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That's a tough one, because I've met plenty of quality IT people in a similar situation. You need to figure out if it is operational and economically feasible for you. For example, if you have children that you are raising, maybe you don't have time to do the studies. Maybe you're only planning to work 10 more years; so it might not be worth the time or money to do invest in it. If you have no college credits, it wouldn't be a piece of cake as you'd be forced to take all those social sciences, math, history, humanities, ect..., but if you are are junior standing, then you should probably finish it.
If your current employer has tuition reimbursement, I'd utilize it. You can deduct college tuition from your taxes; so the monetary cost could be low.
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I'm looking into the feasibility of taking classes and using my old credits, of course they are over 20 years old now. And like you said, I'm really only looking to put in about 10 or 15 years before I hang up the hat and enjoy the rest of my life while I'm still spry enough to do it.
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That is difficult to answer. If you feel you can go back to school, I think I would recommend that.
I was part of a hiring campaign in our company earlier this year. I participated in +10 interviews and passed my recommendations on to my manager. I did not have the deciding vote on whether or not to hire, but I had a good say in the matter.
I personally do not weigh a person on the level of education as a primary factor - I have worked with people that only had a two year degree, but were just as brilliant as the ones with Master and PhD degrees. However, by the time a candidate's resume gets to my inbox for evaluation, it has gone through an HR person and at least one manager above me.
So, I might vote for hiring you without a degree (no, don't send me your resume, it doesn't work like that  ), but you have to pass through a number of filters first. And I am afraid your salary will be lower without a degree, but I don't actually have any numbers on that.
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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Depends on the region. After consulting for a while, I've notices that the HR departments in some parts of the country and certain companies, regardless of where they are at, balk at non-degreed engineers, even if they have 28 years experience! Note that most hiring managers don't care, but their HR departments sure do. This is all amplified when you have an engineering recession.
Further, I know of a few companies which will grab up people with masters degrees regardless of actual experience or capability.
I partly regret not getting my masters when I thought about it back in 93, but even now the idea bores me to death. Back then it was even more theory and UNIX.
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Firstly.
A number of company adverts are heavily sanitised by HR departments before they go out and a company will add those sort of requirements as a default. However when it comes to weeding out the CVs, it is not generally done but HR and those musts are rarely true musts and other factors like experience / skill sets / attitude etc will count for more (depending on the Manager). So I would ignore that requirement and apply anyway.
Secondly.
If there is some special learning you are trying to achieve, then by all means.
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If you have being doing it that long, you shouldn't find it that hard to get. I am not an IT professional and it is not something I do everyday.
I went back and did a computing degree in 2007 and found it relatively painless, although, it ate a lot of my home time due to my offshore work schedule. The hardest part was getting my head round some of the AI stuff, and also remembering the different languages being used throughout, when constantly switching back and forth between Java, C#, VB.net, JavaScript and several others, particularly whatever it was they used for the functional programming, I often found I used the wrong code.
I hated writing code by hand on paper, during the exams!
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It is very common around here to ask for a degree in job description, but with a long and proven experience it never really matter...however lately CVs are 'read' by software and if no B.A. in it it will be dropped by the software, so there is a dilemma...
The best way I found is somehow get contact with the HR directly and let my CV seen by humans...
(Just saying, that learning for the parer will probably kill you  )
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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School isn't worth it.
It takes lots of time, effort and money.
It sucks the energy out of you.
It doesn't actually teach you stuff you need.
The stuff it does teach you could've Googled when you needed it.
School is a slow way to learn.
I've met IT graduates who literally couldn't declare a variable in C#.
School always lags behind with reality. You'll probably be doing some old version of Java (don't do anything else either, because the teacher won't understand it).
You'd better find a new job if they value four years of schooling over 22 years of experience.
I may be a bit biased as I always hated school.
I liked programming really very much until I decided, like you, to go back to school.
Only now, after having done little schooling for about a year, am I finding my enthusiasm and curiosity is coming back.
