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The Apprentice Programmer

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Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#71

Post by LVB »

aviraldg wrote: post #55
dxbydt wrote: post #38

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…

It didn't sound like "anti-college anti-credentialling" at all. All the OP was trying to say was that the traditional method of teaching ie. "all theory" didn't work for him, while a mixed hands-on/practical/theoretical approach did. Your comment, while true, is fairly irrelevant in context of this article.

So what did the OP really mean by this:

Not that degrees matter anymore. They do not. Experience does.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#72

Post by kostya-kow »

rcfox wrote: post #56
kostya-kow wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the knowledge you will ever need you can attain for free on Internet with MOOCs. And some of the more advanced concepts that you mentioned are not beneficial to know for majority of things you will do in day-to-day work, although I bet you can still learn a lot of it for free with online e-books. If you want to do research on some really advanced topics then a degree is a must, but an average (high-)school ed…

That knowledge didn't just appear once there was an internet; it had to come from somewhere. You're able to make geo-local picture sharing apps inside of instant messengers because someone with an advanced degree figured out how to make transistors. Then some other person with an advanced degree figured out how to make combinations of those transistors perform coherent operations to achieve complex goals. Then some o…

You are strawmanning. I wasn't claiming that all the knowledge that comes from people with advanced degrees is useless.

Most people don't need an advanced degree to contribute to society. Proportionally, only a small number people are needed to make transistors and develop mathematical concepts for computers compared to the amount of people using their work.

While it is necessary to have people with PhDs conducting research to have progress, hackers and doers (which base their work on the research) are also needed to exploit the results of research.

It is also possible to not have a degree and still succeed in life, and do things that you love.

Moreover, I think that nowadays it is becoming easier to get knowledge (that traditionally was only accessible in Universities) for free on Internet. I think traditional education system is extremely limiting and archaic. It permits people which excel in only certain kind of environments to conduct research.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#73

Post by meaty »

walshemj wrote: post #63
keithpeter wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Ah you mean the Torry plan to bring back the 11 plus and ship off poor kids to dumbed down Modern Apprenticeships so they can stack shelves at safeway.

You hit the nail on the head.

Except they also have the "back to work scheme" which means they don't even have to pay them to stack shelves in safeway (or Morrisons as it now is).

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#74

Post by genwin »

rachelbythebay wrote: post #68
dxbydt wrote: post #38

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…

Speaking only for myself, it comes from a combination of selection bias and general mistreatment at the hands of others. 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'…

> When your boss tells you that he won't pay you any more because you don't have a degree, it builds.

It's just a convenient excuse. If it wasn't a degree it'd be something else. The boss was negotiating, so negotiation skills are what's needed in this situation, rather than a degree.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#77

Post by genwin »

If you don't have a degree then simply leave an education section off your resume and don't bring the topic up. Ignore degree requirements for jobs; apply regardless. Doing this, your lack of degree will probably have little remaining impact on your career. This strategy works because a CS degree has small actual value to an employer, and most employers know it.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#78

Post by shanelja »

UK-AL wrote: post #69
shanelja wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like an awful apprenticeship, since you are unaware of what you don't know. Did they use source control?

No source control, anything I worked on came directly from my own machine, there were only two copies - the one on the server and the local copy, until my first major incidence, my own source control (in the form of automated backups) was none-existence as I had never encountered a situation where my beginners brain had deemed it necessary.

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#79

Post by bromang »

dxbydt wrote: post #38

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…

Most people reading this site are not doing machine learning or advanced technical work. The day to day work of the vast majority of programmers does not require completion of advanced formal education (or the self taught equivalent).

Even then it is not actually that hard to learn about principal components or matrix regularization if you have some mathematical background and the desire to teach yourself...

Re: The Apprentice Programmer

#80

Post by gfodor »

dxbydt wrote: post #38

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…

The point isn't that you shouldn't learn latent dirichlet allocation, but that the best way to learn it is to come upon a problem that warrants it and then have a mentor point this fact out to you, motivating you to learn it so you can expand your capabilities.

There are plenty of engineers who love to pour over academic research of the bleeding edge who have no problems to solve with it, yet when you ask them to hack together a prototype of an idea they don't know where to start. I think there is a clear personality type that prefers to continue reading before doing, since there is an ever-present fear that just around the corner there is some kernel of knowledge that will remove the need for a massive body of work. In reality, this is almost never the case, and elbow grease and experimentation turns out to be the solution to many problems, not digging through libraries, frameworks, algorithms, and academic research.

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