Stephanie Giovannini (7/6/2015)

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I agree with Steve, though it's certainly difficult today to get a foot in the door without the piece of paper. That was not always true.

I have a bachelor's degree, which was largely a waste of my time and my parents' money. The most valuable item I've received from my college education was the opportunity to meet my now-husband. I'm sure that if I had attended when I was older and not so burnt-out on full-time education that I would have appreciated it more. But I was so eager to "start life" that I married, started a full-time job as a programmer and bought a house before I finally earned that blasted piece of paper. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering (BME). I don't think I've ever used anything that I learned in college in my career. The "general education" courses required in engineering are very lightweight. My communication skills were honed in high school and hardly exercised in college. I remember college English chiefly for the visceral dislike that I still retain for "A Portrait of a Lady."

My husband spent his early college years teaching himself to program the Macintosh (back when the C language was bleeding edge and most Mac programs were in Pascal) at night while he slept through the day (and his classes). He left college (obviously), continued to develop his programming skills independently and worked in retail. His entry to programming as a career came at Sears when he attempted to sell a Macintosh Performa to a customer who was eyeing it with the paternal attitude of a Macintosh aficionado. That person happened to employ a small set of Macintosh programmers and happened to need a junior Mac programmer, though he was not looking to find one at Sears. My husband has been in professional programming ever since. He did get the piece of paper eventually. I admit to using fatherhood to blackmail him into finishing his degree. Since I was at home with our infant daughter during the dot-com bust of 2001, I asked him what would happen to his family if he were laid off and his lack of a degree made finding another job impossible? That did it. He spent five years finishing the piece of paper in the evenings. His degree was never anything more than the ability to check the "degree" box on a job application.

On the other hand, I've had the dubious pleasure of having to train several recent Computer Science graduates who lacked fundamental programming talent. I remember one of them especially. She had no ability to program whatsoever and could not be trained to do so. She fundamentally did not understand how computers work. Her only real skill was complaining, which she did fantastically. If she didn't like what one level of management said, she went up another level with her sob story of being under-trained and having no help to do her very difficult job because people were mean to her. The company sent her to weeks of training in PowerBuilder, after which she couldn't figure out how to disable a button on a form. I wish I were making that up or exaggerating it, but I'm not.

I'm not surprised that graduates can get a CS degree without fundamental talent. I have a very poor ability to visualize and solve problems in three dimensions, but I have a BME. I would be a disaster actually working as a mechanical engineer. I didn't discover that little problem until my senior year in my capstone mechanical design courses. Since I scraped a D in those, I graduated anyway.

Programming is more of a trade than a profession. An apprenticeship program would do a better job of weeding out those who lack talent while teaching marketable skills and providing a "piece of paper" for the HR department.