Would a CS Degree Be Good for Someone Over 30?

mbuckingham asks: "I'm 39 and have been programming for 20 years. By 'programming', I'm talking about the usual business applications type of stuff. Easy stuff really. I went to college for a while, but never got my degree. It bugs me that I've never completed my degree, but since I've always had decent jobs, it hasn't really mattered too much. I'm really bored with what I do every day, and I'm thinking about going back and getting the degree, because I think it will make it possible to move towards doing some more advanced, system-level type stuff. I know I don't want a MIS degree, because that would be rehashing everything I'm already bored with. Does this make sense? Would a CS degree or a Computer Engineering degree be better?"

I'm in a similar position to you.

[Anonymous Coward]

And I went & did my CS degree.

And it does lead to more interesting job offers.

The trouble is, moving from doing business logic type boring stuff to interesting CS type stuff is that you have to take a $40k a year paycut. (and that's after you've had no income for the time it takes to complete your degree).

Its worth thinking about how important money is for you. In the end, I have my CS degree (and I feel good about it, dont mistake me), but am doing the same work mostly.

But I don't mind doing boring work for 6-9 months a year if I can take another 3 months to travel / do charity work / etc.

I am in a similar situation

[ganjadude]

Granted I am only 21, I started working on my CS degree when I was 17, went for 3 semesters and stopped. I have been hands on with machines since about the age of 7 and found the classes boring (the teacher tried to tell us how an ip address is exactly like a phone number, and would not hear how its not really that much like a phone number more like a street address.... he said I was crazy)

Being 21 I find it IS worth going back to classes,even if its only part time. Unfortunately I found out the hard way no matter how much you know, without that little square of paper, they will not even look at you 90% of the time.

Now if you know someone who will open the door for ya great, but if not, at least grab some certs. They will at least look at you that way.

Re:I'm in a similar position to you.

[AuMatar]

40K pay cut? I do the systems type programming, and make far more than anyone I know doing buisness type systems- they tend to look for bottom of the barrel coders and anyone who took a certification course, where systems level programming requires brains.

I don't see why not...

[Alpha830RulZ]

It won't hurt, and it could be interesting. I went back for a second degree when I was 27, in Accounting, of all things. I used it to get a job with Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, which has led to a great career for me.

If you do the degree at the right school, a key benefit will be the availability of the career placement apparatus of the school, which is one of the easiest routes to a quality job with major industry players at the end of the process.

I agree with the person who noted that the more CS'y jobs pay less. I do datawarehousing/data mining/predictive modeling, and make much better money than the average Java/C#/C++ dev, based on watching the job boards. My work isn't as -cool-, but it pays well and I find it interesting. Sure, it'd be cooler to be a game programmer or device driver hack, but I like to play with my kids and golf, and if I have to write SQL and Crystal Reports stuff to make that happen, that's fine with me.

It's also fun to go back to school and babe watch.

what's your true goal?

[evilmousse]

i can't tell whether you're looking to use a degree to advance your career or not. on one hand you say you've not needed it so far, and on the other you say you think it might open doors. it doesn't sound like you have a specific goal for which a CS degree is a requirement, so lacking that, I'd say don't get an inferiority complex.

ask yourself, "do i enjoy dealing in underlying academic theories, or do i prefer concrete applications to real problems?". if you're tired of dealing in the latter, intellectually curious about the former, or want to gain some specific skills, go for it. if, however, you're just having a vague feeling of "missing out", i'd say don't. degrees are best attained with a purpose in mind, and it sounds like you're doing fine as-is.

if you're still not sure, why not try to find an appropriate class to take without committing everything, as a test of your own enjoyment/committal.

as someone who did the opposite and started with much schooling and less practical experience, i'll tell you i look over the fence at your green grass now and then too. i don't utilize the theory i've learned nearly as much as the more practical knowledge. the rare circumstances i do utilize the theoretical learning are fulfilling tho.

All depends on the company ..

[LionsFate]

I have no degree.
In fact I'm a high-school dropout (though I got the GED).

I'm a manager at my current company.
I've had up to 12 people reporting to me.

Of those 12, 2 I count as Sr. people, and neither has ever gone to college.
And by Sr. I mean I can leave them alone and they just know what they are doing. The type you say "Give me a widget" and they'll go design what your thinking almost spot-on perfect.

I have had 3 people who have PhD's, they are all Jr. programmers who I'd say really are not that worth it.
One that no longer works here I had to explain over and over and over again how to do simple things.
"Its a while loop .. WHILE .. You loop over things .. You know, loops?"

I know there are large companies that "require" degrees, however I also know a lot of people who work for said companies and are utterly bored to death.
I work for a medium sized company that says "Degree or equivalent experience".
Working here I've written in C, perl, Lua, Java. I've written threaded to multiplexing to client/server to fancy GUI programs.
Been an admin, a networking engineer, a programmer, now the managers hat.
I have a world of freedom.

In my experience smaller to mid-sized companies are the most interesting.

