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Ask YC: Why the degree?

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Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#191

Post by xenoterracide »

xlnt wrote: post #112
xenoterracide wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds - best programmer I've heard of doesn't write a blog. You still haven't told us who Ayn Rand is.

You haven't addressed the point and you can google her.

to a degree I did. Maybe not to the degree you desired.

My point was is that even though it filters out many of the worst programmers it would also filter out all of the really great programmers. I'd rather have my search take longer and cost more to have those great programmers on my team than end up with just good programmers.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#192

Post by brianm »

The key here is to see it from the opposite end -- from the potential employer point of view. We (I am a programmer, but I do a lot of interviewing and general recruity stuff) get metric raftloads of resumes, interest emails, and so on. Most of them are pretty unexceptional to begin with, and most candidates also lie^w exaggerate.

In order to find the people you want to hire you have to trim down the ones you talk to by some means. Think of it is a heuristic based search -- it won't be perfect, but it can be very good. You take the traits which correlate highest with success (I will leave success nebulous on purpose, that is a whole other discussion) and start whittling down the search space. A college degree tends to correlate highly with being a good or great programmer, therefore it is frequently used. This is a simplification, of course (though I am sure there are shops which really do this), but there it is.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#194

Post by LogicHoleFlaw »

gnaritas wrote: post #153
pfedor wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many good candidates could be put off by such test. More importantly, even if they agree to your test and send you some code, you need an engineer's time to evaluate the code sample, and if you're going to invest engineer's time you might as well do a full phone screen. The recruiters are by and large non-technical people. They would love to be able to ask some technical questions which could help them predict whethe…

I disagree, any candidate worth having would enjoy such a test. Any programmer who is put off by being asked to program needs to find another profession, period. You should not ask someone to program during an interview, you should review the code they've submitted and make them explain it, all if it, their design choices, their idioms, naming conventions, etc. If they can't discuss code they just wrote prior to the…

One issue to be aware of is that it's not just the corporation interviewing multiple candidates. It's also the candidate interviewing multiple companies. Putting a large burden on each candidate may not scale if every company does it. I agree that it's important to assess actual coding ability but I don't know if a programming test is the best way to go about it.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#195

Post by Hexstream »

helveticaman wrote: post #160
eru wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is autodidact such an unusual word in English? (I would find a perfectly acceptable - but I am not a native speaker though. That's why I am asking.)

Yeah, in Spanish it's not unusual or fancy.

In French (autodidacte) it's pretty much the canonical word for that concept, too (French is similar to Spanish in lots of ways).

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#196

Post by falsestprophet »

rms wrote: post #141
Goladus wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those following along at home, the unpretentious word for "autodidact" is "self-taught"

Anti-intellectualism will be the death of us all.

Using that word may not be pretentious, but -- worse -- it is bad form. An intellectual might object to the word's use in this context simply because it is bad writing.

The goal of writing to communicate. Unnecessarily using obscure words clouds communication. In this case, I don't think the using "autodidact" was necessary. It did not add to brevity or cadence or coherence. It was a mistake.

The only thing worse than an anti-intellectual is a bad intellectual.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#197

Post by Hexstream »

neilc wrote: post #77
gnaritas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"normal people who want to learn such things choose to go to school" That's a load of crap. Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. Only very young people consider "going to school" a viable option. Normal people have jobs, kids, and responsibilities and don't have time to go to school every time they pick up a new interest.

Normal people who want to learn such things pick up a book and read about it. I would be very surprised to find very many "normal people" who have the drive to learn, say, probability theory or statistics to any reasonable depth by self-study. Of course such people exist, but they are neither typical nor common.

Thank you, now I feel special ;P

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#198

Post by Hexstream »

mrtron wrote: post #19

"I know several people that have degree's in computer science, and none have any magical abilities that you only pickup at university." I think you are shortchanging the value of a formal education. You are forced to learn things you don't necessarily enjoy. For example, I was forced to take a few stats courses which I found extremely boring, but recently at work it was incredibly valuable. I know I thought I was a g…

"You are forced to learn things you don't necessarily enjoy. For example, I was forced to take a few stats courses which I found extremely boring, but recently at work it was incredibly valuable."

I don't think that's the way to go. If learning something is boring, then it's either because you'll never need it or you don't realize you'll ever need it. You can't know if it's boring because of the former or the latter before you really need it.

For example, I found math pretty boring in school (beyond 6th grade, say) because I just didn't see what applications it would have in my life even if I knew I wanted to be a programmer and supposedly good math skills were a hard requirement (it only is if the problem-domain you're working on requires math).

But now I have some big ideas for my projects and I learned that some fields of mathematics and other disciplines would be a great investment to learn because it would ease or even simply make possible their implementation. So now those topics really look fun to me so it will give me the push I need to learn it all as fast as possible and in an enjoyable way.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#199

Post by LPTS »

falsestprophet wrote: post #196
rms wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anti-intellectualism will be the death of us all.

Using that word may not be pretentious, but -- worse -- it is bad form. An intellectual might object to the word's use in this context simply because it is bad writing. The goal of writing to communicate. Unnecessarily using obscure words clouds communication. In this case, I don't think the using "autodidact" was necessary. It did not add to brevity or cadence or coherence. It was a mistake. The only thing worse tha…

I feel like I'm in junior high getting bullied for being a nerd. I'm so sorry for using a big word. In the future I'll try and limit myself to a fifth grade reading level (maybe reaching rhetorical, which is a fancy word for a skillful kind of speech, heights of seventh or eighth grade level) so that the idiotic (for you mouth-breathers, idiotic is a big cloudy multisyllabalic way of saying dumb that fails to add brevity, or cadence or coherence) Techcrunch half of this forum can follow along without having to use a dictionary to find a word they don't know.

"Autodidact" is obscure? WTF? Where is this coming from? Did everyone come here right after watching the American Gladiator contest? Did we get an influx of Time Magazine readers?

For me, the goal of writing here is to practice at playing with ideas. If, in playing with ideas I use words that are (maybe, a little) obscure, and I fail to communicate to people who seem to me like idiots, well, I'm fine with that. Great, actually. If only the failure to communicate ran both ways.

I'm done being autodidactic. I'm going to put down my books and go watch some soap operas and sitcoms until I figure out how the idiots here think.

Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?

#200

Post by LPTS »

DougBTX wrote: post #181
rw wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not pretentious just because you don't know it. "Autodidactic" sums up a phrase using just one word. Basically it comes down to this: Having a larger vocabulary allows you to spend more time communicating and less time talking. Just like abstracting functionality away inside functions allows you to spend more time solving problems and less time (re)writing code.

You're certainly right about abstraction being useful. My fist thought was that the simple-English for autodidactic here would be "self-taught", being aware of unnecessary abstractions, though the subtler meaning is closer to "someone who will teach themselves". Simply saying "self-taught" wouldn't have had the right connotation: instead of "clever and driven", it would have been, "but what have they missed?" and we…

I thought there was a difference where self taught would be "I did teach myself this thing" and autodidactic would be "I have the personality trait of continually teaching myself new things." Only one of the dictionaries I checked made this fine grained (and relevant) distinction explicit though.
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