BSc. in computer science - worth the money?

I think everyone has a different opinion about this subject. I personally agree with you that teaching stuff yourself is a good way to practice. Besides that I think that a combination of self- teaching (hobby) and courses/classes is the best way. Sometimes It's good to see other perspectives than what you're learning yourself.

I'm primarily self-taught. No degree. Still make a pretty comfortable living. I have always been of the opinion that the self-taught people generally are a better hire than someone fresh out of school as they've learned the 'what not to do' having struggled and broken things in their learning that often just doesn't come up in college courses.

My guess is that a comp science course might give you more options on where to go next. Learning web site development online really just allows you to learn more of that, but a computer science course would probably introduce you to a wider, richer world than just making web pages show content pulled out of a database.

yes, really worth

What do you want to work with when you are finished? This is not necessarily the right degree if you want to work with such things as Laravel.

I see no problem in self taught, but since you don't get diplomas you need to make some prototypes, examples or use cases instead that you can show when you apply for jobs. These are worth way more than a diploma though.

When I did job interviews, they always asked me for my experience and said they didn't care about my education, because a lot are educated in the IT field, but have no clue how to face new problems. By this I mean college as well as university degrees. It is an area that requires a lot from you, in order to be efficient for the companies. Except if your plan is to do maintenance of existing systems only.

Luckily I'm from a part of the world where educations are free, so I have no clue what you have to pay for it. As far as I know, all the MIT courses are for free online with video, but you need to pay for the exams.

@EmilMoe, I envy your free education. You Euros are quite lucky to be able to go to school for free. Here, in Canada, education costs an arm and a leg. Seems to me that Americans and Canadians are getting a bad deal.

I did my CS degree (didn't quite finish it for various reasons, but was very successful at the 80% I did) and I'm happy I did it.

I'm German, and I didn't pay a dime for it either. Actually got 200€ as a welcome bonus from the city because they get tax €€€ per student. So over here, it's not so much of a tough decision, especially since you CAN make a living on only about 800€/mo compared to most US / Canadian cities (I lived in Vancouver for a while, $800 would have been the rent for a doghouse over there).

Here's my take on it: If all you want is learn to code and get a job in coding, don't do it. Especially if you're spending several years on it and have to take on debt, it's a bad decision. Because as a matter of fact, a CS degree doesn't really teach you to code. At least mine didn't.

Plus, developers are wanted so much these days that employers don't necessarily expect a CS degree for developers. So that's an upside.

If you're serious about computer SCIENCE (hence the name), a CS degree is super cool. It's not just coding, it's a whole new mindset of divide and conquer, recursion and what not. Advanced math. Solving problems. Binging docs. Geeking out on the latest AI and bot stuff. Taking apart the latest Kinect and playing with it. Logic and more logic. That's what CS is about. Hardcore engineering and science stuff.

Even in a CS degree, they expect you to learn to code yourself. So if that's all you want to do, the best degree you can get is Laracasts ;-)

I am about to start my CS Degree in the UK. I have been creating websites and programming for around six years and have no problem finding a job. However, I want to become a better programmer and think like a computer scientist. Also, I know that even if I want to stay in web dev, I will have a better chance in getting a higher job role because I am self taught but had the gumption to do a CS Degree.

It is worth noting that the tide has shifted in the past several years. Where it used to be that without a degree getting an interview was difficult, now without experience you'll have a much harder time finding a job. A degree might help you get a higher starting salary, but even with a degree if you lack real-world experience you'll find it more difficult to get a job.

The only thing a degree is a guarantee of is out of pocket expense (unless you live somewhere that fully subsidizes college). The days of a degree meaning a better quality of life, or better employment are kind of behind us.. too many college grads with no real skills or life experience.

I'm about to start this here in New Zealand: http://www.ara.ac.nz/study-options/qualifications-and-courses/programmes/Bachelor-of-Information-and-Communication-Technologies.xml

Was thinking about going to University instead to study Computer Science since my College don't offer it but not certain.

I've self taught myself, yes i fairly don't have a clue about how things actually work but i figure it out day by day. College/Uni don't really teach you shit, I just completed Level 4 (the degree is Level 7) and they said, "Once you hit the degree, they just tell you to go away and do it" but it was the exact same thing in Level 4, they really don't teach you anything to be honest, they just provide you with the task. I was looking forward to doing the "small" web development course in level 4, turned out, they didn't tell you what PHP/HTML or anything was, it was literally just a "copy this" and "enter this".

And where am I so far? $12,000 in debt for just level 4 and i really haven't learned jack shit.

I just wanted to add that you can almost always find somewhere, where you can work for free. If you are really focused this should give you both experience but also new knowledge, especially if you force yourself to the books. But don't keep the job for a long time, if it doesn't give you new challenges.

