I’m planning on switching careers. Currently, I do IT support (desktop administration) and have a pretty nice job. I’d like to move into programming for the increase in flexibility and salary, as well as long-term job stability—I’m pretty sure my current career will be automated away well before I’m capable of financial independence. To further that end, I’m fairly close to finishing my BS, and changing majors to Computer Science would greatly aid my transition.
Current options:
Quit the job and go back to school full time. I’ll have enough money saved to do this in December 2014, and will graduate in May 2016. I’ll need to take on about $15,000 of student loan debt to accomplish this, and I’ll be without an income during that period, so this represents a big hit to my finances justified by a much better paying job.
Go to school part time while working. One free class per semester is a benefit of my job, and I’ll graduate in August 2019. This puts off my ability to get a programming job for quite some time, but it avoids any student loan debt, and it allows me to keep my income.
The first option will break even financially with the second option if my beginning programming job pays $60k and I get one immediately after graduation. Both of these conditions seem unlikely, so I’m inclined to think that staying in my job and getting the computer science degree slowly is a better choice. However, I imagine that there are benefits to getting into the programmer career sooner rather than later, though I’m unable to quantify these and am not sure how to incorporate them into my decision making.
This website seems to suggest that the average CS major makes about $58k for a starting salary. So, if you do reasonably well in school, then getting a $60k starting salary doesn’t seem unlikely.
Why do you think getting a job right after graduation is unlikely? Can you find out from the school how likely it is for a CS major to get a job right after graduation? If the probability of getting a job right after school is low, then can you consider attending a different school?
Also, programming competency can be signaled without a degree: contribute to open source code, build something, participate in programming contests. But the degree would definitely help.
Also, I think you overestimate how easily your current job will be automated away. Support—for humans by humans—seems to me to be one of the hardest problems to automate away. Consider how many different skills you need: natural language processing; understanding emotional, cultural, person-specific and historical contexts; empathy; specific technical knowledge; the ability to communicate that knowledge effectively and so on. I don’t think the AI community is even remotely close to nailing this (Am I wrong here? Someone care to correct me?). Which is why we positively hate voice-prompt hell.
Getting a programming job is not contingent on getting a degree. There’s an easy test for competence at programming in a job interview: ask the candidate to write code on a whiteboard. I am aware of at least one Silicon Valley company that does that and have observed them to hire people who never finished their BS in CS. (I’d rather ask candidates to write code and debug on a laptop, but the HR department won’t permit it.)
Getting a degree doesn’t hurt. It might push up your salary—even if one company has enough sense to evaluate the competence of a programmer directly, the other companies offering jobs to that programmer are probably looking at credentials, so it’s rational for a company to base salaries on credentials even if they are willing to hire someone who doesn’t have them. Last I checked, a BS in CS made sense financially, a MS made some sense too, and a PhD was not worth the time unless you want a career writing research papers. I got a PhD apparently to postpone coming into contact with the real world. Do not do that.
If you can’t demonstrate competent programming in a job interview (either due to stage fright or due to not being all that competent), getting a degree is very important. I interview a lot of people and see a lot of stage fright. I have had people I worked with and knew to be competent not get hired because of how they responded emotionally to the interview situation. What I’m calling “stage fright” is really cognitive impairment due to the emotional situation; it is usually less intense than the troubles of a thespian trying to perform on stage. Until you’ve done some interviews, you don’t know how much the interview situation will impair you.
Does anyone know if ex-military people get stage fright at job interviews? You’d think that being trained to kill people would fix the stage fright when there’s only one other person in the room and that person is reasonably polite, but I have not had the opportunity to observe both the interview of an ex-military person and their performance as a programmer in a realistic work environment.
Having a degree seems like a good way to signal capability of doing the job. I will be studying, learning, and practicing as I go, and if I’m capable of getting a programming job without the degree, that would be ideal.