If I ever start to hate myself and rather be brain-dead I'll go back to school again.
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I also hate school too but employee requires degree as they control what pay to give and chances for promotion and not everyone is lucky. I have to beat HR and recruiters as they only recognizes degree 
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Seems like your beginner luck has ended then 
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agree, time to go back to school to get degree and be a junior developer/software engineer for degree batch after degree. FYI degree and non degree benefit is different even if is same position of junior.
modified 17-Aug-16 19:08pm.
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The more stuff you have in your arsenal the more chances you have in life. Sometimes we are given a signal about how things may be in the future. There's a chance that the signal can be ignored and all will be fine. It is always better to respond if you are able. If a degree rules you out of consideration for many jobs now then speculate on how things may develop down the road. There are many people today who are unemployed because they did not heed these indicators and fell behind when the competition become very tough.
Peter Wasser
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell
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I have over 25 years of experience in designing embedded systems, and yet I found I couldn't break into the medical industry without a degree. It was best explained by an HR manager like this:
If I designed a small sub-system of a product, and designed it perfectly, documented the firmware, got it past V&V no problem, but another part of the system failed leading to either serious injury or death, I could be called to give a deposition. One of the first questions I would be asked would be where I earned my degree. If I had no degree, they would blame the failure on the "uneducated" so called "engineer". So at the ripe old age of 56 I went back to school, got my associates, got several contract jobs in medical and now working on my bachelors. It's painful sometimes, but so far worth it.
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demotis wrote: So here is the deal. I have 22 years of experience in IT, with the last 15 in software development. I'm up to date on many of the latest technologies and constantly learning new things (thank you Code Project for your help with that). I have recently started looking for a new job after having worked at a place for 7 years doing C# .Net programming with a hint of PHP/HTML.
With that amount of experience, I would say you're far better qualified than any new graduate, no matter how good their degree.
I dropped out of university over 30 years ago, and although the first couple of jobs were hard to get, and quite low level, once I had a few years experience most of the companies I applied to were very keen to take me on. I can't recall any of them questioning my lack of a degree when compared to even a few years of relevant experience.
It's quite likely the companies you're looking at simply put that clause in to discourage young, inexperienced, applicants. I'd recommend applying, and making sure your CV / resume emphasises your depth of experience.
eta : any employer who insists on a degree (as seems to be the case, reading more of the thread) and will pay an inexperienced graduate more than a seasoned engineer / developer isn't the sort of company I'd consider working for...
Days spent at sea are not deducted from one's alloted span - Phoenician proverb
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molesworth wrote: ... any employer who insists on a degree (as seems to be the case, reading more of the thread) and will pay an inexperienced graduate more than a seasoned engineer / developer isn't the sort of company I'd consider working for...
I have decided to go ahead and get a degree in CS with a emphasis on Programming. Actually, I'm going to get just enough to be a Computer Science, but I'm going to concentrate on Theory so I'm not bored to death making "Hello World" programs and having to explain the difference between an object and Class.
With that said.... You are 100% right. A 4 year degree with 3 years experience? In a best case that's only 7 years experience. I got double that, and mine is real world, on the job experience. But, apparently we are in the minority.
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Consider a Master's Degree. I got mine from Missouri State.Computer Information Systems Graduate Program - Computer Information Systems - Missouri State University[^].
The program was a mix of on campus and online. It took 2 years with 4 weeks on campus plus lots of nights and weekends. But at the end (and I have kids and worked full time) I had a Masters in Computer Information Systems. That degree opened up several doors for me when getting employed. Tuition wasn't too bad, so I paid out of pocket
Good luck!
Hogan
Hogan
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Having been on the other side of the conference table here's what I've seen. In the embedded programming world, and granted it's a bit different from normal programming, there are so many resumes a degree is used as a first order filter (electronics, part of that embedded difference) in selecting who to interview. A BA is better than nothing but for a tech job it really has to be a BS degree, unless it's a tech writer or customer training position.
