I agree. In the good old days, apprenticeship was a thing, and a good thing. You learn much more by doing than by actually looking at books or videos. Unfortunately, there's a huge industry in "education". Just as you'll never be a good carpenter just by reading a book, the same can be said of IT. Comp Sci graduates are nearly always useless for the first 6 months after graduation, until they've been able to cut their teeth on some real projects.
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I think you are simplifying the situation too much. Not all software development
work is at the level you are describing.
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There are application programming jobs, scientific programming jobs, system-level
programming jobs, and others.
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System-level work, such as, "compiler engineer" requires a knowledge of algorithms and data structures: sorting, linked lists, hashing, parsing, abstract-syntax trees,
graph theory (i.e. Warshall's algorithm, transitive closure, optimizations), and others.
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I'd like to see your non-Comp-Sci, non-book-learning people jump into a compiler-
engineering job at Intel and hit the ground running the first week.
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What kind of dummies have you been hiring among the Comp Sci group?
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I started with a non-Comp-Sci certificate and I was a programmer, but just a
programmer. Boring, boring and more tedious boring work Finally, I got a BS
degree from a good university where I became fascinated with compiler engineering.
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So, Comp Sci programs at a good Comp Sci department can open up new possibilities
that you will not get at a technical school.
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Unfortunately, it's hard to find a good Comp Sci department that is reasonably priced
and does not require you to do high-school humanities all over again.
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Which calls into question the US education system. It needs to be overhauled. Maybe
Europe is better.
Topic: Alternative Non-Accredited Computer Science Degree? (Read 4377 times)