How Important is a Well-Known CS Degree? 1280
syynnapse asks: "I've been interested in computer science since my mother taught me how to program in QBASIC when I was eleven, and I've wanted to be a developer ever since I learned C++ in AP Computer Science while in high-school. Now I'm in my sophomore year of college studying CS at a state university that isn't particularly known for its CS program, but I'm quite happy and personally think I'm learning plenty. My father thinks otherwise, and the deadline for transferring successfully is approaching quickly. What chance do I have in the real world with a not-so-prestigious degree? Am I likely to be learning what's important? Am I looking at a series of awful jobs if I don't transfer?"
Experience is key... (Score:5, Informative)
The most important thing in the market today is experience. Go look on Monster or any of the other sites right now, and you'll see one phrase quite a bit -
In other words, a degree is a bonus now rather than a prerequisite if you have talent and experience. If you have no experience and no big certifications, then a degree is something (and perhaps the degree from a bigger school could help a little), but the jobs available to you in this boat are not all that appealing for the most part anyway.
The great jobs go to those with solid experience, and for those people (and the people hiring them), the degree they have is considered decoration rather than the meat of the resume.
Perhaps this is different in the development field, but I doubt it; I'm coming from the infosec side of things and I imagine things are much the same for programmers.
In short, degrees and certifications are "get you in the door"-oriented credentials; the big jobs rarely go this breed of applicant.
Re:Experience is key... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I doesn't matter in 99% of the cases. (Score:2, Informative)
Although I do agree with most of your comment, as far as CS is concerned, I would hardly call Chico 'average'. The only two things Chico is known for are:
1.) Huge partys
2.) Their awsome CS program.
All your pr0n are belong to us.
I have hired hundreds of people.... (Score:3, Informative)
co-op co-op co-op (Score:1, Informative)
Take the University of Cincinnati. Not an Ivy league school, but all of their engineering students are required to co-op(cs is in their college of engineering). They come out with 15-18 months of REAL WORLD experience. That's what gets you a job.
If your university offers a co-op program, enroll in it... today!
Re:I doesn't matter in 99% of the cases. (Score:1, Informative)
These very-top schools pre-screen for smart people better than any recruiter I've every hired.
Hire someone from any of those, and you at least know you're getting someone of better-than-average intellegence and some potential. It definately is one of the first thigns I look at when screening a stack of resumes.
Re:I doesn't matter in 99% of the cases. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Experience is key... (Score:5, Informative)
Once accepted, then consider the choices. The school will play some minor effect, for example having MIT on your resume will get your future employers/grad school's attention slightly more. However no worthwhile company or graduate school would put too much emphasis on the school alone. Employers and admissions groups are well aware that the best schools can easily graduate idiots, and smaller schools can easily graduate geniuses.
Really it depends on how well you do in your environment. If you work reasonably hard at a smaller school, you will stand out like a big fish in a little pond. And, if you do research work for some professors or groups (which I highly recommend), then at your chances are much higher that you can impress them enough for very personal letters of recommendation. From what I hear the letters of recommendation are typically the most important factor for future applicants to either companies or grad schools.
If you transfer to a big school, say MIT, then it's a different ballgame. You will certainly have a wider array of course offerings and research projects, and will have peers who will challenge you more. However you will also find it much more difficult to rise above the radar. The general body of student talent will be greater, and it's easier to fall under the noise floor, so to speak.
Beyond this it's hard to decide what to do without carefully looking at the details. I've seen situations that favor both sides. For example, I knew a guy that had a very good GPA in EE at a small school, and had the opportunity to transfer to a different place. His EE classes weren't very intensive, so his theory knowledge won't be as good. I was hoping he would transfer, because he had a good opportunity to do so. However, if his research went well enough, it might not matter too much.
On the flip side I've seen a few undergrads from schools with small physics departments do amazingly well. They would do research with a professor, do it really well, and then get into a top-tier school. Usually a professor at a small school will know many colleagues at the top-tier schools, and can easily pass a personal reference directly to them.
