A college degree is NOTHING when you’re in the real world!

You can find a video with more information at the bottom of the page.

In high school, my family, teachers, and counselors, pushed me to go to a four-year university and complete a bachelor’s degree program. They didn’t really care which field, as long as I got a degree.

A couple years after graduation I ran into my old English teacher. When I told her I was working on a two-year degree, she said “That’s great! But make sure you finish up and get your four-year degree.”

Some things never change.

I’ve been in the software development field since I finished my two-year degree, and I haven’t had any problems. In fact, I’ve seen quite the opposite. I’ve witnessed people with four-year degrees making way more money than me, but they lost sight of the fundamentals.

At one of the companies I worked with, one of our team leaders gave me an assignment where I had to update some old technical documentation. This is the norm at most companies. Sometimes you change a policy or workflow and it’s important to maintain parity with your documents.

I had to look through each process and update it to match our current process. I had a hard time parsing through some of the information at first. It wasn’t properly numbered, some steps were repeated, there weren’t any diagrams or images to represent key parts of the processes. It was a disaster!

I held out and managed to tidy them up. But I was surprised to know these documents were still being used even though they were so outdated. Turns out the team lead who assigned the work was the one who created these documents. And what’s worse, THEY had a four-year degree!

Now you might be asking yourself, “what does the degree have to do with anything?” I’ll tell you why. Technical Writing was a required course for their degree program! They took and PASSED a course on how to properly create technical documents, but couldn’t do it in the real world!

It would be a couple years before I took a Technical Writing class myself. I laughed to myself with each new lesson, remembering how that team lead didn’t follow a single one. In fact, there are only a handful of organizations I’ve seen with decent documentation.

I value documentation because it helps me with daily processes. I use this for work, and personal projects. Either way, certain things require a set of repeatable steps.

It’s fine to commit things to memory, but what happens when you leave and a new person joins the company? Without you, who is going to explain the things only YOU know?

IT departments typically have a computer setup process for new hires. This ensures new team members can get to work as quickly as possible with all the tools they need.

You don’t want to show up to a new job and sit on your hands for the first few hours because someone forgot to install antivirus on your work machine, or set up the monitors at your desk. Documentation saves time by making your work consistent.

Technical documentation isn’t always a top priority. But if you’re going to do it, do it right. Even a numbered list of steps is fine as long as it is clear and consistent.

Even if it’s outdated, at least keep it clean!

That being said, on your road to becoming a professional, look for useful skills that can help you as a developer. Learn to take good notes, document complex processes. Especially uncommon ones.

Don’t rely on your university to give you all the answers. I promise you, there are things you’ll learn along the way even though your professor never brought it up. And if you DO have a degree, good for you! Keep looking for ways to improve to be the best in your field.

Continue to grow and improve because there will be many universities, many professors, and many computer science courses. But there is only ONE of YOU.

For more on this, watch the YouTube video below.

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Coding Fanatic