chrisn-585491 (9/11/2013)
Degrees are not a sign of competence. There are many folks with CS degrees that can't problem solve and many MBAs that can't manage. The best programmer I know is self trained, the second best was a music major. The best DBA I've been around has a culinary background. (He's also a MCM, too.)
I can definitely vouch for that one, having originally been a Bachelor's of Computer Science recipient and not having any idea what I was doing :w00t:. Our college curriculum focused on basic C++ programming, with some assembly programming here and there, and our database course (for one semester only) was with MySQL. In it, we were largely taught that triggers should do most of the heavy lifting in the database. Oh, and I started on my degree in 2005. Yeeeeeep...
The degree certainly looks nice, though, and it gives me a little bit of credence in my resumes, at least. Still, I definitely wasn't satisfied with what I'd learned, and started doing plenty of self-study to learn more. A lot of what I initially learned was that I hadn't learned much of anything useful, so I had to ditch the (bad) course education I picked up and instead develop good programming habits. But you'd never guess that was the case if you judged me entirely by the fact that I have a diploma, with the idea that having it guaranteed my competency.
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