Programmer Humor

Last company I worked for and now contract for, explicitly set out to hire promising juniors over seniors. Reason being, they had to fire a guy with nearly a decade of experience because he was completely unable to adapt and learn new things, so his experience was all doing the same stuff over and over again.

A small company that has cash reserves will absolutely hire a bright grad who can hold a conversation in the interview, only trouble is the ratio between candidates and job openings.

Whether or not you're wasting your time in college is only something you can answer. However, there definitely are jobs out there for junior software devs right now. If economic outlooks improve, I'd expect demand for juniors to rise also.

Anecdote: I saw stats shared on social media by a CS professor at my former college. Enrollment for their classes is way down this year, when "back in my day" they were packed. Make of it what you will, but it's possible young people might no longer be seeing software development as an easy career to get into. That could make it a more attractive prospect for someone who's in it for more than just money.

I can share my experience with college, which it took me a while to appreciate but eventually I realized that while it wasn't apparent at the time, it did make a difference. But of course, your mileage may wary, it's just my personal experience.

I felt like I'm forced to go through a lot of bloat I'll probably never need - why do I have to learn stuff like Prolog, Lisp, Smalltalk and other obscure languages that I'll realistically never need? Why force so much in-depth math, I'll probably never need to be able to formally prove the Big O of a Hashtable...

After spending few years working after/during college in offensive cybersecurity, where most of my colleagues did not have a degree, I've eventually realized what was the point of all these classes. I noticed that people kept reffering to programming as in "I'm a python programmer", or "I'm a java programmer", but I never really felt like that - when someone asked me if I can write something in any language, it didn't matter what it is, I can just relatively quickly pick up the syntax and write anything I need in whatever you need, and I eventually realized that that's exactly thanks to the college - the point was not to make me a Smalltalk or Prolog programmer, but to give me a PTSD from every different style of languages, from OOP through functional to whatever Prolog is, and while I do not remember almost anything, I still have the basic understanding of how does that style works, and when I look up any new language I need to use for the job, I've already seen and was forced to once learn and understand (well enough to pass exams) something with similar concepts.

And that's a really big advantage that people without degrees don't usually have (at least from my experience with my colleagues). It will teach you how to relatively quickly pick up different technologies and use new things, and that is a really valuable thing. And it's the same about data structures and other math - you will probably not remember it, but the feeling that "wait a minute, this problem sounds familiar, isn't there like a obscure tree-thing structure that solves exactly this efficiently?" or "wasn't there some magic with stacking trig coeficients for this?" will stay with you, and give you a headstart in looking up the concrete details that would be pretty hard to find otherwise.

So I'm really glad I went to college. And in addition to that, it was amazing for networking - I had a masters in Gamedev and while that didn't teach me almost anything new, it gave me a lot of friends and an amazing community of passionate people that I keep on making games with.