For companies instead of school, I know less of the hiring practice. School will probably play some factor, but they're more interested in knowing that you can get the job done than which school you went to. If you have good letters of recommendation to this end, you'll be fine.
Re:Oft heard, but bullshit: Experience is key... (Score:5, Informative)
60% Experience (this is what gets you in the door)
39% Interview (this is what gets you hired)
1% Piece of paper
Nobody puts weight on the paper because everyone knows that schools do not prepare programmers for the real world.
About the only exception I could see to the 1% rule is if you come from a particularly prestigious institution like MIT, CalTech, etc. That said, people who come from institutions like that usually do very well in the interview because they are ultra-geeks. In any event, since the percentage of the population coming from those places is extremely small, it's not really a factor.
Re:Two words for ya... (Score:5, Informative)
Your resume is ugly and difficult to read. Please, choose a different font, and format it better. Also, check the language flow, and ditch the scale of 1-10 stuff.
Also, you have tense problems. Some things use past tense, others use present. For ease of reading, it's best to use past tense in all job descriptions, including your current job.
Also, you have typos (empahses in last segment, possibly others). PLEASE proofread your resume. Nothing kills your chances faster than careless mistakes.
It's also not immediately clear if you have been working as an independent contractor all this time. Without that little tidbit of information, you look like a serial job-hopper.
Your opening paragraph reads like a recommendation letter from someone else. Show, don't tell. Don't tell me you're a great team leader, give me examples of when and how you were a great team leader. Don't tell me you can make tough decisions, give me an example of when you did so, and why your decision was the best one.
Hope this helps!
Re:Computer Programming != Computer Science (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't -- I said that he wasn't interested in computer science when he was 11 years old.
Three words: Waste of Time (Score:1, Informative)
Masters students usually expect to earn more coming out of college (and with some reason since they just spent all that money on more schooling) but generally have not learned anything relevant to make them worth it.
Better to start making money now and get experience on top of it.
I hire people from top schools... (Score:1, Informative)
A top school definitely has more foot-in-the-door ability, how you perform in the interview is up to you. BTW, I'm posting anonymously so this doesn't come back to bite me, but I have a BS from a top school and am making 200K as an architect at age 28. Food for thought...
YES it matters (Score:1, Informative)
Having said that however I think after a few years of interesting experience (vs schmuck work) it probably doesn't matter at all since by then most employers are more interested in your experience and references.
Also, you should really get a PHd or Masters at least. I learned the hard way that even with a degree from a top CS school there are certain classes of hard or interesting problems that no employer will ever let you touch otherwise so I ended up going back to school (which really sucks ass after having made good money for a few years).
Re:Experience is key... (University of Phoenix) (Score:2, Informative)
It depends (Score:3, Informative)
Helping my roommate with his homework further reinforced this view. Much of his homework for equivalent courses was much easier. Of course, when I took it we didn't have google or the other Internet resources available either.
Not all colleges are created equal.
-Aaron
Maybe some places, but not most (Score:3, Informative)
Every once in a while you'll hit some nutjob who went to a big university and was in a frat or something, and he'll try to give preference to an alumni, but most people are buying a person, not a cookie cut with some specific cutter.
Re:Experience is key... (Score:3, Informative)
Go to Sourceforge or Freshmeat or Rubyforge (or where ever) and get invovled with a project that interests you.
This gets you some exposure and experience at the same time.
Re:Experience is key... (Score:1, Informative)
Anyone can learn to program in (insert language). Lets say you have years and years of programming experience in C++. Thats all well and good, you probably know the language well. Do you have any clue how it works? Do you know how a compiler is written? How to design a processor? How much math have you had? When more languages are developed, how are you going to know which is better and why? The bottom line is, you learned to program like a monkey... not a computer scientist. It isn't the piece of paper thats important, it is what you learn. My company won't hire you if you don't have a BS (BAs need not apply). Heck I was lucky to get my job with a BS, many of my colleagues have a MS or PhD... why? Because they do research, they don't want code monkeys, they want computer scientists. What we do has never been done before, so being really good at programming in one language doesn't help them at all. So I guess it depends on what kind of job you are looking for.
