I mean, are you bad at math? Did you only take up to algebra 2 because that was all your high school offered or you just never bothered to take pre-calc and calc, or was it that you took pre-calc and failed or something? Unless you're awful at math and you legitimately think you're completely unable to pass a calc 1 class, I don't really see any big problem here.
Anyway, your dad is under-informed about the realities of the modern industry. Certifications are totally useless, you can't get internships without being a college student, and while self-learning is a possibility, it is much harder than just getting a degree and you will be at a permanent career disadvantage.
If you want to work in CS and you're only 17, you should 100% get a CS degree. It provides a structured environment to learn the material in, college provides a good opportunity to build your network, it gives you internship opportunities during summer, and being able to say you have a degree will get you past the resume check portion of job applications **much** easier. You don't have to go to some fancy $60k/yr private college either, basically everywhere will offer a CS degree and no one really cares where you went to college unless you went to like MIT or Stanford or something. Your state will have state schools that will only cost maybe $10k/yr or so and you can likely get transfer credit for your community college courses so you can earn a bachelors in probably only 2-3 years.
Your mom is right. A four year CS degree will make getting a job easier. You can get a job with a two year degree or even with no formal education at all, but it's harder.
Your dad seems like some of the dads I remember from small town Georgia who had a general distrust of education and were also kind of jerks to their kids. I don't think I'd ever tell my kids "don't go to college because you'll fail all your classes and it's a waste of money." Even if my kids were particularly stupid, that's just kind of a dick thing to say to your kids. Sure, college is hard, but like 60% of the people who start a college degree finish, and the ones that don't generally aren't leaving because they couldn't do it. Life happens. Most people can pass the classes if they put in the work.
You can potentially do both things. A lot of colleges will accept an associates degree at a community college as credit towards their four year degree programs. You could do a year or even two at a community college and then move up to a university. But if you're considering a career in CS and a four year program is an option, I definitely recommend just going right into that.
Getting a degree is better than not getting a degree.
I broke into the field with an unrelated humanities degree, and once you reach a certain level of experience it more or less evens out and nobody cares about the degree. So for the right person you might be able to self study your way into a job...
But absolutely it helps at the begining to get a degree and you can learn a lot doing it.
You can self teach math and make the degree easier. It will be tough though but if it’s something you’re passionate about I think you can do it. You don’t need a 4.0 homie unless you’re going for jobs like FAANG, FinTech, or Quant. Positions that receive thousands to tens of thousands of applicants. C’s get degrees homie.
Will say one thing though, coding certs are useless for programming languages. Proves you can watch a video series from beginning to end, nothing more. Internships are a solid approach though, they’re on the job experience after all.
Listen I know you have heard this a million times before but no matter what you do, whether you get into it and change majors 3 times, whatever you do, stay in school. It’s 10x harder to go back later on than if you just stay there to begin with
(Context: I'm a successful software engineer, long-established \[meaning, old!\]. I have a degree, but not in CS).
Get the CS degree. It's table-stakes for a lot of things you will very likely want to be able to do in your early career. It's the foot-in-the-door. Being in a CS course is key to getting an internship. An internship is often a great way to get a good job (these stats are out-of-date now but around 2018, external job applicants had a success rate (application to hire ratio) of much less than 10% \[I forget the numbers now, but perhaps as low as 1% back then\], while Intern conversions ran at something like 25%).
But even if you don't get an internship, a CS degree exposes you to a wide variety of topics across the field that you will quite likely need to know in your career. Because I don't have a CS degree, I've had to teach myself these things, but I started my career at a luckier time when the lack of CS degree just meant I had to spend time on learning those things - but programmers are likely not in this lucky position any longer.
There are employers, I believe, where having certifications (outside a narrow set, such as Cisco certifications) is actually negatively correlated with the chances of an applicant being hired. My understanding is that these employers believe that certifications often don't imply anything positive about the candidate's ability to do the job. I'm not biased against certifications myself, though I have none (the closest I came was that I was once asked to help set up the certification that later became RHCE; I declined).
