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Consider the "self taught - no college degree" realm of the software industry. Its rather large. Clearly, no degree is required.

On the other hand, here is someone who has completed a degree and gone beyond. Clearly they have the ability to learn new material. Furthermore, they attained a proficiency at least that of the self taught - no degree segment mentioned above.

Now, given a "you can make $150k/year as a software developer" vs "you can make $100k/year as a ME" there's something to be considered. Additionally, if thats instead a "you can make $70k/year as a junior engineer getting the necessary time to become a licensed engineer for the next few years" ... well, there are student loans to be paid off.

2 comments

I am fine with people having no degree and learning computer programming , but do not understand why people get masters in mechanical or electrical engineering and then enter programming web apps..if its all about money why do they waste the mechanical/civil engineering seat at the university ?

If argument is that they need to pay loans, then computer degrees should also be allowed to learn on the job and do mechanical/civil stuff ?

It certainly makes sense, and if someone has the programming skills, I suggest that they do it.

There is a problem on the hiring end of the software market though where I get flooded with resumes from engineers and data scientists and interviewing them for a software job seems to be a complete crapshoot. Literally the best and worst candidates that we get through. We get some folks with serious traditional engineering chops who can't code (as in solve a problem with software) their way out of a paper bag.

The self-taught developer and CS grad pools seem to be far more consistent, in my experience. I get through less of the very worst people and those are easier to filter in this pool.

Something to consider about many scientific programming domains - they don't do much in the way of conditionals. Glance at the code for FFT - https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Fast_Fourier_transform (especially FORTRAN for the engineer and MATLAB for the data scientist). This is the domain that many work in. Throw a problem at people who haven't gone outside the implementation of mathematical formulas that requires using conditionals as part of the design and there may be a bit more difficulty. This could account for the "worst candidates" that you've experienced.

They're the ones applying for experienced full stack developer positions...also we're not doing gotcha-style whiteboarding. It's literally 'take some basic thing and break down how it works' -- we don't even require it to be something in code. Some guy came in and gave us a data model for a flush toilet and nailed it.

If the self-taught/bootcamp junior programmer can nail it while you can't and are asking for twice+ as much money, how do I justify hiring you?