[deleted]
Ask YC: Why the degree?
51–60 of 211 posts
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#52I used to think that a computer science degree was not useful. However, can you answer the following questions: 1. How would you program a compiler for a new DSL? 2. What is stdcall? How does it relate to the stack? 3. How many registers does a 486 have? What is a register? 4. How does ethernet work? 5. What is the most efficient way to break a project down into tasks and milestones when dealing with a large team? 6.…
"When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them." No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and speci…
The thing is this: There are some things that ones does not know that one does not know. And only in a formal teaching environment is one introduced to these topics. Most schools give a healthy dose of general knowledge together with the domain specific knowledge. And most self learners tend to stick to domain specific topics.
I don't know how self taught you are, but 100% of my income comes from things I learned myself and applied myself. I spent $0 to learn those things, and now I make, well, a fair bit more than $0.
In spite of all I learned by myself, when I went back to school, I discovered things I did not even know where useful to me.
I'm not saying that a person is flawed because he is not aware of some specific area. He just is not aware of it because it's not something he directly requires. What Web programmer needs to know about register transfers? Well, if he went to do a CS degree, this knowledge would be forced on him, making him a better programmer in general!
Civilisation only exists because of the institution of school. Don't bash it, it's a very good thing.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#53I used to think that a computer science degree was not useful. However, can you answer the following questions: 1. How would you program a compiler for a new DSL? 2. What is stdcall? How does it relate to the stack? 3. How many registers does a 486 have? What is a register? 4. How does ethernet work? 5. What is the most efficient way to break a project down into tasks and milestones when dealing with a large team? 6.…
"When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them." No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and speci…
I think you misunderstand me. I do not learn exactly enough to get things done. That would be impossible. If I am asked to program a web app in PHP, I would study PHP, Databases, Web server configurations, and have enough knowledge to develop a web app. I would not start by studying design patterns, software modelling techniques and abstract functional programming.
That's the difference between self learning and structured learning - most of the time people learn things specific to the topic they are interested in. If you are trying to claim otherwise, then your worldview is deeply flawed.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them." No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and speci…
I think you misunderstand me. I do not learn exactly enough to get things done. That would be impossible. If I am asked to program a web app in PHP, I would study PHP, Databases, Web server configurations, and have enough knowledge to develop a web app. I would not start by studying design patterns, software modelling techniques and abstract functional programming. That's the difference between self learning and stru…
As a self-taught hacker, this just isn't true of me. I'm constantly reading about things that I have no immediate use for. In fact, one of the reasons I dropped out of my CS undergrad program was that I felt like its focus was too narrow.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them." No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and speci…
I think you misunderstand me. I do not learn exactly enough to get things done. That would be impossible. If I am asked to program a web app in PHP, I would study PHP, Databases, Web server configurations, and have enough knowledge to develop a web app. I would not start by studying design patterns, software modelling techniques and abstract functional programming. That's the difference between self learning and stru…
(I don't mean to sound harsh on you, you sound smart and what I wrote has the wrong tone.)
"most of the time people learn things specific to the topic they are interested in."
Your structure is wrong. It's not most of the time all people. It's most of the people all the time. An autodidactic person (admittedly rare and an outlier) will have already studied design patterns or whatever, because they read obsessively and learn best that way.
I'm not trying to claim most people don't work that way. I'm saying there is a group of outliers that has both an ability to learn way better and faster than school can teach, and who dropout. These outliers are both highly desirable employees and cast off by the system. I think that normal people are projecting their own inability to self teach well at a college level onto the freaks who have this ability.
If you think there isn't a group of outliers who is better off self teaching, as able as any PHD's, and who drop out or don't attend school because it is stifling to their natural urge to learn, your worldview is excluding a lot of the most talented and creative people on the planet.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, I am inclined to believe that work experience is a better filter. If you are hiring freshers, than ask them to build something in a day or a week and use that instead. Now, that doesn't mean that a person without a degree doesn't have a chance... it just means that they will have to prove themselves in some other way (being famous coder/blogger/speaker helps there)... Actually the onus is on the employer. S…
The onus is not on the employer. The employer's job is to fill the hole with the best that they can easily ascertain. I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit. The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 a…
fill the hole with the best that they can easily ascertain.
I as an employer and employee of other organizations in the past - I can tell you that filling the hole with what is available lowers standards. While this does happen, it is not something to aspire too.
I can tell you from doing hiring in the past that people have gotten very good at filling their resume's with bullshit.
I agree. But how is this relevant to our discussion. I have not said that the resume is a criteria.
The last time I hired someone for a Senior Developer position, I had to filter through almost 500 resume submissions. Of those, I did a telephone technical interview with about 200 applicants. We did face to face interviews with the 6 applicants who passed an incredibly simple technical interview - Things that any programmer who has done any real work would almost be insulted by.
Apparently, your filters arent effective.
Any available filter to help sort the wheat from the chaff is helpful, and a degree is one of those filters.
A degree may be one of those ineffective filters that you are already using. Perhaps it is just a segmentation factor like gender or age. If all one seeks to do is reduce the number of resumes/candidates one has to meet, then one might as well use gender or age or anything else.
