of failure that a lot of those people reeked of

that's definitely true, but unless you're at a very very very small university, you should be able to find a cohort of people in your department who aren't idiots. and you WILL need to make a slight effort to meet people in other departments who are cool, but undergrad is such a great time for that. god, i miss it. being a grad student is awful for broad networking

Some, but most went through a organized education system ie. college.

Also talent != knowledge and skill

You don't see talented doctors giving you your quadruple bypass, you fat little dick. You see skilled doctors.

tl;dr gb2codecademy

Is 4 year CE in a community college worth it?

Daily reminder that the only non-meme undergrad degrees are JD, Biomedical Engineering, RN and MD

Study something related instead like statistics and get a data science job.

you can always transfer if you want. that's what i did.
my highschool gpa was shit, so i applied to a 4 year school that had like 97% percent acceptance rate. then i just kept my gpa up by taking pickaprof classes and was able to transfer to better university after a year.
the schools were utsa and ut austin, so it was easier, but you can do the same from a community college. probably just need to keep a higher gpa. think i transferred with like a 3.6. i wasn't in the guaranteed transfer program though, so i was kind of shitting myself waiting to hear back.

>recursive function
People still do this shit? There are always first years I suppose

Do you not like math? Do you hate math? Do you just want to program to make vidyagames and an "AI" waifu? Do you want to just learn every programming languages?

if you answered yes to any, don't go, stay home and learn programming, you're not looking for computer science