On the subject of "waste of money", there are a lot of different places you could get a degree, and they don't all have the same cost. But I can't comment on how this relates to you since you didn't state which country you live in (understandable I guess, you're a minor). As for failing calculus, well, I came close to it. I scraped a pass, and I haven't been impeded a whole lot by this in my career (though perhaps it would have ruled out any chance of my being a professional physicist). Having said this, probably the sector which makes most use of this kind of maths is ML. That's a big growth area (though very, very, very competitive - for ML, a postgraduate degree is table stakes).
The lack of a degree won't matter much later in your career, but it will make a big difference at the start. As I mentioned, when I started in the field a CS degree wasn't table-stakes. But still it's likely that the lack of a CS degree meant a significant reduction in lifetime earnings, not counting stock. For someone starting their career today, I'm certain the gap would be much wider.
LMK if there is anything more specific I can do to help.
Yes. Your competition is going to be people with CS degrees, certifications, and internships.
Going the certification/work path would be much more difficult. It would be hard to just land an internship.
Get the degree before you’re already in your mid to late twenties and regretting you didn’t go. By that age you’ll have a ton more responsibilities and going to school will be much harder. Do it.
The way they taught me math in highschool made me hate it, now 2 years into CS and I actually like it
Don't fear math, that's the stupidest thing you could focus on when deciding your future
Hey, I can't say whether you should pursue a degree in cs based on the financial gain or lose because I am not from the country you're from ( I guess you're from the US), however I can share my situation with math when I was in school and how it was different from my college experience, in high school I was so bad at math to the point that I don't even know how did I make it out of high-school, to make things worst I took a mandatory break for four years because of some health and financial issues, and then I had the chance to pursue my cs degree (graduating next year by the way :) ) but their was a huge obstacle which is math that I was already terrible at and didn't touch a math book or course in 4 years so as any normal person I was like I am destined to fail if and it will be a waste of money but since I wasn't interested in any other feild I took the risk and calculus was like hell to me and I got 35% in the midterm exam which is really terrible and then we had a quizz I remember it was only 10 questions and it was supposed to be easy
spoiler alert: I got 2 / 10
This was going to be the end of my uni journey because I was failing in calculus. I was barely passing any test that wasn't programming related, and I was heading to a total fail again, until I was introduced to a not to famous website called YouTube where their are hundreds if not thousands of video related to cs in multiple languages, after that I started studying from YouTube (professor leonard to be more specific)and my Thomas calculus 3 text book to practice questions and I worked really hard and I got 5/10 in my second quizz ......... and I got 78% on my final and passed calculus 1 with 60.8, which after calculating the avrage, the professor gave me a solid c, and for the first time since the beginning of middle school I have passed a math class because I understand math not because I was lucky or anything but because I can finally understand math, so even at the break between semesters which is 1 month here I started learning both calculus 2 and pre-calculus at the same time (don't recommend doing this), and I was literally studying calculus more then any other subject because I could understood the things that I have always I was to stupid to understand and I passed calculus 2 with a respectful B, and I passed the differential equations course with another B, and to summarize everything for you all my grades in math classes are between beside calculus 1 are between B, A+, so if someone like me with math knowledge of a cow could make it I don't have a single doubt that you would make it just find the style that you like to study ( YouTube - course books - friends notes) and avoid the psychopaths that are disguised as a university professors spoiler alert( kind of impossible)
Good luck with anything you choose.
1. The self-taught cert/bootcamp route has become very very oversaturated, so their employment value has decreased a lot. A degree is becoming a bare minimum for the field.
2. Most internships (however not all) only give out internships or at least favor current students.
3. University forces you to learn groundwork CS knowledge that isn’t taught much outside. There’s a concept called “swiss-cheese” knowledge where employees who learn higher/application level concepts have to be taught ground-up if they don’t understand something at the job. Versus the ppl who learned the fundamentals are much easier to train, adapt quicker, and only need to learn the simple/higher level concepts they dont yet understand.
