On 6/11/2018 at 11:39 PM, malhotraprateek said:
Once you can prove to an employer that you have the same or better skills/experience than a graduate from a computer science course or have a decent enough portfolio which says it for you, you will have a much better shot.
This is one of my biggest concerns when hiring someone who doesn't have a CS degree. If they have no degree or a degree in a different field, I need a lot of reassurances that they have a broad knowledge base.
One of the biggest benefits of a computer science degree is that as an employer I have an assurance that the candidate has been exposed the full range of topics. The person many not remember the details but if I talk about state machines or talk about heapifing data to pull by priority, or talk about network bandwidth, or talk about manipulating relational database on the database, or talk about cryptography and the risks it solves or the risks it doesn't solve, a CS graduate should have a basic understanding of all the topics. As part of the program a CS graduate should have some exposure to the full breadth of the field, even if they didn't dig deep into every topic.
Those who do not have the degree and are self taught tend to have more limited experience. There are topics they didn't teach themselves. Sometimes it is due to lack of interest, the person has no interest in relational databases so they don't study it. Other times it is due to pure ignorance, they don't know that they don't know it and therefore have no knowledge that they could study it. When an applicant does not have the degree I need to quiz and test them to ensure I'm satisfied with their knowledge.
As one example of this, years ago I worked with a self-taught programmer who had worked on many games over the years. He was working on a data processing tool and was taking far longer than expected. Eventually others were brought in to help, and he showed he was having trouble figuring out all the combinations of options to the tool. He had built a state machine that handled much of it since he was quite familiar with that, but he had absolutely no concept of a grammar. Some of us sat down with him, learned about the state of the tool, and it was painfully obvious he was trying to implement every step of a grammar through a convoluted state machine, making a bunch of states at every step to account for each option. Although he had been a game programmer for years, he never learned about grammars and didn't even know they existed. Sure he'd seen documentation that explained grammars, but he thought they were a convenient documentation format and didn't know how they worked. He had a hole in his education that a CS student would not have had.
Having a degree helps assure the employer you've got the background you need. It will help you every time you apply for a job. You can gain the knowledge on your own, but neither you nor your employer will know what gaps you've got until you fall into a trap like the one described. If you don't have a CS degree and I'm interviewing you, you can expect some questions on a range of CS topics, particularly theory topics, that you may not have studied on your own.
