I guess my point is that it isn't so much the degree as the person that got a degree. I live in an economically depressed area, and some very intelligent people here just don't have the resources (time & money, with time being the harder of the two.) to attend a college. I encourage these people to play with computers whereever and whenever they get the chance.

Taking classes at a college is a very valid way to learn about CS... but its not the only way. And not all college graduates are created equal. At my last job, I was being _productive_ in a FPDos 1.02 within a week. On the other hand, I had someone who graduated from the same program that I did that was never really all that productive. She was a hard worker, but she really didn't get it.

Its the material, not the degree.

>Todd,
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>>Its my impression that the people that want to *work* at learning *do*. It doesn't matter if they do it on their own, or if they do it through a college. These people are the "bright" ones. Not the ones that said, "Hey, there is a lot of money in computers, I'll get a computer degree..." instead they are the people that figure that they have a fun toy on their hands and want to learn all they can about how to play with it.
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>Over here there is a serious shortage of IT people. Not even lots of money attracts new IT people. It seems to be that only the ones who are interessted in computer science will take the course.
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>>I love to see talks about design methodology and object "patterns" here... as well as the occasional database design. I think that its the highest level of playing that I do, and the most fun.
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>Well, that is one of the subject i've learned through college. When FP went OO I was way ahead of people who had too learn the principles of OO and how to design OO systems. Playing with it only brought in some new ideas but never brought in new knowledge of the OO principles.
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>>I've known people that master's degrees that could think their way around anything I could do... I've also know degreed people that weren't sure what I was talking about when I told them about relational databases.
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>Well of course. A good friend of mine is a system administrator. He has lots of experience, reads the latest technologies and works with this subject every day. Though he doesn't have a degree, he knows much more about maintaining NT, UNIX and LINUX system than I do. But on the other hand I know much more about developing systems and the IT world in general.
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>The only thing I'm trying to say is: When you have a degree in Computer Science, you'll have some broad knowledge about Computer/Science. Whatever you do within the IT, you 'll have some advantage over someone who doesn't have the degree.
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>In college we learned some very important algoritms about finding the shortest path, the cheapest path, Security, Binary trees, Linked lists, Recursion, Operating systems etc. Though you can learn this in practice, I'll bet that the AVARAGE non-degree holder will not know as much about it than I do.
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>But even more important is that i've learned some human communication and analitical skills. In our business it's very important to have a very good interaction with your client. Determining what he wants (because often they don't know for themselves what they want), to have good and constructive discussions. I'll bet some of the VFP prominents could use these skills.
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>Walter,