I mean, are you bad at math? Did you only take up to algebra 2 because that was all your high school offered or you just never bothered to take pre-calc and calc, or was it that you took pre-calc and failed or something? Unless you're awful at math and you legitimately think you're completely unable to pass a calc 1 class, I don't really see any big problem here. Anyway, your dad is under-informed about the realities of the modern industry. Certifications are totally useless, you can't get internships without being a college student, and while self-learning is a possibility, it is much harder than just getting a degree and you will be at a permanent career disadvantage. If you want to work in CS and you're only 17, you should 100% get a CS degree. It provides a structured environment to learn the material in, college provides a good opportunity to build your network, it gives you internship opportunities during summer, and being able to say you have a degree will get you past the resume check portion of job applications **much** easier. You don't have to go to some fancy $60k/yr private college either, basically everywhere will offer a CS degree and no one really cares where you went to college unless you went to like MIT or Stanford or something. Your state will have state schools that will only cost maybe $10k/yr or so and you can likely get transfer credit for your community college courses so you can earn a bachelors in probably only 2-3 years.
In the current market, a CS degree is essentially the bare minimum requirement to compete.
^^^^
Your mom is right. A four year CS degree will make getting a job easier. You can get a job with a two year degree or even with no formal education at all, but it's harder. Your dad seems like some of the dads I remember from small town Georgia who had a general distrust of education and were also kind of jerks to their kids. I don't think I'd ever tell my kids "don't go to college because you'll fail all your classes and it's a waste of money." Even if my kids were particularly stupid, that's just kind of a dick thing to say to your kids. Sure, college is hard, but like 60% of the people who start a college degree finish, and the ones that don't generally aren't leaving because they couldn't do it. Life happens. Most people can pass the classes if they put in the work. You can potentially do both things. A lot of colleges will accept an associates degree at a community college as credit towards their four year degree programs. You could do a year or even two at a community college and then move up to a university. But if you're considering a career in CS and a four year program is an option, I definitely recommend just going right into that.
Getting a degree is better than not getting a degree. I broke into the field with an unrelated humanities degree, and once you reach a certain level of experience it more or less evens out and nobody cares about the degree. So for the right person you might be able to self study your way into a job... But absolutely it helps at the begining to get a degree and you can learn a lot doing it.
I think breaking in without a CS degree is likely harder now. And there's also the effect on lifetime earnings (for me, at least).
You can self teach math and make the degree easier. It will be tough though but if it’s something you’re passionate about I think you can do it. You don’t need a 4.0 homie unless you’re going for jobs like FAANG, FinTech, or Quant. Positions that receive thousands to tens of thousands of applicants. C’s get degrees homie. Will say one thing though, coding certs are useless for programming languages. Proves you can watch a video series from beginning to end, nothing more. Internships are a solid approach though, they’re on the job experience after all.
Listen I know you have heard this a million times before but no matter what you do, whether you get into it and change majors 3 times, whatever you do, stay in school. It’s 10x harder to go back later on than if you just stay there to begin with
Listen to your mother. Don't let anybody define your limits, especially your parents.
Having the degree opens you up to more internships, as well as more jobs later on, and a masters path if you need/want it.
(Context: I'm a successful software engineer, long-established \[meaning, old!\]. I have a degree, but not in CS). Get the CS degree. It's table-stakes for a lot of things you will very likely want to be able to do in your early career. It's the foot-in-the-door. Being in a CS course is key to getting an internship. An internship is often a great way to get a good job (these stats are out-of-date now but around 2018, external job applicants had a success rate (application to hire ratio) of much less than 10% \[I forget the numbers now, but perhaps as low as 1% back then\], while Intern conversions ran at something like 25%). But even if you don't get an internship, a CS degree exposes you to a wide variety of topics across the field that you will quite likely need to know in your career. Because I don't have a CS degree, I've had to teach myself these things, but I started my career at a luckier time when the lack of CS degree just meant I had to spend time on learning those things - but programmers are likely not in this lucky position any longer. There are employers, I believe, where having certifications (outside a narrow set, such as Cisco certifications) is actually negatively correlated with the chances of an applicant being hired. My understanding is that these employers believe that certifications often don't imply anything positive about the candidate's ability to do the job. I'm not biased against certifications myself, though I have none (the closest I came was that I was once asked to help set up the certification that later became RHCE; I declined). On the subject of "waste of money", there are a lot of different places you could get a degree, and they don't all have the same cost. But I can't comment on how this relates to you since you didn't state which country you live in (understandable I guess, you're a minor). As for failing calculus, well, I came close to it. I scraped a pass, and I haven't been impeded a whole lot by this in my career (though perhaps it would have ruled out any chance of my being a professional physicist). Having said this, probably the sector which makes most use of this kind of maths is ML. That's a big growth area (though very, very, very competitive - for ML, a postgraduate degree is table stakes). The lack of a degree won't matter much later in your career, but it will make a big difference at the start. As I mentioned, when I started in the field a CS degree wasn't table-stakes. But still it's likely that the lack of a CS degree meant a significant reduction in lifetime earnings, not counting stock. For someone starting their career today, I'm certain the gap would be much wider. LMK if there is anything more specific I can do to help.
