Do Developers Need College Degrees?
Succeed personally: no. Some dev jobs obviously require a lot of foundational knowledge. I wouldn't want to have a colleague who didn't know linear algebra, simply because that's important in my field. That's not important for making Wordpress sites.<p>I think there are things "every good developer should know" such as knowledge about how cpus work, how OS'es work, how some important algorithms work, some basic set theory and complexity etc. All of this is doable without a degree, but I'd probably be more willing to bet that someone with a degree knows it, than someone without. Also of course - there are jobs that are doable without knowing foundations, but I'd call those "code monkey jobs" and whether such a job constitutes success I guess depends on who you ask. And what it pays.<p>Most importantly, when I recruit I don't see the diploma as evidence of what they <i>know</i> but as evidence that they could <i>learn</i>, <i>quickly</i>. If the diploma is from a prestigeous school but says they failed math 101 four times over that would make me doubt their capacity. Being able to pick something up is the capability I'm looking for. A curious mind, with a taste for the abstract. A diploma is just one clue.