Well written. I have a similar background and I agree with most of your observations and conclusions. Not the part about prestigious universities catering to 'rich kids", though, at least not any STEM departments.

Classic gatekeeping argument insisting a CS degree is necessary to write good software. I don’t have one and have 20+ year successful career with accolades, know many others in the same boat. Obviously there are CS degree people who were also successful, and the flip side comes for both camps, I’ve worked with absolutely awful engineers with or without a CS degree.

It is a signal, not the signal.

While I agree with this in principle, I think the market is a separate problem. As much as this is correct, the market is not going to select for competence. The market is going to select for affordability.

Ultimately the most affordable worker of the future is going to be the person who knows just enough to prompt an agent to first build a feature and second fix it "fast enough" when it ultimately breaks.

Companies might have a couple of people who actually know how to design systems and think deeply on hand for overall architecture, load balancing design, and serious problems but this will be a small cadre of employees. In some sense, I suspect, in relation to degrees, computer science will eventually look like the field of curation: an extremely small pool of outstanding positions looking to be filled by an orders of magnitude greater number of degree holders.

Unless the bubble does eventually burst, in which case people will hopefully return to their senses.

So says "zaksa".

Follow up question. Who is zaksa?

This is a very dated view. We're in the process of offloading that to the machines.

i dont think a whole degree is required for software dev, prolly better to just make it a major in some other degree like eng or sci

A lot of the leet code problems are "math shaped". LLM's are pretty strong at that.

My guess is that interview questions would test your skills combined with the llm, because when testing skill without, the difference is just too big.

Excellence is what matters. It can be found in universities (and is in theory what universities are for), but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement. In fact, I usually react to the new hires with C.S. degrees with some degree of frustration at what schools are teaching these days.

Excellence can also be found in independent reading, and it can be learned with professional mentors as well.

You can learn it from AI, too, actually. I'm skeptical about the central use of AI in writing code directly, but find it incredible as a teaching tool. It is especially impressive when I use it as something between a tutor and a search engine, talking to it a lot about the best way to do things and asking it about standard methods and resources. It's not infallible, to be sure, but it's this incredible combination of tutor and textbook, with a better connection to the zeitgeist than all but the very best of tutors and textbooks.

> They either focus on the wrong things when developing software, they have a very shallow knowledge and lack of regard of how difficult good engineering is, or they’re utterly clueless and rely on good soft skills and politics.

I’ve worked with plenty of people like this that had degrees. A few of them even have masters.

> The people I wrote above weren’t considered bad performers.

Did management - the people who are supposed to deal with the issues described - have degrees?

I have a CS degree. I learned some useful things. However, I graduated in 1998. I've had to learn a bunch of stuff since then because it didn't exist in 1998.

For folks that don't have CS degrees, they just have a little more to learn outside college. When I started my career, a significant majority of my colleagues didn't have CS degrees. It just wasn't a popular major in the 90s.

Among the best developers I've ever worked with never went to college at all.