Developers: What education/qualifications do you have and has it helped you in your career?

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So, was having a discussion in the office recently about everyone's degrees and we found that out of about 12 people only two of them actually had computer science degrees.

Most of the rest were in STEM subjects, but not actual computer science.
I'm in that boat having been a developer for 11 years, but with a maths/physics degree.

The reason it came up is that one of the guys was having a conversation with someone with a CS degree and found himself getting a bit lost with some of the conversation. Not sure exactly what it was about but I think it was fairly technical.

From my perspective I don't think I could tell who has a CS background and who doesn't purely from the work they churn out, but I have at some points considered doing a masters in computer science so that I have some formal computing education.
I certainly don't think not having that has held back my career at all though and I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts.

EDIT: I should probably clarify I'm talking about helping in day to day work life more than the degree getting you on a grad placement scheme or anything like that in the first place.

 

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Short answer...

I don't think it will add much to your everyday working life with a maths/science degree and 11 years experience, but you know your situation better than I do, and if you feel that some formal CS education would benefit you professionally or personally, then go for it.

Longer answer...

So, I'm a developer with a CS degree (graduated 2007). In terms of career placement my degree opened the door, but I can't say I refer to my textbooks on a daily basis now. I learned more about the actual working life of a developer and programming for money (rather than for academic assignments) in about the first three weeks of proper work, let alone three years. Prior to my degree I'd been programming since about age 14 (mostly Perl, what a language to start with!!)

Does that mean my degree had no value? Of course not. I thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and through my degree I have a sound theoretical understanding of how computers actually work, the logic and mathematics on which their operation is based, database theory, data structures, algorithms and networks, and so on. Your mileage may vary as to how relevant those topics actually are. Do I use this information on a daily basis? Generally not consciously; but it's hard to say how differently I think about programming versus someone who doesn't have that background.

Something you don't mention is what kind of development you actually do. There are many different kinds of job which are recognised as "development" - for example, a Wordpress template developer, a database developer, a legacy developer maintaining old batch scripts, an embedded systems developer working with low level languages and strictly limited memory and execution time requirements, and so on. Obviously some of those roles would benefit more from a sound understanding of computer science, whereas to others it would simply be irrelevant.

And of course we come to the simplest question - are you interested in CS, either professionally or personally? You mention that "one of the guys was having a conversation with someone with a CS degree and found himself getting a bit lost" - did this lack of understanding cause a problem in your working environment, or was it simply a common interest conversation where one person knew more specifics than the other? If you are experiencing working issues due to a lack of CS background, then some formal study sounds like it would be a great idea. If not, then the decision is largely a personal one - will this kind of study enhance your understanding of what you do (or could, or might do, etc.) in a productive and enjoyable way?

One of my former colleagues, with no formal maths/CS background, is planning to study for a "Foundations of Computer Science" XSeries certificate (material from MIT and other institutions). I suspect that with a maths/physics degree and 11 years of experience behind you, this would probably be below your level, but with the increasing number and quality of online courses, accredited and otherwise, that are available now, something like that might be a good option?

Hope that helped! (Sorry if not!)

Thanks for that. In my case anything like a masters would be done purely from a personal point of view as I've never particularly struggled to do my job.
I'm an application developer building financial trading systems, so it's a bit more involved that doing WordPress templates but there still isn't all that much algorithmic complexity.

There is still an element of not really knowing what I'm missing out on by not having ever done pure computer science though.
A lot of the stuff we're doing now has a background in functional programming (that was the topic of the chat the guy got lost with) so I'm learning about lambda calculus, monoids, monads, currying - all new stuff that until reasonably recently I barely knew existed.

Just like a fictitious book, it has content but is still made up.

I'd say that it was a fictitious story in a real book. If the book was fictitious it wouldn't exist to have the story in it!