One of the obstacles I hear about often enough is that if you have a resume and cover letter that clearly shows that a person has single-handedly written a number of operating systems, compilers, assemblers, and a wide range of other applications, but not mentioned parallel port drivers, he won't be invited for an interview for a position requiring experience having parallel port driver requirements, because the HR droid doesn't know that the person with that history can easily write a driver. That's doubly true if the person involved, though he clearly and demonstrably is capable, lacks a primary credential like the educational qualification that's been the subject of this thread from time to time.

Consider the guy who graduated with a BS in math and later went to grad school and, after a short time, was awarded his doctorate, say, in operations research. Most HR guys don't even know what operations research is. I know of a fellow who has a BS math from Harvard, which he got at 17 years, and who later got his doctorate from MIT (just down the river from Harvard) at 19. He's embarassed that he hasn't got an engineering degree, but he hasn't got one, though he's worked in engineering for many years. He gets work, and does it well, but has trouble getting past the personnel office unless he knows someone on the inside.

I've known excellent programmers who've gotten their education in economics, or in music. I've known terrible programmers who have advanced degrees in software engineering. In fact, it's hard for me to think of a software type who has the personality and discipline required to be an engineer. I know a few excellent engineers who are also excellent programmers. Their eductation isn't in software, though, but, rather in electrical engineering.

It's not exactly true that U.S. electrical engineering curricula are all light on software. When I last looked, admittedly a long time ago, when my sons were considering what to do, the EE curriculum at local engineering schools included a year of Pascal, a year of 'C', a semester of assembler, and a semester of operating systems. It also included a course I've mentioned before, namely Programming Languages and Processors, in the course of which one had to build an original computer based on an original CPU, implemented in SSI/MSI and write the required cross-assembler, cross-compiler, and resident debugger for it. That's not light work for a semester. That was one "3-hour" course, and these guys had on the order of 18 hours' classes.

RE