>I agree with your statement: "If you have a good grounding in CS, you have longevity. Couple that with a good math background, and then you have even more possibilities."
Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your degrees.
In tech here, unless you have x years experience in the latest tech(.net, typescript, Node, etc.) you ain't getting any job regardless of your CS degree.
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I'm only expressing my experience on the market here in Europe as a engineer with 6 years of C&C++ experience, with BS in CS and a MS in Embedded systems, and web shops have declined to interview me citing I don't have enough experience with the latest web languages and frameworks. Perhaps people feel that ageism and obsolescence won't happen to them.
I guess I only worked for archaic engineering companies then.
Outside a couple of startups with dubious prognostic of success, I never saw a CV going through HR for IT department without having higher education degree, with the exception of technical students.
And in most European countries one doesn't get to sign Engineer on formal documents (from law point of view) without the proper tile certification.
I've worked in lots of places where having a degree was not a requirement to get hired but certainly a lot (especially bigger) companies value an education. I would say that the more accurate statement is that enough valuable work-experience can alleviate the need for a degree but degrees are far from worthless.
Some of the best as well as some of the worst developers I have worked with had no formal CS education. (The worst ones got in through biology -> bioinformatics, the best ones through gaming and setting up networks and general enthusiasm for the subject).
Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your degrees.
I regularly hire people into a commercial software company in Europe, and I don't inherently care about your degree, but I do care about you understanding a broad range of the fundamentals, and in the absence of a CS degree (which does happen) I have to spend extra time assessing an applicant's understanding of the fundamentals. Recently hired a fresh grad without a CS degree for a C++ programming position, and his interview was a bit longer than usual while we ran over those basics.
The degree IS a form of signalling; it signals "I probably have a grasp of the basics".
We can argue about "fundamentals", but I'm happy hiring non-CS grads. Because for us, "fundamentals" are things like "can you work in a team?", "can you write/communicate well?", "can you grasp real-world workflows/issues/bottlenecks real people have using products?", and "will you try the simplest thing first?". Other degrees offer the same or more opportunities to hone these skills.
It's easy for senior engineers on the team to address gaps in CS knowledge, but much harder to address a lack of soft skills, writing, or over-designing/too much abstraction (because you were taught the patterns, but not when to use them). I could go on, but IMO, this is why interviews are still so broken, and why the field of software development still faces the same issues it always has. Granted, I'm not building a DB, but compared to maintenance and over-engineering, performance is rarely an issue, and easily solved via profiling.
My fundamentals include a basic knowledge of algorithms, data structures and essentially just how to think about problems in a way that solutions can be programmatically represented.
Basically, can you write simple software? Everything you mentioned is also needed, but I really, first and foremost, need them to be able to write some simple software. If they can't do that, I really can't afford to teach them. A CS degree often makes this check simpler than for the candidates with other educations, such as the history degree holder we have.
If you don't need that then sure, it's a different hiring game for you.
My guess is that c/c++ experience is really good when you apply for a c or c++ job. If you apply for a web developer job mostly consisting of html+css+js it might not be seen as a plus. Even for c# and java jobs c++ experience is somewhat good but not perfect.
My view has been that the experience is good but not enough, you must show a willingness to learn other things and work in other languages and any experience in the languages actually used trumps a lot of other things.
How do you show that when you're no even invited to the interviews in the first place? HR looks at your resume first when screening, not your willingness to learn.
Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your degrees.
That’s also true in the US outside of the HN/Silicon Valley bubble...
Maybe in the US or SV but in Europe nobody outside research, academia and archaic engineering companies where a degree is a form of signaling, care about your degrees.
In tech here, unless you have x years experience in the latest tech(.net, typescript, Node, etc.) you ain't getting any job regardless of your CS degree.
Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I'm only expressing my experience on the market here in Europe as a engineer with 6 years of C&C++ experience, with BS in CS and a MS in Embedded systems, and web shops have declined to interview me citing I don't have enough experience with the latest web languages and frameworks. Perhaps people feel that ageism and obsolescence won't happen to them.