I read the comments first, then read the article, and was confused since I thought this comment was referring to a different article.
I found it strange that the author is a fool who makes your blood boil solely because he said (in one sentence) he wouldn't immediately hire CS majors. He didn't seem to be disparaging CS degrees, just saying that the non-CS students who'd taught themselves programming tended to be more interesting.
This chimes with my experience as well. I am a CS student, but the best CS students seemed to be those who never went to lectures and worked on cool side projects. Likewise, I met a few non-CS students who, naturally, never went to CS lectures, but were also working on cool side projects, and taught themselves programming to get them off the ground. Some were big-ball-of-PHP-mud type coders, some actually became very solid programmers, I would happily work with almost any of them. There's many bright CS students who lack that same gumption, and I'd be less interested in working with people like that.
I found it strange that the author is a fool who makes your blood boil solely because he said (in one sentence) he wouldn't immediately hire CS majors. He didn't seem to be disparaging CS degrees, just saying that the non-CS students who'd taught themselves programming tended to be more interesting.
This chimes with my experience as well. I am a CS student, but the best CS students seemed to be those who never went to lectures and worked on cool side projects. Likewise, I met a few non-CS students who, naturally, never went to CS lectures, but were also working on cool side projects, and taught themselves programming to get them off the ground. Some were big-ball-of-PHP-mud type coders, some actually became very solid programmers, I would happily work with almost any of them. There's many bright CS students who lack that same gumption, and I'd be less interested in working with people like that.