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Less that you don't need education and more that the education of a CS degree has little relation to the practice of software development. It's probably improved, but when I was in college 20 years ago CS was something you did abstractly on a whiteboard, it's computer SCIENCE. That's certainly valuable to society as a whole and certain fields, but it has little bearing on building websites or business CRUD or other things the vast majority of us are doing. I don't need a new hire to be able to implement a sort algorithm from first principles, I need them to know git and how to write unit tests and how to communicate with a team effectively.


It is often used to check if a candidate can master complex topics, but I would disagree that formal education doesn't help for software engineering.

Asked the other way around, what would you suggest as education for someone who wants to be a software engineer?




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