I have been reading programming books in my sparetime since I was 13 because I wanted to learn it. I never read any of the programming books in my schools though, usually I found other books on same topic, but more interesting for me, that way I fast forwarded my understandning curve because it was so easy to relate things.

For example we had a course on DBMS and SQL and got a generic monster book on 1800 pages. I was already firm with MySQL so instead I bought O'Reilys 2 books on MySQL High Performance, which was very easy for me to understand compared to a book that didn't have any "real world" examples.

I was also once following, when I wanted to learn to speak and read polish, a guy called David Snopek. He tought himself fluent polish in just 1 year by self studying 2 hours every day reading Harry Potter, but forcing himself to learn new words every day. His website is unfortunately gone.

Another guy who used to be an editor for NYT, Malcom Gladwel, researched and argued that the recipe any expert is that you work with that specific topic for 10,000 hours. That is about 5 years if you are focused 8 hours 5 days a week.. Similar to an education.

@canadianlover , self paced learning from paid or free resources is a good option but one needs to be very focused during the learning phase. Always start with a plan and define a time-limit for completing the course. It is indeed less expensive than formal college or university level education and is more direct towards solving real word problems. However, what I have noticed that some employers require a proper college/university diploma/degree and only shortlist applicants on this basis.

On a separate note, how was your overall experience with the college education. My son will be starting a "Computer Programming and Analysis" 3-year program this September at a GTA college and any input/tips is highly appreciated.

@dotcorner, my experience during my computer courses were both boring, and in particular there was one professor who i didn't like. He had a thick Chinese accent and it was apparent English wasn't his first language. Some of the concepts he taught I missed due to the previously mentioned reasons. I ended up dropping out, though I may return and do the courses over again with a different professor.

Back in 2009 when I was signing up for college, I didn't know about online courses. So I took 3 years of computer science courses and it was fun but when I noticed that we are studying some outdated content, it was too late.

When I finished all courses I found out about online courses and started watching tutorials. That was the best thing I've done so far. I relearned everything on my own and even learned some more advanced concepts along the way. It gave me the image of what people do at their job.

Knowing what I know now, the only reason I would sign up for college again would be to meet new people. I wouldn't care too much about the content because I know that online courses or working on real projects would bring me more knowledge because there's a difference when you study something from a real developer, compared to a typical professor with outdated technologies experience. (No offense)

Check out Eric Elliot's article on college degrees and coding

@Ruffles, I can understand the social component of going to school. I remember getting thrown out of the student union building at my college for being too drunk. School is definitely a good place to meet new people and form friendships, but as you say, what they teach is outdated and from my experience, there are some lousy professors in the college environment.

jeffery is a much better teacher than my VB.NET prof. he's an American who is a good teacher, whereas my professor seemed to have English language skills to learn from. i made the mistake of not doing a practice assignment for the midterm and ended up failing it. Looking back now, I don't think I would go the university route again and stick to MIT courses as well as (obviously) the online courses offered on this website. You get access to the newest stuff, and there's less bullshit when it comes to quizzes and exams.

The biggest thing that always bothered me about Programming exams in college is that they expect you to know all of the syntax, as if you were learning French or German, etc.. And while yes, most/a lot of that sinks in over time, every dev I know refers to documentation pretty much daily..

In other words, a fully closed-book test on development is kind of ridiculous to me, and proves next to nothing about ability/skill other than how well you can memorize. But therein kind of lies the entire problem with most formal schooling.. the vast majority of it is geared toward test-prep, rather than teaching people how to learn the content matter.

Here at Brasil things are complicated. Undergraduate courses are so expensive, you have no idea. I've 6 years experienced with web dev and work since i have 17 years old. With the salary i won, it's impossible to pay my university (it costs 90% of my salary), so we always need the help of our parents.

Anyway, the course of Computer Science it's great, you will not learn how to mastering your programming skill, but you will learn more things that you can imagine. Maybe now you are excited with Laravel, Vue.JS and all those nice platforms, but don't forget that those things are passangers... with the graduation, you will able to understand how things have been created, how they work, and you will have a vast world of different skills and jobs to explore.

One of the problems I see with university is that it's waaaay too general. I believe that if they reorganize the "Software Engineering" diploma into multiple diplomas or paths like you see on some of the course websites, it would give people a lot more choice and specialize them before they find a job. Right now, I think that you study too much junk and when you get ready for your first job, you get out of there and you have no idea what's JavaScript, HTML and CSS.

I think it would be ideal if they took some kind of bootcamp type of teaching, where you take courses, you build projects and after 4-6 months, you get out of there ready with some kind of entry level job.

I believe that either the education institutions don't really care that much about this or they don't have the people or money for this type of courses.