So the question posed today is do you need a college degree to be a developer in 2023. this is an interesting question to look at because it's on a lot of people's minds people in their late teens who are getting ready to go to college. people who are already in college and maybe wondering if they made the right call or not. most people reading this have probably heard of the whole you know college dropout who went on to make some crazy thing in the development world and be ultra successful.
Do You Need a College Degree To Be a Developer?
now although that situation is not super typical and i don't advise anybody rush to drop out the next film opportunity. if you look closer at the situation for a lot of these people it starts to make sense on why that decision worked for them so what exactly is the purpose of college as understood by most people.
Well most people would say college is for two things it's to 'a' teach you something and 'b' give you a credential that helps you get a better job. so while both of those are indeed true the former could be a little misleading so just imagine you're 18 years old you've decided that you want to go get a computer systems engineering degree, you are graduating with a really high gpa.
you got admitted to the college of your choice you're about to graduate high school and then you start college and then your very first class you're going to take for your computer systems engineering degree is going to be english.
not just english but some basic math and humanities and biology and pretty much a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with computer systems engineering.
this brings us to our first very important fact about college and it's not designed to teach you any specific thing this is why you can't say get a bachelor's degree in python college is intended to teach you a broad set of things of which some will be specific to what you're majoring in it's not necessarily a bad thing that's like that being well-rounded is good and going to college for four years.
also shows you can commit to something for a relatively long period of time and that you can comprehend and process a wide variety of information. although those two things are not specific to any particular degree.
they are desirable traits in any prospective employee. so imagine you just graduated from a four-year college and you got a degree in computer science and you really want to be a python programmer but you never actually took a python class you understand a lot of fundamentals about computer science and then you took two years of just general studies what do you do now and this brings us to the main question of this Article again do you need a college degree to be a developer?
In this case because you want to be a python programmer and your college didn't actually teach you python you're kind of at a poor position to gain a job in python. so you apply for a python developer job you get an interview and the first thing the interview asks you is can you show us your experience in python and you tell them well no i haven't really done much in python but i do have a four-year degree in computer science and unfortunately what they're going to say is they're going to say well we really need somebody to just hit the ground running and start writing python on day one and unfortunately the degree that you spent four years getting is going to be absolutely useless in that moment.
so this brings us to our second really important point and that experience beats education every time so this brings us back to our topic question do you need a college degree to
be a developer?
The answer is a definitive no in this case with the employer who needs an employee who's going to hit the ground running and write python immediately. it's going to be the guy that just finished his nine month python bootcamp. that's going to get that job ahead of you and that's because that guy is telling the interview, yeah i just did a nine month you know python bootcamp i'm really good at python now i've done a couple projects i can definitely start working on your project asap. i start and the employer is going to say great fantastic you're hired start immediately.
so follow-up question is a college degree ever necessary and the answer is absolutely yes, the situation the employer that i just described is probably 98 of the cases but what about the two percent.
so if you want to work at a big company or a very technical company like a google or a facebook then you're probably gonna need a degree or you're gonna have to be a well-known name somebody with a ton of experience or maybe a connection to get your foot in the door.
the reason this is the case is because these companies can be extremely selective. these are people who are gonna put candidates through five rounds of interviews. they're gonna require a bunch of stuff and it's gonna be really intensive.
that's because everybody wants to work at google on facebook and netflix and amazon and all these place.
This is just the nature of the market when there's more candidates than there are jobs then they can be really picky but this hasn't really changed the fact you still need some experience.
it's just when google's interviewing two people if they're gonna pick between somebody with experience and somebody with experience and a computer science degree from stanford.
then obviously they're going to go with the latter i suppose the upside for a lot of the bigger companies is that they're more likely to have positions for somebody at a junior level who maybe just has a degree but no experience and they'll take you in just because of the degree.
this is something that's typically not afforded to people without a degree it's very uncommon to find a small and medium business who doesn't have a large amount of budget to hire somebody who they then have to train small medium business mostly needs people to show up and start doing work immediately.
so in the end whether a college degree or a coding bootcamp or just nothing at all is the right move for you depends on exactly what your ultimate goal.
experience is a very good thing to have but none of that knowledge and experience really came from college it all came from being out there and getting work done.
FINAL ADVICE: DO YOU NEED A COLLEGE DEGREE TO BE A DEVELOPER?
My advice for everybody whether you're in college or not is to do stuff outside of work in your free time and continue improving your trade over time and one day you have so much experience and knowledge that you'll be an asset to pretty much any place you go to.