51–60 of 157 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, that's a lot of hubris from the author. I don't think anyone out of college for more than a few years thinks the "tier" of college you went to is the ultimate arbiter of how competent you are and can ever achieve.
Believe it or not, _statistically_ speaking, top tier STEM schools do have way more smarter students per my experience. Prestigious Universities earned their fame for the most part.
> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’
Yeah, this. My home state's college's CS program boasted it was one of the best in the northwest. My friends that went through it constantly had to ask me to explain simple stuff to them because the professor's assignments were wrong or confusing. Compare that to our local community college, which seemed to have a much more well-rounded course and taught the fundamentals in a way that made much more sense. Anecdotal…
Is it the students? How many people are going into CS because they've had a taste of programming somewhere outside of school and decided they want to be a software engineer, and how many of them just get into CS because they heard that CS grads have very good employment prospects (Low unemployment, high salaries)? Anecdotally, I can tell you that during my senior project for my CS degree, someone in my group admitted to hating coding, but was pushed into CS by family, and that he couldn't code worth a damn.
Or is it the schools? In my school, the first two years were much heavier on the code, where the latter two years were heavier on CS theory. But in both cases, the quizzes and tests were on syntax and other things that could be answered with a short answer, or they were multiple choice. The only time your coding ability was tested was in the homework, which is easily plagiarized with Google and Stack Overflow.
OOP is kind of topic that everybody is expected to know, yet for some reasons there are huge gaps between people when it comes to proficency at it, at modeling systems and domains correctly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
don’t mean to detract from the conversation, but isn’t math 55 just elementary algebra and analysis? surely this is insufficient at the vast majority of schools to constitute a math degree
algebra, analysis, topology. That is about what the average mathematics curriculum consists of. Maybe we have different definitions of average, which seems to be a hacker news bias, schools in the top 40 are not average by definition , but many many schools offering math degrees don't even offer classes beyond that level.
but, i’d still be stunned if introductory algebra, analysis at a baby/papa rudin level, and some point set topology would be sufficient enough to be called a math degree
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's controversial because that assertion assumes that entrance to MIT, Harvard etc. is primarily based on IQ (or whatever other metric of "smartness" one uses). It is apparent that admission to these universities is based on many things other than IQ, and that IQ may in fact be a lesser component than other things, such as socioeconomic status (which leads to attending schools that prepare one for applying, being ab…
I didn't say there weren't other factors, there clearly are, but there are real differences in smarts between schools and to consider this controversial is something I think is more of a product of our present moment than something that people really deep down believe. And I actually think I can speak to this with some amount of personal experience. I've been at both a lower tier college and a best-in-the-country uni…
Tangentially, I think it is lazy to say somebody who is disagreeing with you is just being "politically correct" or "a product of the present moment". I see no evidence for claims like yours, which strike me as more ideologically driven than you might believe.
I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…
> Almost everything you will ever need is already implemented in a library for you to reuse, and even reaching for that library is pretty rare. This undercuts your claim a bit as someone has to be able to write the library in the first place. Yes it’s rare, but the software engineering industry is big enough that “rare” can be a “this happens all the time in domain X”. Overall though I’d agree that it’s not useful fo…
I'd disagree with this assessment. In my own experience, I've found that competitive programming is useful in teaching a few skills. However, the apparent point of competitive programming--building up a good repertoire of advanced algorithms and data structures--is pretty close to useless. In my professional career, the most complex algorithm I've ever had to code myself is ... union-find (on like two occasions), wit…
To me competitive programming doesn't make you a good software engineer. It will teach you bad practices, like abusing of dangerous programming constructs or data structures to optimized the code or just save some typing while writing the code (like one letter variable names, macros, etc), global variables and state in the program, not using common design patterns, not using OOP, not documenting the code and in gener…
Interviewer: How do you swap two variables without using a temporary variable?
Candidate: x = x + y; y = x - y; x = x - y!
Interviewer: You're hired!
... two months later ...
Boss: What the hell is this code you wrote?
Programmer: I swapped two variables without using a temporary variable!
Boss: You're fired!
The HN crowd will know Adam D'Angelo (IOI Gold) - cofounder of Quora and Nikolay Durov (IOI ICPC Gold) - cofounder of Telegram. My personal examples are Singlestore (billion dollar company) which I cofounded and Near Protocol - 5Bln market cap crypto company cofoundered by Alex (ICPC Gold). There are also numerous fantastic engineers that have competitive programming under their belt working for tech primes and startups.
People who win are usually very very smart. AND they learn to work hard - you can't win without great work ethics. Skills wise you learn many algorithms and data structures cold. Plus you learn how to write small program with very few bugs from the the first try. Do they come out as complete package of a well rounded engineer - no, but there are years ahead to learn and they are trained to learn fast.
Bottom line is I can't disagree more. People familiar with the subject are often lucky to have the team and come with great network of nerd friend. Of course you will find people from this world who don't succeed, but more plenty become fantastic engineers.
> Assuming for a minute that students from lesser tier colleges are less smart (possibly untrue but again a discussion for another day) Let’s discuss it now: they are NOT ‘less smart.’