Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/1/2015)
cdesmarais 49673 (7/1/2015)
Where are you seeing all these new hire programmers without degrees? Not being snarky, I just can't remember the last one.
Meet some at almost every event I go to, at user groups, etc. It's not a majority. It's not even close. It's a small percentage, but it seems to be growing.
A good number of the MVPs, well known SQL people, don't have degrees.
Probably this is mostly an age and years of experience difference, or maybe a UK versus USA difference but I see it differently; the proportion of software developers without a degree used to be about 30% (the proportion without CS or MIS or IT degrees was between 95% and 100% in 1967) and has decreased a lot over the years; the picture in SQL specifically may be different - after all, there were no SQL developers at all when I worked briefly on computing at RHEL (summer 1966) and thoughout the first twelve years after I decided (in late September 1967) computing was what I would do therel there was no commercially available SQL (first formal release of Oracle was summer 1979, they beat everyone else to it) and for quite time after that SQL developers without degrees were as rare as hens' teeth.
Tom