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Why Software Engineer Should Have a Degree

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There are two paths to achieve success in any profession: the typical one and the complex one. I see that a lot of people advise taking the complex path, as it’s more

In book “The white coat investor” author uses a phrase of “living according to how the governement suggests”. For example the government wants to incentifize people to own their houses, so home owners get a lot of tax offsets and benefits. It also wants you to get married and have children, since married couples and couples with children have a lot of offsets too.

The same is for investors: those, who buy assets and hold them for a long time are treated much better than short-term traders and speculators.

The US has a “federal law” – country-wide set of rules and regulations people of all states have to follow.

You live in a framework. A structure which has rules and regulations which make law. You can stretch the law, but in most situations you just have to follow it. One of the laws is the federal law in the US, where in other country it’s just “the law”.

You make the choice whether you fit in this framework or not. This framework is there as a suggestion. If you break it, you’re on your own and you’ll be made liable.

are made for us to have a law which

Explosion of computers through rapid hardware and software causes massive interest in computer science and engineering. There’s also a money effect, since it’s widely publicized that “high-tech” pays “a lot”. This causes an influx of people trying to jump on the opportunity and capitalize on it. You may too, and I applaud the idea.

You probably wonder what’s the best way to do it. In here, I can’t address all your questions, of course, since I don’t know how old you are, what your background is or what you’ve done so far. But my assumption is that you’re somewhere in between 15 and 35, and you want to get into computer business.

you probably want to write software. High-tech also includes hardware: building physical systems with real chips, real PCBs and real chassis powered by real power. Less people want to do this nowadays. Comparign salaries between hardware and software business, it’s understandable. Elecronics industry, even through very satisfying (I’ve worked at Xilinx), is considered less sexy, and somewhat less dynamic. It’s true, and my guess is that even electrical engineers end up doing software at some point.

think question people ask on HackerNews, forums and s originally not interested in interested in computer science and engineering. There is a shortage of good people in this industry, and even the juice squeezer is something that has a programmable chip. My roommate has a programmable oven.

Talking with You must have a degree to have a succes Many people w Degree isn’t that important

There are 18.5 million software professionals in the world. Out of that, 3.6 million are in the US. That’s 19% percent.

Visas

Growth

Management

Whether should you have a degree or not in order to be an active software engineer is a difficult question. My answer is: you should definitely strive to get a degree. The highest possible within your capacity, and from the most prestigious institution you can afford. Let’s talk why I’m right here.

Get a degree

Get a degree, if possible. If you’re in the US especially, getting a degree from any school is likely to give you enough background to get into the engineering profession. While targetting top 10 schools is a good idea, targetting 10 others will get you a solid understanding of programming concepts. If at all possible, by all means get a degree.

Go to a community college, take as many math and CS classes as possible. Then transfer to a better school, and repeat the process. As of 2017 you should put less pressure on programming technologies and languages, and more on hard science, like: statistics, linear algebra and algorithms. Programming languages are trends that aren’t really that important to your future, in my opinion. If you’ve learned to program well in C++, Python or Java, you should be able to learn other programming languages from a book.

My take on the US universities is that even the lesser known schools give great education. If you can downsize, move to another state and study at the state school, you should probably do it.

First of all the universities here are much more up-to-date with the industry. The study programs prepared by a

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