61–70 of 156 posts
note that he moved to the USA where the stigma of going to the wrong sort of school is less of a problem.
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I wonder if a company that stressed a role like this up the career ladder as an alternative to a high-level architect role would see much success.
I don't know, but I can think of several things to make it more workable: ---you could probably pay less. Programmers' opportunities for meaningful, understood-by-the-recipient service are few and far between. I don't think it gets any more meaningful than this. One of my favorite gigs ever was tutoring Python for Tutorspree, and watching my students progress. ---It has a higher meaningful skill ceiling. The problem…
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> Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to. That's missing the major point of the piece, IMHO. The OP isn't describing "self education", and (coming from a US perspective) is not even a typical drop out. What's being described here is a vocational pattern of learning, where on-the-job experience is backed up with classroom instruction. That's not exactly what "drop out"…
Yup. In the UK we are trying to reconstruct the 'dual system' and we have things that are called apprenticeships but not quite as well organised as the ones they have in Germany. The OP is not a drop-out. He has followed an established path!
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I live in the UK, in the north, the company was tiny: www.cicsolutions.co.uk, only a small 3 person company, don't get me wrong, they were a great bunch of people, but the teaching style was all wrong - I was punished severely for infrequent mistakes (accidentally deleting a CSS file instead of renaming it, there was no backup system etc in place) - and the money was fairly horrific.
err a 3 person company is in not in an position to support apprentices - this is the problem with the half assed Modern Apprentice system its abused to hell by tax dodging coffee shop chains and supermarkets to get cheap 1/3 the minimum wage trainees for non skilled work.
For a start, the college taught the most irrelevant of things - how to use Microsoft word, how to set up a router, what an email was - I mean, in what world should you seriously consider jumping in to the deep end of web development in a paid job if you don't even know what a fucking email is?
Then there was the poor time management, I was given only one afternoon a week for my coursework which I was to complete in work and not at home - I was royally screwed the first time I got behind and playing catch up after that, I could not be given more time, couldn't do any at home and no one really seemed to care.
I was on of only 2 technical people, and the other one was my boss, who almost never had time for my training from day one, in 9 months there, I had 3 lessons from him, one of them a one on one on how Joomla components worked, another a 15 minute tutorial on the class structure used in CodeIgniter and the third (and this was the only truly useful one) was a 2 hour lesson on Database design, not just "Well, that should use an ID and be an int(6)" but actual useful theory, not just how two tables interact, but why they interact, and what joins do. In 9 months, I only had one lesson where I walked away knowing more than when it started.
In a way I feel sorry for the person they replace me with, but in another way, having to do all the work on my own, to deadline and design was probably the best training I could have had.
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There's also a bias if you look at dropouts as a homogeneous group, because they aren't. It's just as ludicrous to predict the same outcome for someone like me, who was always way ahead and bored to death of school, and a poor kid from the city or country who couldn't read at grade level. I doubt Tobi ever had reading comprehension problems and I bet he was passionate about his hobby leading up to his track switch. A…
I completely agree with you. You expressed exactly what I was thinking. I am 15, and I am planning to drop out of school. It is extremely frustrating trying to persuade my parents that dropping out of school doesn't mean I am giving up on life, and that I am not a failure. I cannot function in this artificial society that exists in schools, and I learn much better by myself. Finishing school would be complete waste o…
Until you _can_ comprehend them, you should not assume they are idiots.
I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist. You don't…
Is it intrinsic to this treasure trove that the knowledge it contains must be transmitted for pay, with exercises to be completed on a deadline, and with little choice on the learner's part as to what is learned?
And to say that the learner does not get to decide what they will research for their dissertation is just flat-out wrong. It is assumed that the student will pick what to write their dissertation on - they need to study it in-depth for 2-4 years and picking something that they do not find interesting will most likely lead to dissatisfaction (but it is still a choice).
Granted, a PhD program requires a prerequisite BS degree or equivalent which is generally not paid for and follows a typical regime. However, not all knowledge is the same - highly specialized "brink of human understanding" type learning is paid, unstructured and definitely has no exercises to complete (since the one learning them has the most understanding of the topic).
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No, it mustn't be transmitted for pay. In Argentina, for example, public college is good and free. More importantly to your question, teaching a hard curriculum to a lot of students at the same time is a hard problem, and exercises with deadlines and relatively tight syllabus are a method that has been shown, for many years, to work for a large number of people. It certainly doesn't work for everyone, it certainly is…
In America, most people get a degree and leave school with unbelievable debt that can't be bankrupted, should hardship ever occur. I would have taken apprenticeship over college any day.
I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist. You don't…
When you see someone who has three degrees in various flavors of computer science (BS, MS, PhD) who doesn't know about what happens when you use "==" with two floats, it builds.
When your boss tells you that he won't pay you any more because you don't have a degree, it builds. When you find out he's paying the three network engineers 3x what you get and they don't even really understand TCP/IP (so they wind up coming to you for everything), it builds.
When you see someone who is hired as a sysadmin because they are clearly such a great computer scientist and can do anything, and then who can't manage the simplest of Unix maintenance requests, it builds.
Any time someone tries to use their degree as a club instead of a wall covering, it builds.
That's just me. I can't say why other people feel that way.
For the record, I only got my degree two years ago this month. I mostly did it because I really needed to "walk the stage" at last. Everything else was secondary. Now that I have it, does it make me any better than others? No way. If anything, it puts me behind the 8-ball having to pay off these stupid loans for the rest of my life.
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err a 3 person company is in not in an position to support apprentices - this is the problem with the half assed Modern Apprentice system its abused to hell by tax dodging coffee shop chains and supermarkets to get cheap 1/3 the minimum wage trainees for non skilled work.
I couldn't agree more, like I said, I was in a position where I was already capable on the day I walked in the door (I sat down on day one and head my first website live by day 6) - I dread to think how it would have turned out if I hadn't have been. For a start, the college taught the most irrelevant of things - how to use Microsoft word, how to set up a router, what an email was - I mean, in what world should you s…
Did they use source control?
I simply do not understand this anti-college anti-credentialling sentiment. I am featured in the latest Hacker Monthly ( print version of HN). So they asked me for a bio. I wrote something about how I learnt everything in college...am not a hacker...and that you should go to grad school if you want to get better at CS. So they edited out all of the pro-college stuff and just said this guy is data scientist. You don't…