To get to the real question, I think as long as your school is teaching you the essentials of computer science, you are OK. My school didn't really teach any programming. They still assigned incredibly hard programming projects, but the professors felt that teaching you how to use a specific language was beneath them... you can do that on your own (if you have any brains). They stuck to the basics... data structures, algorithm design and analysis, OS, compilers, architecture, etc. If you think they are teaching you these well enough that you can discuss them in an interview, you are fine.
P.S. Co-ops are an EXCELLENT IDEA
M.I.T. (Score:4, Informative)
I took some "trendy" courses in the business school (Course XV) and core theory courses (Course VI-1). The former long became obsolete, while the latter are still useful.
Re:Trust your Instincts (Score:3, Informative)
I think deffinately calculus. In fact, if there is an Applied Mathematics departement at said school, picking up a dual is gravy. A third of the algorithms I deal with are descretized forms of differential equations. About a third are based on the solution of linear systems, often systems of linear Differential Equations. The remaining are based on derived statistical distributions. Respectively, Differential Equations/Numerical Analysis, Linear Algebra and Mathematical Statistics, are represented. Just knowing how to expand a function into a series can help when optimizing code at the nitty gritty level.
Again, this will only help, not hurt, you if you are looking into computing in the engineering field. You may not engage it right away, but that knowledge will get you out of the code monkey stage and into developing algorithms, if that is what you so desire. It all depends on whether you want to write code for a living or solve problems using software you have written for a living.
No matter what university you graduate from, a dual degree will have interviewers exclaiming, "Check out the big brain on syynnapse!" That being said, I must concur with what I have read before, there is no susbstitute for real world experience. An internship or a side job or work with a professor looks great on the resume. Even latching on to an open source project will reveal real world coding skills and a measure of self motivation and discipline. No one is breathing down your neck to submit that patch. You did it because you motivated yourself.
Good luck!
I have an Ivy League degree (Score:4, Informative)
However, once that door is opened, the rest is up to you. That is, 1) your work experience, 2) the rate you adapt and learn, and 3) your attitude and personality.
I am in a Fortune 500 internet company (market cap = US$50B) and everything I learned about technology (SQL, OLAP, datawarehousing) I learned on the job.
Caveat: I am not a programmer and my degree is a BS in chemisty and Asian Studies.
Re:Oft heard, but bullshit: Experience is key... (Score:3, Informative)
(Liberal arts grads can go blow).
These are not hard and fast rules but the reason I'm being so stringent is that there are still lots of monkeys out there who think they can code (you would not believe the number of "Java programmers" I've interviewed who can't write an equals method). I don't have time to interview everybody. So, a good CS degree at least suggests the candidate has some formal training in analytical thinking and weeds out those who jumped on the dot-com gravy train in the late nineties.
[BTW, I don't have a CS degree but a good physics degree from a good University. Despite being in the industry for nearly 10 years, I sometimes wish I had that CS degree...]
Re:School more important than the degree (Score:3, Informative)
Professor Rowland taught freshman chemistry up to his winning the Nobel Prize, and may still do so. I heard Professor Luiz Alvarez taught freshman physics at UC Berkeley after his prize.
Re:Oft heard, but bullshit: Experience is key... (Score:3, Informative)
In the last few years, it's not even worth trying to get into a company unless you have a CS degree or know someone in the company. Many of those "Or Equivalent Experience" postfixes have vanished in the past few years.
Degrees have become a first-level filter for the hundreds and sometimes thousands of resumes received for each job posting.
As for which college, I've seen cases where the hiring manager automatically preferred applicants from their college, or from ones they perceived as "peers" of their school. I'm sure there are still people like that, but that's hit-and-miss.
