131–140 of 305 posts
I literally had sign up for classes as soon as registration was open to graduate, otherwise I would not get into courses required.
This article is credentialism at its worst. The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own. These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.
I go to the university and get severely disappointed, and after 3 semester all the passion get sucked and I left.
However, I WISH that college/university were way better. Be on a class with others help a lot, and despite I'm not very social at all, be along others with the same interests? that is so rare that is a prize on itself.
How make things better and why I get disappointed is other matter that have been discussed on HN a lot, so instead I wanna point that having a good experience in an education setting (that I have in a tech course!) not only is good for the people that like to walk the common path, but also the self-taught!
How lovely If I could get into some very rewarding clases, not matter if in a university or in a backyard....
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Some universities hire non-tenure track instructors, with no research requirements, sometimes called "Lecturers". Of course, they are compensated horribly, so nobody wants to do that unless they have no other choice, and once you do that, good luck ever getting a tenure-track position. The whole academic job market is pretty dysfunctional. It's more interesting to look at the flawed ways universities have of measurin…
> Of course, they are compensated horribly Non-tenure track academic teaching positions that pay "horribly"... I can already imagine the kind of talent they attract.
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this is one of the pathologies in academic institutions: they need teachers, but they evaluate researchers. the people who make the cut for researcher also have a lot of other options, and the institution ends up with an undersupply of teachers.
Some universities hire non-tenure track instructors, with no research requirements, sometimes called "Lecturers". Of course, they are compensated horribly, so nobody wants to do that unless they have no other choice, and once you do that, good luck ever getting a tenure-track position. The whole academic job market is pretty dysfunctional. It's more interesting to look at the flawed ways universities have of measurin…
This article is credentialism at its worst. The best programmers I know are self-taught, because they have a passion for it. I know people working at minimum wage, never enrolled in college, who got decent programming jobs after a year or two learning CS on their own. These people will always (I hope) form the core of the profession.
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My (UK) uni admits about 350 people to the Bachelors programme (I think about 250 survive the first two years) and about 100 more into the Masters programme. This year we had over 300 people take the AI module and it has absolutely resulted in a decrease of teaching quality, and I'm not sure if some of the students are qualified to be there (namely, Chinese students who can't even read the coursework specification co…
I think this is a problem across the board in UK univeristies these days. When I did my CS degree (1993), I was one of two people in the year who got 1st class, now I think it's something like 25% awarded 1sts and the rest get 2:1s
>Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full. I know this doesn't refute the point the article is trying to make, but it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me that an underclassman might not get into a highly sought after elective.…
While the article bemoans these programs becoming restrictive, it is ignoring a major reality. Let's take a person. This is the person that might end up getting 'weeded out' before they've even gotten their foot in the door. They probably have 0 or near 0 background in anything related to computing. They similarly likely have negligible background in anything related to science/engineering/mathematics. And keep in mi…
> The majority of people in his class will fail/drop out of the program before graduation, regardless of background. Really? That sounds like a huge failure of the system, especially since they've gone into debt for that.
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Competition must be fierce... at the level they want to pay.
95K a year for a starting professorship... or 3.5X that in total comp in industry. Not a terribly difficult choice!
Since it's a public school you can find out how much each one makes - https://www.newsobserver.com/news/databases/public-salaries/
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> Of course the reality isn't quite as utopian. It also means professions like law and medicine require whole additional degrees. I kind of like the fact that in the US, doctors usually have some exposure to science outside of memorizing facts for their next test at med school. It makes them more likely to be able to understand studies, for one thing. I might hazard to guess that if you study philosophy before going…
I believe that philosophy undergrads get the highest lsat scores, however that could have changed in the last 5 or so years.