Not that degrees matter anymore. They do not. Experience does.
Pursuing a degree gives you valuable experience - it would be a disaster if it didn't. There are other ways to get experience as well and some of those are better suited for certain individuals like myself. Our industry, when it works well, is meritocratic. If you are great at what you do the way you collected that experience is irrelevant.
I couldn't tell you who at Shopify has CS degrees and who doesn't. It simply never comes up. What comes up a lot is how good and how helpful people are and there seems to be little correlation with the degree.
On the other hand, I enjoyed my entire time in college, and I feel that I received a great deal of valuable experience, but I also did a great deal of coding outside of school. I think in my case I would have been fine without getting a degree, but it helped to hone some of the areas that I was not very strong in.
It got to the point where we heavily weighted applicants who studied Physics/Mathematics/Economics over the CS ones.
As my co-worker said: If someone in our city has a CS degree and needs a job, he probably really sucks at software development.
The real competitive advantage was hiring people with very good math/quant skills and teaching them software development concepts through Coursera and pair programming. We saved a lot on salary and we got very good developers.
"Not that degrees matter anymore. They do not. Experience does. That is one of the things my apprenticeship and the dual education system in general taught me: experiencing and learning things quickly is the ultimate life skill. If you can do that, you can conjure up impossible situations for yourself over and over again and succeed."
This is only my opinion, but when I look at the OP's statement in that context, I think that he's arguing that a credential isn't as important as the ability to trust that you learn your way through hard problems as they come up. In that regard, I completely agree with him. I think we all know some people with great educations who, when faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, will spend days finding literature to support the conclusion that the problem can't be solved. And conversely, we also know people with little education who look at insurmountable problems as fun projects. Personally, I suspect that this difference comes down to attitude and experience. On one hand, it takes a really great attitude to consistently stare down difficult problems. But on the other hand, I think that with experience comes confidence and solving really hard problems takes as much confidence as diligence.
That is, of course, all my opinion and there's a high probability that I'm wrong....