I'd guess that if you are looking for work with a smaller company or in some location not known for its computer industry, a state college just MIGHT help more than some large college because of the chance that you would be dealing with an alumni. At least when the interview goes quiet you can have that conversation about how great your college's sports team "the fighting dung beetles" is doing.
It depends... (Score:5, Informative)
Just a little side note: I went to a university known for having a good business and data processing curriculum. I took my first job writing in an obscure language for outdated mainframes. After about 2 years, I thought I'd look for a job doing what I really wanted to do, and the conversations with recruiters usually went like this:
Me: I'd like to start working as a game developer/engineer/etc...
Recruiter: Well, I see you've got many skills listed on your resume. But, what experience do you have as a developer/engineer/etc...?
Me: (sheepishly) Well, none - but it's something I'd really like to do. I've done some work on my own and read up on the subject quite a bit.
Recruiter: Well, that's nice and all, but my clients are going to want someone with solid experience... Would you be willing to take a job writing in COBOL instead?
You see, my mistake was twofold:
The perception problem is very real. If you stay at a lackluster school, you will neither get a good education, nor have a good career - at least not without a great deal of effort. Having a few years in an given technology tends to pigeon-hole your career prospects, and you might find yourself unable to find a position doing what you want to do if you don't get in with a good company right after graduation.
Re:Experience is key... (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that you'll get a better or worse education. It's that you'll get a better or worse personal network. That's all it is.
I graduated from a prestigious university (not necessarily known for CS, in the spirit of full disclosure, but in the top 10 most presigious US News & World Report) with a CS degree, and I can tell you that most people I went to school with do no better or worse than anyone else simply by relying on the prestige of their degree. The people who do well are those who regularly play a role in alumni activities and contribute to the alumni social network. And, for whatever reason, the more prestigious the institution the more active the alumni are about helping each other out.
Have I personally gotten jobs through people I know/knew through university? Yes. Have others I know? Yes. If I didn't lift a finger to keep in contact with that network, would it help me at all to have my degree simply on my resume? Marginally, it might help me get my foot in the door, but the interview is the proving ground. Don't pass that, and it won't matter if you have letters from Caltech, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon.
Re:Oft heard, but bullshit: Experience is key... (Score:3, Informative)
The school you go to....
- undergraduate - doesn't matter .
- graduate - matters, especially for an MBA
- PhD - is everything
Hope that matters.Experience vs. Education in the dot-bomb era (Score:4, Informative)
Experience will trump education on a job-by-job interview, but consider what happened in the post-dot com boom, you NEEDED a CS degree. They wouldn't even consider you otherwise, unless you had a direct inside connection.
In times of plenty and demand for workers, education pales to the immediate need for experience, because they can always hire someone else if you don't fully pan out.
In times of lean, when companies need good people to fill their positions, they can be pickier, and you'll be interviewing against people with equivalent experience, and they will be more thorough with the evaluation. That's when education comes into play.
As a CS major (bachelor's only, not an ivory-tower PhD) who has dealt with many a non-CS IT worker, the difference in ability between those who took Computer Architecture, Algoritms, and Operating Systems versus those who just learned C or C++ on the job or in a night class is huge. Unfortunately, it's difficult to communicate on a resume, but on an actual ability standpoint, it will resonate, and that will build you a local network of people that respect you, and that will get you future jobs.
Re:Oft heard...whatever! (Score:2, Informative)
In the limited amount of hiring I've done (2 sysadmin positions, 1 programmer), I find the degree and institution are good general indicators of talent, but not absolute ones. It's a form of verification, often: when a candidate interviews really well, and I see he's from (say) MIT, it makes sense. It's comforting. It fits. When a candidate interviews really well and he's from (say) ITT Tech, it doesn't fit. Something's wrong, why didn't he attend a better institution?
