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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak for Finance but if your CS degree isn't equivalent to ~4 years of work experience you went to a bad school.

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Some numbers:

College:

    30 weeks
    40 hours per week
    4 years
    = 4800 hours

Work:

    49 weeks
    50 hours per week
    2 years
    = 4900 hours

And that's being generous at only a 50 hour work week, as well as being generous in giving a full 40 hours worth of college work. I think your comment perfectly demonstrates my point.

CS majors are also doing 2-4 internships which are by and large more formational experiences than a bootcamp. I don't know where you work that a developer working "only" 50h weeks is "generous" but I hope I never find myself applying there.

> CS majors are also doing 2-4 internships which are by and large more formational experiences than a bootcamp

This seems like a left turn from my comment. Nowhere did I say bootcamps are a replacement for formal education. I was comparing the value of time in the workforce vs. time spent in school. I was discussing finance majors who, shockingly, also do internships. I don't know anyone that took a bootcamp as a replacement to a college education, so I'm not sure where you pulled any of this from.

> I don't know where you work that a developer working "only" 50h weeks is "generous" but I hope I never find myself applying there.

Maybe my part of the world is unique, but I've never worked less than 50 hours per week in my 10 years and I honestly can't say I know anyone that does excluding people with "non-professional" jobs.

I've worked exactly one job that routinely took more than 40 hours/week and I make sure to not fall into that trap again. 50 hours a week standard is the same as a 20% per hour pay cut

Only if you're not paid by the hour.

True, but is that a significant amount of people who would be going to boot camps for engineering? The type of people who have the personality to get and succeed at consulting jobs seem to overlap heavily with the type of people who can learn on their own

You're saying people who actively sought out continuing education and were willing to do a career transition are people who aren't willing to learn on their own? That's just silly.

I think they are saying the opposite.

Some of the stats in the thread seem to indicate that a not insignificant minority do self employ or consult.

I was saying the opposite.

Sorry, I completely misinterpreted that as "taking coursework" is the opposite of "independent learning"

Nah I meant more that bootcamps aren't the "proper path" for lack of a better phrase, that everyone goes to by default. It takes a certain amount of motivation to go out of the norm, or at least a certain amount of comfort with that risk, and that same mindset applies to entreprenership.

I say this as someone who just went to college because that's what you do and only got into software because my degree led to a $10/hr job which could not pay rent and student loans. If I had gotten 25 or 30 an hour there's a good chance I never would have had the impetus to teach myself anything

> I was discussing finance majors

I wasn't, I explicitly said I can't speak for finance majors. My point I would not consider 2 years of work and a 4 year CS degree from a well-regarded school to be equivalent for technical hires.

My internship experience was what made CS click, rather than the curriculum itself. Agree that they're a critical ingredient. :)

Which plays directly into my comment about work vs school.

As a college student, I consistently put in 60-80+ hours a week into my studies. I know this is just one data point, but I think your estimate of what it takes to be a student is way off. However, I do take a lot of classes, and do research, so I may be on the upper end.

(This is at a state school in the US.)

That's absolutely insane. I overloaded half my semesters and had a double major-double minor and didn't work anywhere near those hours. Maybe college has changed in the last 10 years, but I went to a very good school and had a drastically different experience. It's insane to believe you should be working more in college than after, let alone double.

Seriously, that's insane. I've never heard of anything even resembling that.

For a lot of the classes I took, this is what the hours looked like for my classmates as well. I do not think it's that unusual, even.

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