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Crazy. It depends on the kind of software being built. Working on embedded systems for avionics is an entirely different animal than working CRM software develo

Crazy. It depends on the kind of software being built. Working on embedded systems for avionics is an entirely different animal than working CRM software development as an example. Even Wozniak didn’t have a degree until 1986, long after Apple went public. Most of the people I worked with at Apple didn’t have CS degrees yet they built the thing many of you are using to read this. Much of software development is deciding what to build rather than how to build it — that takes skills far beyond CS. We are building software for people to use rather than building it for its own sake. CS people might know algorithms but do they understand why they even need it? How does it help the user? Some of the worst places I’ve ever worked had lots of CS degree people who spent more time complaining about framework defaults than building something people are able to quickly use and pay money for. Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees. Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, Zuckerberg, Chris Wanstrath (GitHub,) Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox.) — no CS degree. Stewart Butterfield (Slack) had degrees in philosophy! Reid Hoffman — also a liberal arts guy. Avie Tevanian (Architect of MacOS,) — no CS degree. And while Steve Jobs wasn’t as technically astute as Wozniak — he still did tech and of course, no degree at all. I could go on all day — I only mentioned the famous ones. At Apple I could list a hundred top engineers with no CS degree. I am sure most people here could. The CS degree gatekeeping is complete ridiculousness. I am biased though— I spent 7 years at Apple and have been in this business 16 years and my degree? Journalism. CS people might be able to answer questions, but many times they don’t know the questions to ask. Tech has room for everyone and everyone brings a different skill set to the party. Not all doctors need to be neurosurgeons.

mcv 27d ago
> Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees. Some of those (certainly Grace Hopper) are old enough that CS degrees didn't exist. Hopper had a PhD in mathematics.
- tzs 27d ago
  Add John Backus (FORTRAN) to that group. Like Grace Hopper, got his degrees long before CS degrees existed. His bachelors and masters are in math. Dennis Ritchie (C) got his degree, bachelors in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard, after CS degrees came into existence but 20 years before Harvard offered a bachelors degree in the subject. At the time those interesting computing could study it as a special track in the applied mathematics program. At a lot of research universities I think that was the general pattern. They start a CS research department which takes on graduate students and offers PhD and masters degrees. Then they start offering undergraduate courses, but no degrees. This can go on for a while. Eventually they add undergraduate degrees. When I was a Caltech student (class of '82) they were in the "this can go on for a while" stage. My degree is in math but I took all of the undergraduate CS courses they offered. It wasn't until 2004 that they finally started offering a bachelors degree in CS.
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mcv 27d ago

> Inventors of Perl, C, Turbo Pascal, Typescript, Delphi, C#, FORTRAN, PHP, and COBOL pioneer Grace Hopper — no CS degrees. Some of those (certainly Grace Hopper) are old enough that CS degrees didn't exist. Hopper had a PhD in mathematics.

tzs 27d ago
Add John Backus (FORTRAN) to that group. Like Grace Hopper, got his degrees long before CS degrees existed. His bachelors and masters are in math. Dennis Ritchie (C) got his degree, bachelors in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard, after CS degrees came into existence but 20 years before Harvard offered a bachelors degree in the subject. At the time those interesting computing could study it as a special track in the applied mathematics program. At a lot of research universities I think that was the general pattern. They start a CS research department which takes on graduate students and offers PhD and masters degrees. Then they start offering undergraduate courses, but no degrees. This can go on for a while. Eventually they add undergraduate degrees. When I was a Caltech student (class of '82) they were in the "this can go on for a while" stage. My degree is in math but I took all of the undergraduate CS courses they offered. It wasn't until 2004 that they finally started offering a bachelors degree in CS.

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