Sr. Server Engineer (Vintage Systems) at Living Computer Museum,

On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote: I have only a BS in Computer Science. I've discovered that my degree opened a few doors that would have otherwise been closed by completely clueless people. I've met programmers with weird degrees (physics, statistics, chemistry) who were the best I'd ever met. And I've met programmers with advanced degrees in computer science who couldn't find their ass. I began programming professionally when I was 19, a full six years before I graduated with my degree. (I did work, school, and kids all at once) And nothing was more irritating to me in an interview as when i was asked how many years of professional programming experience I had, then after responding, I was asked, "yeah, but how many years after you graduated." Excuse me, where's the door? Now maybe you learned something from your degree program and maybe you didn't. But in short, a BS degree in computer science allows an HR drone to check off a box before sending your resume on to the hiring manager. It's there for clueless HR people and hiring managers who don't know the first thing about software development to allow some other mechanism to help them filter out people who can't program because they're too inept to make the decision using their own knowledge and skills. <rant off>