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Do I need to go to university?

colah.github.io

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Re: Do I need to go to university?

#61

Post by toyg »

VMisTheWay wrote: post #50

30 year old here, I'm considering a new degree in computer science to add to my chem Engineering degree. I have 12 years casual programming experience. My work experience has been design Engineering, which is a low 6 figure job. I also live in an area with an old industry that's getting Engineers outsourced. I'm considering a comp sci degree so I can get into embedded, or electrical engineering, AI, or pretty much an…

I don’t think you need a degree for that sort of career shift. Just get a short training course and start building stuff and applying for jobs.

University degrees are, fundamentally, a mark of status and patience: “this guy had enough money and willpower to sit through years of drudgery, so it’s safe to hire him to do the same for us”. After a few years nobody cares what the degree was actually about, particularly in IT where everything gets redone every few years.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#62

Post by scottishcow »

Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a stronger signaling value than your typical college degree.) As much as I hate it, the world runs on limited resources and people and organizations have no choice but to rely on some sort of signaling scheme as a filtering mechanism.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#64

Post by WalterBright »

petargyurov wrote: post #53

I have a degree in Theoretical Physics. During my second year I started to realise that I don't want to stay in academia, and at the same time I started to do a lot programming. I finished my Bachelors and got a job as a backend dev. The way I see it, altough I learned a lot in uni, it's basically a "VIP" token to get yourself a job. And that's sad. Lots of companies will hire physics and math grads _just because_. T…

Some universities teach formula plugging, and some teach fundamentals. I've worked with the graduates of both, and the former can't solve any problem that doesn't have a book answer, and they'll misapply that.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#65

Post by sanxiyn »

scottishcow wrote: post #62

Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a stronger signaling value than your typical college degree.) As much as I hate it, the world runs on limited resources and people and organizations have no choice but to rely on some sort of signaling scheme as a filtering mechanism.

I agree, but the signal can be pretty small. I contributed to Firefox and it was good enough to be hired by web browser company without a degree. After that, work experience was good enough for pretty much anything.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#67

Post by xondono »

WalterBright wrote: post #54
laingc wrote: post #37

The anti-university sentiment on HN is absolutely alien to me. Not only did I get a lot out of my university education, but it was a totally transformative experience for me. It also enables me to do my job, and I’ve never seen anyone without a good education do it well. Yes, I get that you can be a react developer without a university qualification. This may come as news to some, but most fields bear no resemblance…

My experience is the same. I often hear people say that a university education teaches nothing useful, that it's just learning to take tests, that the course material is irrelevant, that it's just for networking and signalling, etc. I suspect they both a) selected the wrong major and b) went to the wrong university.

And I suspect that both of you got technical degrees and work in technical fields.

You are almost by definition an edge case.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#68

Post by toyg »

barry-cotter wrote: post #31
asutekku wrote: post #7

If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go. Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.

> If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go. The entire point of the article was that if you have something better to do than university and good reason to believe you can actually do it you might at least consider it. Also, three to four years of foregone earnings are a powerful reason not to go to university if you’re already capable of earning a…

People don’t care that much about what university you’ve gone to, but they definitely care about the fact that you’ve graduated.

Source: am 42 with no degree, and I’m surprised when my CV makes it through HR filters, because it’s so rare.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#69

Post by glangdale »

barry-cotter wrote: post #31
asutekku wrote: post #7

If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go. Yes, there are some exceptions but in most places and for most people a degree is what matters, not how many commits you do have in your side projects in github.

> If you have the option to go and you want to advance on your career, then there’s almost zero reasons to not go. The entire point of the article was that if you have something better to do than university and good reason to believe you can actually do it you might at least consider it. Also, three to four years of foregone earnings are a powerful reason not to go to university if you’re already capable of earning a…

Even at age 48, I see people getting on the inside track because they have degrees from name brand universities, including myself (I have a PhD from CMU). A degree from a good place signals (rightly or wrongly) that you were academically strong enough to get in and to finish.

As for career development - 3-4 years of career development "forgone" isn't really that much relative to the sum total of an entire career. One could just as easily say that when you're 40, no-one but bureaucrats is going to give a crap whether you have 19-20 years of experience or 23.

There are always exceptions - the whole "dropped out of university to found X or invent Y" thing - but 95% of people's actual accomplishments (as you so excitedly put it) are going to be a bunch of 'turned up, did pretty good' lines on a resume. All other things being equal, I'll hire the person who passed university-level calculus at a good school, thanks.

Re: Do I need to go to university?

#70

Post by clarry »

tjpnz wrote: post #55

Can't speak for other professions but as a dev I've got no regrets in getting a CS degree. There's nothing you'll learn there that you couldn't maybe teach yourself but that's exactly the point. Unless you're a gifted autodidact you'll face considerable difficulty and will likely end up skipping through the important stuff coming away with a very flawed understanding indeed.

What's the important stuff? Where do I check my understanding?
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