My experience (of employees and students) is that too much programming experience before you enter the Computer Science study can actually be bad. It seems that if you have spent your teenage years hacking along you tend to know 1-3 programming languages very well but you have little knowledge of other parts of computer science (system theory, algorithms, compilers, software engineering and so on). However you *think* you know it all and spend little effort on the studies. These students also tended to only finish the “fun” bits and never actually spent the time needed on the details/hard to find bugs/trivialities.

This is usually exaggerated by the (mostly unfounded) respect from other students who may have limited experience, but tend to put some effort into their study.

I have similar experience of these guys (because they are almost always guys) in the workforce. The tend to overestimate their (programming) skills but have weak theoretical background.

That may be fine for a lot of jobs out there – but it is not the same as being a computer scientist.

Maybe universities should lessen focus on “common” programming languages and instead offer supplementary courses in the programming languages du jour for those that don’t have any programming experience. Instead they should increase the focus on core Computer Science topics (such as algorithms and system theory for pure computer science) or the core topic in their genre for more specialized programs.

I started Comp Sci and did a year and a half, then I left and got a job doing Tech Support and System Administration at a small company. That progressed to a job doing some contract PHP work at a smaller company with a much larger web presence and then a full time Sysadmin job at an enormous company that owns it’s own data network. I have come a long way without a degree and it doesn’t appear to have held me back at all. About half of my colleagues have degrees.

I learned a great deal from the classes I did at University and I fully intend on going back to finish my degree however the lessons I have learned while working in the field have prepared me for the second half of my degree better than the first half of it ever could.

While at University, I witnessed a fellow student starting a degree after twenty years in the business (the business and degree were both Graphic Design) and he sailed through it. He scored 100% on nearly every assignment. I’m sure he would have learned something from the work involved and I’m sure the degree will be useful to him but a degree is onnly challenging to those who don’t already know how to do the work. Learning how to do Comp Sci while being paid to learn is much better in my opinion than having to pay to learn. You could even work part-time and do your degree part-time.