81–90 of 163 posts
It mustn't be forgotten that a theoretical curriculum teaches discipline to learn just about anything--if you can learn complexity theory and algorithmic proofs, chances are you can learn to create a CRUD API.
Post number 7,819,394 talking about how useful or not useful a CS degree is to a programming job. Here are some lessons I learned by going to school that I find incredibly useful: 1. How to shut up and get some work done, even if I don't see the point to it. 2. How to shut up and get some work done, even if it isn't directly applicable or valuable to a job or something I want in the future. 3. How to take feedback an…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to say school wasn't useful to you but all of these things could also be learned on the job. (As that is where I learned them)
That's true, and I completely understand, but it's besides my point. My point is to implore people to stop looking at a CS degree as just a means to get a job. If you look at it that way, of course you're not going to find 100% value in it. Getting a job is simply not what a CS degree is for. It was never declared to be for this purpose—nobody claims it's for this purpose (except maybe some schools for marketing purp…
Young people need money to buy food and pay for rent and to have fun. Thats what they care about. I went to a top tech school, but I know so many people at the school who DIDN'T go into tech and are now working as consultants doing 80 hours a week for half of my pay. But they hate their career choices.
And those are the people with the GOOD jobs, because they majored in business or something. I know others who are doing even worse than that doing part time tutoring, ect.
All of those people would have been better off just going to a coding bootcamp or something. Its ok if programming wasn't their "passion". Because its not like those people are currently following their passion working as consultants and part time tutors.
At the end of the day, getting a 6 figure salary, and working normal hours puts you way ahead of the vast majority of americans. It gives you the freedom to do what you want, when you want.
And it turns out, young people, after they have been in the workforce, failing at their dreams for a couple years, start to realized that they care a lot more about the freedom that having an awesome, high paying job offers them, and not really about anything that college supposedly delivers them.
What I got out of my CS program was... discovering that figuring out how systems and things worked was interesting to me. I also found the prospect of something closer to engineering was a better path to me than academia, teaching, law or some other path.
In terms of the relevance of specific coursework, I can't say that I spend a lot of time with advanced math or some of the other topics, but I learned my way around a UNIX system, got my first taste of large scale networking, and a bunch of other things.
What I learned most about in school was me.
1. Pick the three most important lines out of this 100 lines of code.
2. Explain why they're important to those who're not familiar with the problem at all.
3. Rename its functions and variables to achieve maximum consistency to you.
4. Optimize the code for maximum efficiency.
5. Optimize the same code for maximum maintainability. (assuming the code will be used for 30 years)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are about going to school , though, not getting a CS degree. And 100% of these things could, and probably should, be learned in the real world and not through paying tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of education. I did not go to school for a CS degree, and that has not hampered me in any way when searching for a job in software. All I learned in college was how to game the system of the institution…
> that institutions like that are a societal racket and waste of time and money. This is completely wrong. Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity. I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to clarify, I and many other Americans use the term school to mean tertiary education (university, higher education).
I thought this was the case but wasn't 100% sure which this poster meant. So in the last sentence where they say 'college' do you think they're talking about secondary or tertiary? It might just be a confusing-to-parse post.
university = college = tertiary education = higher education = postsecondary education = school = uni
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what is the point then?
If you can't see the point, then maybe university isn't for you. I'm not going to write an essay on what point I saw in school because I don't have time or interest. The point is that I saw value in it. I liked learning about computer science. Why can't people stop shitting on this concept?
But you have to understand that other people mostly just care about being able to put food on the table, pay rent, and being able to save up enough to be able to support a family and buy a house.
"I hope to see the industry improve in this respect, but in the meantime I'm happy to exploit this imbalance as a competitive advantage." I wonder how much of requiring a computer science degree is simply because the people hiring have computer science degrees. Seems like a self perpetuating insiders club.
Conversely I don't have a CS degree and I take a rather cynical view of candidates who have do. Perhaps I've created a self perpetuating outsiders club at my company. :) In all seriousness, though, it's because the CS majors I've interviewed have (generally) been great at theory, crap at application. I once had a guy hold forth for 10 minutes about cardinality and then flop sweat when I asked him to explain the diffe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that institutions like that are a societal racket and waste of time and money. This is completely wrong. Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity. I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.
While it's clear many university institutes and projects have benefited the wider public, I think he was specifically referring to the value of university to an individual, for most people (excepting those who are studying sciences to enter a specific niche field where they wouldn't be able to pick up the necessary skills anywhere else) university is indeed a waste of time and money. I'm a 22 year old developer based…
If you can't see the value in university, good for you; nobody's forcing you to go.