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Computer science as a lost art (2015)

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Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#41

Post by flatline »

ThJ wrote: post #36

As a person who never had a degree but whose knowledge goes above and beyond what 90% of the market needs and well into CS territory, this article insults me. It's also a painful reminder of similar prejudices in people who are looking to hire. I often end up doing the kind of basic development the author talks about and I'm not happy about that. Why not just take a CS degree? Because I'm a poor fit for the education…

The author did disclose his bias up front and was responding specifically to a question about a traditional degree vs. a bootcamp. I personally still think that general education holds a lot of value. Of course it’s not for everyone, and I think it’s a problem that it is marketed as such. Nonetheless, there is a lot of value in liberal arts, in learning to think not just about software but other things. Good developers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, etc., etc., pull inspiration and insight from fields beyond their own. And we don’t apply software in a vacuum, we apply it to real problems in some field, typically other than software. I think a broad knowledge is part of where the “advanced stuff” comes from, and degrees are tailored to impart some of that over, say, a four week coding course.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#42

Post by thaumasiotes »

stcredzero wrote: post #16

It means that a person can get the little things done while knowing very little. But it also means that this person probably will never learn enough to get the big things done. To be honest, I get secretly frustrated with the lower-level people who now exist in giant hordes. (I rarely tell anyone that.) To me, they are like people who have decided to learn 5% of their field in order to get a few things done, have som…

> people graduating with a Computer Science degree from supposedly top tier schools with high GPAs that supposedly mean something

Who claimed that a high GPA from a top tier school meant something? Top tier schools are notorious for giving As to everyone. The point is that you got in.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#43

Post by robertAngst »

ThJ wrote: post #36

As a person who never had a degree but whose knowledge goes above and beyond what 90% of the market needs and well into CS territory, this article insults me. It's also a painful reminder of similar prejudices in people who are looking to hire. I often end up doing the kind of basic development the author talks about and I'm not happy about that. Why not just take a CS degree? Because I'm a poor fit for the education…

I'm the other way.

CS grads are lazy programmers with the mentality that someone else will do it.

I am self taught and can usually rig a solution to a problem in a few hours. A CS grad will tell you its impossible.

Maybe they need to do hackathons, but its like they have been taught to doubt instead of taught to think.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#44

Post by robertAngst »

scarface74 wrote: post #28
learc83 wrote: post #17

I've worked for years as a self-taught developer before going back to get my CS degree, I've taught at a bootcamp, and I've hired bootcamp graduates. Bootcamps can be valuable, but they are in no way comparable to a 4 year degree from a decent CS program. The top performing bootcamps are either functioning as an extended job interview that you have to pay for, or they are very good at selecting experienced students w…

Computer science graduates also need a lot of training. If not more, a boot camp graduate has already been exposed enough to modern tech stacks to at least come in as a junior. Too many CS grads have little practical experience to hit the ground running on even the simplest real world projects. Yes I have a CS degree.

It should be a requirement to have each student complete a modern full stack.

Some schools have pitiful results for what they say is a degree.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#45

Post by robertAngst »

Swizec wrote: post #20
wrs wrote: post #4

Well stated. I recently went through (the recordings of) MIT’s intro course for electrical engineers, in which somewhere the professor says students may wonder why they have to do all this calculus and learn FET models and so on — in real life don’t you just wire chips together? And he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.

This is the best, most succinct, answer to do you or don’t you need an eng degree I’ve ever seen. Thank you

Do you want a 200k/yr 50hr/week job? If so, Get the bestest degrees.

If you want a 110k/yr to 1B/yr job, self taught with some confidence is my recommendation.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#46

Post by johntam »

User23 wrote: post #14
yontherubicon wrote: post #7

So, for the dogshed builders among us, what might be the recommended pathway to learn some architecture--beyond the obvious academic options? I'm sure this has been covered to death on HN already, but if anyone has a link bookmarked and feels like sharing?