That being said, I do not have a degree in anything, I got into the industry at 17 and haven't had time to go to school. But, I've been able to get far by working harder than everyone else; in the conversation of degrees making a difference, I'd like to have one, sure. But I've never needed one. I think it's come up in one interview once, and it ended up being a nonpoint.
And see you turned out to be alright :)
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
"When you learn by yourself, you tend to learn enough to do what you need to get done. In school you learn things that are not immediately obvious that you need them." No, no, no. YOU tend to only do the minimum to do what needs to get done without outside pressure. Don't project your flaws onto us self teaching people who don't share them. Any autodidactic person will constantly be learning both generalist and speci…
The thing is this: There are some things that ones does not know that one does not know. And only in a formal teaching environment is one introduced to these topics. Most schools give a healthy dose of general knowledge together with the domain specific knowledge. And most self learners tend to stick to domain specific topics. I don't know how self taught you are, but 100% of my income comes from things I learned mys…
I went to college and was a semester away from graduating.
Here is my education history. I studied music and philosophy not computers. Anyway I was self taught enough that in my senior year contemporary philosophy of mind class (which I studied independently because it was my interest before the class was offered), the professor asked me to proofread and critique the final rather then take it. I never took notes but I could correct other peoples notes from memory. I also taught myself composition and music theory up to the 400 level before dropping out of school. In high school, I got perfect scores on AP tests for classes I skipped almost every day (I got 15 college english credits for a class I failed). I did knowledge bows and was the knowledge bowl coaches TA, where he gave me old questions and encyclopedias on various topics and we got 2nd at state. (we were a poor public school). I had more AP credits then the saludictorian and valedictorian but I sat in the back with the pregnant girls and delinquents at graduation. I don't think I learned things from class, and think all that was self taught. I always got in trouble for reading ahead or hiding a book.
School is, in general, good. But for certain bright people, putting them like that in classes with people of normal intelligence is exactly like putting normal kids in classes with severely mentally disabled kids, and limiting the normal kids potential to the mentally disabled kids potential. On balance school is good, but there is a class of people for whom school is devastatingly confining and intellectually restricting. Depending on early experiences, these people are going to hate school early, become self taught college dropouts or never go to college (who can blame them?) and teach themselves skills like this guy is saying. Because these people's dropout status is related to their high intelligence, excluding them with barriers based on degrees is a great way to protecting yourself from some of the most creative, intelligent, original thinkers our planet has to offer.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#58In my experience hiring software engineers, possession of an undergrad CS degree was not a helpful filter for resumes. I did find that candidates with advanced degrees or undergrad EECS degrees tended to be a little bit stronger than the average candidate. So did candidates with unrelated undergrad degrees, and a few years of job experience.
I never figured out how to look at a resume and meaningfully select for extremely good hackers who were within our ability to attract (although it was easy to identify them in interviews). The ones for whom that was obvious from their resume had better opportunities.
One thing that I find interesting about this conversation is how much more often it comes up in software than elsewhere. Why are there so many autodidact hackers out there? I think it might be that computers are such excellent, affordable learning environments. The quick feedback loop you can get actually working with a computer is unlike anything available for most fields.
On the other side, academic CS programs are relatively new, and possibly don't do such a great job yet. Or maybe it's just that they've been attracting large numbers of the wrong people in recent years.
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#59I haven't met self-taught programmers who learned much theory (CS, math, physics, etc). I bet there are some, but I guess they are rare.
Theory gets useful if you want to tackle harder problems. If you aren't aware of the theory, you often don't know what you are missing. As an ex-dropout, I was in that position for a long time.
Going out on a limb now, big company with little respect for theory -> Microsoft, big company with healthy respect for theory -> Google.
You can do fine without theory, but its getting harder (and will continue to).
Re: Ask YC: Why the degree?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is this: There are some things that ones does not know that one does not know. And only in a formal teaching environment is one introduced to these topics. Most schools give a healthy dose of general knowledge together with the domain specific knowledge. And most self learners tend to stick to domain specific topics. I don't know how self taught you are, but 100% of my income comes from things I learned mys…
I went to college and was a semester away from graduating. Here is my education history. I studied music and philosophy not computers. Anyway I was self taught enough that in my senior year contemporary philosophy of mind class (which I studied independently because it was my interest before the class was offered), the professor asked me to proofread and critique the final rather then take it. I never took notes but…
Because these people's dropout status is related to their high intelligence, excluding them with barriers based on degrees is a great way to protecting yourself from some of the most creative, intelligent, original thinkers our planet has to offer.
Thank you LPTS, that's pretty much exactly what I wanted to say. A lot of people have gone off on tangents discussing the merits of a degree, where I actually agree with them for the most part.
The point I was actually trying to make, you've conveyed very well. Don't judge our intelligence or ability on such a unrelated subject as having a degree or not.
Hopefully a few people will have read this thread who will be employing in the future, and the information contained may influence their decision when they're deciding to write the "Degree required" line on their job advert.