Go To University, Not For CS
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Go To University, Not For CS
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Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#2Nice post. The world is lacking tons of culture (although you don't always need to go to university to get it, especially if you are a self-learner). Enjoyed the post though.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#3Love the post. Having done college and then post-grad, I have to say that I missed out on the immense opportunities of learning about culture, art, history and so many more things.
Additionally, One thing that that the article did not mention is the environment in the CS departments(just for hanging out... and getting new ideas) which is way more better then the things you'll learn in class.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#4It's difficult to take this person's point seriously when he claims
>Another way to explain the shallowness of Computer Science is that it's the only discipline that eschews paradox. Even mathematics has reams of unanswered questions and potential paradox in its core philosophy. In Computer Science, there's none.
No unanswered questions? Rubbish, 'P=NP' anyone? Correctness of the assumption of the Church-Turing hypothesis (which is falsifiable if not provable) ? Granted, I'm not sure exactly what he means by "eschews paradox", but I assume this is mostly because the author doesn't really know himself. If he simply means "lacks counter-intuitive ideas", than he's dead wrong. I'll put forward the Halting Problem as an obvious example. Counter-intuitive if for no other reason than people are simply used to problems being solvable.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#5tl;dr: Don't major in it unless you're attending one of Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, CMU or MIT.
OK, that's in part my spin---he only mentions MIT---but it's also my considered recommendation post-the dot.com crash. If you plan on/desire to stay programming, I think you really need to be severe about approaching this, seeing as how the normal career of a programmer is over by age 35-40; beating that is going to take a lot more than going to a Javaschool or just starting with your native programming talent.
ADDED EVEN LATER: see this other posting in this thread for two exceptions to the 35-40 problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1391516
ADDED: going into serious debt to attend a Javaschool for the purposes of becoming a better software developer strikes me as a particularly bad bargain nowadays. If you don't have what it takes to be an autodidact after graduation for the rest of your career you should think really hard about getting into this field to begin with.
On the other hand, now that we're in what looks to be a long Great Recession at best, this may be your best bet, it's just probably not a good one if you don't get into the best school you can and engage in serious extra career long effort.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#6People will most certainly ask you why you studied Art History in college if it turns out that you came out the other end with no marketable skills, especially when articles about your woes show up in the New York Times as though your poor planning and choice of topic did not lead directly to your inability to find work.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#7Another misinformed post by someone who thinks CS education is useless and that ability to code at age of 19 is suffiecient to become a superstar!
If someone follows his advice I would really sad for that person, CS is an amazing topic! And its main purpose is not teaching programming but whole other things.
It depends a lot on which school you go to though, if you are goint to top 30 schools is US, then i can assure you that the CS departments there will offer you much better opportunities than you can ever imagine!
For rest of the universities their other programs are most likely to be as useless as their CS programs.
Let me put here harshly: There is NOTHING,NOTHING that programmers have achieved in last 10 years!!
All the advancement in this field has came from people who introduced novel paradigms (which requires creativity and not programming!) or came from CS / CE / EE Academic departments!
The Web, Google (PhD Students), advances in chip design, Virtual Machines (VMWare) etc, came from People who had siginificant university education in CS EE or Physics!
Just because you can write code does not means that you have mastered CS.
I bet all smart-ass programmers on this forum, cannot understand most of the mathamatical concepts that go behind stuff such as Machine Learning or Information Retrieval or even Theory of Computation.
These are uber loosers who think that wearing Star trek shirts and writting Glorified Enterprise fizzbuzz makes them smarter than any CS dept grads.
If you are following their advice, I really feel sorry for you!
If CS education was really so useless, Why would Google take some many PhD's??
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#8I must thoroughly disagree.
First off, I agree on the importance of culture. But equating a CS degree with coding is just plain wrong; Dijkstra has a nice quote on this. CS is and should be applied mathematics, and what more timeless topic is there than math?
Secondly, there are some serious doubts whether university teaches you to think independently. As a counter argument, read "The Disadvantage of an Elite Education"[1]. Summary of this article: university teaches you--if you're somewhat ambitious--to become an excellent sheep. In other words, it promotes you into being the same mediocre person as anyone else.
That said, I still believe there's a ton of things to be gained from spending four years in a university: network, culture, more-than-average-but-still-pretty-mediocre ability to think, fun, and being inside a solid recruitment base for cool companies.
[1] http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-el...
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#9tl;dr: Don't major in it unless you're attending one of Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, CMU or MIT. OK, that's in part my spin---he only mentions MIT---but it's also my considered recommendation post-the dot.com crash. If you plan on/desire to stay programming, I think you really need to be severe about approaching this, seeing as how the normal career of a programmer is over by age 35-40; beating that is going to take a lo…
If you are not going to top 30 schools, then it is likely that the "culture" being taught their is no better!
How can you say that CS dept in non top 30 school is bullshit but other departments would be glorious?? It boils down to whether you go to a good school or not!
Also how many liberal Arts Majors get job?? And then Why not Major in CS It wont do any harm at least!
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#10I disagree with this article. I thought I could code prior to university but had no idea. If you have a chance to go to school, go. If you want to be a software developer, major in CS. Definitely have a minor or double major too.