Ask HN: What is the advantage of a formal CS degree for an entrepreneur?

23 points

16 years ago

I am a business guy. I have degrees in economics and finance, and I have a few years of corporate banking experience working on $1MM - $100MM deals. I have some light web development experience and started doing freelance web development for local companies as a teenager to pay my way through college. Now I want to bring the elegance of web based applications to enterprise software for the financial services industry. I have the domain experience and I am an inner geek at heart, but I lack the formal education. I have seen a lot of people on HN say that getting a formal degree in computer science is far better than teaching yourself. However, I haven't seen anyone specifically mention what exactly would be missing from a DIY curriculum. After all, many undergraduate courses from top CS schools are now online and free.

For example, say I went through all of the computer science courses on Academic Earth (http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science) and also used the Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/) to bone up on my math (I already have a decent background in algebra, probability, statistics, and calculus). I am also learning Python and Django and know HTML, CSS, and some Javascript. Plus there are a lot of great communities online that I could go to for help, and I would probably make a lot of great friends there too.

Other than the people I would meet and the actual degree, how much would I actually be missing out on if I went the DIY mentioned above? What, specifically, would I not be able to understand other than strictly theoretical stuff (machine learning, NLP, etc.)? Would going back for a master's degree in computer science really be worth it (perhaps the MCIT program at UPenn: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/grad/mcit/)?

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