programming jobs without degree

[stevenpalomino]

Hey all,

I was just curious to those of you who have been around the coding business for a while and maybe even to some of you who hire programmers. Is it even possible to get a job as a programmer without having a degree? Say I'm self-taught. Will I have any chances to get a job as a programmer? I know in the 3D field people don't care about your degree and only look at your reel. What about in the programming world?

thanks!

[nuzzle]

Is it even possible to get a job as a programmer without having a degree? Say I'm self-taught.

As far as I know programmer is not a regulated profession in most countries, so if you have deep special and proven skills I'm sure you can find a job also without formal education. But to build a successful lifelong career a degree is a much safer bet.

[aamir121a]

not just degree , plus industry certification like MCSE , Cisco cert , have you ever seen the MVP's in this forum they love to flash it around and it pays, lets face it not everyone is Google.

[GCDEF]

Experience is more important than a degree, but getting started without a degree or some kind of certification will be tough. If you just had self-taught on a resume, and no experience, I wouldn't call you. About the only way I think you could do it would be if you already work for a company and they let you start taking on programming assignments and you work your way into it. Getting hired with nothing would be next to impossible I would think.

[ninja9578]

I tend to find that the self-taught programmers can either be really good, or really bad. I've known self taught guys who have come up with some of the most sophisticated and well-built software I've ever seen, but I've also seen the flip side of that. The degree helps filter out the bottom group of programmers, so if you are just starting out, it may be more difficult to get a job as a programmer than if you have a degree. However, if you have experience and products, I think you shouldn't have much trouble. Skilled engineers are in high demand.

[stevenpalomino]

What is a certification? Is it like a degree but in shorter time or an add-on to a degree?

[GCDEF]

What is a certification? Is it like a degree but in shorter time or an add-on to a degree?

Various companies will certify that you are competent with their products. http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en...w-by-name.aspx

Also, there are trade schools that will give you a crash course in programming. While not up there with a 4 year degree, a trade school certificate is way better than nothing.

[stevenpalomino]

Ahh okay.. Would anyone recommend online schooling? I'm looking into the game design program at full sail university and it's got a LOT of programming.. Has anyone heard of it or taken it?

[Lindley]

Say I'm self-taught.

How are we to know that your self-teaching was any good? Do you have experience putting all the concepts from the book into practical applications, or are you just big on theory? Do you know the best practices, or is your code going to make other programmers wince? (To be fair, that's the case even with many degree holders....)

[ninja9578]

Just to let you know, game development is actually one of the more difficult programming niches to get into, and they usually do require degrees.

[GCDEF]

Just to let you know, game development is actually one of the more difficult programming niches to get into, and they usually do require degrees.

And it seems like that's what a lot of the younger people are studying. If you go into game development, there'll be a lot of competition from people with degrees.

[JohnW@Wessex]

And it seems like that's what a lot of the younger people are studying. If you go into game development, there'll be a lot of competition from people with degrees.

If the experience of the company I work for is anything to go by, then realtime, multithreaded, low level C/C++, hardware interfacing, comm protocols etc. is wide open. We need a new engineer to replace me (time to move on to pastures new; and more money ) for which I've been writing interview questions to help filter out candidates on second interviews. So far nobody has got past the first. A lot of the candidates seem to major in Java, others are graduates with plenty of Matlab skills but no commercial experience, and both usually have little C++ experience. We had one older candidate who new C++, but his examples were very basically C with some classes thrown in.

[Feoggou]

it seems that's a kind of problem for me too. I have taught myself C++ and applied only the things I saw I needed. it's a bit of a problem as I don't know exactly what to specialize in (e.g. I don't think it's good idea to learn from scratch I don't know what linked list or tree when STL already uses good ones).

I've started learning C++ from C++ the Complete Reference before C++ got standardized the second time (I think it was the first edition), so it lacked STL and modern programming. As time moved on I started getting into Windows programming (win api and mfc), and only later found out that C++ improved in time (and I got other editions of C++ The Complete Reference). I lack knowledge in STL as I didn't use them too much in my programs - and I even implemented a double linked list that, if it contains pointers it deletes them when it must(using a pointer to a function: the programmer that uses the list creates the function to delete an object - e.g. using CoTaskMemFree or delete) and has other attributes. The great problem with this is that it was a big attempt to throw STL away and when I applied for a c++ job, a test I received was with STL. The same is with I/O: I preferred (and still prefer) C functions (e.g. scanf, printf) and therefore the C++ I/O didn't stick to well in my mind.

I'm interested in a career in game programming. can you guys please give me an idea what I should focus on?
it seems templates (which I did not use too often in my life) and STL are needed. Though I've not been using inheritance too much either, I can use it, and I guess pretty well. though I have no idea what kind of project I can make using extensive inheritance and virtual functions and all that goes with classes.

And this is again a great problem of self-teaching: you need to make projects. And what projects can you make except those kind that you are interested into? (e.g. a program you need). And I didn't need to much inheritance and C++ complex stuff. or perhaps they could have been used but did not came to mind or something.

another problem is that I cannot base myself on what is taught at a faculty. At least the faculty I attended (it matters which country and which town/city after all) did not teach me too much C++. That is, about 2% of what I know of C++ is found in that teaching. The same or worse is with using optimizations and advanced stuff. So it's a bit hard to get to learn c++ otherwise than self-teaching (and I don't have the money either to go I don't know where and attend I don't know what course to expect to be taught everything I need). And I really want to become a good C++ programmer.

[ninja9578]

Gaming is a huge field, what do you want to work on? Graphics, AI, networking...? Different parts of the game have different engineers who have very different skill sets.

And I disagree about the part of knowing exactly how linked lists and vectors and trees work not being necessary. How will you correctly choose your container for you case if you don't know exactly how they work. There are also cases where you may want to write your own variant of one of those. I have written my own implementations of string, vectors, lists, and trees for various reasons.

[Lindley]

We had one older candidate who new C++, but his examples were very basically C with some classes thrown in.

That's not always a bad starting point. I've met some really good low-level coders who stick to the C aspects of C++ (when they deign to use C++ at all). It would be nice if they could learn to write in a higher-level style most of the time, but it's also handy to have someone who can eek out every spare cycle from those inner loops when necessary.