Do you really need a degree for tech - an MLH podcast

Tue, 27 Jun 2023 08:06:43 -0400

Yesterday, I noticed a LinkedIn post by my friend Jonathan Gottfried of Major League Hacking about an MLH podcast, The State of Developer Education. The episode he shared caught my eye. It was titled "Do you Really Need a Degree for Tech?" Here's the YouTube link. It featured Lauren Schaeffer, Developer Advocate for Grammarly.

I enjoyed listening to Jon and Lauren's conversation and recommend that you too take a listen, Lauren talked a bit about her journey and highlighted some happenings and practices along the way in school, IBM, MongoDB, and finally Grammarly. Truth be told, though, I didn't feel that they really dove into the title question of "Do you really need a degree for tech?"

The podcast did make me think a bit more about the title question and we'll get to that later but I wanted to riff on one point Lauren made that struck a chord with me. After pivoting from a straight engineering role to a DevRel role, she worked it so that she could spend one quarter a year working on an eng team. I love this. Really smart. It can only help a customer if their DevRel people keep their tech skills sharp and are in the trenches with the developers and likewise the transfer of knowledge the other way has got to help the straight dev teams. I don't think this could be a universal practice though because I've met many DevRel people and while some, like Lauren, clearly have the engineering chops, others I've met don't, or at least don't yet have a strong enough tech background to be dumped in to an eng team for a quarter and be productive.

Besides loving the idea, even with the limitations, it's something I thought about with respect to teaching. When I was working on putting together my teacher certification programs I thought about tech internships for teachers as a sabbatical solution or summer enrichment. Teachers would be certified through a strong CS Ed program and then later, when they are ready for a sabbatical or a summer boost, and this would mostly be aimed at high school teachers, they could do a tech internship set up for them. I even talked to a number of tech leaders who seemed to like the idea.

It made all the sens in the world to me. A high school teacher in the sciences might work in a lab during their summers but for a high school CS teacher working with a CS researcher would be pretty worthless. Very little, if anything would end up enhancing that teacher's in class performance when they were back to teaching. A tech internship, on the other hand would up their software engineering game, bring them up to speed with best and industry practices, and even give them the platform to tell their kids about how "when they were there."

Unfortunately, I think that's a program that will never come to light or at least it won't for a good long time. Now that we're seeing cert programs pop up, we're getting what I feared. A few solid programs and many more weak certification mills. Teachers going through the latter will in no way be prepared for a tech internship and their students will be the worse for it. For a teacher tech internship program to exist, we'll need to wait for the next few crops of teachers to work their way to their licenses and hope that they select the strong certification programs.

So, that was my big takeaway from the podcast but I do encourage you to listen to the whole thing.

To get back to the title question of "is a degree necessary?" - that's a debate that's gone on for a while now and it frequently focuses on code school vs college. I think there are a couple of additional wrinkles to add.

Are we talking about K12 –> Code school –> workforce or are we talking about K12 –> college for non CS –> Code school –> > workforce. These are two very different things. I recently wrote about liberal arts education and how I feel that a BA in CS can be more valuable than a BS in CS for many people and that the liberal arts, if taken the right way by a student that's ready for them can be a big boon to our society as we try to get a handle on the ethical and AI related issues that have been too long ignored since we decided that education should only be for jobs.

The code school in some ways can be viewed as a lightweight CS minor focused on industry so is it really different than someone doing an undergrad in anything and taking enough CS for a job? Probably not. The CS major probably gives the student more adaptability and grounded base knowledge but then the CS major also requires a lot of cruft only useful for the future PhD candidate.

On the other hand, K12 right to the code school, particularly given the damage caused by common core, NCLB and the like will miss serious opportunities on the "soft" side from college and yes, the humanities.

No answers here but more to think about.

So, once again, check out the podcast. I'm going to have to look at the other released episodes myself when I get a chance.

code schools on C'est la Z

Do you really need a degree for tech - an MLH podcast