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I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

miguelrochefort.com

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Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#211

Post by amingilani »

I feel like some of the other comments are missing out on how it's possible to do this slower while still working, regardless: Thank you for this experience, it's super motivating. I recently got into the GA Tech OMSCS program myself. I had a non-tech BSc from a South Asian university that I barely survived because it wasn't my thing. Ever since I got out of school, I've worked in tech. I even managed to get a job and move to North America through my work, but the lack of a degree always felt off to me as well.

If I'd read this article a few years ago, I'd likely have jumped into this program before joining GA Tech's OMSCS program. But at this point, I'm happy with what I chose, and to be able to work and study at the same time, no matter how intense it may get.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#213

Post by chrisseaton »

the_only_law wrote: post #191
chrisseaton wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the qualification (from whichever accredited university) would open up a lot of opportunities I'd caution about this - if you think you can apply to jobs requiring a PhD I would think that when you apply the first thing they're going to do is to ask you who your advisor was and what you did. Unlike a bachelors just having a PhD isn't worth much - they will want to know what you actually achieved. If you have a…

Just out of curiosity, who is offering remote PhD’s? The only online PhD’s I’ve ever seen have been in nursing related fields.

I did a regular PhD just didn’t ever go into the office. (I did at the start for a few weeks and did every now and again.)

And I guess every PhD is now a remote PhD for at least the next year?

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#214

Post by war1025 »

ChrisRR wrote: post #171
abfan1127 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I paid off $240,000 in 3 years by not being an idiot with my money. I got on a budget with my wife. We cut up our credit cards because we always double or triple spent our money. We budgeted for things like Christmas. We followed Dave Ramsey's plan. We're 2 months from paying off our house now. Edit - I went back and checked, it was $140k.

What the hell? So you're literally earning $80k above your living expenses. Waaaaaay above average I'd be more surprised if you couldn't pay that sort of money off Re your edit: I'm even more sceptical now. Your figures were off by a third. I know exactly the value of my mortgage when I took it out. That figure is burned into my mind. I don't know how you could be out by $100,000

I don't know what it will add to the conversation, but I thought it was worth adding in my two cents.

My family of five is supported by my income (~$100k / year).

I get paid weekly. Every Friday, I go into my bank account amd transfer anything in excess of $2000 into the stock market.

Some weeks that's quite a bit of money, some weeks it's not so much money.

As of a week ago when I did the math, we had $65k more to our names this year than we did one year ago.

Probably half of that was money we saved directly, and half was stock market gains, so I guess from a debt payoff perspective maybe that's closer to $30k.

But I guess my point is, I don't think it's unreasonable to think a two income household in a higher-income metro than where I live could have $80k/yr in excess income to pay down debt with.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#215

Post by the_only_law »

JamesBarney wrote: post #76
ajkjk wrote: post #36

> In 2012, I studied computer science at Concordia University and dropped out after 1 semester. > On my first day, I attended 2 lectures. I quickly realized that a 2-hour commute to listen to someone slowly recite a PowerPoint wasn’t the best use of my time. It's so depressing that a lot of expensive higher education is this pathetic. I wish our education system worked enough like a market that it could hold lecturer…

Everything in higher education makes a lot more sense when you realize they aren't selling an education they're selling credentials.

Among other things, yes.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#217

Post by Bakary »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #67
gspr wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment summarizes much of the the whole thread: a bunch of people who think that getting an academic degree should be like trade school.

I don't fully understand this mentality. We don't look at everything we want to accomplish and say"what's the fastest way to get there?" a 4-year university degree certainly isn't if you want a job, money or credibility. The journey is amazing; I have 2 undergrads and a MSc not because of the material benefits, but because I absolutely loved school, especially the second time around. #3 grad school was a little disap…

The mentality comes from people in the more recent generations having to deal with harsher competition and lower economic prospects, and not having certain expensive pieces of paper lock you out of many opportunities. The problem is that trade schools need to be reformed/expanded, or employers have to reevaluate how they evaluate things.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#218

Post by jventura »

Buttons840 wrote: post #192
jventura wrote: post #153

While I praise the author's effort, as a professor myself (I teach CS in a local polytechnic school - something like the US community colleges) I really doubt the quality of either the WGU and of the knowledge retention. As an example, this semester I'm teaching Operating Systems concepts (definitions, processes, threads, semaphores, mutexes, signals, memory layouts, IO, etc.), and even if I take the theoretical conc…

I took a Data Structures and Algorithms course at a brick and mortar university. It was being taught by a substitute teacher from the art department who knew some programming. The class was 5 assignments, the first of which I completed with about 60 characters of Python code; I remember feeling smug because others struggled with the same assignment. The other assignments weren't much harder. It's not all bad though,…

> It was being taught by a substitute teacher from the art department who knew some programming. The class was 5 assignments (...)

I guess you were unlucky! Teacher from the art department, and a class with only 5 assignments?! Didn't your university had a CS department with CS-competent people to substitute? For instance, the CS department of my college has at least 40 teachers, and it's a polytechnic school (more like a vocational school than a theoretical university)..

What I want to say with this is that maybe your university is also questionable for delivering CS courses like that..

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#219

Post by seiferteric »

read_if_gay_ wrote: post #60
seiferteric wrote: post #26

This is very interesting to me. I have an EE degree but have been doing software full time since I graduated in 2009. Even though I am mostly self taught and feel competent enough compared to my coworkers, I frequently have pangs of self doubt around not having a CS degree. Mainly worry about not having a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data structures. I have been thinking for a while of an online CS degree and t…

> Mainly worry about not having a deeper knowledge of algorithms and data structures. Why not just look at these then? As an example you could check out MITs algorithms and DS lectures on Youtube. An entire degree might be a lot of wasted effort.

Some of it is just the unknown unknowns I guess. I can only look at things I think I may not know or know well enough. Whereas a directed course might guide me to what I don't know better. But perhaps you are right, I should probably start there.

Re: I prepared for a decade to graduate in CS in three months

#220

Post by _nrv9 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #55
djsumdog wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're given a resume, do you look at the education, other that briefly? If it doesn't sound like an online program (e.g. University of Phoenix) I doubt most would notice. But then again, I never see resumes until someone asks me to do a phone screening. Even then, I kinda glance at them enough to figure out which set of questions to pull out. So I guess that decision is made well before me. Getting to the actua…

When I see degrees from universities I've never heard of I assume they're diploma mills and look them up. Often they're not but fill a particular niche in learning or circumstance. This is the major failing with the US system IMO, in Canada the word "university" has a much stronger legal definition so there is more trust in it. Similar to what happened to the title "Engineer" when programmers started using it* *I hav…

Wow, I hope to never work with you. You value things that should not be valued in tech. We care about competence, not credentials.

I've interviewed dozens of engineers. Never once looked at their education or gave it any weight. I assess them myself, no need to defer.

Selecting for people from schools you've heard of is probably the wildest thing I've heard in my career.

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