IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

There exist just closet programmer jobs still? I was always under the assumption everyone was a full on software developer.

Hachima_sl said:

For whatever it's worth, according to Salary.com it's 7% for entry level programmers and 4% for entry level Software Engineer, and thats counting associates degrees. The other 90+% have BS/Masters/PHD. Even smaller % as you go to higher level positions.

Which does bring me to another point that hasn't really been brought up. There is a difference between a computer programmer and a software developer.engineer. The later being more involved in areas other than the coding and being part of and defining the entire lifecycle of requirements gathering,design,testing etc.

Software Developers : Occupational Outlook Handbook : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Makes this distinction too and also gives a nice overview of areas CS majors can go into besides your typical 'programmer' With web development being just 1 step above a support specialist and requiring the least amount of education. About a 20k difference in average salary between a programmer and software developer too.

This also doesn't go into all the other roles which also commonly have a CS/IS degree background like project manager, business analyst, UI designer that don't write code at all. Another interesting statistic would be how many CS majors out there actually are writing code for their job role. Higher for recent grads, but overall I wouldn't be surprised if its less than 50%.

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Where is Salary.com pulling those bullshit numbers from? 7%? Anyone who actually works in this field can go around tomorrow within their company and take a poll on every developer to see who does and does not have a degree. I did it today at my current company. 3 developers (including myself) have degrees. 11 don't. This company has 450 employees and is the Administrative Services Organization for Medicaid for the entire state of Connecticut.

And that link doesn't really say anything, it just says this is the average salary for this job title (and job titles in the development world are different in every single company) and this is the degree "required" to get that job title, which is completely innacurate. This argument won't ever be put to rest because I've seen with my own eyes many, many very successful people who do not have degrees in this field. Not even associates degrees. The last company I worked for had probably less than 50% of its developers with degrees in a developer related field of study. It was the best company and team I ever worked for/with. It was sold to a private equity firm in its 10th or 11th year of existence for a very nice sum. I don't know that exact sum but I made $11k off that sale with the private stock shares they gave me (and everyone who worked for the company) just for signing the offer letter and being on staff when the company was bought. The lowest level employees in the company made $11,000 on that buyout. I believe the company sold for around $120 million but I can't confirm that.

Here is a link to the information on the buyout:

Genstar Capital

Yes my stories are all anecdotal but from my experience I find it impossible to believe the number is THAT far skewed in favor of degrees. It's an impossibility. I've worked for 4 companies, none of which had even close to that amount of skewing when it came to developers with degrees vs developers without. And I myself as a hiring manager find it absurd to discount someone simply because they didn't go to a university for computer science or MIS degrees.

But in all honesty, trying to convince me to change my opinion on this would be like trying to convince Fox Mulder that Aliens don't exist. I've seen too much!

Khane is basing everything off anecdotal evidence, just like others are. For instance, 100% of the people at my job have at least a BS, with many having an MS/PhD in engineering or computer science. I wouldn't be able to guess any percentage as a whole though.

Celestein_sl said:

You're arguing for why people should dismiss your point of view, don't do that!

I have the opposite experience, there's no one at my company currently who doesn't have a degree, was 3 our of 25 who didn't have one at my last company, and non-degree holders were at least a small minority at my last several positions. So we have opposite experiences.

I don't believe my anecdotes are representative of the entire world though, and don't dismiss new evidence that contradicts my world view. Don't be that guy.

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No, that's exactly what I am saying. I cannot be swayed simply because of my own personal experience. I'll never agree, even if you shove definitive evidence in my face because I can't understand why anyone would dismiss a resume because they don't have a bachelor's degree in a related field of study. It's exactly why I'm arguing the point.

Deathwing_sl said:

Because it makes the recruiting job much easier. How do you filter through resumes if you don't have that criteria? Also, imagine how many applications you would get if anyone with a bit of experience applied to a job because the expectation that a degree was not as important(kinda like certs outside of IT).

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I filter based on technical skills and knowledge. Filtering based on degree sounds ridiculous to me. I honestly don't care whether or not you went to school or where.

Once you do it for long enough you learn how to ask questions that decipher a person's problem solving skills, pragmatism, and development philosophy. The worst kinds of questions you can ask are syntax questions because all those are, is memorization. Is it 100% foolproof? No, but it's a better gauge than a piece of paper is. I have had a hand in the hiring of dozens of candidates, but I most of whom worked out quite well, but I definitely had a hand in hiring a few terrible "developers".

I guess another factor in why I don't care about a degree is because the degree I received I feel was a joke. I went to a very reputable university, got a bachelor's in MIS, and took what I felt were classes that were completely inconsequential with the majority of my professors being the typical "Those who can, do. Those who can't teach" types.

I took 2 C++ courses, all those courses were for, was for learning OOP. We didn't even get into memory management in those classes. The last module in the second semester was learning stacks and queues. I took a course in MIT scheme... great... an entire semester on recursion? Really? I took a VB.net course with one of the most incompetent professor's I've ever met in my life. The entire course was how to build a form and NEVER write your own code. Just use the built in functionality. I took a course in HTML and CSS. Same professor as the VB.NET course. He took 20 points off my final project because I built an email order confirmation and receipt system into my shopping cart. He said it was annoying and people don't like to be annoyed via email. I took a course in Macromedia Coldfusion (it was still macromedia back then), yep, great skillset to have. I took a class in PERL. The entire class was regular expressions. That's all we learned for an entire semester, we would get a text file and have to tranform it using regular expressions in code. I took 2 worthwhile classes. A standard SQL class, and an Oracle 9i class. Both taught by the only professor who was actually trying to give us college kids useful skills for our careers. Again, more anecdotal evidence, but you can see how someone who holds a degree doesn't necessarily have the skills you'd think they do.

Deathwing_sl said:

Did they have a degree?

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The bad developers I hired? I wouldn't know, I really don't even look at that section of a resume.

Someone was asking along these lines earlier... but I went back to school at 25 and graduated at 29. I also did (paid) internships at IBM and the company I still work for. No kids or spouse though which is easier, to be honest the weirdest part is the first couple years when other students are like 17/18.

Khane_sl said:

I filter based on technical skills and knowledge. Filtering based on degree sounds ridiculous to me. I honestly don't care whether or not you went to school or where.

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Meh, depends on how long the person has been in the industry. Unless you've done some really interesting open source work or know someone it would pretty darn difficult to even get an interview without job experience or education.

How can healthcare.gov have so much code???

Tuco_sl said:

Sounds like you got fucked by the downside of gravitating toward a 'real world skills' centric degree where they avoid too much Computer Science shit and teach more programming shit. Or had very unrigorous professors...

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The professors were awful. They had entirely too much freedom to teach whatever the hell they wanted instead of following a set curriculum. And they weren't very smart.

Tuco_sl said:

I think the number cited is bullshit, but if it's true it probably has to do with using auto-generated code (which can get extremely bloated, a matlab generated C class we use should be some 300 lines of code but is actually 15,000) and using excessive amounts of legacy / third party software that is needed at all.

A good example is using Boost, which is a massive and fantastic C++ library that has 19million lines of code.The Boost C++ Libraries Open Source Project on OhlohIf you have a project that uses it to say, print hello world in multiple threads using Boost threads, your project has 19 million lines of code unless you take the time to trim your usage to just the bare necessities of the boost threading library.

But like I said the figure given is probably bullshit.

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From what I heard they did include all the lines of code of all the 3rd parties as well in the metric reported for heathcare.gov

Programming Language Breakdown for the HealthCare.gov Website | Randal S. Olson