From a recent post I made @ javaworld on the topic of ‘Do you need a degree to be a programmer’

There is a serious and mostly ignored split between Programming as a Trade and Programming as a Science.

There is a huge and legitimate need for people who can make a Core 2 Duo bleed by simply looking at it and thinking harsh and deep computer sciency thoughts. These folks tend to be on the science edge of the spectrum, you need them to be. You may be plumbing the depths of the universe, doing 15 degrees of relationships among a population of billions, inventing new and innovative compression algorithms, developing operating systems that run on graphics cards as parallel processing platforms or peering through an atom, these people are scientists. They make the tools that make the rest of us go. These folks don’t get paid tons but they also tend to go to work in big safe buildings with lots of locks and guards and almost never get fired.

Then there are the trade folks. Computer Science as a Blue Collar occupation. All of the Java, C, C++, perl, python etc folks who just want a paycheck, get enjoyment out of building things and occasionally, very occasionally, hit it big. Thankfully there are enough of the blue collar folks that the ‘hit it big’ ratio appears to be fairly high and thus encourages the rest of the interested to jump in and try their luck. But, for the most part, the blue collar folks are head down in the trenches on the hamster wheel of quarterly releases that never end.

Incidentally, these folks, just like auto workers, tend to get outsourced.

If you really want to get extreme, for the Blue Collar crowd, there is no longer a relevant need to understand Big O/Sigma/Theta and they really don’t care about sorting algorithms or how an operating system manages its virtual memory. Their ability to do good or bad is limited, incidentally just like the auto workers, by their tools compensating for their lack of knowledge/care (optimized compilers vs safety robots). The constraint of range that both the auto-worker robots and Blue Collar developer compilers/tools enforce is at the same time liberating as it is constraining. In some ways you can Do More Faster and in other ways you Just Cant Do As Much. But as long as those White Collar guys keep getting paid to make sure the tools compensate everything will be a-ok.

This is also why you don’t see a lot of Blue Collar guys doing embedded work, the toolsets are not engineered for safety so those tend to be more Sciency then Trade.

Anyhow, this ‘must have a college degree’ is an attempt to maintain software engineering as a White Collar profession for -all- of its members and maybe does us all a bit of a disservice when, truly in todays service economy, it has become Blue Collar in the western world.

Then again, maybe we’d all be better if everyone could make processors bleed by looking at them.. I just don’t know, but I do know that in my recruiting efforts seeing this split and understanding the requirements for a given position dramatically increases my success rate in hiring Right Fits for my team.

Your mileage may vary.