Difference between bachelor's degree in programming and random guy on the internet learned from fcc?

[mrandrebro0]

Hi, first thank you guys for making such a great website which is insanely helpful for anybody who started learning programming as a hoppy and as another to generate money,
i just want to ask What is the difference between someone who got his programming degree from a university and a guy who learned every single course in freecodecamp site?

[kevinSmith]

The difference between “someone who got his programming degree” and “a guy who learned every single course in freecodecamp” is that the first one has a much better chance of getting hired. If you changed the second guy to “a guy who learned every single course in freecodecamp and then used that as a base to keep learning and built increasingly more complex and well coded apps, while learning new skills, building an impressive portfolio on the way” … then they start to get in the same range. But just the FCC certificates - those won’t get you a job. They just

Practically? (imho) at the uni you’re going to learn a lot more theoretical concepts and get a broader spread of knowledge. A self-taught person might not have that, but may have more practical knowledge than the uni guy, at least on a focussed range of subjects.

Which is better? That depends on what the employer wants. Some employers may have practical reasons to want a guy with a degree. Maybe they need someone with knowledge of the kinds of things that get covered in uni but tend to be skipped by self-learners. (I would guess that your average uni guy is going to do better at tree and graph problems than your average self-taught person.) Or maybe they deal with large sums of money or hospital care - where a mistake could be very costly - so they want to be able to say, if something goes wrong, “hey, we did our due diligence, all our guys have degrees”.

Is a degree a huge advantage? Meh. I think it’s a slight advantage in terms of what you learn and a slight advantage in terms of getting hired. Part of that is also that at uni you meet a lot of people and connect up and hear about jobs, and companies recruit there, and your professors may have connections, and there may be alumni associations, etc.

I would also say that some places may prefer self-taught people. The place where I got my first job liked a mix of people. There are all different combinations.

Is it harder if you are self-taught? Yeah, I think so. But it’s not impossible - many have done it, including me. If you don’t have a degree, it just means that your portfolio has to convince them that you can code and build sites.

[bradtaniguchi]

Assuming we are referring to a Computer Science degree, there’s actually a large number of differences.

Time
It usually takes 4+ years to get a BS degree. Computer Science usually stuffs in a lot of credits and stuff to learn, so it could take longer for some.
FreeCodeCamp on the otherhand shouldn’t take that long, assuming you spend just as much time on it. However its also possible you don’t need to do everything to be relevant. For example you can skip over all the Python related stuff and focus on web-dev.

Money
FreeCodeCamp is free, it just costs time, grit and an internet connection.
College usually is usually an expensive investment into one’s self, with varying degree’s of cost. I say as long as the college your going to is accredited its probably worth it. Sure you can spend 100k+ and go to MIT for a year, or go to a local college for much much less.

Curriculum
Neither FreeCodeCamp or College should be seen as a 1 stop shop. College will teach you more topics overall, where-as freeCodeCamp teaches on specific subjects around only a few area’s of technology. College will teach you more about the underlying theory, and fundamentals with only a slight focus on modern technology and use-cases. The reason for this is technologies change, but the theory doesn’t. This means in the long run, the fundamentals will usually hold much longer than whatever knowledge you learn in FCC.
Take for example the React courses are already “outdated” in some aspects as the framework has already changed.

Opportunities
FreeCodeCamp is a framework to learn around, with built-in community via the forums.

College is an institution based around learning, with built-in community, resources, peer access, networking, facilities and a place for companies to invest into more learning. So its vastly superior in terms of how much you can learn, access, use, and leverage in your journey. From job fairs, to classes with peers learning the same thing as you, to access to your professors who have experience, its all there. The only thing to keep in mind its all optionally leveraged, you can easily go to class, do the tests and not engage beyond that and essentially “waste” all those perks.

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So overall there’s little overlap between the two, even if the end goal is the same, how you get there can be different.