I have a few friends who work for some larger companies.
Very few are given real freedom, especially in comparison to how much I have.
They tend to get stuck being one of X-thousand programmers, always working on the same thing, just a new revision.

So do you want a degree that a larger company may want, but you'll probably be bored to death?

Or a small to mid-sized company that probably doesn't require one and gives you more diverse assignments and keeps you interested?

Oh yeah, and my opinion as a hiring manager, we don't give much credit to degrees. I've yet to see one that actually teaches anything we use in the real world.
I'm sure its great for example with Google which does so much advanced mathematics work, but your not going to find that at most places.

This is of course just one managers opinion, your millage will vary.
Though its an opinion at least shared by many other execs I've talked to.

Re:Worth while? For you, or your employer?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

If you're not, the piece of paper will still break the corporate ladder's glass ceiling for non college graduates.

I have a Software Engineering Degree (Bachelor's), and 12 years worth of experience in the industry. One of my team leads currently has *NO* college degree. Where was that glass ceiling again?

Take Paul Graham's Advice

[Dasein]

And stay upwind.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html [paulgraham.com]

Maybe a math or applied math degree?

Re:Find a college that takes life experience

[eclectro]

Well I think there was a day when what you said may have been true. But don't think that isn't going to rapidly change when everyone gets faster broadband. The demand continues to grow in this sector, and I suspect that online degrees will gain increasing currency because traditional schools will simply become less attractive to those that don't want to put up with everything from weird antics of professors to parking problems.

Thousands of people are paying bills online now too. A concept unheard of seven years ago. If you can trust an online bank, why couldn't you trust an accredited online school?

Re:I'm in a similar position to you.

[Frumious Wombat]

I remember an associate in grad school from CS, who said he hadn't seen a computer in four years. He was doing parallel algorithms on an idealized (PRAM) architecture, and real systems just got in the way. You probably should get some sort of degree for the resume points for when you're older and the PHBs are looking for reasons to replace you with younger and cheaper, but inferring from your question, you should probably look more on the engineering side. Real CSci tends to be applied math, though it takes a while for new grad students to realize this.

OTOH, it wouldn't kill you to brush up on your algorithms on your own time, then take some upper-level course in OS, networking, etc. They'd probably be interesting, you could use the knowledge, and you'll skip dealing with the layers of gen-ed courses designed to keep 18yr olds out of trouble and on their way to being somewhat educated citizens. (those courses are far from useless, but it's nice to be able to pick and choose from the advanced ones, and not have to take Psychology for Physicists with 1000 other students because the registrar said so)

Re:It Depends on What You Want to Do...

[EastCoastSurfer]

I think - honestly - that a CS degree at your time in life is worthless for the most part.

I would disagree. More education is never worthless. Of course at 30 what you pick to study and how you go about doing it is much more important than at 18. At 30, with years of experience, should you go back to school and do intro to computers? Um no. But, I'm sure there are many topics that you've never come across in your experience that would be fun and useful to learn in a school setting. Some schools may even let you do a dual undergrad/MS (if you never finished your 4 year BS) based on your experience and maybe some testing out of classes.

Keep in mind, too, that even as a manager, I get to write queries against SQL databases with 140M records - that impresses some of the young'uns. :P

When did 140M records become big? Maybe if that is 1 table :p

Re:I'm in a similar position to you.

[jozeph78]

It's very, very simple. The "business'ish" programming roles are usually 50/50 development and analysis whereas the systems level programming jobs tend to keep you boxed in a more technical environment. People who blow smoke up ones ass make more money than the ones who actually do things. The world's best programmers couldn't sell a free system to a business, thus we have Linux. The worlds best marketers shoved windows 3.1 down everyones throat and built an empire. Where's the money?

Of course there are some very, very technical systems guys at MS but I wonder if their Engineers make as much as the DW guy who hands Ballimer his monthly report.

What are you interested in?

[LauraW]

I'm replying a bit late, but what the hell...

I think you should go for the CS degree, but only if you're genuinely interested in some CS topics like algorithm analysis, language design, advanced data structures, distributed systems, machine learning, etc. If you like that sort of thing, then you'd probably enjoy the CS program and the kinds of jobs you could get with the degree afterward. But if you're thinking of going back for the degree just so your resume looks better, I'd recommend against it. Your years of experience as a developer should matter more than a degree for most jobs, at least at companies that you'd want to work for.

In a past life, I was a manager at IBM for a while, and I had a very good team of engineers. About half of them had a CS background, but the other half had degrees in things like percussion and philosophy. My degree is in geophysics. And one guy on the team was still working on his associates degree. A person's degree didn't seem particularly correlated with how smart they were or how much they got done. The percussionist and philosopher ended up writing some of our trickier, more algorithmic code.

On the other hand, here at Google where I work now we seem to have a pretty strong emphasis on degrees, especially for people without much industry experience. It makes some sense, given the huge volumes of data we work with and the interesting algorithms we have to use to do it. But still, it's possible to get into even this kind of environment without a CS degree if you have some knowledge and experience in the right areas.