OSSU: A path to a free self-taught education in computer science

This isn't because of some idea that it's bad to learn programming for fun, but more that I think it's kind of reductive to try and squeeze things down to a streamlined lesson to begin with...There's a reason college takes four or more years; it takes a long time for these fundamentals to really sink in, and moreover, a lot of the "extra" classes you're required to take actually do inform your perspective on a lot of career stuff. For example, I hated taking philosophy classes and thought they were "pointless", but I recently realized how much they have helped me with logical thinking, and being able to justify decisions I'm forced to make.

If you're learning to code just for fun, these things are totally fine and can be incredibly fun, but if you're learning to code for a job, please don't treat these things as an "alternative" to college. Any kind of self-learning system almost universally requires a huge amount of self-study, probably more than a university, if you want to become any good at this stuff.

Four years at university gets you breadth that is probably good for you as a human, and probably important for contextualizing your work as an engineer (oh hey, history might be a valuable lesson for your understanding of ethics. Art and literature might combine with your computer science degree to inspire projects natural language processing or generative art.)

I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven. And honestly, I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.

> I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.

I apologize that I didn't make it clear, but I'll clarify now: if you want to make your current job better, then these "teach yourself to code" things are probably great. You'll probably learn a lot to make your job less boring.

> I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven.

Yeah, as I said I'm a dropout, I do ok after ~1.5 years of regular school, then straight to the working world, so clearly it's possible to do these things, but I think this path is just sub-optimal. I feel like I had to practice stuff a lot more than I would have if I had just stayed in school.

But I will concede that it's possible, and school isn't for everyone; I just don't want to encourage the trend of people dropping out, and then thinking they'll make a ton of money in Silicon Valley. Yes, it does happen, but it's hard, and you'll have a much easier time if you just finish school.