A Matter of Degrees

I have a PhD in computer science. I got it like 31 years ago. It was a personal achievement. I don’t believe it is more than that, as I think education is a personal thing.

Over the years, I have had interesting reactions when people found out I had a doctorate. One of the reactions was: “my cousin has a masters too”. Well, that is very nice of them. It is a bit like me telling you: “I have five dollars” and then you reply “Bill Gates has a few billion dollars”. That is obviously very nice for him.

Another weird reaction was “we had two PhDs before, they only knew how to talk and they had no idea how to work. So, we had to fire them.” Okay, wow, nice of you to tell me about that.

I did not even set out to go to graduate school. When I was in undergraduate, I took everything under the Sun in computer science. Well, almost all of them. I could not handle numerical analysis. I could not do much theoretical computer science. So I only took the introductory courses for them and stopped. So, when I finished my degree requirements, I really did not want to stop. And I did not want to start working either. So, graduate school was the only option that I could take to fulfill both.

And the doctorate was just a continuation of studying more computer science. And I got in love doing research as well. The joy of discovering or inventing something completely novel was intoxicating.

Ok, so, what do I think about whether we need a computer science degree to be a “software engineer”. I have a simple opinion. If you think being a programmer is like being a licensed plumber, or a certified electrician, then, no, nothing is necessary for that, as long as you can pass the licence test or the certification exam. If you think being a programmer is like being an electrical engineer, then yes, you do need to know the fundamentals and to know why things work, not just how things work and how they should work.