The Apprentice Programmer

More people start _anything_ than finish it. Since starting is a prerequisite for finishing, it is always the case that a maximum of 100% will finish, and likely fewer.

If your point is that more people start school than finish and somehow that weeds people out, you could also say the same thing about apprenticeships.

>I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment

Speaking as an anti-college, anti-credentialist person, well, a lot of it, for me? is that I didn't go to college.

I mean, everyone likes to pretend to be altruistic, but in the end? we all see the world from our own perspective.

And really? most people seem to think that you go to school, you get a cs degree and you will be pretty good. And that's simply not true. I've hired people with CS degrees only to have to fire them, because it turns out, they didn't actually learn anything.

I mean, I've also worked with people who really did learn incredible things in school. Things, as you said, that I certainly have been unable to teach myself.

I also think a lot of this anti-college stuff is people who went in to debt for life, having been told they'd get useful job training and, you know "find yourself" (you know, the class thing. No matter how much money I earn? I'll never be middle class; in the eyes of most people, i'll never be a 'professional' a 'real person' unless I go get a degree. I'm the guy who fixes the pipes. Which, eh, I am mostly okay with at this point.) - but anyhow, yeah, these kids graduate and find that the market value of their degree is, well, pretty close to zero. (and yes, a lot of these kids got degrees in philosophy or fine arts... And yes, we laugh at them for expecting to turn those degrees into money. But they were 17, goddammit, when they made that decision. What kind of asshole expects a 17 year old to make good decisions, especially when they receive bad advice from every trusted figure they talk with? Then we go and say "unlike every other bad loan you will take in your life, the person giving you the loan takes no responsibility. You have to pay this one off. No bankruptcy.")

This idea that "you can do anything you set your mind to" also permeates education, and it's incredibly destructive; it's how we end up with those people with CS degrees who can't outcode me.

College is expensive, and if you need to take out a loan to go there (most do) it is risky. Not only that, but credentialism (the idea that college exists in order to get credentials) coupled with the enormous expense has led to declining standards and quality at American schools. It is not unreasonable to ask why one should be paying so much and taking on such a large risk for an education that is of questionable quality, particularly in fields where vocational skills can be learned elsewhere.

I'd argue that it has not been shown to be effective. We're reaping the fruits of that today: grade inflation, disinterested professors, and new graduates without the jobs that served as the carrots to get them into school in the first place.

>It's certainly possible to obtain this knowledge on your own with serious self-study. But it's a hard route (albeit one getting easier thanks to Coursera et al.)

Now, what little math and theory I have learned, well, really, what anything I've learned... I've found that it's dramatically easier to learn from books than from a lecture. First, people talking? really, really slow. I ain't no speed-reader, but I can manage 400 words a minute, give or take, without skimming; of course, I can go much faster when I'm just skimming over the stuff I already know.

My usual strategy is to buy several books at the same level on the same subject; Preferably by very different authors. (I want at least one of the books to be a classic by the person who came up with the idea.) the idea being that each one is going to explain it in a slightly different way, and while I'm only going to retain a small portion of each book, well, books read fast, they don't cost much, and if I take away 10% of each book? I'm doing pretty okay.

(I mean, that said, my math and my theory is still pretty weak, compared to many of my educated peers who work at the same payscale, So I'm not saying my strategy is good or anything... it's just that I've never gotten much at all out of lectures. Payscale is also interesting... it seems to scale more with negotiation aggression than anything else.)

>Is theory actually useful? I would claim that it is, even for programmers doing CRUD apps and the like. Knowing the fundamental abstractions of computer science and the ways people have applied them in the past saves an enormous amount of needless reinvention. As a concrete example, parsing is a very well-studied problem in academia. But somebody without that background trying to write a parser will struggle far more than another familiar with CFGs or PEGs.

Why the fuck would you write your own parser for a CRUD app?

Seriously, that's whats wrong with the world.

I'm a SysAdmin. The way I see the industry? you hire a bunch of php monkeys to slap something together. customers don't like it. You pivot, come up with some other business idea, hire php monkeys to slap something together (usually using the same monkeys and the same code) you repeat until the market likes the output.

By this time? It's a giant hairball. It's disgusting. But you are getting users, and it's making money, so you've gotta scale.

Now, you could pay a bunch of 'real programmers' to write you something good, but that can take months or years even with competent management.

So what do you do? you hire someone like me. I show up and put a caching http proxy here, I put some indexes on the database server (and put it on a beefy server, and maybe even setup a read-only replica for the database) etc, etc.... i slap on duct tape until you get around to having a competent person re-write the whole mess. That's the "computer janitor" role.

So yeah. that's why I hate CRUD programmers trying to re-invent the fucking wheel. There are plenty of parsers out there. Use them.

This, this is why sysadmins hate NoSQL. seriously, in a few days I can make a crashy access db 1000x faster and more stable fairly easily by ODBCing the data out to a reasonable database. relational databases are incredibly easy to tune and improve, and I don't need to understand your giant PHP hairball that is full of global variables. USE A RDBMS. then you can do your job, and then if the thing takes off and you need to scale, I can come in and do mine.