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We should ban these personal rant posts like 1. Stop doing ** 2. Why I don't like ** 3. You should not ** It's your personal thing. Don't like certain thing - try to do it your own way. Can't do it then change your attitude.
1. Stop Posting Rants on Hacker News
2. Why I Don't Like People Writing About Disliking Things
3. You Should Not Tell People Not To Do Things
I wrote a similar article 2 years ago ( https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/ ) arguing against MOOCs for learning data science/machine learning skills, as they are not reflective of real world applications. I'm all for personal projects especially in DS/ML (it's how I started my career in the field), but the unfortunate reality is that there's really no way nowadays to learn the hard/boring parts of DS…
How horribly disappointing. I'm at the tail end of a 6 month, $17,000 online DS bootcamp. I've got some great projects and learned a ton but yeh, they seem to be slowly preparing to let us down. They keep saying how hard it will be to find a job and may take months. LOL, I'm screwed.
Even topics like ML (an example referenced by the original post) benefit greatly from an understanding of theory and fundamentals. Yeah maybe any random dev can hack together a model by downloading scikit-learn and throwing data at it, but you'll probably get much better results if you take the time to learn about concepts like cross-validation, overfitting, etc.
The "just do stuff" attitude has its merits, but there's also something to be said for working from first principles and learning some theory to back up your applied skills.
MOOC in case you were wondering like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
JIT in case you were wondering like me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_learning
- CS50 at they very beginning of my career ~2015 that brought me to the fundamentals of CS and all that it can do in a very fun way.
- Jazz Appreciation from UTAustin (https://www.edx.org/course/jazz-appreciation-3). I lived near a Jazz club and I often heard snippets of performances while walking by, but I felt like I needed a music background to really appreciate what I was hearing. I randomly spotted this course and I learned which eras of Jazz I like best, common themes in music, common instrument combinations, and the final project encouraged me to go listen to Jazz myself. It's become a fun part of my life in a way that a short YouTube intro or just walking into the club wouldn't have been able to inspire. Part of that was likely the predefined path it offered and Jeffrey Helmer's enthusiasm for teaching the course.
Ultimately, MOOCs can very well be a way to procrastinate on a professional or personal level from just diving into the thing you already have the basics for. But it can just as easily be a way to open you up to something you never thought was in your wheelhouse in a structured path. Blog posts, documentation, and most YouTube videos are too static to serve an absolute beginner that needs questions answered early, consistently, and frequently.
We should ban these personal rant posts like 1. Stop doing ** 2. Why I don't like ** 3. You should not ** It's your personal thing. Don't like certain thing - try to do it your own way. Can't do it then change your attitude.
Seriously though? It's useful to see people's perspective and the discussion around them (and personally speaking, I come to HN for the discussion) is useful and insightful -often more so than the original article.
Click-baity titles are annoying, though. I'll grant you that...
As a noob, I feel this. The weird thing is that I am very well aware that tutorials only feel good because I see progress, but that progress is empty. I am aware that confronting a personal project really settles that knowledge in, but I still postpone personal projects whenever I think “I don’t really understand what this means, maybe I should just finish that online course and I’ll be ready”. Also fighting perfecti…
Incremental custom projects is a good way to learn -- not everything has to be "useful for others", especially where learning and practice is concerned.
If the point of the article is "don't do online course at the exclusion of everything else", that is just common sense.
I have to mirror an observation I've read on here that matches my retrospective view: Job applicants with multiple online course certificates tend to do poorly in technical interviews.
This may in part be a failing of our education systems. "Be taught about something -> write test -> pass/no pass" is usually all there is, and this system of how knowledge is valued becomes ingrained in students. Sure, tests usually contain sections of "applying" the knowledge, but ultimately it's still studying to and because of the test.
If you're lucky enough to be both versed in a subject and visit a school that provides extra-curricular engagement on these subjects, you may get a glimpse of what it feels like to solve a challenge because you want to. Otherwise you have do that completely separately from whatever formal education you receive.
It has personally taken me many years and several key experiences outside of school to fully grok that presentations aren't just condensing a topic you don't care about into a scheme somebody else dictates, held in front of an audience that would rather be elsewhere. Or that playing music isn't just about getting the notes and their volumes right. But now I deeply enjoy both. I would imagine that many are similarly stuck with a terrible mindset regarding learning or problem solving due to the way they were educated, even if they would find it exhilarating with the right frame of mind.
So yeah, show off your self-directed projects in your resume. Thrill your interviewers with the cool problems you tackled. Mention key challenges you overcame.
Without exaggerating too much, I would say online course certificates are as indicative of your technical abilities as a screenshot of a completed Tensorflow download. And that extends to the message you send if you include them in your application.