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Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't surprise me really. When I was at university the programming textbooks we had were vile nasty and plainly incorrect. And those of us who dared challenge it by writing correct, robust code were penalised as the staff teaching it didn't understand the domain of what they were teaching properly and didn't have any real experience and assumed we were doing it wrong. We learned quickly to approach education with a high level of scepticism and get your info from more than one source (textbook) and find out which ones were reputable and which ones were garbage.

Basically there was a monolith in the middle of the course, a crap textbook, and monkeys were praying to it as the authority on everything.

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Along the lines of taking the authority of a book as a replacement for critical thinking... I was once hired to rewrite some assembly language spaghetti code a more-electronic-than-software engineer had worked on for two years. Ostensibly he was ordered to help me accomplish this, but he was more like what in court would be described as a "hostile witness"

I spent a couple of months "hacking", just familiarizing myself with the microcontroller and its instruction set, and the tooling. (In fact, I had no source code to look at during this time, as he would not surrender it!) When I finally got his source, I rewrote it to a 100% functional equivalent in two weeks, 1/5 the size without all the unnecessary control path duplication and without pointless register moves. At the time I found the way he had used register moves particularly puzzling because it resembled the way an un-optimized compiler might work.

Months later after I was no longer on that project, I got a call from him. He was very flustered and wanted to know where I "got" a particular sequence of instructions from. I was like, come again? He said, "It's not in the book. You used a sequence of instructions that's not in the Book." (The Microchip programming manual.) He asked about another block of 3 or 4 instructions - also not in the book (in the combination I used them in).

Slowly it dawned on me - I'm quite certain he didn't understand what any individual instruction "did". That whole level level of abstraction didn't exist for him. He programmed in assembly, yes, but only using blocks of example instructions from the Book. Suddenly the pointless register moves made sense - he was acting as a human compiler, without an optimization step.

Years later I realized I should have asked him, "and how do you think the example code in the book was written?"

That seriously sounds like someone that has only learnt through rote memorisation. Absolutely great at taking tests and doing things by the book but completely unable to apply the things they should have learned to a problem that falls slightly outside the examples.

Great story though, even though it makes me shudder.

> We learned quickly to approach education with a high level of scepticism and get your info from more than one source (textbook) and find out which ones were reputable and which ones were garbage.

Ironically, I think this is one of the best lessons anyone can learn . . .

One of the reasons I don't consider a degree anything of value when evaluating candidates. It might be a baseline or it might be a red herring. Best to just assume a degree and no degree are equal and asses based on practical examples.

I would think a degree would be valuable, if for nothing else, then because it indicates a willingness to put in 4 years of work to achieve a challenging goal. Conscientiousness is the word, I believe. A university degree shows you have some minimum level of conscientiousness.

Probably correct. It’s a very expensive way to prove ones motivation however.

Reminds me of when I was 15 and the teacher we had the previous year had left and one of the maths teachers took over.

He did his best but I have taught my self faster than he did.

Though because I was on the CSE stream even though I got a grade 1 they wouldn't let me do computing at A level - as CSE kids where supposed to leave at 16.

Your last sentence is intriguing to me. I understand all the words, and I think I get the gist, but I'm not familiar with any of it.

What is CSE? Google seems to think it's Certificate of Secondary Education. So, middle school -> early high school equivalent?

Grade 1? A level? Leave where, the school?

(I'm in the US, so that's probably the disconnect)

At that time there where two sets of exams taken at 16 O levels and CSE.

The O levels where for Kids in grammar and private schools and the CSE's where for the kids who went to secondary modern schools who left at 15/16.

As I was dyslexic I was put in the CSE stream though I did get a grade 1 in maths and computer studies which is the same as a pass at O level I didn't get to do A level computing.

Thanks!

Part of getting through an education program is learning the differences between the right answer and the expected answer. If the book says it is so, then it is so, even if you know it isn’t. Remember both “facts”. Keep one for the test and the other for reality.

Sounds very much like doublethink.

And that's why just going to the cheapest university is a bad idea.

My mid tier university has a fundamental problem where the lecturers aren't even hired to teach, they're hired for research. And since the university can't get enough American grad students to stay and be research slaves they bring in grad students from the third world. Then these grad students are required by law to teach a certain number of credit hours to conduct research and there you go. The result is every general class is poorly taught by people who can barely speak English and don't care about teaching so you end up teaching yourself or failing.

CS courses generally don't have this issue but they do have a large amount of mediocre professors. Reason being anyone talented in CS can make 2-3x the salary out in the real world and so CS grads rarely stick around to teach.

The saying "those who can't do, teach." is as relevant as ever.

This hasn't been my experience in CS, the research professors teaching courses were interested in teaching, the only thing the grad students do is grade assignments/exam papers.

> Reason being anyone talented in CS can make 2-3x the salary out in the real world and so CS grads rarely stick around to teach.

I would call bullshit on that, money is not the only thing that motivates people to do things.

The professors or graduate students hired to do research aren't the ones who end up teaching wildly incorrect material. That happens when you hire people specifically to teach, and don't pay them very much at all.

I can speak from my own experience; even though English is my first language, I entered as a grad student and TA in a public US university as a foreigner, since my undergrad degree was done outside the US. After they determined that I was capable of speaking understandable English, they actually made me an instructor of record for a 300-level course that none of the active faculty was available to teach.

It was quite an experience.

I think the problem is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the "mid tier university". The university is a research institution and not a vocational training institution. Students who wish to learn a trade (plumbing, computer programming, etc) can attend one of many fine (and possibly less expensive) public and private vocational training institutions that have relationships with local businesses that hire graduates.

Students who wish to explore topics and solve problems at the limits of current human knowledge generally enroll at the University. At these institutions, undergraduates have an opportunity to work in research laboratories and graduate students, postdocs and faculty have the responsibility to obtain grant funding to keep their labs operating. As a courtesy, occasional classes are taught (to get students up to speed on basic theory) but there is an expectation that students are self-driven and can figure things out on their own (hence its ok if the TA is not a native English speaker, etc).

TLDR: If you want to learn a trade, go to vocational school. If you want an education, go to University.

This was exactly my experience 20 years ago. Shame things haven’t changed.

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