161–170 of 330 posts
The article should mention breadth. University education forces you to take courses that may be outside of being directly related to your field. My computer engineering degree also included classes in the following subjects, some mandatory, some chosen by me: - Film history - Multiple English/Literature courses - Geology - Physics - Chemistry - Macroeconomics - World History All these subjects made me a more well-rou…
This is a very strange article and premise to me. A university education is not vocational training. A CS education includes courses in programming, but learning to program—indeed, learning CS—is only a part of the education you are signing up for at university. I arrived at university having already worked for a couple years in open source and a bit of contracting. I worked as a professional programmer throughout my…
> This is a very strange article and premise to me. A university education is not vocational training. I know right? Stupid plebeians expecting to get something that will help them earn a living out of spending three or four years learning something and foregoing the earnings they could have made in that time. If you don’t know that university is for signaling your social class rather than learning skills that will b…
If your goal is to maximize your earning potential, there's far more effective ways of spending 3-4 years.
I think CS i still very much a discipline we fail to teach - And no wonder when you look at the curriculums. In our last hiring round, we filtered a lot of applications down to 5 individuals we wanted to interview. During the interview they were all asked to write their own implementation of Fizzbus in whatever language they desired. 3 out of 5 completely failed to arrive at a working function, the 4th was able but w…
I recently had a technical test, which I failed because I was depressed how boring it was so I missed many easy answers (say asking about private/public fields in OO).
I've been a software engineer for 30 years and by far the best programmers I've ever known were all self-taught. I'm not knocking college degrees. I have one myself. However, those who are self-taught tend to take far more initiative and invest far more time in studying and understanding how things work than those who just got a degree. They seem to be intrinsically drawn to the craft and don't just do it for grades…
But to be honest, I'm not happy and I feel like I'm living sunken cost fallacy.
Studying is awful!
By myself I always studied topic deeply and toughly. I searched for variety of opinions, approaches. I spent as much time as was needed for me to feel like I understand the topic fully - to me it is when I stop encountering novel ideas. I enjoyed freedom of curiosity and learning.
Studying, for me, is the opposite. I no no longer master topics. I don't feel like I'm learning. I study to pass dull exams. My learning is shallow. Deadlines and strict curriculum kills my curiosity. The old technique of studying the day before exam, passing and forgetting is back.
I still study on my own, the way I always did. I love reading latest papers from Arxiv. I love learning, but I hate studying. The vision of becoming researcher is still in my head and it's the only thing that keeps me from dropping out. But the more I experience academia, the more cynical I become.
Also, regarding communication and organization skills. I feel like working thought me a lot more about communication and cooperation than any school project. At work you are around professionals. People want to get things done. There are processes and managers in place. There are people with battle earned experience that you can talk to on daily basis. People who often know a lot more about getting things done than academia people ever will.
I literally feel like my random work colleagues could give better lectures about work organizations than the ones I received from some academia people.
if you're excited by current programming trends, and only want to ride that, don't invest in CS. CS is amazing, but it's usefulness in the job market is thin. In my limited experience very few people will care (or have to) about strong abstractions and proofs.
On the other hand knowing how to hack mobile responsive react thingies will get you going nicely.
If you want to explore the mathematical side of things, infinite ideas .. pick CS books or cursus and enjoy.
When teaching yourself how to code, coding is the ends.
When going for a CS degree, coding is the means.
Full disclosure: I have a CS degree so my perspective has a natural bias to ot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I - disagree here. My CompSci background gets me called in to deal with the hard stuff that others skip bc the theoretical parts of CS are not present. As mentioned in a further comment below - I can understand why code is slow (eg: BigO for cpu or memory), what structures and algorithms to use in different scenarios (Data Structures & algos), how things are working (Computer Architecture, Programming Languages [theo…
> I know what is happening at a network layer, OS layer, memory layer, application layer, and system layer, and code layer. Yep. For me, the biggest reason I think a degree is necessary is because it is comprehensive. Self taught people are going to inevitably have multiple holes in their understanding. And worst of all, they will be ignorant of where those holes lie and how large they are.
> Yep. For me, the biggest reason I think a degree is necessary is because it is comprehensive. Self taught people are going to inevitably have multiple holes in their understanding. And worst of all, they will be ignorant of where those holes lie and how large they are.
This is not my experience. Self-taught people are often much more aware of the potential for knowledge gaps, because they've had to learn what to learn. Part of self learning effectively is appreciating the complexity of a topic and choosing what to focus on, rather than just be lead through it by a teacher.
Their default position is one of humility, rather than the often common attitude of "I have a CS degree so I know what is happening at a network layer, OS layer, memory layer, application layer, and system layer, and code layer". (Hint, you don't).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think the article made the best points in favor of a CS degree. I went to a top 40 program and I took a lot of CS and hardware classes and what I did learn, crucially, that is more difficult in the workplace, is how complex systems work and how to approach complex systems. Now, you could accidentally learn that on the job, or intentionally if you choose to, but you can also sort of skate by in a fog of ignora…
I think that is fair but remember over half of the classes you took in the pursuit of a CS undergrad were not CS classes. Of the half remaining maybe half of them were truly vital? Even the example of building a microprocessor (or your own compiler as a right of passage) totally useless to 99.5% of practitioners in industry. That is a quintessential "hoop-jumping" class. Did you also learn the proper way to heat sand…
At the risk of pointing out the obvious: If you live in a country where a CS degree from a decent university is not even close to costing six figures in tuition fees (for example in most of the EU), just get the degree and learn how to code by yourself.
If you're really passionate about the science of computing, do CS. But if you're really into particle physics, anatomy or medieval history, do a degree in that (and learn to code).