111–120 of 134 posts
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Are you suggesting that the average postgrad salary is is $150K? If so, which planet?
He's saying a reasonable software developer salary is $150K which is likely true if someone is a software developer who is considering a masters program just for fun.
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I used to have a bot that asked people every day if they needed help, then ask who they needed help from and what they were blocked with. That adds just enough push to force people into asking for help. If you’re using a standup as anything other than a pulse on making sure progress is possible. You failed.
As a manager, one has to manage many different personality types. Not all people are proactive in communicating that they need help or are lagging. The manager could go to each of his directs and ask these questions individually, but it is more efficient to do it as a group. The group setting also gives coworkers the opportunity to say, “oh, I know what’s going on. I can help with that.” Stand ups do not have to happ…
I loved 50% of my Master's degree program. Those were the best CS courses I ever took (writing assemblers, compilers, CPUs in FPGA, OS kernels from scratch). I could have presumably avoided the degree and done it all by myself, without the knowledge of a professor, without the support of the TA and without feedback from others, but it would have taken at least twice as long and I am not entirely sure I would have bee…
The primary advantages, as you note, of taking a formal course are that it is well-structured and you get feedback and support.
Secondary advantages include a potentially positive and motivating learning environment, meeting and interacting with instructors and other students, increasing your portfolio of completed projects, and a potentially useful or beneficial degree or certification.
Overall though I'd say the main advantages come from completing the course projects.
If you have the time and motivation, you can teach yourself from the same material, but that usually requires more time and motivation.
It's a shame that formal and self-directed education are often seen as being in opposition to each other. As a field I think we should support and encourage both.
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You should aim for a research environment where you don't have to justify your existence to some "product manager" every 24 hours. Take it from me as an old person: if you work in stupid environments in stupid ways on stupid stuff... what happens is exactly what you'd think would happen.
Why do you think standups are stupid? They are merely a way to understand what the rest of the team is working on and to make sure you have the resources you need to do your job without having to interrupt you later or are you having to interrupt somebody else later it takes 15 minutes and it often saves hours of wheel spinning.
It serves no purpose because if you are blocked today waiting till a morning meeting is a bad approach because the meeting than expands to discussing an issue that belongs at another meeting. Plus the time wasted adds up.
Asking for help today is something seniors do.
Standup meetings treat developers like children and encourage bad habits.
Success in ICPC or grinding leetcode is probably a better predictor of success in technical interviews that are based on algorithm puzzles or competition problems.
But it won't teach you how to write your own compiler or OS kernel.
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you can get a stipend along with tuition forgiveness, so all you're really losing is $150k+/year in opportunity cost by goofing off in academia rather than working
Are you suggesting that the average postgrad salary is is $150K? If so, which planet?
Someone without a formal CS education who's selling programming courses telling you that formal CS courses don't necessarily teach you programming (duh). He has a point that if you do a Master's you might be going without the extremely useful basic algorithms and data structures courses, but that is easily avoided by choosing a program that lets you take that. For other topics that aren't strictly programming, eg AI,…
1) free
2) taken from outstanding courses at Berkeley, Stonybrook (the illustrious Steven Skiena), MIT and Stanford.
As I see it, this is evidence that those schools have some good courses. Graduate systems courses are pretty great as well, and of course you can hit other areas such as computer graphics, AI/ML, etc..
For formal education, I'm a bit biased toward multi-year programs (because it takes a while to learn this stuff) and schools (like those above) with good CS courses. But there's nothing to say that the authors' unaccredited graduate program is bad - based on the above I'd expect it's probably decent, although I worry about the 15 hours x 52 weeks though because I don't think that's enough time. In my experience a good systems or engineering course takes about 200 hours.
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you can get a stipend along with tuition forgiveness, so all you're really losing is $150k+/year in opportunity cost by goofing off in academia rather than working
Are you suggesting that the average postgrad salary is is $150K? If so, which planet?
Those who are in a position to easily walk into a situation where they can get one, are well off enough to not need one.
So, if you have the possibility of getting one, it won’t matter if you get it or not (Gates, Zuckerberg, etc etc). If you can’t get one, then it probably would have changed your life… of course “you’re not qualified to try” so don’t worry about it.
Just don’t be born poor. That is the best solution.
Of course programmers don't need degrees, the same way that good builders, carpenters, electricians etc. Don't need degrees. In fact, I've always believed there should be trade schools for programming, that programmers should unionize etc. etc.
Engineering is typically a different set of skills altogether. It's about understanding how to analyse reality, combine them with ideas in your mind, and guide those ideas back into the real world.
Civil and Electrical Engineers working in construction never lay a brick or run a wire (in fact, often there is legislation preventing them from doing so). But a construction project could never proceed without the careful analysis that engineers bring to the table.