I’m a self-taught dev and I don’t hold any kind of degree. I studied computer science for two years and foreign languages for four years. Then I decided to drop out. I regret a bit not learning French to a more advanced level, but the whole studying thing just stopped making sense for me.

It may seem weird to people from places where the educational process is actually meaningful. But I grew up in Russia, and it’s a fucking mess there. Nobody actually cares about anything. You can simply buy your degree. And that’s exactly what a lot of people do. So when you see a person with a degree from Russia, take it with a pinch of salt. In some cases, you don’t even need money, because professors just don’t care. You can bring something that you found online and present it as your work and everything will be fine. I personally did this several times for courses that were kind of unrelated to the field.

That, by the way, is another stupid part of the Russian educational system. They just have to have some bullshit courses that the Ministry of Education decided that students have to have. It can be anything. Some universities have courses about God.

Anyway, it stopped making sense to me, because I saw that both parts just don’t give a fuck. Students come and just sit there and wait for studying hours to end. Profs did whatever they felt like. Some could even spend half an hour talking about football or whatever. And I decided to just stop and start working.

By that time, I already had some experience with designing tools and some HTML + CSS experience. And little by little, my front-end developer career started to lift off.

And it seemed to be working out fine for me. Until I decided to pursue a career outside of Russia. I found a job that even sponsored my working visa in the UK. But when it came to an end and I started searching again, I faced a really nasty situations.

The first one was with a web agency from Zurich. We had several calls. The guys were amazing, they sent me an offer, and I was ready to go. But then the Austrian government got in the way, saying that I don't have a degree and can’t really come to work there. Well, that was a bummer.

Almost right after this, I found a position at a German company. Again, everything was amazing. I went through all the stages of the hiring process, and again it all stalled when I applied for the visa. The department that was responsible for my visa just kept silent. And when I couldn’t stay any longer in the UK and had to leave, after half a year, I got approved. Again, my education was the reason for this long wait. By that time, I had already found another job and didn’t really care about that visa.

At that time, I thought, well, the world of bureaucracy was simply not ready for the rapidly evolving IT market. Because obviously there’s nothing stopping anybody from just using the tutorials online and just learning software development. You don’t need official courses or whatever. Yeah, it will be another kind of knowledge, but the required overlap of skills is still there.

You don’t need a CS degree to build an app. All you need is time and determination and an open mind, of course.

So, now when I see a degree in the requirements list, I automatically consider the guys to be outdated. If I were to hire anybody, the degree would be the last thing I would look at. It absolutely doesn’t matter when you compare it to skill and experience. A CS student that just got out of university is a much worse candidate than a person who has spent these years coding either for fun or for real projects. It’s about problem-solving skills, nost algos.

Yeah, you need deep knowledge when you do low-level stuff or something physics-based or some shaders. Basically any math-related code. But most of the applications out there are not math-related, they are mostly logic-related. A fresh degree holder will make the same kind of mistakes as the one without any degrees. And only with time will they both learn the proper ways of software design.

It’s experience that matters if you need a coder with the skill set to build quality software. My view is, of course, biased by my path and my past. But that’s what I see all the time.