Life without a Degree

So since I’ve been keep­ing my eyes open for a job lately I’ve seen the dif­fer­ence (yet again) between hav­ing a Degree and not.  Let me start off with the fact that I do not have a for­mal degree, or for­mal cer­ti­fi­ca­tions (except the Zend Cer­ti­fied Engi­neer,) or any other real qual­i­fi­ca­tions aside from expe­ri­ence and time with books teach­ing me the prin­ci­ples of some­thing then allow­ing me to stum­ble in the dark to fig­ure out the details; with that out of the way let me state that if you’re in a posi­tion to go to school or enter the job mar­ket GO TO SCHOOL there are var­i­ous rea­sons behind me say­ing that.

At work we’re cut in half on hav­ing degrees, and I have to say I can­not really see a vast dif­fer­ence in the code pro­duced by those with a degree and by those with­out, then again we use PHP which is extremely easy to become lazy in.  In my recent job hunt I’ve noticed that degrees (even when adver­tised for) are optional once you have a few years of expe­ri­ence, the real dif­fer­ence comes in gain­ing the expe­ri­ence.  I had to scrounge the bar­rel for con­tracts for years as a con­sul­tant to gain my knowl­edge and I see the large gaps in my knowl­edge (UML, over­all Archi­tec­ture, etc) that have been small pains to work around or deal with (yes I’ve had to learn as much as I work over the last few months and largely in my own time.)
I have sev­eral ques­tions though; I have a friend who recently asked me for help with a C# home­work project, my friend is a senior at a local Uni­ver­sity and should at the very least know the basics of logic and pro­gram­ming.   His code was sub­op­ti­mal; it had infi­nite loops, un-terminated con­di­tional state­ments, and so many syn­tax errors that I com­pletely scrapped what he had writ­ten in favor of writ­ing the applet from the ground up.   So the real ques­tion is how well does a for­mal uni­ver­sity pre­pare a pro­gram­mer for the real world of appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment?  How does that edu­ca­tion stack up to some­one with a com­puter, a hand­ful of books, and a will­ing­ness to learn? 

In my case, only time will tell, I’ve got­ten a list of 10 books that are sup­pos­edly worth­while to check out and that should sub­sti­tute for a CS degree, as such I’m going to start off and prob­a­bly expand on that list.  Here it is 10 Boks that will Sub­sti­tute a Com­puter Sci­ence Degree

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