Laura Vasquez

Do you think a university degree is relevant for tech jobs?

Or is experience/skills more sought after? For example, I know a few software engineers who don't have a college degree and learned from a bootcamp or were self-taught, but sometimes struggle on the job with things they didn't learn. But is it better to go to university for this? What do you think?
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Bunnarith Bao
Self-Taught, coding for over 8 yrs, and now I'm a Tech Lead and am poised to continue moving up the chain. I interview a lot of candidates for our engineering teams and having a degree on your resume has plenty of merit, but there's definitely something to be said about someone who is actively in their free time learning how to code and has some type of portfolio that I can easily see. Either way when interviewing, you're going to be evaluated on what you know + some live coding exercises, and degree or not you'll either sink or swim. Always keep at it though regardless! In general - in terms of relevancy, yes it's relevant but certainly not required.
Arthur Brunner
it depends. For me, a person with experience regardless of education is enough . Sometimes, a university degree speaks alot because it means you learnt other courses not related to your field and you have done some networking
Cam Burley
I went to a fancy school of book-learning...paid too much money...learned to code on my own. I currently never use anything I did in college, and when I started a company, my first hire was a self-taught developer without a degree. Degrees can help you get in the door but mine hasn't helped in any way with doing the work.
Jess Tan
Work attitude > college degree. I have friends who graduated from bootcamp and they are the most hardworking and curious people I’ve ever met. As long as you are willing to learn, it doesn’t matter where you graduate from. :)
Kamran R.
I think it depends on the role and company. In my experience, an education does seem to matter in tech. However, there are exceptions to the rule. My prediction is that over time, conventional educations will become less relevant over time in tech.
Itz Patrolman
Not really I think it should be base on experience and skills not degrees
Chris Theodor
University studies provide you with something that potentially will help you to succeed in your life. That something, can benefit you in technical jobs but it's not the necessary factor to create the success. If you have already know about your passion, if you know what you want to do and if you are convicted that's where you want to be in your life and if that thing does not need a university degree or college, then skip it. If you do not know what you want to do in your life, then in my opinion a college is one of the best places that they can help you to figure this out. Remember, things are totally different than even 10 years ago. There are so many places today that you can go and find your calling in your life... University is just one of them. My advice is, keep searching. There are tones of technical jobs out there and not all of them need a degree. BTW, in none of the companies that I worked with I was asked to show them my degree or anything else...
Laura Vasquez
@chris_theodor Awesome! Great advice
Alex Devero
Is a university degree relevant? Yes. Is it necessary? No. Is it worth the money? Maybe
chetan kantharia
In my opinion college degree is good to have but not required these days as you can quickly learn any new skill online by videos/mooc and become hireable. A degree will help you get your first job. To further develop your career you will need to do:- 1) Need to build your reputation, It can be on Github, StackOverflow, blogs, or testimonial on LinkedIn, etc. 2) Good understanding of concepts like algorithm, design patterns, etc. I believe continuous learning is a key success :)
Dave Mackey
A lot of great developers are self-taught...but I hypothesize that many of these developers had one of several advantages in their favor. (1) They began working with tech at an early age, (2) they had the financial wherewithal to focus on tech full-time if introduced at a later age, or (3) they're just really, really smart. I'm not going to categorize myself as one of the "great developers" - but I am self-taught and I did have the advantage of working with tech from an early age. There are different ways in which beginning to work with tech young may be advantageous, but for me, and for others I've seen it seems to be about the sheer quantity of time one has to mess around. It is much harder now to learn new technologies while maintaining other adult responsibilities (work, family) than it was during my child and teenage years. I also think there is some advantage to having been born in a specific period of technologies' explosion. For myself and others, we started with fairly simple technology and the technology grew in complexity around us. We were there every step of the way, so it was not as seismically different as it is for someone attempting to get up to speed now. From a personal perspective, I would note that while I am self-educated that does not mean I do not wish I had a formal education. There are areas in which I am not as strong as those with a formal education (and on the other hand, areas in which I have through hard experience become more flexible/knowledgeable than many with formal training). I don't have evidence, but I suspect that the suggestion that formal education in technology is too quickly outdated is not entirely correct. Sure, what you learn about a particular language may be outdated relatively quickly but other areas tend to stay fairly consistent over time - for example, underlying mathematics, lambda calculus, design patterns, etc. Or, at least, they provide a basic foundation upon which one can build (e.g. knowing x design patterns will help one learn newer y patterns because you understand the reason y is an improvement over x).