Equivalent experience is just a dodge to avoid legal hassles for dicrimination. HR puts it in there but it rarely has any relevance to the hiring process. Does a degree actually make a difference otherwise? Only for an entry level position. A senior position is all about experience, because we know technical knowledge has a short half-life.
In interviews I started with a couple tech questions, just to eliminate the resume inflators. After that I was more interested in the non-technical skills, things like communication skills (writing, speaking up to express opinions) and some understanding of the economics of commercial software, the importance of project management and the aility to think beyond the assignment for next week.
And that's where the degree does make a difference. Going to a university or college is more than job training, it's exposure to a variety of disciplines. A code bootcamp can teach someone to write code, but it doesn't teach the ability to extrapolate from the immediate into the abstract. Software is more than writing code (yeah, blasphemy!!), it's economics, politics, sociology, and even psychology when you have to climb into someone's head to reverse engineer undocumented legacy code.
Does the 15 years experience count? Sure, but you have to get out of the pack before anyone looks at it. If the degree comes after the experience, no one really cares, because you won't be applying for Grunt Programmer I job classifications.
So if you do go back to school, take some theory classes, Numerical Analysis, Queueing Theory, Finite State Automata, but don't neglect Economics and English, especially writing. At a senior level you have to communicate your ideas in an effective manner to both management and your junior team members.
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This actually makes a lot of sense. in the short amount of time this post has been out I have resolved myself to enroll for one of the online degrees. I've sent in my info and have requested my transcript from when I was in school back in the early 90's. I hope that at they can count some of my credits.
It is a great idea to take theory classes. I was thinking that I would need to take "Intro to Programming" and start from the bottom, but it is perfectly logical that I could take some theory classes to get a BS and then back it up with my real world experience.
Thanks for the insight.
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I definitely fall into the don't need an education camp, based on my 38 years experience in the field. However I was fortunate enough to earn a degree early on, and along the way fell into the defense industry. In that industry hiring companies must have relevant degrees so that they can slot you into a defense contract. Many contracts for skilled labor don't include categories for non-degreed personnel. You have to fit into one of the contract slots so that the company can get paid. They make their money off of the difference in the contract category payment per hour and your salary. So depending on the industry you're applying for its something to consider as you make your decision. Just offering a different perspective than what I've seen here so far.
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If company wants you to have a paper and sneezes at your experience, you don't wanna work for them. Really, you don't. You would regret it from day one of employment.
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This almost has to be measured person-by-person depending upon your background, skill level, and career goals; however, you make one large assumption that may not be true - that school will teach you things you already know. I know plenty of people with over 20 years of experience that are mystified by "memory overflow" errors. Those individuals never took the time to actually understand the underlying principles of what they did and it held them back. That said, school is expensive and time-consuming. It will require tremendous dedication on your part to fulfill the degree requirements and work full time (if that is what you are planning to do). I followed this path myself many years ago and I didn't regret it, but I also look back and wonder how I managed it all working full time, taking 2 classes per semester, and raising a young family.
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It so much depends on yourself - what you have learnt through those 15 years. I've met quite a few non-academics who have learnt what to do, but with a very vaugue understanding of why they have to (or ought to) do it that way. (As in Geek & Poke: TDD [^].) I was teaching for a few years at a tech college, where we had a terrible time 'deprogramming' some of those self-educated guys coming to us for a degree, 110% confident that they knew all the 'right' ways ... that were not.
Then there are those who have learned from their experienced colleagues, and picked up the good practices, and also know the real world problems to be solved (which those coming directly from high school certainly do NOT). They can be the finest students there are, worth their weight in gold, especially in group projects, and even at lectures, asking exactly the right questions to pinpoint the essentials.
When young people ask me for advice about education, my recommendation is: Get yourself a lower degree to learn some academic principles and methods, and quite a bit about practical work, 'the craft'. That ensures that you, according to a systematic plan, have been 'diciplined' to solve problems in a reasonably orderly manner. Here in Norway, we have these three year engineering schools not classified as universities; they educate engineers to do engineering, not to do paperwork.
