[ale] CS Degree necessary?

[Michael E. Barker]

As soon as I read this most interesting thread I thought of "A Portrait of J.
Random Hacker" Appendix B from "The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.3.1,
29 JUN 2001"  The cited section is:

Education

Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated
to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by
other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be
more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which
people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the obvious computer
science and electrical engineering) physics,
mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

A couple things stand out in the above.

1)  You don't have to go to college to be a proficient hacker.
2)  If you do go to college you don't have to be a computer major to be a
proficient hacker.

IMHO it all comes down to what you want.  Do you want to have a <joke>CS in
BS?</joke>  If you do go for it.  Do you want to obtain a job just to move up
through the ranks (and pay with some exception) or do you want to hands on
design and code some really cool sh..tuff?

Take some time to evaluate you.  Write down everything you want and then go back
through that and decide what is most important to you.  Use that as guide to
plan your career including your education.

I don't have a BS just a technical diploma.  But I have not used any of my
academic languages professionally.  I'm currently not employed but I do every
day what I love to do.  I also spend energy and time every day to further my
education in many areas of my life.  I have continually done just that since
high shool.

If I were to go for the BS I would tend to lean toward just proving what an
earlier reply stated in that I can go the distance.

But this is me.  You figure out what you want and go for it.

-Michael


>
> > Hi,
> >       I know a similar thread has gone on in this list a while
> > back but for
> > one I'm too lazy right now to go back and try to find it and two I don't
> > recall well enough if it addressed this exact topic.
> >       Right now I am set up to major in Computer Science but I've
> > only been
> > taking general education core classes so far. I was talking to people
> > about some of the classes for the major and I took a look through them
> > myself and I'm not sure how interested I am in taking half of them. I'd
> > like to have a career in computers but I don't know how much I'll enjoy
> > this major.
> >       Is a CS degree really necessary in the real world for computer jobs?
> > What are the advantages/disadvantages to having it? Anything else to
> > add?
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> >
> > ---
> > This message has been sent through the ALE general discussion list.
> > See http://www.ale.org/mailing-lists.shtml for more info.
> > Problems should be
> > sent to listmaster at ale dot org.
> >
> >


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