Also, when hiring, you want to know about the person's professional culture to be able to predict how he will fit in. I know what the cultures are at MIT, Caltech, CMU, Stanford, UCB are like. I know that if I hire someone from Caltech, he'll be pretty honest about things left lying around because they have an honor code there. I know that if I hire someone from MIT, he'll be apt to use unattended things around the lab to measure the mass of some esoteric subatomic particle in his spare time. Do I know the same thing about, say, U Michigan? UT Austin? NMSU? UC Irvine? UMass Boston? Nope. Will that prevent me from hiring them? No, but I'm more likely to hire someone I know more about, even if it's only by reputation.
Source of Degree does matter. (Score:2, Informative)
[My comments are relative to my 25 years of experience in server development -- almost all at startup companies that grew into larger companies through various combinations of success and acquisition. I've toggled between hiring manager and developer about 50/50. If you're looking at IT or Applications Programming opportunities or want to work "eight-five" at a big company, my observations may be irrelevant. There are, of course, also exceptions to all the "rules" below - but in my experience they are fairly rare.]
BOTTOM LINE: GO TO THE BEST CS SCHOOL YOU CAN SUCCEED AT - THE SCHOOL MAY SET THE TONE FOR THE REMAINDER OF YOUR CAREER.
I've reviewed quite a few (probably nearly 10K) developer resumes over the years - most of which were prescreened by recruiters to my specific requirements. Even with the "prescreening", a resume probably gets an average of one minute of attention unless something particularly turns me off (in which case, it gets less than one minute) or particularly excites me (in which case it gets more time and may eventually end up in a hire). The more years of experience a candidate has, the less relevant the source and major of the degree is (although, if someone under about 50 doesn't have a B.Sc., preferably in CS or math, that's a red flag because such degrees were commonplace by 1980). But, for candidates with less than three or four years of experience, both the source and major of the degree is a very significant factor.
I've also been involved in a fair amount of on-campus recruiting over the years and the reality is that GPA and school are VERY important. From a "lesser" school (say, without the intent of offense, most Cal State schools) anything much less than a 4.0 "in major", 3.7 overall, and a preference for "hard" classes (i.e., CS classes to build credits, not Psych 101A) usually gets the resume routed to the "no on-site interview" pile - this is because it is relatively easy to get a 4.0 in-major from such a school unless one is lazy or not very sharp (neither of which is promising in a candidate for a job!). From a "better" school (say, without the intent of offense, UC Berkeley), seeing one or two A-'s or B+'s for a CS class is not completely off-putting (a B- or lower is cause for substantial investigation however). Even with prescreening of transcripts and resumes, from a lesser school I am happy if one on-campus interview out of 15 advance to an offer of an on-site interview. On the other hand, I expect as many as four or five from a top school to advance to an offer of an on-site interview.
One problem I have found with candidates from "lesser" schools who are at the top of their class is that usually they haven't been challenged by peers, coursework, and professors as much as they would have been at "better" schools. This "large fish in small pond" syndrome is a problem for a couple of reasons. First, they often think they are better than they are (after all, they are better than most everyone around them - but the people around them turn out not to be very good) and don't interview well due to this disconnect. Second, they often just haven't been exposed to some of the trickier concepts so in a 45 minute interview, it's hard to find a common ground from which to probe their intellect. This is sad because I'm sure some of these candidates would have been more qualified if they had been challenged more -- but perhaps could not afford to attend a better school or screwed up their verbal SAT scores and didn't qualify for admission to a better school.
Although one can rationalize "I will stay at a lesser school and get the experience I need at the first couple of jobs and then move into better jobs", I don't think this works well in practice. It's been my experience that the first job or two often sets the tone for the remainder of developers' careers. By the time you're "ready" for the better job, all the other people competing for the job already have three or four years of better experience so you're still beh
FWIW (Score:2, Informative)
I worked in corporate IT at two major telecoms, and two major consulting companies. At every job I've had the prior service military were a significant back bone of the profit making contingent. They required less management, met deadlines, and didn't whine about company decisions. Oh, I'm prior military myself (USMC).
