Step two: Package that with a bunch of people (both experienced and inexperienced) who can help with coursework and answer questions when they come up, teams of people to work with, somewhere to live with dozens of others doing the same work, hundreds more learning unrelated things (but who might be useful to you in the future), and you've got something close to a replacement for college.
Every time I think of all the extra hundreds of hours I spent learning things that didn't help my developer career and that seemed to be distractions, I tend to compare those to courses published online that have precise learning modules that are so helpful.
College just seems like it's so expensive compared to the value you get out of other sources of knowledge.
Some day most (certainly not all) aspects of university education will be supplanted by high-quality universally accessible materials. But it's not here yet.
I've just started playing with this thesis and published an article about it. I'd love to hear what you think about it: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...
Yet, perhaps there's something about that process. After all, there are aspects to a formal collegiate experience that are not neatly captured by boot camps, fora, YouTube, and documentation. Perhaps some of those aspects, like an instructional environment that values theory, are of nontrivial significance.
Obviously, it's still possible that something better can be done. This may not be the same as a better option having been developed and being on offer, though.
I have never held a dev job before, but I’ve gotten to doing some pretty serious and nuanced coding (all the way down to memory management and writing in C). They’re a really great team of people, their unofficial motto is “Google it”, and RTFM, and their program is called Holberton School.
I really hope it succeeds.
How much time have you spent on set theory or discrete mathematics?
So far, the first part (9 months) the focus is mostly on practical project-based learning and skills for developers. But we are encouraged to learn on our own. I certainly know about uncountable sets and the Axiom of Choice, but how much do I really need for the problems I am solving on my day to day?
Unfortunately, I must inform you that that is the answer I feared. There's a strong tendency for would-be "better options" and bootcamps to discard CS fundamentals and theory in favor of practical education. I am of the opinion that this sacrifices long-term practical utility for short-term utility. While seemingly of obvious benefit to those seeking jobs in the not-so-distant future, this is a penalty that mounts later in careers.
Odds are very good that your entire career will not use whatever tools this program has taught you. Odds are similarly good that your time as a junior engineer won't hinge much on abstract mathematics. But odds are very good computers will run on the same mathematics in twenty years.
Even today more interesting work (cryptography, geospatial, distributed systems, graphics) hinges on the sort of mathematical underpinnings that are generally found in a full collegiate computer science education. Of course, all of this can be learned independently, but most individuals struggle to learn crypotgraphic mathematics in such a way.
So really, it depends a great deal on what you want to do with your career. How much you know about how computers work will do a great deal to determine how much flexibility you have down the line. I have had jobs where reasonably complex synchronization problems involving work-stealing and partial orderings over a network were pretty common, and other jobs where `rails g ...` was the most complex thing I needed to know.
On the other hand though, I wouldn't presume to write my own cryptographic protocol without having the fundamentals myself. Wouldn't you say that it's actually reasonable to learn this on your own? There are so many options, paid, or free, that can help you with this. You could take a Coursera class, or follow an open source curriculum like someone said in the comments down below.
You did say "most individuals" struggle to learn in such a way, but the argument can be made that individuals studying cryptographic principles are not "most people", which, if not intelligence, shows a special kind of perseverence and dedication that will also differentiate them in self-study. I wouldn't say what you're saying is immediately obvious.
You're also right that the argument can be made that any individual who might seek self-study of advanced mathematics is not "most people" as I described previously. To that subject, let me offer a different formulation: most individuals attempting to study advanced mathematics independently struggle to learn effectively in such a way.
A non-zero number of people have set about doing what you describe with a special kind of perseverance and dedication... and wound up making rather severe mistakes. CryptoCat comes to mind. Perseverance and dedication failed to differentiate them. You may be different! It's very possible! But perseverance and dedication should not be confused for a rigorous and rigorously evaluated course of study. This becomes a significant difference when questions of scaling arise.
The world is full of options to help you learn, and I would not dissuade you from doing so. I just want you to be aware of the limitations likely to be imposed by a given educational approach.
The general need for a better approach might not be the same as a given different approach being better.
Sure, but the risk of getting led onto an inefficient, time wasting path that doesn't give you a good grounding in the foundational knowledge is also high.
The skill to evaluate approaches to learning the information and the set of information you need to learn is not something you are likely to have without having studied the information, and there are lots of people with pet theories or financial interest in your actions trying to promote different approaches.