College.

[mattheweston]

The best advice I can give anyone who just got out of college is to consolidate your loans and lock in a low rate. I locked in at around a 3.0% rate for my undergrad and I'm hoping they don't raise it before I can do the same with my grad school. My wife has two loans that we aren't able to lock in so we're screwed unless we pay those off quick. In total once I finish grad school between the two of us we will be facing over 100k in student loan debt. I'm looking at around a $500 payment for that all combined. However, I should be able to make over $100k when I finish up and I'll have some certs (paid for by my employer), when I finish that masters as well.

The degree is definately worth it; however, try to find whatever means you can to pay for it and avoid student loans if you can. If you can't, use the money wisely and don't borrow more than you have to. There are tons of scholarships out there. http://www.fastweb.com I believe is one site that you can use to search for scholarships. Also search for grants. There used to be a commercial on tv with a crazy guy who was talking about grants for all kinds of usual stuff, pay your bills, go to college, buy a car, etc. , this may sound crazy but, there is some truth to what the guy said.

In the end, you will get what you put into college. If you go and blow it off the degree won't be worth the paper it's printed on. However, if you go and actually learn something you will walk out with a very valuable education.

Think of it from the mind of a hiring manager. You have two candidates. One with a degree and one without. Weigh the pros and cons and the decision should be easy.

[Aspirer]

Wow, great advice guys!

There are soooo many things I want to do with my life... I've wasted the last four years working a blue collar job, and doing nothing but playing games. Gotta find that motivation.

[teamtwentythree]

I agree with what has been said above about CS degrees. They don't guarantee success, but they open many of the doors you need for it. It is a huge waste of time/money as 50% of it is utter BS, but those are dues paid by people who know what they want (us) for the slackers who think college is about finding yourself.

That said, what people don't care about:
Grades (At least I haven't seen this matter in the hires I've been a part of, we'll find out if you know your shit during the interviews)
Credits taken at the university you graduated from

What people do care about:
Degree
Work experience

My advice:
Work during school
Consider taking the bull filler classes at a community college, just make sure they count towards your targetted 4-year school. I would probably go so far as to do the intro CS classes too, if you feel you've already got a handle on basic Java or whatever they use at the 4-year school.

[TheBuzzSaw]

I think I've mentioned this in another thread somewhere. Regardless, I'll say it again.

I participate in the hiring process now at my job. I've been through many applicants by this point. I can essentially confirm what has been said in this thread. We've hired people with and without degrees. We've turned away people with and without degrees. Let me just share a few observations.

I'd have to say the best attribute of any engineer is humility. Accept that you don't know everything. Accept that someone who supposedly "knows less" than you do may still know something you don't. One of my favorite co-workers is one you might consider unqualified at first glance: he has yet to finish his degree, and he had minimal previous work experience. However, he is humble and therefore teachable. As a result, he is one of our best guys. He asks questions; he's always willing to learn. He works hard, and now he's very qualified. He's not afraid to say "I don't know" when asked about some aspect of programming. We hired him because he demonstrated his will to work. He codes on his own and tries new things all the time. During his interview, I asked him how he would go about debugging a function call to a library where the source code was unavailable, and he gave a clear answer detailing how he would go about it; it wasn't some textbook answer. We could tell he had a passion for this stuff.

On the flip side, we had another guy who was an arrogant jerk all the time. (He was there before I was hired.) He had it in his head that because he had 5 years work experience over us, everything he said was correct, and everything we said was strictly opinion. He refused to collaborate. He refused to entertain alternative solutions. He refused to listen to "kids fresh out of college". If someone other than him made a big improvement to the code, he would hunt for some reason to disqualify it. I could go on forever about how idiotic this guy was, but I think you get the point. He eventually quit because he felt "no one on the team respected him". That is ironic considering he made no effort whatsoever to earn our respect. Here we are, 6 months later, and we are busy deleting all his code because he introduced so many bugs/instabilities into the system, because he refused to consult anyone else on any of the work he did.

Arguably, exhibit B was "more qualified" than exhibit A, but look how things turned out. Your attitude is a big contributor.

I've interviewed graduates who could not tell me what a pointer was. Degrees don't make you smart; they're supposed to act as proof that you were smart already.

Let me just make this one last comment. Again, this is purely anecdotal and not supposed to represent some greater truth. With day to day development tasks, everyone on the team operates on fairly equal ground. The teammate with the least experience contributes about the same as the teammate with the most experience. It's a great team. However, whenever an extremely complex bug or bottleneck presents itself, the guys with degrees tend to be the only ones capable of fixing it. All the guys still finishing their degrees are left scratching their heads, and we graduates usually end up finding the problem. The younger ones do not even know where to begin looking. Anyone can fix simple off-by-one errors and null pointer exceptions, but it takes a sharp eye to catch a problem being caused by memory-stomping, slow file I/O, mutex-locking, etc. all converging on one place.

Sorry about the rambling. Again, that's not to say "degree == smartness". It's just my observation at my job that the ones with degrees tend to know more about complex problems.

[Benjamin100]

How does somebody without a college degree prove to an employer that they are a competent programmer?
What will the employer want to see/ what would impress them?