The best introduction I’ve ever read is Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation. It is eminently readable. It somehow manages to be logically rigorous while remaining approachable. I couldn’t recommend a book more strongly for someone such as yourself. As a bonus it’s not even particularly long.

+1. It was a terrific read when I took my Computability course, very, very well-written.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#47

Post by wavefunction »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18

> If you want to make the tools and libraries that the lower-level people use, you do need that degree. No, you need to somehow invest more time to build more features than another sucker out there. That's almost entirely it. Period. Shit is just fast enough these days, and if your industry cares about performance, well then maybe understanding something about caching that can be learned in less than a day from a blo…

This is completely untrue. I have in the past and continue to create web components that "hard CS" folks would scoff at and also quietly use in their own projects if my work weren't owned by my employers.

I've built chunking hi-def megapixel web camera services a decade ago when browsers were limited to 20mb uploads. I've suggested building simple structured data protocols based on xml for a high-rate foreign exchange brokerage client-server architectures. We wanted to secure traffic between the client and server so I suggested self-signed certificates.

I'm not stupid but I'm not a "10x developer" either. I work as a software developer because it's the most lucrative, accessible and interesting opportunity for a non-credentialed individual like myself. I've met folks with Masters in CS that unfortunately didn't merit a basic certificate in the same.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#48

Post by rayiner »

ThJ wrote: post #36

As a person who never had a degree but whose knowledge goes above and beyond what 90% of the market needs and well into CS territory, this article insults me. It's also a painful reminder of similar prejudices in people who are looking to hire. I often end up doing the kind of basic development the author talks about and I'm not happy about that. Why not just take a CS degree? Because I'm a poor fit for the education…

I don't think that's a charitable reading of the article. The author is not saying that you can't have this knowledge without a degree, he's saying that few people in the field today have this knowledge, because they don't have the degree. The two assertions are different: there are things a degree teaches you; if you have the degree, you probably know them. While you can't judge whether any given individual has the same knowledge without the degree, you can:

1) Expect that 1,000 people with the degree will mostly have that knowledge;

2) That 1,000 people without the degree will mostly not have the knowledge.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#49

Post by tonyarkles »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #18

> If you want to make the tools and libraries that the lower-level people use, you do need that degree. No, you need to somehow invest more time to build more features than another sucker out there. That's almost entirely it. Period. Shit is just fast enough these days, and if your industry cares about performance, well then maybe understanding something about caching that can be learned in less than a day from a blo…

That’s all true. The flip side is that there’s also problems that do actually require specialized training. An example that comes to mind for me from a few years ago involved real-time simulation of a constellation of satellites. The accuracy was on the order of meters. I ended up implementing RK4 as a solver, and had to use pretty complex differential equations (2nd order effects matter at that resolution).

The project also involved real-time bitstream generation and modulation at 10MS/s. That was a mixture of understanding DSP and some clever hacks to get the performance we needed on the hardware we had. Oh, and concurrency without race conditions, because we needed to use every core we had to make it all work.

Yes, there’s lots of business problems that can be solved by programming without much computer science. But there’s also a huge pile of problems where it’s not even clear that it’s possible to solve using current tech. I, personally, much prefer the latter, but to each his or her own.

Re: Computer science as a lost art (2015)

#50

Post by chrisco255 »

spraak wrote: post #40

> If you want to make really interesting exciting things that have never existed before, if you want to make a tiny little difference in the industry and change the world just a little bit, then you do need that degree. If you want to make the tools and libraries that the lower-level people use, you do need that degree. I wonder if the author considers Node.js to be really interesting and exciting and never existed b…

I think exceptional genius combined with exceptional work ethic can overcome any shortage of credentials or education, period. But for the great majority of folks, a formal CS education will give you a great advantage over a bootcamp graduate, or even a self-taught hacker. The thing is, if you're smart enough and contrarian enough, you're not going to listen to anyone's advice on this topic anyways...so those of you who do care what other people think, I think it's best to get a CS degree. Boot camp just doesn't cover enough bases. It's important to learn fundamentals. The fundamentals change much less often than languages or frameworks or platforms.
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