When balancing two CS programs as an undergraduate you should be more interested in whether they are ABET accredited utilizing the latest curriculum standards than what name is plastered on the sign. What is your goal? Do you want to work in industry or be involved in research? If you want to be involved in research find the prestigious research university and ingratiate yourself with the faculty. If you are interested in doing 4-years and opting for industry get the paper and run for the door. When I'm hiring people the paper gets you the interview, your skills get you past my minions, and your ability to communicate with me during the interview gets me to sign the will hire paperwork.
Re:I doesn't matter in 99% of the cases. (Score:1, Informative)
First off, most contributions are not earth shattering, so don't worry about that too much. I think a well respected developer type could break into many schools for the systems software track (e.g. Linus Thorvalds could most likely gain admission to any Ph.D. program for O.S. research). For conference or journal submissions, the forum matters. A peer reviewed forum (e.g. USENIX Technical conference) is considered more prestigious and would tend to count more heavily than an article in say Linux Journal, but in general activity looks good. IEEE or ACM transactions in particular tend to be prestigious journal forums. Some well respected researchers wrote popular tools that weren't necessarily novel in their design and approach during/before grad school, so it helps (e.g. Vern Paxson/Flex and David Kots/Gnuplot spring to mind).
One reason for this bias is that we are looking for people that can come up with novel solutions, and many trade magazines tend to focus on applying known techniques and tutorial treatments (e.g. Dr. Dobbs). There are some areas where exceptions might be made (e.g. some good security folks may not be published in the traditional academic areas, but may have some interesting tools and vulnerability analyses posted to say BugTraq, however, negative awards like felony convictions for violating computer security won't help :-)).
Many schools screen by GRE's and grades, so if they are too weak, that could limit your choices. I recommend trying to do well on the GREs (since it isn't that hard for the general exam, the subject exam was a bit tougher when I took it) and it is a way to avoid being screened out. In particular if you have good recommendations, you want the committee to look carefully at them, and get past academic issues. When looking at grades, students who do well in the upper division classes but had a weak semester or two early in their academic careers are preferred over students who collapse at the end. If you are a recognized minority, that can help to get funding (and perhaps admission). If your GREs are good and you can't get in, one option is to apply to a lesser known or regional school, do well in an M.S. program and transfer (either after the first year or when finished). If you still can't get admission, ask if you can take grad courses as a non-matriculating student, do well in those courses and reapply with recommendations from those profs.
Re:Experience is key... (Score:2, Informative)
We hired consulting services from someone who'd worked on an open source portal project we rolled out at the office. After he'd touted to my boss how great he was and his fellow OS programmer backed it up my boss asked me to do a technical interview.
My take on him was that he was "ok" technically, with some experience with the product, but lacking severely in overall professional development skills. My boss hired him anyway.
Four months into his contractual employment, after not seeing even ONE usable contribution my boss FINALLY cut the cord. That left me and my team 2 months to do what was originally spec'd at 6 months of development time to produce the end product.
So while I definitely don't doubt good devs can be found working on OS projects, that's not where I go looking for them.
And yes, I do dev hiring now.
Re:Computer Programming != Computer Science (Score:2, Informative)
Computer science is the study of computers and related theories, like algorithms, data structures, theory of computation, AI, etc.
Software engineering is the practice of applying theory and experience to capture requirements and build robust, well-tested that satisfy those requirements.
Many computer scientists can perform software engineering, many cannot. Many software engineers have studied computer science and further that study, but many have not and do not.
The key to getting a job is to be good at what you do. If you're at a good school, you've got an easy ticket past the resume scanners, but you'll never get the job on that alone. If you're at a bad school, work hard, learn as much as you can, get some experience, and you'll be just as well off.
Re:School more important than the degree (Score:3, Informative)
The answer is, as always, to take a holistic view. Graduates with no experience often have just enough knowledge to make them dangerous and belligerent. Long-time developers with no formal training sometimes end up egotistical, inflexible, and lacking the skills necessary to move from a development mindset to an engineering mindset. What you need is a degreed professional with experience.
And you may want to read goto considered harmful [c2.com]; you'll find out that, in many cases, it's not.