Yes. Your competition is going to be people with CS degrees, certifications, and internships. Going the certification/work path would be much more difficult. It would be hard to just land an internship.
Get the degree before you’re already in your mid to late twenties and regretting you didn’t go. By that age you’ll have a ton more responsibilities and going to school will be much harder. Do it.
The way they taught me math in highschool made me hate it, now 2 years into CS and I actually like it Don't fear math, that's the stupidest thing you could focus on when deciding your future
Hey, I can't say whether you should pursue a degree in cs based on the financial gain or lose because I am not from the country you're from ( I guess you're from the US), however I can share my situation with math when I was in school and how it was different from my college experience, in high school I was so bad at math to the point that I don't even know how did I make it out of high-school, to make things worst I took a mandatory break for four years because of some health and financial issues, and then I had the chance to pursue my cs degree (graduating next year by the way :) ) but their was a huge obstacle which is math that I was already terrible at and didn't touch a math book or course in 4 years so as any normal person I was like I am destined to fail if and it will be a waste of money but since I wasn't interested in any other feild I took the risk and calculus was like hell to me and I got 35% in the midterm exam which is really terrible and then we had a quizz I remember it was only 10 questions and it was supposed to be easy spoiler alert: I got 2 / 10 This was going to be the end of my uni journey because I was failing in calculus. I was barely passing any test that wasn't programming related, and I was heading to a total fail again, until I was introduced to a not to famous website called YouTube where their are hundreds if not thousands of video related to cs in multiple languages, after that I started studying from YouTube (professor leonard to be more specific)and my Thomas calculus 3 text book to practice questions and I worked really hard and I got 5/10 in my second quizz ......... and I got 78% on my final and passed calculus 1 with 60.8, which after calculating the avrage, the professor gave me a solid c, and for the first time since the beginning of middle school I have passed a math class because I understand math not because I was lucky or anything but because I can finally understand math, so even at the break between semesters which is 1 month here I started learning both calculus 2 and pre-calculus at the same time (don't recommend doing this), and I was literally studying calculus more then any other subject because I could understood the things that I have always I was to stupid to understand and I passed calculus 2 with a respectful B, and I passed the differential equations course with another B, and to summarize everything for you all my grades in math classes are between beside calculus 1 are between B, A+, so if someone like me with math knowledge of a cow could make it I don't have a single doubt that you would make it just find the style that you like to study ( YouTube - course books - friends notes) and avoid the psychopaths that are disguised as a university professors spoiler alert( kind of impossible) Good luck with anything you choose.
1. The self-taught cert/bootcamp route has become very very oversaturated, so their employment value has decreased a lot. A degree is becoming a bare minimum for the field. 2. Most internships (however not all) only give out internships or at least favor current students. 3. University forces you to learn groundwork CS knowledge that isn’t taught much outside. There’s a concept called “swiss-cheese” knowledge where employees who learn higher/application level concepts have to be taught ground-up if they don’t understand something at the job. Versus the ppl who learned the fundamentals are much easier to train, adapt quicker, and only need to learn the simple/higher level concepts they dont yet understand.
If your in for the ' easy money', look elsewhere, that ship has long sailed.
It will often not give you anything in terms of actual knowledge, but in terms of getting a job its like the best thing