Comment by ThJ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThJ | Hacker News Reader

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As a person who never had a degree but whose knowledge goes above and beyond what 90% of the market needs and well into CS territory, this article insults me. It's also a painful reminder of similar prejudices in people who are looking to hire. I often end up doing the kind of basic development the author talks about and I'm not happy about that.

Why not just take a CS degree? Because I'm a poor fit for the education system. That's why I dropped out of high school in the first place.

Also, I feel like I've paid my dues already. I've been learning about computer software (and hardware and electronics) for 27 years. I haven't stopped at merely what I needed to know to do my job. I have done a lot of self-study. I routinely roll my own libraries and write embedded code, and I had a patch submitted to the Linux kernel a few years back. I also design analog and digital circuits on my spare time.

I feel it's not about having a degree at all, because I'm living, breathing evidence of that. I've met people with CS degrees who can barely write a line of code. Maybe they didn't go to a good college. Maybe they did, and it's possible to pass the exams by cramming (followed by forgetting).

Saying that you can't do advanced stuff without a CS degree is snobbery.

I don't think that's a charitable reading of the article. The author is not saying that you can't have this knowledge without a degree, he's saying that few people in the field today have this knowledge, because they don't have the degree. The two assertions are different: there are things a degree teaches you; if you have the degree, you probably know them. While you can't judge whether any given individual has the same knowledge without the degree, you can:

1) Expect that 1,000 people with the degree will mostly have that knowledge;

2) That 1,000 people without the degree will mostly not have the knowledge.

I disagree strongly with your point #1. "This knowledge" specifically is deep full-system understanding, as quoted in the article:

> "They use languages, editors, compilers, and operating systems; but they don't have the first clue about how to create any of these things or even how they really work."

And yes, he is asserting that people should get this from a degree:

> If you want to build doghouses, just pick up some skills with hammer and nails, and then go for it. If you want to be an architect who designs and builds skyscrapers, then go get a degree in architecture first.

The full depth of applied understanding comes from personal interest & experience. Whether or not a person with such interest pursues a CS degree is completely orthogonal.

Plus, these applied low- & mid-level computational practicals have nothing to do with Computer Science; they are programming, architecture, and engineering. People generally do not complete CS degrees with any specific imparting of these 3 facets, unless they use their university time to pursue their own interests & ambitions in the field. And again, such people can and do pursue those outside of university, especially in their pre-university age exploratory years, and on-the-job experience with real systems.

> The full depth of applied understanding comes from personal interest & experience. Whether or not a person with such interest pursues a CS degree is completely orthogonal.

It's not orthogonal, but rather highly correlated. Combinatorics, graph theory, computer architecture, etc., will all be part of a university CS curriculum. Someone who has a CS degree will probably know those things (or at least recall them after a brief refresher).

Combinatorics and graph theory have zero to do with this practical knowledge. I'll grant that computer architecture classes introduce some relevant concepts, but this foundation can be had from anywhere as its matters, history, and details are widely discussed in the open online as a persistently current practical concern.

People like the author, with a degree and lots of experience under their belt, really overestimate what the degree specifically gave them, vs what they learned through decades of experience as they developed their craft. When it comes to practical, applied programming and skills of abstraction, informed by deep knowledge of what goes on under the hood, vanishingly small amounts of that come from university education.

Again, I will be careful to separate out those who do actual Computer Science on the job from this practical craft of quality programming. The former is much more rare, but is a separate field.

The author did disclose his bias up front and was responding specifically to a question about a traditional degree vs. a bootcamp. I personally still think that general education holds a lot of value. Of course it’s not for everyone, and I think it’s a problem that it is marketed as such. Nonetheless, there is a lot of value in liberal arts, in learning to think not just about software but other things. Good developers, scientists, mathematicians, artists, etc., etc., pull inspiration and insight from fields beyond their own. And we don’t apply software in a vacuum, we apply it to real problems in some field, typically other than software. I think a broad knowledge is part of where the “advanced stuff” comes from, and degrees are tailored to impart some of that over, say, a four week coding course.

Absolutely agreed. I eventually finished a CS degree, but what I learned from it was a little speck next to what I'd learned outside of it (even measuring right after graduation).

I believe the only thing of lasting value I got from the degree was that I saw more of a 'roadmap' of CS topics that I didn't know existed before, which were a starting point for me learning more about them on my own. HN has done that more successfully than the university since though ;)

It also makes the opposite error: claiming that you can do advanced stuff with (just) a CS degree.

In the years since the author graduated, there has been a shift in some CS degrees, to meet market needs. A key difference is that then, a CS degree wasn't about programming.

Those CS degree were just the starting point, letting you know what is out there, and a taste of how to approach it. Part of that was contact with research academics. (Though some recent graduates miss the point and believe that because they now know something, they now know everything.)

Interesting. I didn't read any snobbery into the article. From the tone, my take is he's talking about an interest and willingness to acquire CS knowledge and skills. He framed it in terms of degree or not because he was responding to a question about somebody who's in college wondering what to do.

I'm the other way.

CS grads are lazy programmers with the mentality that someone else will do it.

I am self taught and can usually rig a solution to a problem in a few hours. A CS grad will tell you its impossible.

Maybe they need to do hackathons, but its like they have been taught to doubt instead of taught to think.

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