All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
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All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
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Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#2I didn't learn any of those things in college. Maybe you just picked up the wrong things or are you just ignorant of what you really learned?
I learned a good basis in information theory, maths and software engineering.
Besides that I learned to analyze, research, work together on and write about software development processes.
I also met many people who were interested in the same things as I am, and many people who are interested in different things but still in the same field or in a field that touches my field.
And althought I learned how to work for someone else I also definitely learned how to start for myself and build something cool :)
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#3Computer Science us a scientific career (the name is a dead tip-off), and as such you shouldn't expect to learn how to start a company if that's your field of study. There is some common ground between what's needed to be a computer scientist and what's needed to be a technical entrepreneur, but if being and entrepreneur is what you know you want to do, CS is probably not the best way to get there, specially in places where education is as expensive as it is in the US. But that's a long shot from saying it only "prepares you to work for someone else".
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#4As a soon-to-be college graduate, I'd be very interested in hearing your answers to those 10 questions at the bottom.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#5This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off the bat:
"1. Plagiarism is bad.
Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you find a real swell formula online? Did you know you can't copyright formulas?""
This isn't plagiarism. Plagiarism is when you copy others' work and claim that the work is yours. You are welcome to copy the entirety of a Wikipedia article verbatim and submit it, as long as you appropriately cite it. Of course, you may not get a good score, since your contribution to the work was zero, but you haven't done any unethical.
This is true both in academia and industry.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#6Apparently I went to the wrong college. Note, I still _am_ in college, but nonetheless part of our learning was independent readiness. In my first non-basic programming class, my professor taught us alongside our Operating System class how he built computer kits and sold them. We were taught legalese in the field, and the power of performance.
My school is very small, and our department is even smaller. We have very few students pass through our department each year (around 3), but we're pushed to be our own innovator in the world. While a lot of our schooling does involve how to work within a company, we learn just as much about being independent.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#7This article was light on details, but I thought it was important to address at least the first point, which has a fundamental misunderstanding right off the bat: "1. Plagiarism is bad. Wrong! If the licensing is right, copy to your heart's content. If you're not in violation of copyright, trademark, or patent, you can do whatever you want with someone else's creation. Sometimes they even give you permission. Did you…
Most open source licensing requires 0 citation. If I copy your formula or recipe, I don't need to cite a thing - you don't own the copyright to your own formula. I could sell your work if I wanted to do so.
Plagiarism, as it affected my grading, was copying without attribution. Attribution is rarely required for most licensing, except where it is. These sorts of distinctions are lost in the collegiate machine.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#8This is ridiculous. Going to college certainly shouldn't be taken lightly and if you don't have an interest in broadening your mind and just want to make money, then you'd be better off educating yourself or going to a trade school. But for people that genuinely have a love of learning and want to discipline their mind in ways they haven't thought (not to mention meet interesting and intelligent people inside and outside of their career), college can be a worthy investment.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#9What a joke. This is a circlejerk for the anti-college crowd.
I'm sorry your college experience was such that one of the biggest things you learned was that 'plagiarism is bad.'
College is a place for exploration. Join a fraternity, join a club, learn a new language, take a class you won't use after graduation. Get drunk and blow off classes because there's nothing better than going to the campus diner at 3am and having conversations with people you'll never meet again. Meet a professor and get coffee with him, and talk with him about everything except the course material. Go to a game. Meet new people. Learn new things.
The list of ten things at the end is laughable. Half of them are standard syllabus material for a BBA (1, 2, 4, 8, 9). And do you really want to learn how to answer "How to move Mount Fuji" in a college course? Do you understand that the whole point of that question is to test someone's critical thinking and approach to problem solving, not because there is a textbook answer?
Maybe all you learned in college was about learning to work for someone else -- that's probably because that's all you did. And that's your fault.
Re: All I learned in college was how to work for someone else
#101. Plagiarism is bad
I'm assuming this meant in the sense of "why can't I just copy a binary tree implementation from the internet and turn it in", since every advanced course I took in college encouraged the use of libraries where appropriate (to the point of linking to open source libraries on the course website). The answer to the former question should be painfully obvious... you're learning to be a creator of things, not a user of things. That would be like taking an operating systems course and saying, "See, I downloaded Windows! Where is my A?"
2. Performance Matters
Tell this to Digg (one small example in a sea of them). Kevin Rose has said several times that he regretted hiring so many "get things done" PHP programmers that had no in-depth algorithm knowledge because as soon as the site had to scale none of them had knowledge outside of their PHP sandbox.
As far as the difference between copyright, trademark, and patents, ABET requires a Capstone/'Ethics' course that includes these very topics. I actually did a research report on software patents during my undergrad which included a presentation on how software patents have affected the software industry. As far as planning a product and tracking its development, ABET also requires an 'Intro to Software Engineering' course which is, you guessed it, planning and building a product from first principles.