Having a university degree, I can unequivocally state that needing or prefering anyone with a degree in a developer's position is the biggest boatload of crap I have ever heard. I work at one of the oldest and best software and web development companies in Cape Town, and I was not even asked whether I have a degree.
As a developer, nothing but your portfolio of work or your codebase should ever count. Any company who asks for anything else could not find their own asses with their own two hands. The kind of company that needs BSc graduates to function should not be in development. They should be making soap or death rays or somesuch.
The reason I say that is that even though development is not as purely "creative" as say, graphic design, it does need a lot of creative thought. And that is exactly what a degree "strips away." A degree is a standardised methodology. It requires thinking "in the box." Varsity does not make you mallable. It makes you molded. It took me years to get the varsity way of thinking out of my head.
And before you bla bla about coding standards etc etc. I have here a guy who DEVELOPS coding standards, frameworks and entire DBA's as his job, and guess what, he has not studied anything in his entire life. Except what he studied for himself via the net, informally. And he just about glows in the dark.
Remember, I HAVE a degree, albeit not in the sciences. But I will tell you this. I was in res with about 500 Engineering guys. And the most spontaneously "out of the box" creative thing I saw was a guy wearing plakkies and rugby socks over longjohns and PT shorts, with a longsleeve dress shirt, a open face balaklava, coke bottle glasses, and two wads of toilet paper stuck up his nose in order to prevent the snot from dripping onto his books.
That is the guy I would want to be working with my clients, because he had a BSc Masters. Ya sure.
As things stand now, I get a great salary, I work flexi hours and work in a great environment, with great people.
People who want people with qualifications, want paper tigers and stepping-stoners. I have yet to find a person who is "sufficiently" qualified, who does not overly rely on their qualifications in lieu of real world knowledge and chutzpah.
People who are not "qualified" tend to work much harder, in my experience, and they also tend to have a lot more valuable self taught knowledge, because they have nothing to "fall back on."
So please, keep the silly degree and show me whether you are real and can do the work. Degrees and such show me a basic flaw in character, that being the "safe fall-back position" mentality. I want the guy who works his ass of and becomes an expert because he has to.
And also socially and pressure wise, having a degree is not going to benefit you, as varsity, at any level, is a closeted and unrealistic reflection of corporate and social life. What I took away from varsity is a useless degree and the ability to slog black labels at an unprecedented rate. (Which is worth more than the degree in corporate and social situations any day.)
The reason why people are bashing graduates is because in most (most) cases, graduates of even the lowest level carry about them such a sense of entitlement and superiority (they are amongst 4% of society after all) that you cannot put them in front of clients at all because of the built-in know-it-all attitude they display.
And as for employers who want a degree, beware of the type of situation you will be working in if you go work there.
Show me your skills. History, if not this thread proves beyond any doubt, that it is unstudied individuals who made the greatest economic and societal leaps.
As a last example, many years ago, I used to be IT manager (when I still liked hardware) for a very well known national company. When I decided to leave, we started looking at a replacement for me. It was a 6 month nightmare. I had guys with Computer Science, ITC management and just about every other degree come in there for practicals. I had guys with N+ and A+ and just about every other plus you could think of coming in there.
I chased them away faster than you can imagine. Want to guess who got the job, and still has it? The little matric grad who I got to help me with network installs during the time we were busy with the interview process. Why? Because he could think on his feet and never shunned the idea of asking questions. Most importantly, he had no post-degree ego. And I hear he is still doing a stellar job about 10 years later and makes a bundle.
My point was merely that there are programming tasks that could never be done without a very thorough study of that specific field.