Then go out and see if you can handle it well - you probably can. If you are an academic by nature, you will often ask yourself lots of 'why's, you would like to know the underlaying ideas and concepts for everything from design methods to code patterns to whathaveyou. Then, after a few working years, you enter a university to learn the theory, the principles. You have the background to understand why, to ask the right questions, to know how to apply the theoretical knowledge - for all of this: in contrast to your fellow students who haven't had a single working day within that professional field. You will gain a tremendous lot more from the academic theory than they will, because you will know why.
But you don't have to know all the theory. I have had colleagues with 3 year basic engineering only, but their mind has been so 'academic' that the have picked up more than enough of the theory on their own. And they have been truly excellent practitioners of the trade.
Your case is one level below at the academic scale: It is not putting abstract theoretical principles on top of a lower degree plus work experience, but putting a lower degree on top of work experience alone. The difference isn't essential. If you do a lot of work mostly because you know that's the right thing to do, but you don't know why, and that bothers you somewhat, then you definitely should go for the bachelor. If you either say 'Well, I know what to do, and that is good enough', or you say 'But I do know all the 'why's!', then you probably would benefit far less from going back to school.
If you are of the self-taught kind that has not been guided by more experienced colleagues, then you probably could benefit a lot - and it might be painful. I tried to teach my students a number of good principles, and a couple of the self-taught ones handed in coding exercizes of fairly good coding quality, headed by a comment line: "This is how the professor forces us to solve the problem:" - and then followed an alternate code block of really messy code, all commented out and with a heading: "And this is how a real programmer would do it: ...". I smiled, recognizing that they at least had learned the good principles, even though they explicitly rejected them. Hopefully they wouldn't be as much in opposition when getting out into the open world.
So it all depends on what you know, your attitudes and work patterns. If you present a few thousand code lines that you have written, would reveal a lot. Having you explain the architecture, the modular structure, of some large system you have been working on, would reveal a lot. Having you explain the principles behind the design of the internal module interfaces in your system would reveal a lot.
You don't go to U to learn the syntactical details of another programming language. You go to learn the concepts of programming languages in general, so that you later can handle all sorts of languages. You learn priciples of graphics programming, not one specific plotting library. Etc. etc. If you know C#, PHP and HTML, but you have no clue about XSLT, how to write a parser, or algorithm complexity, then maybe a bachelor would be a good idea. Unless you say 'I will never need to write a parser or use XSLT, and the CPUs are fast enough so algorithmic complexity is irrelevant', of course.
(Bonus story: A fellow student of mine, in one of his first job assignments had to make use of his parser programming abilities to parse bacteria(!). More specifically: Writing code for automatically classifying microscope images of bacteria of different types. They defined a BNF syntax for images of each type, and parsed the image according to the BNF. Identifying bacteria type A or type B is like identifying a 'while' loop or a 'for' loop - same method, even though the 'tokens' were graphical elements rather than textual symbols. If he hadn't know the idea of a tokens and parsers, of formal grammars and BNF notation, he would have had a hard time in that project! This is the kind of background you get at a U, but rarely in a programmer position in some arbitrarty company.)
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It so much depends on yourself - what you have learnt through those 15 years. I've met quite a few non-academics who have learnt what to do, but with a very vaugue understanding of why they have to (or ought to) do it that way. (As in Geek & Poke: TDD [^].) I was teaching for a few years at a tech college, where we had a terrible time 'deprogramming' some of those self-educated guys coming to us for a degree, 110% confident that they knew all the 'right' ways ... that were not.
Then there are those who have learned from their experienced colleagues, and picked up the good practices, and also know the real world problems to be solved (which those coming directly from high school certainly do NOT). They can be the finest students there are, worth their weight in gold, especially in group projects, and even at lectures, asking exactly the right questions to pinpoint the essentials.
