All that matters is how much effort you put into it.
A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
121–130 of 330 posts
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#122Teaching yourself to code while getting a CS degree is best IMO. Just teaching yourself you'll likely miss lots of topics and not challenge yourself as much. Conversely I've met plenty of students that don't really care about the topic and are just taking the class to get a job. So do both! Take the class and teach yourself. In other words pursue your hobbies and use code where those hobbies match. Learn the things y…
Teach yourself enough to get a useful job, then constantly be learning while making money. Worked for me. Always assume there are ways to be doing it better, and never be the most experienced person in the room (try to be the newest!). That took me from decent with computers to senior engineer - the hardest part is getting the first job. It will seem random and you may have to not take much money at first. Or if you want to fast track and can afford it go to university.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#123All the points mentioned in the article are not specific to CS, and they are mostly about living normal adult life (socializing, deadlines, etc.)
I don't think that going to college is necessary or detrimental. It's probably good that people from 18 to 21 stay somewhere safe and learn something out of their parent's home.
That said, there is very little that a CS course can teach you that is both practically useful on the job and you can't easily learn from yourself. That's because a large part of coding is not about knowing the most advanced and obscure data structures or algorithms.
Which brings me to the point. Neither of those options teaches you how do develop a product feature. That's what people still learn on the job today, and it's why knowing how to code is merely necessary but certainly not sufficient to be a good developer.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#124Teaching yourself to code while getting a CS degree is best IMO. Just teaching yourself you'll likely miss lots of topics and not challenge yourself as much. Conversely I've met plenty of students that don't really care about the topic and are just taking the class to get a job. So do both! Take the class and teach yourself. In other words pursue your hobbies and use code where those hobbies match. Learn the things y…
Upvoted, I think people don't really understand how little time is spent on actually learning to program in an average computer science degree. If you don't study programming yourself and have intrinsic motivation to do so, you really can't program all that well despite having a CS degree.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#125All the points mentioned in the article are not specific to CS, and they are mostly about living normal adult life (socializing, deadlines, etc.) I don't think that going to college is necessary or detrimental. It's probably good that people from 18 to 21 stay somewhere safe and learn something out of their parent's home. That said, there is very little that a CS course can teach you that is both practically useful o…
logic, computational complexity, algorithms, best practices and patterns one can learn on its own but it's _rare_ to find a self taught coder that has had exposure to these topics.
there are great developer that are self taught and self sufficient, sure, but the majority end up coding small potatoes or cogs within a soul crushing enterprise with zero agency
and while most cs grad have little coding skill they have the ability to learn far beyond because while they don't know the hows, they know whys
so even if their core skill stars similar, their long term trajectories are wildly different, which is something to consider too
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#126Talking with co-workers who completed 4 year CS degrees, I feel like I got a much better value out of my now defunct 2 year trade school. Mind you this was 15 years ago, but I came out of it with a decent enough working knowledge of C, C++, VB.Net and Java - and basic understanding of SQL, PLScheme and functional. On top of that there was a solid year of data structure class. Trade schools have been largely demonized…
Good bootcamps are an alrighty substitute, no? Most of them are a bit of a scam but they do get you up and running pretty quickly with a top-down approach.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#127Teaching yourself to code while getting a CS degree is best IMO. Just teaching yourself you'll likely miss lots of topics and not challenge yourself as much. Conversely I've met plenty of students that don't really care about the topic and are just taking the class to get a job. So do both! Take the class and teach yourself. In other words pursue your hobbies and use code where those hobbies match. Learn the things y…
Upvoted, I think people don't really understand how little time is spent on actually learning to program in an average computer science degree. If you don't study programming yourself and have intrinsic motivation to do so, you really can't program all that well despite having a CS degree.
While I didn't do a CS degree, from what I could tell of friends who were doing that, it was a course in mathematical logic and algorithms built with that logic, and analysis of problems in such a way that they could be explored and solved using the logic, with some modules demonstrating applications of that mathematical logic such as operating systems and compilers, which were helpful tools created out of the logic in order to facilitate further exploration of the same.
A big clue going in, I suppose, was that the CS degree entry requirements demanded applicants to have mathematics A-Level (i.e. spent, under the typical UK system, about a third of their age 16-17 full-time education exclusively on mathematics). It was in no way intended to be, and clearly was not, a degree teaching people how to be software engineers or how to program beyond being able to put the logic, in the chosen notation, on the screen.
This was back at around the turn of the millennium.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#128I did "all three". My road was basically:
- tons of self study while I designed hardware and wrote code on my own
- school, which started showing me more advanced things
- an internship, which exposed me to the real world
I was into computers years and years before college. This was the 1970s, when books on computers were few and far between. I had not heard of Knuth (and if I had, his books might have chased me away) and most of my learning about computers was from Intel datasheets and articles from BYTE and Dr Dobb's Journal. I read about Smalltalk and Pascal and FORTH (and wrote my own FORTH) and C (and mucked around with Tiny C) but didn't really know anything.
School taught me some theory (starting with Knuth and such), but the whole time I was taking classes I was doing my own self-study on things the school didn't offer (mostly I was studying how to write LISP interpreters and compilers, and then how to write video games). School taught me how to teach myself.
The internship taught me about politics and how to work with people, how to work with physical machines (from DEC-10s and large PDP-11s to microcomputers), and Unix systems programming ("Here, kid, photocopy my copy of Lyons Notes, read that and also K&R, and have fun").
I was taking grad-level courses when I realized that I was having more fun writing video games than anything else, and I was not looking forward to spending my last year of school doing the boring graduation requirements courses I'd blown off in favor of just taking more CS. So I dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley and still, 40 years later, don't have a degree, and I'm still reading papers and learning new stuff all the time.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#129To those who self study: how or where did you learn the design patterns for good code? Anyone can learn how to write text book programs in any language but working on a team and diving into a paradigm say MVCC or something doesn’t seem as easy at least for me
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#130One of the dirty secrets of university degrees is what you majored in barely matters. You will not use it directly much. What you learn at university is a universal way of thinking and learning.