Quote:
Originally Posted by Linguist
... and Bill Gates was a dropout. And Zuckererg quit after first year. Exceptions are good and all but try explaining big-oh runtime to someone spending a few days of your company's money to irrelevantly optimize their ok-running code.
Ironically, one of the best coders I know went to art school and never had CS education. But these are exceptions and are wayyyy far and in between. I know a -lot- more smart people who went to school for CS/math.
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Among the programmers I have met and worked with I would have to say it is the opposite. The better ones do not have a degree in in CS. Of course I generally don't associate with incompetent people so I am probably not factoring in the tons of "PHP for dummies" types. So you may be right about the general population of programmers.
That being said, it's a shame there is not more emphasis on Computer Science (CS) among the non-college programmers. Many think that CS has nothing to do with programming but that simply is not the case. Maybe... if you consider installing Wordpress "programming". lol
I'm tired of hearing lame arguments over-emphasizing optimization in speed that sacrifices code readability and development speed from people who have never programmed in assembly, counted clock cycles, or don't know the difference between a logarithmic and exponential algorithm.
I am not a college graduate, and yet when talking to people who have a degree in CS it is frustrating and disappointing when they don't even understand basic CS concepts like Big-O notation and finite automata.
Also, one of the tests at a former company involved us putting an open-case computer in front of the job candidate and asking them to point to the hard drive. There were people with Master degrees in CS that couldn't do it.