How important is grad school for a programmer?

[cheapguy]

I was just curious about the number of people who do go on to grad school. Most people tell me that it's not necessary for me to go to grad school. Just four years is enough...I would like to know what everyone else thinks. Programming is soo fun, yet so frustrating at the same time!!!

[rock]

If what you want to do is to become a programmer, there's really no need for graduate school. Get out after 4 (or 5!) years started earning $$ and getting experience.

If, however, you enjoy programming, but eventually want to branch out into other realms, the more education you have, the higher the glass ceiling. However, you'll be overqualified for the typical programming job by the time you graduate - something to be aware of when you're mapping out the future.

I personally have a Ph.D. in Engineering and am at my first real job-type-job, with plans to move into technical management in a couple years.

[Zoma]

It depends on what you want to do and how much you enjoy school. I learned a good bit of programming on my own before starting college. I forgot what C/C++ I had learned because they started off in Ada. Then when I took their C class, I had a crackpot professor* who confused me so much that I knew LESS about C than before I had started the class. So I relearned it on my own. I have not learned very much useful after 5 years in school as a CS major. Almost everything has been on my own. So I'm against going to grad school (at least at the moment), and I think you need to learn a lot on your own if you want to do well. Maybe I just went to a bad school.

*This guy sucked. I was just going through my old papers from classes, and looked at a test I got a 51/100 on. I looked at what he marked wrong, and I should have a grade in the mid-90s. At the time I was too confused to complain, but he really was that bad.

[krack_it_up]

Well, I got my MIS degree and am currently working. It has been my experience that the people that complete their PhDs are usually the ones that want to a) teach b) go into research or c) get into upper management. Most CIOs have PhDs or at least a masters (at least in my experience) Alot of the key positions at major companies are phd level people. But if you want to be a code monkey like the rest of us, a BS is good enough. It all depends on what you want to do. I will say, however, that a colege degree is becoming more and more important. With the IT job market as dry as it is, you really have to shine to get a decent job. It's not like it was 2-3 years ago.

[Galen of Edgewood]

I have my BS in CS. Unfortunately, I got laid off on Nov. 30, 2001. I haven't been able to find work yet... Education isn't the problem in my area. I just don't have that experience. I have just under 4 years of expereience and I think that's what's killing me.

Then again, I don't know PHP, SQL, or any database languages... That ain't helping either...

[cheapguy]

sorry to hear galen, i'm sure things will start to pick up soon.
And thanks for the input everybody.

[bryce777]

I am a perpetual grad student.

I have learned interesting, useful stuff, and the more high end and complex the systems you are creating, the more important education is.

If you just want to do ecommerce etc., it is not of much use.

As for pay, you will never recoup the money you put into grad school compared to having put in the time working....

[DeadKen]

I don't think theres many professions in which your degree could matter less.

Ask Mr. Gates!

Actually, if your interested in doing research, go for it. If your interested in just doing, a BS is enough.

[e_dawg]

Originally posted by DeadKen
I don't think theres many professions in which your degree could matter less.

Ask Mr. Gates!

Actually, if your interested in doing research, go for it. If your interested in just doing, a BS is enough.

Word.

In fact, even a BS is really hard to justify, since work comes and goes at such a rate that paying off the loans you'd need to take just to get one would be hard with the inconsistency of the work. Many companies look for degrees but will not pay you what you're worth because they can get someone else with the same degree for less since they are just as desperate as (or more desperate than) you... I run on skill and track record, I've made bottom-of-the-barrel (which I would have made with a BS when starting anyway), and excellent for the geographic area (more than colleagues with Masters degrees)... It really doesn't matter what letters are behind your name, but where you position yourself in the industry. Good positioning and skill pays off regardless of whether or not you have a degree. In fact, one of my friends said my experience, education, and skills would amount to an MS to his company anyway, if they were hiring right now. The problem is that nobody is hiring, or if they are, they are looking for really bizzare and impossible to fill positions, probably with the intent to replace the IT department they laid off 6-12 months ago with a single under-paid person...

[bryce777]

As for whether a degree at all is worth it, I definitely think it is.

A local state school is very inexpensive, an in one year you can pay off the loans if you land a decent job. You can also get scholarships, and going to school while working is (Or during the boom rather was) the norm.

For some jobs, a degree hardly matters, but even for sysadmins they are helpful in aiding them in understanding what is really going on - and more and more people do not have a small set of responsibilities, but must learn a bit of everything eventually.

For a programmer, there is no doubt in my mind that a degree helps you in many, many ways. Most of the things you learn are things you will need to know eventually, and if you do not, you will be stuck with simpler tasks and smaller projects, relatively speaking. The reason programmers get paid a lot is that they have a lot of knowledge beyond knowing their languages of choice well and knowing their platforms well. A good programmer should be able to jump into any language immediately and be able to hit the floor running and understand the problems at hand instantly. As a programmer you will ahve to study a LOT to be successful at anything beyond something like coldfusion or oracle forms development or perl scripting, and you may as well get the degree for the studying, and the degree will at least make you aware of areas to think about and research in the future if a problem comes up that can be solved using something you have vaguely heard of...there are manyt imes this comes up since no one can know everything, and because in general saying 'no' to a client is not an option.

Also, another big factor is simply finding a job. If you have a job now, you may think you are ok, but any areas you are an expert in will eventually become obsolete...and when you do not have a degree you are much more pigeonholed as the perl guy or VB guy or C++ guy or whatever. Fair or not, most places simply won't hire anyone without a degree. It would be a cold day in hell before anyone without a degree got hired here, no matter how good they were, simply because we have to send out people's resumes all the time, and it is hard to justify charging 100-200 dollars an hour for someone without a degree whereas someone who solved a fairly well known problem in their domain area in grad school who is working towards a phd is easy to sell. Hiring people is the hardest part of this business, when one person can drop the ball and destroy a project and potentially the company itself by underestimating the costs or totally messing up the design.

We are happy with maybe 1/3 of the people we hire as it is, and fire 1/3 within a year and don't give raises to the other 1/3 til they quit. When you are paying people more than 100k, you want the very best, and it is extremely hard to tell how someone will really perform until they are there. Even people who totally ace interviews (not many of those) will sometimes totally fail, so people without degrees, or who have any other outstanding problems such as poor english, will never even get an interview...a lot depends on programmers doing new development generally speaking, and the salaries are high enough that mistakes are very costly, and no one likes firing people because it costs you a LOT of money to do so.

Not all environments are as high pressure, but many are, and many are much more so. Games programming is fairly high pressure, and lowlevel OS dev even more so, and high end embedded systems is extremely high pressure in that they must be perfect and millions or billions depend on them, and they also take more and more education - generally the more interesting the work and the higher the difficulty of the problem domain, the more education you need.

You will also have an easier time moving into design or 'architecting' positions if you desire, and the best of all worlds is to be an architect/designer/coder, but too often you will get kicked up completely into management.