Degrees are meaningless, excepting places like CalTech. I’ve known too many ‘programmers’ who had a CS degree yet were damn near useless to think otherwise. Not to mention my own CS degree taught me almost nothing.
Agreed. I've known a lot more self-taught folks worth their salt than those with degrees. And those with degrees almost all started coding before they got to the university age.
I wouldn't say it was a shit university, part of it is that I knew how to write code before I got there. But the CS program wasn't great. My entire point is, if someone has a CS degree from University X and you don't know if that program at that university is any good, the degree is meaningless. If the university's CS program isn't any good, you can't count on the degree meaning anything.
There are also a lot of e-commerce agencies who just don't have their sh1t together. Was expected to work on 3 different clients a day who all had different platforms, different requirements etc.
Yes, you can dump some new code into the project that looks like it's working, but then you don't have time for any unit tests, exception handling if the user won't cooperate etc. and it's basically just some dodgy, untested code that will come back a few days later with some issues related to something nobody told you about.
The other "senior" programmer in the company never set up any local environment but instead ftp'd all changes directly to the live server. I asked him if needs help to set up a local server and debugger, but instead he would just dump vars on the live server and stream the contents of error.log to his second screen to catch any issues...
The amount of unqualified people is staggering beginning with those who have no university education.
I don't see it as a problem, because qualifications without competence are meaningless.
You should be more concerned with how qualified people end up performing worse and being less educated, knowledgeable, and prepared than unqualified people.