I’m planning on switching careers. Currently, I do IT support (desktop administration) and have a pretty nice job. I’d like to move into programming for the increase in flexibility and salary, as well as long-term job stability—I’m pretty sure my current career will be automated away well before I’m capable of financial independence. To further that end, I’m fairly close to finishing my BS, and changing majors to Computer Science would greatly aid my transition.
Current options:
Quit the job and go back to school full time. I’ll have enough money saved to do this in December 2014, and will graduate in May 2016. I’ll need to take on about $15,000 of student loan debt to accomplish this, and I’ll be without an income during that period, so this represents a big hit to my finances justified by a much better paying job.
Go to school part time while working. One free class per semester is a benefit of my job, and I’ll graduate in August 2019. This puts off my ability to get a programming job for quite some time, but it avoids any student loan debt, and it allows me to keep my income.
The first option will break even financially with the second option if my beginning programming job pays $60k and I get one immediately after graduation. Both of these conditions seem unlikely, so I’m inclined to think that staying in my job and getting the computer science degree slowly is a better choice. However, I imagine that there are benefits to getting into the programmer career sooner rather than later, though I’m unable to quantify these and am not sure how to incorporate them into my decision making.
Thoughts?
This website seems to suggest that the average CS major makes about $58k for a starting salary. So, if you do reasonably well in school, then getting a $60k starting salary doesn’t seem unlikely.
Why do you think getting a job right after graduation is unlikely? Can you find out from the school how likely it is for a CS major to get a job right after graduation? If the probability of getting a job right after school is low, then can you consider attending a different school?
Also, programming competency can be signaled without a degree: contribute to open source code, build something, participate in programming contests. But the degree would definitely help.
Also, I think you overestimate how easily your current job will be automated away. Support—for humans by humans—seems to me to be one of the hardest problems to automate away. Consider how many different skills you need: natural language processing; understanding emotional, cultural, person-specific and historical contexts; empathy; specific technical knowledge; the ability to communicate that knowledge effectively and so on. I don’t think the AI community is even remotely close to nailing this (Am I wrong here? Someone care to correct me?). Which is why we positively hate voice-prompt hell.
Is getting a job in programming really contingent on your getting the degree, or rather on you being capable of doing the job?
Getting a programming job is not contingent on getting a degree. There’s an easy test for competence at programming in a job interview: ask the candidate to write code on a whiteboard. I am aware of at least one Silicon Valley company that does that and have observed them to hire people who never finished their BS in CS. (I’d rather ask candidates to write code and debug on a laptop, but the HR department won’t permit it.)
Getting a degree doesn’t hurt. It might push up your salary—even if one company has enough sense to evaluate the competence of a programmer directly, the other companies offering jobs to that programmer are probably looking at credentials, so it’s rational for a company to base salaries on credentials even if they are willing to hire someone who doesn’t have them. Last I checked, a BS in CS made sense financially, a MS made some sense too, and a PhD was not worth the time unless you want a career writing research papers. I got a PhD apparently to postpone coming into contact with the real world. Do not do that.
If you can’t demonstrate competent programming in a job interview (either due to stage fright or due to not being all that competent), getting a degree is very important. I interview a lot of people and see a lot of stage fright. I have had people I worked with and knew to be competent not get hired because of how they responded emotionally to the interview situation. What I’m calling “stage fright” is really cognitive impairment due to the emotional situation; it is usually less intense than the troubles of a thespian trying to perform on stage. Until you’ve done some interviews, you don’t know how much the interview situation will impair you.
Does anyone know if ex-military people get stage fright at job interviews? You’d think that being trained to kill people would fix the stage fright when there’s only one other person in the room and that person is reasonably polite, but I have not had the opportunity to observe both the interview of an ex-military person and their performance as a programmer in a realistic work environment.
Having a degree seems like a good way to signal capability of doing the job. I will be studying, learning, and practicing as I go, and if I’m capable of getting a programming job without the degree, that would be ideal.