Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

miguelrochefort.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 387 posts

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

#261

Post by bondolo »

I also dropped out of a Canadian computer science degree program but in my case I will likely never get a degree.

I left University of Alberta in 1989 after completing about two years of my degree to co-found a startup with the thought that if it failed I would go back to get a degree at a better program. The startup was a success and I have never gone back to school.

Sadly, in 1988 the University of Alberta CS program was stuck in a 1970s data processing curriculum and, for undergrads, had neither PCs or Unix. I had already been making money writing applications software for PC for several years and there was no way I was going to go work for an oil company or provincial government doing mainframes.

I did miss out on some things by not completing. I had very much wanted to take the compilers course offered by Jonathan Schaeffer (of Chinook checkers and poker bot fame). Had the U of A program included internships or co-op, more unix or PCs and a more modern curriculum I probably would have stayed. Indeed they closed the program to new students for a year in the fall of 1989 to retool it and modernize. The revised program was much better (In irony, I was hiring interns from the program about the same time as I would have originally graduated).

It is still strange when I have to explain sometimes that I have no degree. I can't imagine getting a CS degree just for the piece of paper. I can understand why someone might need that paper in addition to the skills, such as for a TN work visa. Thankfully I have not. If I did go back, and in my 50s I would feel like I was stealing a seat from someone who really needed it for their career, I would go for math, statistics instead of CS, a degree complementary to the CS skills already have.

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

#262

Post by 0xffff2 »

the_only_law wrote: post #246
0xffff2 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is relevant though. Most of the mid-level schools I looked at were ABET accredited. Going unaccredited in CS seems to be a thing that you can only get away with if you have so much or so little name recognition that it doesn't matter.

Isn’t the point of ABET mostly so that you can obtain engineering licenses. I don’t imagine most software development jobs would even bother looking up if your program was accredited because you aren’t going to need a license.

The US government for one requires ABET accreditation for all engineering degrees regardless of licensing requirements for the job. I'm currently a government contractor who is hoping to eventually convert. It's not yet clear to me how much the lack of ABET accreditation on my UC CS degree is going to hurt me.

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

#263

Post by fastball »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #116
D13Fd wrote: post #64

For anyone who is wondering, the school he listed (Western Governors University) is unfortunately not ABET accredited as far as I can tell.

You're correct. The path I took is not without compromises: - WGU is not ABET accredited. - WGU is not as rigorous as other universities. - WGU is not as prestigious as other universities. - WGU gives all graduates the same 3.0 GPA. I probably should point them out in my post. That said, I still believe WGU was the right choice given my circumstances. I don't value these things enough to justify taking 12 to 16 times…

Ew everyone gets 3.0 GPA? What's the point of that? Are all of the exams pass/fail?

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

#264

Post by bserge »

gabereiser wrote: post #136
bserge wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people on Reddit did say they completed 2-3 month bootcamps/courses with no prior experience and got junior dev jobs (in the UK), so I don't even know. Then again it's online and on Reddit, so they may be just lying. I believe it is possible to learn enough to be decent in 3 months full time, and then learn everything else as you go. However, I don't see anyone hiring with that kind of experience. But then why p…

Here in the US we also take a good hard look at bootcamp graduates. Code school/bootcamp graduates I’ve found to be good enough to do most of the mundane web work broiler-plate we have to write. It gives them experience, it give us that broiler-plate code no one wants to write. Bootcamp’s here like Turing or Galvanize cost $20k and take 4-6mos but you’ll get an entry level Dev job at $75k or more when you’re done. It…

This is really interesting! What about applicants who didn't go through a bootcamp, but have decent projects on their website/Github/whatever? Is it the fact that you can't verify if they actually built that themselves or just copied/stole it?

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

#265

Post by alistairSH »

abfan1127 wrote: post #183
trophycase wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the average household probably also isn't in 240k of debt unless they made very very poor financial choices.

