I'm just going to throw in my experience here as someone who never went to college but currently writes software for a living.
I do mainly frontend web development with EmberJS, and occasionally work on our backend which is also JS, and I've been doing that for a little over 2 years now.
I never went to college and so a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about in this thread goes right over my head. I've never written a compiler, the last time I wrote any C++ was high school, and I would so easily fail a lot of these interviews if those were the questions being asked. With all of that said, I think I do a good job at what I do without all of that knowledge. The industry is increasingly heading towards web/app dev in a lot of positions as other people mentioned, and I think it's very elitist to judge people for not knowing everything you do, even if you think it's important. The fact that this industry is becoming so open to so many people is amazing. Me being able to find a good job without a college degree just because of my knowledge of computers is what I love about tech. I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.
I don't want to sound like I'm accusing you of being malicious, I just wanted to share my point of view as someone who is relatively new to the industry and never went to college and doesn't have the knowledge that you are suggesting is very relevant. Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.
I never went to college and so a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about in this thread goes right over my head...I think it's very elitist to judge people for not knowing everything you do, even if you think it's important.
Fair enough. However, if someone did go to college, they should at least know what they know, and know what they don't know. If someone is applying to a job with a 3.75 GPA where they might be doing some C++ and they go into an interview and try to tell you that a null pointer takes up no data, they haven't been well served by their education. They should at least know what they don't know, and not waste everybody's time.
However, you should know that these things are important. There are levels of knowledge deeper than being just a user of something.
I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.
So a generalist Comp Sci degree just needs to shrink into Web Development because of your feelings? Look, Web Development is a fine job, but it's not the same as a generalist field of knowledge like Comp Sci. Should mechanics expect that a Physics degree only be limited to their knowledge because of their feelings? They're applying Physics, after all. (Warning: don't you go and denigrate mechanics! That would be elitist.)
The very fact that you can have a job in tech without a Comp Sci degree isn't a justification for the dumbing down of Comp Sci. It shows that it happened needlessly!
Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.
Let's say you discovered an interviewee thought that a 404 meant the request never made it to the server. Let's say they also got a 4.0 GPA at some Web Development coding academy with a great reputation. Wouldn't you at least be scratching your head?
These are things that used to be taught in a Computer Science degree. Now they aren't taught, and companies are going to have to teach new graduate hires this stuff that people used to take multiple semesters to learn? It also used to be that Freshmen in college were expected to know how to conjugate verbs and compose grammatically correct sentences. Now TAs (I used to be one) are expected to teach these things to Freshmen. How is this not a decline in standards?
I do mainly frontend web development with EmberJS, and occasionally work on our backend which is also JS, and I've been doing that for a little over 2 years now.
I never went to college and so a lot of the stuff you guys have been talking about in this thread goes right over my head. I've never written a compiler, the last time I wrote any C++ was high school, and I would so easily fail a lot of these interviews if those were the questions being asked. With all of that said, I think I do a good job at what I do without all of that knowledge. The industry is increasingly heading towards web/app dev in a lot of positions as other people mentioned, and I think it's very elitist to judge people for not knowing everything you do, even if you think it's important. The fact that this industry is becoming so open to so many people is amazing. Me being able to find a good job without a college degree just because of my knowledge of computers is what I love about tech. I think mindsets like yours are what help drive people away from it because they think they need a ton of knowledge to get an entry-level job, and that's just simply not true.
I don't want to sound like I'm accusing you of being malicious, I just wanted to share my point of view as someone who is relatively new to the industry and never went to college and doesn't have the knowledge that you are suggesting is very relevant. Maybe it is relevant and I just haven't figured that out yet, but from where I'm sitting that feels like something that could be taught instead of a hard and fast rule for hiring.