Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BinaryIdiot | Hacker News Reader

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> A CS degree prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes.

I couldn't disagree more. I do not have a CS degree and have lead many teams of folks with a combination of having and not having them. It's a huge mixed bag and I'm not confident you can make a general statement in either direction.

Yes CS can prepare you by knowing some of the basics but I've run into countless people with CS degrees who don't understand how much of anything works. I've also run into many without CS degrees who understand how the damn storage implementation in Postgres works.

Anecdotally, to me with my small bag of data points from the teams I've lead and the people I've interviewed, a CS degree is only what you make of it. If you were a good student, studied and understood the content then you have an edge. If you were an okay student who just memorized things for tests and never actually applied the knowledge then you're in no better state than someone without a CS degree (perhaps even in a worse state as most of the people I know, including myself, were told by multiple leads that without a CS degree everything is going to be a struggle and to advance you career you must get one so of course I had to work even harder to prove them wrong).

I agree with you for the most part, but I think if his sentence read:

> A CS degree can prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes.

I think most people can agree that it doesn't provide any guarantee, but it definitely gives you a boost in the right direction.

(For the record, I don't have a CS degree)

Yeah a simple word and I would have taken the post entirely differently :)

I must have thought the word 'can' and didn't type it because it doesn't read right as it is. I do that sometimes.

Fair enough. I to do that quite frequently :)

I think in many ways, though, the self-taught guys are going to be very adaptive and resourceful to learn new things. The difference in knowledge can often be compared to a self-taught home cook and a formally-trained cook.

I once had an intern that was a CS master degree student and while he was tackling neural networks in school, I showed him how to link to a DLL 3-times in C++ and he still couldn't figure it out on his own. It also shows you having a CS degree doesn't mean anything.

I think CS though will tell you how it works.

> A CS degree can prevent you from making a lot of obvious (if you have a CS degree) and costly mistakes.

That is just wrong. A degree is just a piece of paper. How is a piece of paper going to prevent you from making mistakes? It won't.

What you mean to say was this:

> Any intelligent person with reasonable CS knowledge will be able to work without making a lot of obvious and costly mistakes

I hope I've taught you something. :)

Interesting comments but both are saying the same thing: it's all knowledge in the end.

Either you know or you dont. CS degrees just means you learned it in a more standardized/formalized setting and have some proof to show you did it, but ultimately it's the knowledge itself that makes the difference, not how you gained it.

Agreed. CS degrees do tend to insinuate some degree of focused study, but it's a unique field where you can put in the same focus outside of a collegiate setting and exit with the same result (for undergrad, at least).

I have a CS degree and have worked with brilliant engineers that were HS drop-outs. It has everything to do with a passion for learning. It still requires the time focused on the study of CS, but the setting is secondary.

Different universities will provide different sets of knowledge and depth of that knowledge. However, I think we can generally say that a CS degree will provide the "crystal ball" information that GP states. I believe that your last point is the crux of it all.

Anecdote: I have peers all over the CS knowledge spectrum while taking the exact same class from the same instructors. Some peers have taken that knowledge and written kernels. Others are struggling to write an array sorting method. The former have been served well by their undergrad studies. The latter would have likely fared better in a 12 week bootcamp where it's more training and less theory.

Along with the other remarks, I believe it would be fair to say "all things being equal". That is, a given person would benefit from a CS degree in the following ways.

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