61–70 of 146 posts
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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.
I dropped out of a Computer Science program at KSU. It’s been great.
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.
he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips. You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turn…
Arguably our most prominent contribution to OSS (outside of our own projects) was in React. We're credited in the codebase when the approach was used: https://github.com/facebook/react/blob/v16.0.0/src/renderers...
As discussed in the original PR https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/4400 the original checksum used a naive adler-32 algorithm, but with some basic math you can find a much more efficient implementation that eliminates most of the mod operations without risking a hidden deoptimizing overflow.
It's not everyday that you get to use your background knowledge, but when you do it feels great!
My Alma mater on HN? Weird!
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.
he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips. You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turn…
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…
I'm a self-taught web dev, and I want to further my CS education but can't go back to school for various reasons. I've seen various syllabi eg teachyourselfcs.com and though they seem legit (and I've dabbled is some courses) I don't quite see the application/direct benefit professionally. Let me phrase in another way; when I got started it was easy to see why I needed to learn front-end and back-end to make a web app…
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.
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I disagree strongly with your point #1. "This knowledge" specifically is deep full-system understanding, as quoted in the article: > "They use languages, editors, compilers, and operating systems; but they don't have the first clue about how to create any of these things or even how they really work." And yes, he is asserting that people should get this from a degree: > If you want to build doghouses, just pick up so…
> The full depth of applied understanding comes from personal interest & experience. Whether or not a person with such interest pursues a CS degree is completely orthogonal. It's not orthogonal, but rather highly correlated. Combinatorics, graph theory, computer architecture, etc., will all be part of a university CS curriculum. Someone who has a CS degree will probably know those things (or at least recall them afte…
People like the author, with a degree and lots of experience under their belt, really overestimate what the degree specifically gave them, vs what they learned through decades of experience as they developed their craft. When it comes to practical, applied programming and skills of abstraction, informed by deep knowledge of what goes on under the hood, vanishingly small amounts of that come from university education.
Again, I will be careful to separate out those who do actual Computer Science on the job from this practical craft of quality programming. The former is much more rare, but is a separate field.
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.
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he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips. You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turn…
I'm intrigued. What channel? I greatly appreciate this type of intuition / problem solving. AvE is one of my favorite.