I went back and checked my records. It was 140K! oops. Anyways, here is my list. 85k in student loans 30k 401k loan 20k car loan 30k car loan

So 46,000 in disposable income? That's a massive amount of money by normal-person standards.

Hell, the fact that you had $30k in a 401k that you could borrow from yourself already makes you exceptional.

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

#267

Post by cxr »

abfan1127 wrote: post #221
cxr wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heads up: this is a common pattern of expression that makes you come off as really obnoxious to people who will never tell you that that's what's happening. If you can't understand why people have a problem with this, here's the explanation: there are almost certainly smarter people than you who happened to be more unlucky than you . You were lucky-but-stupid before, so you stopped being so stupid, and now your messa…

At the risk of more down votes, I'll disagree with you. There are certainly smarter people than me who are less lucky than me. However, its a much smaller subset than many would believe. Many claim unlucky when in reality their luck is a consequence of their past choices. They've taken risks and those risks didn't work out.

I once read some advice that I'll try to repeat, but without knowing whether I can do a great job capturing it, but here it goes. The general idea was that if you're on a date with someone, then you should avoid asking or saying things that subtly insist that something is true if you don't know it to be true. An example is that if you don't know whether your date was molested by their father as a child, you should tread carefully with any questions or comments that carry the presumption that they weren't.

Here's some more sage wisdom: the average human has approximately one testicle. Except not, right? Because that's not how numbers work. So, it doesn't matter if, say, only 4% of the people you interact with are unlucky and 96% aren't. This is not an engineering problem. If you do meet someone who is (or was) unlucky, and you have an interaction with them like this, then even though they're in the 4%, their circumstances are still 100% at odds with your assumption.

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

#268

Post by jacurtis »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #141
dumbfounder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume this matters if they want to go to grad school, but does it matter for any other reason? I think employers attribute value to programs they have heard of, whether it is ABET or not is not something I have ever considered.

There plenty of people getting a BS from WGU that go on to Master level degrees at other universities. I know quite a few of them personally. Going to WGU for a BS and then a different university for a Masters, is quite possible and not unheard of.

This is actually what my sister did. She got a WGU Bachelors Degree and then went on to get a Master's Degree from a more recognizable college. She shaved 3-4 years off her full masters program that way (if you consider the time spent for the Bachelors degree in that process) and at the end of the day she is applying on her resume that she has a Master's from a recognizable university name that raises eye brows.

I am currently looking at doing the same.

If you do the math, it is possible to get a WGU Bachelors Degree + Full 2-Year Master's Degree program from a "recognizable" school for less money and in less time than most people are spending to get a bachelors degree from an unrecognizable community college.\

That's a life hack for anyone looking for Master's programs.

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

#269

Post by alistairSH »

war1025 wrote: post #214
ChrisRR wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's certainly not unreasonable or even uncommon. But, it's still way above the norm in the US. Median household income in the US is somewhere around $65k/year (before taxes and expenses).

Side note - You're only holding $2k in cash for a family of 5? That seems low. Your efforts to invest for the future are commendable, but if you get caught on the bad end of a 2008-style recession, is it enough to keep paying bills?

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

#270

Post by abfan1127 »

alistairSH wrote: post #265
abfan1127 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went back and checked my records. It was 140K! oops. Anyways, here is my list. 85k in student loans 30k 401k loan 20k car loan 30k car loan

So 46,000 in disposable income? That's a massive amount of money by normal-person standards. Hell, the fact that you had $30k in a 401k that you could borrow from yourself already makes you exceptional.

Yes. I had ~$500 payments for each of those every month. Luckily, once I got the first one paid off, I was able to roll that previous payment into the next one.

401k match is nice and I'd had been working for 5-6 years when I did this, so it was vested.

I was in a deep hole, but I had a big shovel. I wish I hadn't dug the hole though. I encourage others to not dig holes either now that I've learned my lesson the hard way.

Post reply on HN