I have a degree, but i don't think it is necessary.
I am a self learner, learned coding by finding things how they works. If you are self-motivated, diy code learning is great.
A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
321–330 of 330 posts
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#322Hi, new here.
I use emacs for 95% of my uptime.
I've created a lot of little programs in bash, python and PHP.
Also admin an imageboard, my personal website that i update via SSH, have running some telegram bots that i edited a lot. Actually i'm working in a FFMPEG automatizer un bash.
I don't know if you can do that, maybe yes, sure yes and a lot of more things. The thing, anyway is that i'm an almost lawyer (working, but without degree yet) with absolutely no academic preparation in tech. Just internet, manpages, and intuition.
If your intention are just code to have work and pay debts while obey someone, sure CS degree is useful... but if you want code to resolv things that you actually needs, no, not in all: systematize all the knowledge in an scholar scheme just would be a lost hacking-time.
In the other hand, i havent much work as lawyer, lol, whatever.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#323This 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…
I think your issue isn’t with universities and certainly isn’t with me. Reading between the lines, I think your complaint is with the systemic over-valuing of university degrees by parents and industry. That pushes people into universities that don’t want or need the education provided.
If that’s your issue, I completely agree with you. That’s why, in my comment, I actively encouraged people to do vocational training (boot camps) or teach themselves. If you want to learn to program, those are much better ways than to do a CS degree.
That doesn’t make CS worthless. It’s just different. The CS education provided by a university isn’t meant to train you to be a programmer. It’s broader than that. And it’s also, in some ways, deeper because it dives into CS topics that you won’t ever need for work.
I think that’s totally fine. The vocational and university systems have coexisted for a long time and serve different purposes. Pushing people into the university system that are better served by vocational training is an issue. But throwing away the university or pressing it to become purely vocational training is, I think, both unnecessary and deeply harmful to society.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I think your issue isn’t with universities and certainly isn’t with me. Reading between the lines, I think your complaint is with the systemic over-valuing of university degrees by parents and industry. That pushes people into universities that don’t want or need the education provided. If that’s your issue, I completely agree with you. That’s why, in my comment, I actively encouraged people to do vocational training…
Parents and industry do not over value degrees. They value them for reasons that are mostly, but not entirely, orthogonal to any learning that may occur in university but they value them highly for the excellent reason that they’re a wonderful signal of ability and occasionally what they learned is of some relevance.
CS isn’t worthless. CS is awesome, just like Physics or Philosophy, for those who care about them. Those who have any interest whatsoever in intellectual pursuits are at an absolute maximum 10% of the population. Many more need to get a job and for many of them a university degree is an almost absolute prerequisite. To suggest they forgo it is to do harm to them because there’s the possibility they might listen.
As a society almost everywhere in the first over spends massively on education because while it may be socially wasteful it’s individually rational. It’s a signaling arms race.
Universities have never been primarily for those who had av burning interest in the topic matter. If they became that, forsaking their roots as upper class vocational schools and finishing schools they would be vastly smaller than they are now, in terms both of faculty and student body.
My thanks for such a cordial reply to an intemperate message.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Seeing that I graduated in 1996 from a no name college, do you really think that my degree helped me? By the time I went to school, I had already been writing assembly.
Paper vs knowledge - knowledge beats paper.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#326Earlier 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’ll agree with your disagree. Other than APCS in high school, and some discrete math and number theory in college, I learned to program myself. By reading a lot I picked up most of the things on your list above. But where I really perceive my limitations from lack of formal education is where math comes into play. I get the gist of how cryptography or machine learning works, but I don’t think I’d be able to work in…
Rayiner, that is really impressive. I personally know I loved programming - but would not have had the fortitude to make it through the theoretical comp sci classes had I been self directed. But oddly enough for me, I favored the theoretical more than the practical classes.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#327So, I have two engineering degrees, but not a CS degree, so I'm kind of an intermediate case between the CS degree and the self-taught programmer, but closer to the latter. The only one of the advantages listed in this article that seems true to me, is the Prestige of having a CS degree. There are plenty of employers who will require a degree, and a few which prioritize a CS degree. In general, CS majors spend their…
> CS majors spend their first few years unlearning all of the theoretical constructs they were taught in college Do you have any examples of these theoretical constructs? I find most of the things I learned in my CS degree useful for commerical software development and can't think of anything I had to 'unlearn'.
Well it depends on your employer/domain, but mostly it's the idea that most of what was learned falls under the category of "premature optimization", and makes the software more complex while making a negligible difference in efficiency.
Of course, if you're dealing with truly big data, like a FAANG company or something, this may not be true at all. But the reality is, 90% of the software needed is satisfied by a standard CRUD setup, and you will not need to use any of the algorithms learned in school. This can be frustrating for a new graduate, who feels an urge to do "real" development and get past the simple stuff. It is mostly simple stuff, and should mostly stay that way.
So basically, anything that wasn't CRUD (sort algorithms, processing that avoids just loading it all into memory, etc.) will usually be overkill. But, where you work it could always be different.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Which six classes?
Thats the trick right
I would say: 1. The standard Data Structures and Algs class. 2. Discrete Math (if needed) 3. Systems design 4. A Nand To Tetris type survey class 5. Databases 6. Networking
Bonus: An ethics class. Because the tech world needs more people with functioning moral compasses.
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#329I work with a team of people who mostly have "Software Engineering" degrees. I am one of the few with CS. In short: IN GENERAL - Those with SE degrees (or other non-CS degree, or no degree) can be excellent developers (good code style, good unit test coverage, aggressive PR reviewers, etc). However, the art of computer programming - or computer system design -- is often in formally defining the problem at hand using…
I agree with you in theory, but here's your problem. You assume people without degrees in Computer Science cannot learn those concepts and those with them automatically understand them. A lot of CS people I've met pass a 15 week course in Finite Automata and could not explain one thing they've learned from it. I can go buy a book on Amazon and watch YouTube videos and become more of an expert on it than they ever wil…
Interesting. Could you give an example of this?
Re: A CS degree is better than teaching yourself how to code?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a huge difference in degree between the ability to keep up to date in CS once you have a foundation and building that foundation from scratch. I worked for years as a programmer before going back for a degree, and I've hired and worked with many people with and without the degrees. I've yet to run into someone who self studied their way through the equivalent of a CS degree. I'm sure they exist, but they're p…
I've bumped into quite a few in the bay area, sometimes they're even people building the infrastructure for huge companies like Twitch or people who have made significant contributions that have advanced the field in one way or another.
As I said. They exist. You're going to run into many people of extraordinary ability living in the world's tech hub. But again, the vast majority of people don't have the discipline to self study their way through an entire CS curriculum.