this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2025
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NOTE: Computer Scientists are the folks that do lots of math to figure out the best algorithm to use to solve any given computational problem. It's a very specific subset of programming.
For a long, long time companies sought to hire people with computer science degrees as software developers under the impression that these were the best people for developing software. This was a very bad assumption.
Turns out, computer scientists are often terrible at software development! They don't usually teach things like how to best organize large projects or even basics like source code management or software deployment/management in CompSci programs. Yet those are the actual skills employers need these days.
Want to get a job in software development? You don't need a degree at all! What you need is to demonstrate your skills with whatever tools/software employers are demanding. The simplest way to do that is with posting some open source code to GitHub (or similar).
When hiring—if the person I'm interviewing has a public repo that uses the tech we're using—they're basically hired immediately. At that point the only thing I care about is, "does this person seem OK-ish to work with?" LOL! Easiest hire ever 👍
You're in minority. Usually when people hire programmers they want us to jump through unnecessary hoops and solve stupid fucking leetcode bullshit, and rarely care about anything else. Oh how I hate the leetcode bullshit.
From my experience you certainly need both
In my experience technical knowledge can fill the gap, but it has to be demonstrable.
A lot of schools didn’t offer Software Engineering degrees until the past 10 years though, so people got CS degrees. In college, if I planned on doubling up on as many credits as possible for highest overlap (electives for one and required for the other), there was only a 12 hour difference in courses, which is just one more semester. I don’t think you could double major in them though because of how similar the fields were.
I started in CS for 2 years before swapping to SE, and it’s true that CS was a lot more theory, but we still had to do most of the time same hands on programming.
So... you hiring?