Sorry, I wasn't trying to ask the question my subject line asks, it's just that Slashdot silently ate my ">" character. I was trying to ask "Is Coding > Computer Science?"

This is EXACTLY the right approach. Not that everyone needs a "crack team of commando programmers" necessarily, but just that every programmer should write for maintability/readability primarily first. Then, AFTER looking at real performance metrics (and not just "Bob thinks it's probably slow because of X") specific performance pain points should be addressed, and in those areas only readability/maintainability should be sacrified for the benefit of performance.

But again, if you get to where you have a performance issue, and it's possible to solve it by throwing money at a hardware solution (which isn't always the case), it's very likely that you should throw the money at the hardware, and not at a programmer to fix the issue. Not all the time of course, but with the cost of hardware dropping and the cost of programmers rising, most of the time the hardware solution will be cheaper.

I can't speak to your case specifically, but there's a trend in our industry (because of virtualization, AWS, etc.) to do the exact opposite of what you did. The basic equation of why goes like this:

X = the cost of a programmer for a month (or however long it took), including not just their salary but also their medical, 401k, the fractional cost of their manager's time, etc.
Y = the cost of the cheapest AWS machine you could get away with for the next 5 years

If X > Y then you're wasting money/your programmer's time by making them optimize the code.

So again, I can't speak to your specific case, but a basic truth is that people are expensive and hardware is cheap, so it takes a lot of hardware to make an optimizing programmer worthwhile.

Well, to be fair my current company is a "20ish people shop" :-) But that being said, my previous company was 100+ people, had an HR department, and was just as in need of qualified programmers (and just as willing to hire candidates without degrees).

I think you've had experiences with one specific type of company, but you shouldn't over-generalize your experience to assume the whole industry is identical.

Also, keep in mind that for many Silicon Valley companies these days, HR isn't the gateway, the on-site recruiter is. And that guy measures his success by how many qualified people he gets hired, so you can bet that (unless his employer tells him otherwise) he's not going to turn down opportunities simply because they lack a degree.

Since I'm directly involved in the hiring for my company I can tell you for a fact that we are desperate for qualified candidates, and their college status is like item #25 on the list of things we care about. Given the incredibly competative job market we have, the idea that we (or any Silicon Valley company) would turn down an otherwise-qualified applicant simply because they lack a diploma is laughable.

Now, that being said, we have multiple PhDs on staff, so it's not like we're anti-education. I'm just saying, when you can't hire enough qualified people, the last thing you want to do is throw up hiring roadblocks that don't server any real purpose.

I'm assuming the vast majority of programming jobs require the ability to code, and no further domain specific knowledge. This is just based on my reading of many, many programming job listings over the years.

I'm sure there are jobs that require CS knowledge, just as I'm sure there are (programming-related) jobs that require Biology knowledge or Architecture knowledge or whatever. But all of those are niches: a very small subset of all programming jobs require those specific areas of knowledge. ALL programming jobs require coding though, and even among the ones that require domain-specific knoweldge, I'd imagine the bulk involve a lot more coding than anything else.

Maybe you missed this part of the heading (not even TFA):
"Nearly half of the software developers in the United States do not have a college degree."

That isn't just saying not a "computer science, engineering, math, or physics" degree, it's saying any college degree at all. So, presumably a lot more have college degrees with other majors.

So how exactly is almost half plus every programmer with a non-STEM degree "The Exception"? It seems to me the STEM majors are the exception.

Shoot Slashdot ate the greater than sign in my title. It was supposed to be "Is Coding > Computer Science? Of Course!"

Let me rephrase that question: "does knowing how to do a job outweigh knowing abstract theory about that job?" I think the answer there is pretty obvious: *of course* coders who actually know what they are doing are more valuable to an employer than some kid with a CS degree and no idea how to actually do a programmer's job.

Right, so you can interpret that as "Google's going to become America's ISP", or you can take it as "Google's going to try and poke/prod the industry to change by doing its little experiments in a select number of cities and demonstrating what's possible". Based on what they've said outside that quote it seems to me like the latter interpretation is correct.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes when people say something about someone else, it winds up revealing more about them than the person being talked about?

Here's what your post seems to reveal to me:

1) You think insulting (and not even cleverly at that) random people on the internet is a good use of your time
2) You think that there is no legitimate reason to support open source software, and therefore all support for it is "ass-kissing"
3) You think Slashdot posters are motivated to post what they write to try by "forum points", not their beliefs
4) You think that someone getting a flamebait vote is some kind of great kharmic vengence

I'd encourage you to challenge those assumptions; in my view none of them are true.

I'm not either, but that's hardly the point. Let's say something isn't documented properly and doesn't work the way I expect: just being able to read the source code can be extremely helpful.

But it goes even beyond that, because open source software naturally forms communities around it. Even if I were to never even look at a single line of the source, the fact that it's availble to others adds value for me. I can go download a patch someone else wrote that fixes a bug MS hasn't bothered to fix. I can ask someone who's read the code how it works on Stack Overflow. Or when someone uses that source as a basis for an entirely new and improved version, I can switch to that.

Ummmm ... it's closed source. I'm sure there are lots of other good reasons, but do you really need anything more than that?

Sure, because it's *so* easy to create a successful online bookseller. Gee, why didn't anyone think of that before? Those Japanese people must be idiots. Baka yaroo.

PyCharm (ie. IntelliJ), Chrome, a music program (Spotify, Pandora, etc.) a chat program (Pidgin, Hipchat, etc.), GIMP for image manipulation ...

I have no beef with the emacs/vi folks, but some of us think that development technology (like every other kind of technology) has advanced since the 80's, and we want an OS that looks like it's from this decade to run it on.