How to Skip Expensive Colleges and Still get a Good Software Engineering Job
Skills are more important than where you graduated from college
If you get a degree from a cheap, no-name school, you can still have a great and very lucrative career as a software engineer. In computer science and software engineering circles, there are a few schools with stellar reputations of graduates walking into high paying jobs year after year.
But do you have to go to one of those schools to produce the same result when you start looking for gainful employment?
Nah…
After a couple of years, few people are going to care where you went to school, and some won’t even care that you went to school at all. What matters is what you can do.
Great companies look for great candidates at great schools, so by going to one you might be able to get access to recruiters a little earlier than others, but how much of an advantage is that? If you can code circles around an MIT CS grad, it won’t matter than you went to a small state school with a grand total of 1100 students.
Some jobs don’t require a degree, but instead only “…or equivalent experience.” And for all jobs, what you can do is more important than what name is printed on your diploma. Even Stanford graduates have to prove themselves during interviews. In this industry, people get hired because of their skills, not their degrees.
Take a look at this Inc. article and listen to what Elon Musk has to say about the importance of college degrees. It’s all about what you can do, and if you have a track record of doing awesome things, you’ll probably keep doing awesome things in the future.
It really doesn’t matter where you went to school. The most important candidate criteria are the skill set. Get the skills and you can get the job.
Most of the people I work with now haven’t even heard of the university I attended. Nobody cares. They don’t need to, because I have a track record of solving problems on time and on budget. If you can do the same, and confidently communicate as such, you’ll be fine in your career.
Now go out there and make some of that big software engineering money!
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