The idea that university degrees don’t matter is a Silicon Valley fantasy

General Developer Forum In The News
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Unless you are born into a privileged, well-connected family with substantial capital, your undergraduate degree from a top university is the most powerful socioeconomic opportunity that exists.

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I still believe that good foundations and fundamentals are important, so for me, university degrees are too.

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Even working at a college, I’m less big on such all-encompassing “degrees” and more for trade schools. Trade degrees would give the fundamentals in what you are wanting to get in to while also giving a lot more knowledge on the subject than you get from traditional degrees as well.

Yes my workplace has trade degree programs in addition to normal general degrees, and they are fantastic!

Regardless, go to school.

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I went with a “trade school” approach. Specifically, 1.5 years at Northern Sydney TAFE (Programming, Network Admin) followed by 1 year of a Grad Cert (Design) at a university.

I also did some certifications and online courses - Microsoft Certified Professional and various short courses.

I’m going through a kind of mid-life crisis right now, though, as I discover (and scramble to fill in) significant gaps in my knowledge in the areas of:

  • Mathematics
  • Algorithms and Data Structures
  • Distributed Systems
  • Monitoring and Observability

Also I observe people I worked with seeming to progress a lot in their job titles and scope of work, while I find myself struggling to just stay afloat as a developer.

There is just so … much … to … learn.

It’s not even much fun anymore … it’s just exhausting.

Somehow these people seem to have a cognitive advantage over me, but I haven’t been able to figure out what it is apart from education, since they seem to be such a variety of ages, backgrounds, skills, etc. The only thing they seem to have in common is having a solid educational background in Computer Science or Engineering.

It’s frustrating going through these emotional cycles of trying to build my self confidence by making excuses (oh his promotion was “who he knew, oh her promotion was just “being in the right city at the right time”, etc, etc). Yes if one or two people are promoted, then it looks like luck. But when almost everyone except for me is being promoted, it starts to look like a weakness on my part, like I’m doing something wrong or missed some important life lesson.

I thought just continuing to work hard would improve things, but it’s not. I get to the end of a work assignment and then it just finishes and I’m back on the job market, just like all the other job seekers.

The people I work with keep being shuffled around, always the same age – early 20s/30s – while I keep getting older and keep “treading water” just to stay in the same place.

I’m tired of inventing these wimpy excuses for myself that give me just barely enough confidence to mentally get through my next ~1.5 year work contract.

I need to solve this problem properly by actually learning <insert here whatever these people know that I don’t know>.

The really tricky thing is … would a degree necessarily be the “one solution” to my personal crisis?

  1. I don’t know if I necessarily want to be promoted. What do I really want out of my work? I want interesting complex problems, the ability to tackle them, the satisfaction of solving them, friendly interactions with colleagues, minimal stress, maximal pay, maybe/hopefully a positive impact on the community and the world at large, etc. etc. I’m not sure that a promotion is the obvious answer here.
  2. Plenty of people I know with degrees continue on as developers, apparently they either cannot get a promotion or have no desire to be promoted.
  3. Some people without degrees have also done well, just because they focussed and mastered some specific domain. Not only the super lucky like Bill Gates, but even just some people I worked with at various times. Though if I’m honest, most of my colleagues do have degrees.
  4. So many people have degrees these days, is it even much of a differentiator? To really make myself stand out, I’d probably need a degree from a prestigious university with top marks. But that’s an enormous investment of time and effort. Is it the best way to invest my scarce resources, now, in my 40s? If I invested the same time and effort into work, would I get the results I want faster?

This is such a difficult and murky decision that I’ve actually been struggling for years over it and still can’t quite figure it out.

Meantime I have been pursuing some self-study outside of a formal degree. Brushing up on my math (calculus, linear algebra), basic algorithms and various popular technologies I might need to work with in future (C#/.NET, AWS, GoLang, Java).

But I’m beginning to settle on the fact that, yes, I probably will ultimately need to go for a degree, just to maintain a decent level of mental health and general life stability.

Reasoning:

  • Although almost 40 seems old, actually it’s relatively young, if human life-spans really are increasing as much as I’m told. So if I want to continue working until 60s-70s, that’s another 30 years. I might as well build myself a better foundation of knowledge and skill, in order to access higher quality job opportunities.
  • Some research I came across seems to indicate that education can causally improve health/lifespan, even independent of socio-economic status, etc. (Sorry I seem to have lost the link, will try to find it)
  • It would be nice to feel respected and esteemed in the workplace, if possible, even if I don’t go for a promotion per-se. Perhaps this is why some of my colleagues pursued education despite not going for promotion. They were happy to continue working as Senior Developer, Staff Engineer, etc. but they still got the education, because they wanted to be respected, trusted to deliver on challenging assignments, etc. The learning helped to convince their bosses / colleagues that they really are capable.
  • If I really achieve high levels of focus and deeply learn a subject area (say Computer Science) that learning can probably unlock some opportunities that aren’t apparent to me right now. This might be why educated people I know have gone on to found successful businesses / startups or succeed in other ways. It wasn’t just pure luck – their education enabled them to gain a specific competitive advantage (hidden from others) which enabled their business to succeed.
  • Degrees don’t just stay the same. Universities do gradually upgrade their curricula and improve their teaching methods. So getting an education now is probably worthwhile in terms of setting me up for success in 20 years from now, not just tomorrow. Put another way: it’s not a “waste of time” for someone already working in the industry to “go back to school”. I’m not “going back” in the sense of regressing. Actually I’m kind of “leaping forward” in a sense of progressing , that is, learning stuff that will be valuable for a long time to come.
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I think both the article and your experience point to the same uncomfortable reality. Degrees do matter, but not in the way they are often discussed.

A degree can provide structure and early exposure to fundamentals, but it does not determine long-term competence. Many people close those gaps later through focused work and deliberate learning.

Most of us are constantly trying to improve one area or another, and feeling behind from time to time is part of the job. If certain gaps are bothering you, you can address them without rewriting your entire past. Picking one area at a time and going deeper than your day job requires can be surprisingly effective, and it often helps rebuild confidence along the way.

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