When young people ask me for advice about education, my recommendation is: Get yourself a lower degree to learn some academic principles and methods, and quite a bit about practical work, 'the craft'. That ensures that you, according to a systematic plan, have been 'diciplined' to solve problems in a reasonably orderly manner. Here in Norway, we have these three year engineering schools not classified as universities; they educate engineers to do engineering, not to do paperwork.
Then go out and see if you can handle it well - you probably can. If you are an academic by nature, you will often ask yourself lots of 'why's, you would like to know the underlaying ideas and concepts for everything from design methods to code patterns to whathaveyou. Then, after a few working years, you enter a university to learn the theory, the principles. You have the background to understand why, to ask the right questions, to know how to apply the theoretical knowledge - for all of this: in contrast to your fellow students who haven't had a single working day within that professional field. You will gain a tremendous lot more from the academic theory than they will, because you will know why.
But you don't have to know all the theory. I have had colleagues with 3 year basic engineering only, but their mind has been so 'academic' that the have picked up more than enough of the theory on their own. And they have been truly excellent practitioners of the trade.
Your case is one level below at the academic scale: It is not putting abstract theoretical principles on top of a lower degree plus work experience, but putting a lower degree on top of work experience alone. The difference isn't essential. If you do a lot of work mostly because you know that's the right thing to do, but you don't know why, and that bothers you somewhat, then you definitely should go for the bachelor. If you either say 'Well, I know what to do, and that is good enough', or you say 'But I do know all the 'why's!', then you probably would benefit far less from going back to school.
If you are of the self-taught kind that has not been guided by more experienced colleagues, then you probably could benefit a lot - and it might be painful. I tried to teach my students a number of good principles, and a couple of the self-taught ones handed in coding exercizes of fairly good coding quality, headed by a comment line: "This is how the professor forces us to solve the problem:" - and then followed an alternate code block of really messy code, all commented out and with a heading: "And this is how a real programmer would do it: ...". I smiled, recognizing that they at least had learned the good principles, even though they explicitly rejected them. Hopefully they wouldn't be as much in opposition when getting out into the open world.
So it all depends on what you know, your attitudes and work patterns. If you present a few thousand code lines that you have written, would reveal a lot. Having you explain the architecture, the modular structure, of some large system you have been working on, would reveal a lot. Having you explain the principles behind the design of the internal module interfaces in your system would reveal a lot.
You don't go to U to learn the syntactical details of another programming language. You go to learn the concepts of programming languages in general, so that you later can handle all sorts of languages. You learn priciples of graphics programming, not one specific plotting library. Etc. etc. If you know C#, PHP and HTML, but you have no clue about XSLT, how to write a parser, or algorithm complexity, then maybe a bachelor would be a good idea. Unless you say 'I will never need to write a parser or use XSLT, and the CPUs are fast enough so algorithmic complexity is irrelevant', of course.
(Bonus story: A fellow student of mine, in one of his first job assignments had to make use of his parser programming abilities to parse bacteria(!). More specifically: Writing code for automatically classifying microscope images of bacteria of different types. They defined a BNF syntax for images of each type, and parsed the image according to the BNF. Identifying bacteria type A or type B is like identifying a 'while' loop or a 'for' loop - same method, even though the 'tokens' were graphical elements rather than textual symbols. If he hadn't know the idea of a tokens and parsers, of formal grammars and BNF notation, he would have had a hard time in that project! This is the kind of background you get at a U, but rarely in a programmer position in some arbitrarty company.)
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BA degrees aren't special, that requirement is just used as an applicant filter. In this case, your experience trumps the degree requirement many times over, so if you've been practicing many of the technologies they need, apply anyway.
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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It seems most self-tough developers know about 98% of what need to develop most software application. It is the last 2% that employer are after with developers with college degree. Those 2% are the abstract theories, algorithms, patterns, politics, and communications. It is those with the extra 2% that develop compilers, operating systems, and library frameworks to be use by others.
Getting a BA/BS in computer science will give you that extra 2%.
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