[dandymcgee]

How does somebody without a college degree prove to an employer that they are a competent programmer?
What will the employer want to see/ what would impress them?

1) Job Experience

2) A solid portfolio of work that demonstrates your capabilities (if you can't easily provide code / demo, a thorough explanation of the project, its successes, its pitfalls, and what you learned is more than adequate. This often comes naturally as part of the interview).

3) Personality (this one varies wildy from one interviewer to the next). I generally look for strong problem-solving skills, self-motivation, enthusiasm and, most importantly, interpersonal communication skills.

Regardless of how badly you need or want a job, you should always present yourself with a high level of professionalism, and convince the company of all the great things you can do for them. If you do this well and present yourself as a valuable asset to the company, you won't need to worry about what they can do for you.

Never ask about pay / vacation / benefits during a job interview. All of these details will be provided to you as part of the job offer if they decide you are the candidate they want. Make sure you ask any questions you have about these things after you receive an offer, but before you officially accept the position.

Excluding the above, most interviewers will welcome any questions you have. You should use this opportunity to express interest in the company, the finer details of what they do, their long-term vision, company culture, etc.

My Interview Experience
My first real job interview went terribly. I felt ashamed and embarrassed of how unprofessional I looked (it was a large, successful company). At the same time I learned an enormous amount about the interview process which made me more confident.

There were two questions in particular that I recall not having answers to: "What did you do to prepare for this interview?" and "Why do you want to work for [company name]?"
My (embarrassingly ignorant) answers: "I briefly reviewed your website and dressed up nice." and "I'm in college and need job experience."

These ARE NOT good answers to those questions. My problem was that I didn't really give a shit about this particular company or this job, it was for a software QA (quality assurance) position and I was far more interested in being a developer. I literally was just trying to get a job anywhere. This is not the way to present yourself as a useful asset to a company. If aren't passionate about the job, don't bother applying (if you're starving and applying for minimum wage work that's entirely different, you gotta eat).

In the end, I got offered the position anyway because the hiring manager saw potential. I turned it down, because it wasn't what I wanted to do (and because they asked me to leave school for a semester to train).

[K-Bal]

Never ask about pay / vacation / benefits during a job interview.

In Germany it's quite usual to talk about this in interviews, although it's rather the interviewer that asks you how much salary you expect from the job.

[dandymcgee]

Never ask about pay / vacation / benefits during a job interview.

In Germany it's quite usual to talk about this in interviews, although it's rather the interviewer that asks you how much salary you expect from the job.

This is fine if you're an established professional with past job experience and have a salary history to provide. If you're a first-time employee straight out of (or still in) college, you should be looking for a competitive salary but don't really have grounds to say "I want 10k more a year and an extra week of vacation". A select few may have personalities that allow them to pull this off, but those few aren't going to heed the advice of an internet forum anyway.

[K-Bal]

Never ask about pay / vacation / benefits during a job interview.

In Germany it's quite usual to talk about this in interviews, although it's rather the interviewer that asks you how much salary you expect from the job.

This is fine if you're an established professional with past job experience and have a salary history to provide. If you're a first-time employee straight out of (or still in) college, you should be looking for a competitive salary but don't really have grounds to say "I want 10k more a year and an extra week of vacation". A select few may have personalities that allow them to pull this off, but those few aren't going to heed the advice of an internet forum anyway.

You can't expect way too much if you just finished college, that's for sure. I was just saying that you do talk about salaries in the interview in Germany.

After I received my master's degree in computer engineering I applied for a developer position in the broadcast industry. The job description even said that you were supposed to include a salary expectation in the cover letter. So I proposed 44k€ p.a. and I got the job and the salary (roughly)

[Benjamin100]

Right, but how do you even get an interview without a degree?
Won't most people just throw out the application without a CS degree? It makes an easy filter.

[K-Bal]

Right, but how do you even get an interview without a degree?
Won't most people just throw out the application without a CS degree? It makes an easy filter.

You need to have a good portfolio. Describe what kind of skillset you have and back it up with examples of your previous work. For example, I wrote this in one of my applications: "Beside my studies, I always had an interest in game programming with C++ and Java (videos available online at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheCellGame/videos). I'm acquainted with source code versioning systems and unit tests since I employ both for my projects."

[dandymcgee]

Right, but how do you even get an interview without a degree?
Won't most people just throw out the application without a CS degree? It makes an easy filter.

Call them. Or, if appropriate, literally knock on their front door and ask to talk to someone about a job (today would be a bad day to wear your flip-flops and favorite Hawaiian shirt). If you call and ask to talk to a hiring manager you can almost always convince them to pull your resumé out of the pile and read it, or if even land an interview right there on the phone (be prepared!)

Don't bother applying at "dream job" companies like Blizzard Entertainment or Google unless you have some seriously impressive way to coerce them into noticing you (college internships are a completely different story; and arguably the best way to get your foot into just about anywhere, but we're talking about no degree here).

[TheBuzzSaw]

Right, but how do you even get an interview without a degree?
Won't most people just throw out the application without a CS degree? It makes an easy filter.

It depends on the area and position. Frankly, the skill set is in such high demand, your odds are pretty good even without degree. It's an uphill battle without one, but you shouldn't give up.