For how many years experience, though? And anyways, one has to live in San Jose or wherever else in the valley to have this job. You'd need to offer me a lot more money than that to get me there.

It's not obviously solid. I was a TA at Cornell for a few years. Some of the people who graduated were smart. Some weren't. I assume the same is true of people working at Google; after 4 years some will be getting promotions and responsibility, and some will be looking for an exit since they aren't getting promoted.

I'd interview the above theoretical candidate exactly the same as I would someone with a degree from University of Utah and no company I'd ever heard of on their resume. Because both smart and dumb people can be found everywhere.

Sorry; rereading what I said I realize what was confusing.

How do I, as a person who already has an MS in CSE, get to call myself a Software Engineer? I'm not going back to college for another, extremely similar degree. There wasn't a SE major when I was in college. So I assume there must be some other mechanism for people to be allowed to call themselves "Software Engineers" whenever the law that started limiting this was passed.

Can I do a web search in 1994 for this? Because I don't think there was a Software Engineering degree in 1994, or 1998.

Now I find this alone fascinating. When I was in college, "Software Engineering" was one class in the CS major. There was no Software Engineering degree available at my school, and I suspect at no college or university.

Both places I've worked in my 11 years as a professional didn't really distinguish. I have a Computer Science and Engineering degree. I write and design software. I'm in the research and development arm (or the Engineering arm) of the company. It's several ways to say one thing.

Yes, some distinctions can be drawn, like whether you interface with customers, who does the architecture or design, etc., but in general the people I work with are all over the software life cycle, from beginning to end. We do development (of software) and the official job title has always had "Engineer" and sometimes "Development" or "Software" in it.

FreeBSD 9.0 was dedicated to Dennis Ritchie.

Women need to be treated with respect for their boundaries. The same as men. There's not gender discrimination here; men can and have been sexually harassed, but in a place that is 90% male it's less likely. You seem to be confusing what's prevalent with what's possible.

As I recall, Microsoft's reasoning was made explicit at least once. MSFT believes that, by supporting issues such as same-sex marriage, it can attract the most talented gay people in the software industry as employees, who may see the company's support of such an issue as a reason to work for MSFT rather than a competitor.

True. I earned $14k per year stipend in graduate school, plus $6k per summer grading a summer-school course. I opted for that instead of a more lucrative summer internship.

So for the 2.5 years of graduate school I earned $20k per year instead of around $56k, so if it was $6k extra per year then I'm at break-even next year. If it was an extra $8k instead (since I am estimating) I was at break even a while ago.

Are you part of the interviewing process where you work? I am, and while I can't say what HR or our recruiter might do, I often don't even look at the part of the resume that lists where a candidate was educated, except for curiosity. I still need a candidate to prove to me that s/he can program and can think, and their educational source is only tangentially related in my experience.

My colleagues have interviewed new college graduates in CS who don't know big-O notation. That's a pre-requisite for understanding P versus NP. Though to be fair, there's a broad swath of problems one can solve for an employer where the algorithms don't reach that combinatoric complexity, and the data sets aren't large enough to make O(n^2) with low constants worse too often compared to O(n lg n) with high constants.

The value for me of a course-based M.S. (dropout from a PhD program) was $6000 per year starting salary. That's a pretty decent bump that I likely kept with me my whole career, as raises tend to be percentage based. So after 11 years it may have been worth at least $66k.

Oh, and also I learned a bunch of stuff in those courses I hadn't yet learned as an undergrad. To my recollection, none of the specific things has been relevant to my job, but it is sometimes hard to tell.

I, as a interviewer, won't be "fooled". But since I work with some brilliant software people who never got a college degree, it won't necessarily be a barrier to getting at least a phone interview. If the interviewee knows their stuff, it doesn't matter how they learned it.

I mean, with someone who has 20 years experience, do you care if they went to Harvard, Stanford, or the University of Kansas? Of course not, you care if they're smart and have some relevant skills. A lot of times as an interviewer I don't even care if they have the relevant skills (i.e. I work in the storage industry, but candidates don't need to know anything about storage or filesystems to get a job here -- I certainly didn't know that when I started).

As an interviewer I care about two things, essentially: can you think, and do you understand some CS theory? If you can do the first but don't know the second, you can still get a job, we just won't start you as a senior level engineer.

It may be U.S. only (I hope so!) Others can talk all they want about "well-rounded" but the economic reality is that English, History, etc., courses do not produce graduates who earn more money. And so the only way those departments survive, since they can't on their own merits, is by forcing all students, some of whom *will* increase their earning potential, to take them.

It's pure economics -- there's a bunch of economically useless professors, who have plenty of time to petition the President of the school or the state legislature about why their brand of "well-rounded" is so useful, and thereby gain a fraction of a lot of student's tuition, instead of the very small piece they'd otherwise have.

Now ask yourself this: is college the only time in my life I am able to read classical literature or study art history or any of these other things that somehow make one well-rounded? Of course not. So the idea that one needs to study this in college is ludicrous, except to those departments that don't produce economic value trying to justify their existence.