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The Imposter's Handbook

impostershandbook.com

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191–200 of 237 posts

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#191

Post by pc86 »

muhmi wrote: post #129
jacobsenscott wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CS degree, and while nobody sits around talking about data structures and complexity that's not the point. It gives you a foundation of knowledge that you automatically and subconsciously apply to every job you do. A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. It sort of gives you a crystal ball. You can see that some code isn't going to work when a db ta…

That sounds like very basic CS stuff, so I guess "CS degeee" here means B.Sc. level knowledge? ;)

As opposed to what? When discussing the existence of degrees in industry "CS degree" means Bachelor's 999 times out of 1,000.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#192

Post by Silfen »

crdoconnor wrote: post #154
jacobsenscott wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CS degree, and while nobody sits around talking about data structures and complexity that's not the point. It gives you a foundation of knowledge that you automatically and subconsciously apply to every job you do. A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. It sort of gives you a crystal ball. You can see that some code isn't going to work when a db ta…

>Computers are so fast and cheap today a lot of this doesn't matter most of the time. Indeed, yet since it's emphasized so much in college people prioritize this over cleanliness and architectural elegance which matters much more.

Depends (like most of these generalizations) on your college and teachers. I had two professors who hammered the point that the priorities are: clarity, correctness, and performance. In that order. Perhaps a bit dogmatic, but a useful idea.

We would often spend class time writing cleaner, simpler code after arriving at a correct answer.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#193

Post by BinaryIdiot »

nikmobi wrote: post #173
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. I couldn't disagree more. I do not have a CS degree and have lead many teams of folks with a combination of having and not having them. It's a huge mixed bag and I'm not confident you can make a general statement in either direction. Yes CS can prepare you by knowing some of the basics but I've run into countless peo…

I agree with you for the most part, but I think if his sentence read: > A CS degree can prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. I think most people can agree that it doesn't provide any guarantee, but it definitely gives you a boost in the right direction. (For the record, I don't have a CS degree)

Yeah a simple word and I would have taken the post entirely differently :)

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#194

Post by JeremyMorgan »

continuational wrote: post #43
anexprogrammer wrote: post #18

The main thing people miss out on not having a degree is not getting past silly HR "must have degree" filtration. Never once found a CS degree a worthwhile indicator of ability. It may be a superb book, but not even giving a sample chapter out to judge writing style, quality of explanations, depth and so on?

Comments like these can only really have two causes: - You've bought into the anti-intellectualism wave that's going on in the US. - The universities near you are really poor. Is it really the case that you learn so little on these universities that you literally have no advantage over those who didn't attend?

In some cases it's garbage in, garbage out. They may have been terrible going into university and came out a little bit better. They scrape by barely passing and come out with a degree that is just as valuable as the person standing next to them with natural ability, drive, and passion who excelled through school. After all half the graduates are below average.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#195

Post by tom_mellior »

acs5 wrote: post #115
drak3 wrote: post #32

The excerpt on the Boolean Satisfiability Problem reads > The basic concept that people have figured out, so far, is that a number of NP-complete problems can likely be solved if we crack the Boolean Satisfiability problem. And > If NP-Complete problems get resolved, it is likely (though nobody knows for sure) that we'll crack every NP-Problem Isn't the definition of a NP-Complete problem exactly that it is in NP _an…

Also, the description of the boolean satisfiability problem isn't the boolean satisfiability problem at all, but just what we might call the boolean evaluation problem, or a version of the circuit value problem, which is certainly in P. I have no idea what's going on in the lambda calculus excerpt further down the page, in particular substituting (λx.x x) with (x x)? There seems to be a fairly big misunderstanding he…

I was going to post the same thing about satisfiability. The excerpt about the Y combinator is also misleading. There is no practical way in which the Y combinator "finds the fixed point of any function"; (Y cos) certainly does not magically evaluate to 0.793085.

I think books like this are a good idea, and having self-taught people write them is also a good idea. BUT it looks like this particular book is in serious need of quality control.

(Also it should be split up into several parts. Any book that teaches both the Y combinator and how to configure zsh is... weird.)

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#196

Post by pc86 »

haddr wrote: post #171

Yep, people are really forgetting that most of the time it's just being clever rather than having (or using) in-depth knowledge is what allows to bring some good solution to the table. An example from today: we have a very slow pattern matching code, that starts to be a bottleneck for the application. What can you consider? Well you can dive into sexy bloom filters, experiment with some Trie-based structures. But the…

Seven or eight levels, I would imagine.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#197

Post by MehdiHK »

asciimo wrote: post #181
MehdiHK wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bought it. Pretty basic stuffs: - Didn't learn anything new from Linux chapter. - Data Structures and Algorithms chapter is too basic. There is not even any implementation provided. I thought it didn't offer anything more than you could find on Wikipedia if you add some illustration done with Paper by 53 app. I'd recommend "Grokking Algorithms" by Aditya Bhargava for this topic if you want illustrated explanations wi…

Thanks for mentioning Grokking Algorithms. Looks great, and might be the first non-digital tech book I will have bought in years.

It deserves to be in the bookshelves. :)

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#198

Post by tomc1985 »

This looks interesting but I got turned off by the site design -- there are too many self-help "gurus" out there who make promo materials that look just like this. Quotes on a book that isn't out yet, while plausible, is really kind of weird.

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#199

Post by retro64 »

mattmanser wrote: post #67
jredwards wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no degree in CS and I see these terms regularly. So I google them and read about them.

You don't know what you don't know. The point of a book like this is that some who knows what you don't know from being asked questions about things he didn't know by people who did know, he now knows what you don't know and can tell you what you need to know. The only knowledge you have now is of known unknowns without knowing anything at all about the unknowns unknowns. Know what I mean?

I realize you are joking, but this is why I was in frantic mode in my early years. I do not have a degree in CS, so I had no idea what I was missing. Consequently I read up on everything. I still have a bookshelf filled with books on algorithms, "gotchas", Gang of Four wisdom, database design, you name it. I was forced to learn coding on the side and still have the habit today. I always have a side project going (which has fueled my career, but has also unfortunately cost me my marriage).

I now have a son going through the proper steps of receiving a degree, and I have book to supplement him for every class (except for the higher math).

Re: The Imposter's Handbook

#200

Post by noxToken »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #158
jacobsenscott wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a CS degree, and while nobody sits around talking about data structures and complexity that's not the point. It gives you a foundation of knowledge that you automatically and subconsciously apply to every job you do. A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. It sort of gives you a crystal ball. You can see that some code isn't going to work when a db ta…

> A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes. I couldn't disagree more. I do not have a CS degree and have lead many teams of folks with a combination of having and not having them. It's a huge mixed bag and I'm not confident you can make a general statement in either direction. Yes CS can prepare you by knowing some of the basics but I've run into countless peo…

Different universities will provide different sets of knowledge and depth of that knowledge. However, I think we can generally say that a CS degree will provide the "crystal ball" information that GP states. I believe that your last point is the crux of it all.

Anecdote: I have peers all over the CS knowledge spectrum while taking the exact same class from the same instructors. Some peers have taken that knowledge and written kernels. Others are struggling to write an array sorting method. The former have been served well by their undergrad studies. The latter would have likely fared better in a 12 week bootcamp where it's more training and less theory.

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