You can dole out 40k/yr and isolate yourself from the real world for "culture", or you can go to your local library (where they still are funded) and read a book. Your call!
Go To University, Not For CS
41–50 of 152 posts
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#42My main regret about university isn't that I studied CS, but that I didn't study mathematics. Coming out of high school, I didn't have the faintest idea what mathematics really was. I did study philosophy, but the parts that appealed to me most were, frankly, the most similar to mathematics (symbolic logic and proof-writing). And then when I studied CS, my favorite parts...were mathematics again! All quite ironic for someone who always hated what he thought mathematics was.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#43> 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. It's assumed that all of it is > pretty much solved and your job as an undergraduate is > to just learn to get a job in this totally solved area > of expertise. Zed…
Seems to be talking more about Software Engineering, Business Systems, and Information Technology degrees which started to replace CS (and the awesome CS/Philosophy double) during the late 90s.
You can test the depth of CS for yourself when you take your first formal methods course.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#44i agree, culture is important. but, how much money is it worth? is it worth 20k? 50k? 200k? on the flip side, not all of us are brilliant alpha programmers with entrepreneur-class egos. the labor-class parents of one of my best friends are incredibly proud of his BigCo software job, and BigCos don't hire without a degree. The cynic in me wants to call a [software] degree an average person's investment.
What BigCos don't hire without degrees? I know people at Google and Microsoft without a degree. I work for a giant corporation, without a degree.
I'd say nearly every company whose focus isn't software (they employ more programmers than software companies and they use the degree as a screening tool).
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#45I agree. I went through my junior year of a CS degree and dropped out because it wasn't worth it. If I was to do it over again, I would definitely have chosen a different degree. I'm 100% certain that doing a different degree, I would have turned out a better programmer and better at something else. CS (or any programming degrees) are not as intellectually challenging as they should be. If you want to learn how to program than, I have yet to find any degree that will teach you much about becoming a good programmer, so I would recommend going to school for something else.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#46> You my friend, are an idiot. I hate to tell this to you, but your lack of education makes you that way. Your failure to expose yourself to literature, art, poetry, science (real science, the icky kind) has made you stupid. Another data point against you is that you learned to code and you are questioning whether you can get something out of a university education. How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 2000 years of Philosophy, Biology, Physics, History? Nothing?! All you need is code?
This is inaccurate, but excusable since I assume Zed hasn't been to high school in a good number of years. Things have changed greatly from then—high school courses are far more rigorous than what he describes as "failure to expose yourself to "—and if you're going to a top 30th percentile school, chances are that you took an AP class as well, if not more than one.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did your CS program require a discrete mathematics course?
Yes, and it was my favorite part of the program! (Sorry about the multiple login, I mistakenly logged in with clickpass last time)
Ah ha! I just guessed and confirmed that that's a requirement for ABET accreditation. Which of course doesn't mean the program as a whole will be infused with a mathematical or engineering ethos, I'm sure you can get ABET accreditation while still (mostly) doing Cargo Cult Computer Science.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#48It was a great post right up until the part where he started talking about computer science. It left me with the feeling that either Zed did not study computer science, and is just talking out of his ass, or went through a very bad computer science program and has generalized that all of them must be that bad. How arrogant can you be? There's nothing for you to learn from 100 years of algorithms, complexity theory, l…
The termination with extreme prejudice of 6.001 suggests that some people mostly agree ( http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr... ). Certainly there's an ever increasing role for people pasting together big libraries and frameworks without a deep understanding of what goes on behind the curtains....
I think that there's a big factor that goes largely unacknowledged. Lots of non-Computer Science students have to take introductory programming. Given the choice between teaching a mechanical engineer something like scheme, which he will in all likelihood never use again, and python, which is a lot more widely useful, the choice is clear.
Introductory programming is all about what functions, variables, etc. are. I doubt many intro-level students ever grasped the fact that they were working on more or less the raw AST or the "code as data" thing anyway.
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not like software engineering doesn't have unsolved problems either, like why is it still so hard to produce bug free software, why programmer productivity has only gone up a small amount despite 30 years of language advances and why most software still has to be mostly custom. The dream from the earlier days of software engineering where we were eventually meant to have components that could easily be mixed and…
I don't think we'll ever get around having to build software with code and highly trained developers. The world is still very much custom engineered, from architecture to civil engineering, electrical to mechanical engineering, even mass produced items have relatively few interchangeable parts.
I agree. However, it is worth examining places like Dubai -- the tallest building in the world, and indeed practically an entire new city, was built by unskilled laborers working for dollars a day.
That's a compelling case for commoditization of talent, but in the end I think it's just a heuristic improvement. It gets you pretty far, but at the end of the day you still have huge teams of PhDs and M.Archs doing the actual engineering. (If that was commoditized it would be a scary world indeed!)
Re: Go To University, Not For CS
#50I started University in Computer Science, and then after some time abroad in Mexico, I switched to International Relations and studied politics and economics.
My plans to go into International Business haven't yet materialized and I'm currently in IT, including both web and Windows client development.
Being a one-man programming team means I have to learn a lot by myself and don't have the expertise of others to lean on. Because of that, I feel I'm held back from my potential. For example, I'm having a hard time teaching myself how to do TDD, or learning new languages or techniques.
I think a CS degree would have given me a great background to be a better programmer. So, I wouldn't discount it and I think you still learn the culture because of all the GenEd classes you have to take in University.