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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

The main reasons to get a degree are:

-. To show you can complete a big, multi year project that’s full of doing stuff you don’t like

-. To get past HR screenings

-. If you ever want a chance to reach Executive level jobs, you need to have a degree, for the perception of nothing else.

This debate has been going on for a long time, despite this being presented as a recent thing, and it always comes down to those things. While the tech-minded here might want to see it from a strictly educational standpoint, these are human/societal reasons that are quite important.

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I don't have a degree and I'm 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don't have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there's a tradeoff. But the problem with these education "holes" is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.

My mom is a music teacher, and she finds that she often will get new students who were previously self-taught with blind spots. Ideally, one of the main perks of school, which is difficult if not impossible to get with auto-didacticism, is that you get continuous feedback from someone who knows what common mistakes look like.

My technical background is largely from reading books and manuals on my own, but I'm under no delusion that I would benefit greatly from some more formal instruction for certain topics, if nothing else because then I would have someone challenge me immediately when I'm wrong.

What do you feel are the gaps in your education? Do you think taking an online course would help with them?

I suggest learning a little about data structures and algorithms, each are typically one semester courses in undergrad. You might supplement it with operating systems and distributed computing, though data structures should be a primary focus.

I've tried and failed going back school enough times to know it doesn't work for me. Certification courses & clinics have proven worthwhile in the past though.

Could you provide some examples?

I can provide some examples for him as a self-educated dev:

* What is big O

* What is value type vs pointer/reference

* How does the internet work

* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 (Thankfully, there's this: https://medium.com/basecs/archive/2017/01)

* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc

* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc

* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don't know these)

* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)

* How modern computers work

* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math

* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)

* Linux

I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don't pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.

Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.

A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn't figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.

This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.

I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own. In some cases I also had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn't even taught in school.

If you're self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there's a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1/100th of the price:

1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.

2. Download the course syllabus for the course you're interested in off their website. (Nowadays you can often get the full course, including all the lectures and handouts.)

3. Buy the textbook. When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1/4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed. There's now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn't exist when I went to school, though.

4. Read the textbook. Do some of the exercises. Implement the algorithms.

Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework. Most of them kinda gloss over it because it's required, though, while if you're doing this because you really love the material, you've got a big advantage.

I've interviewed people with degrees that don't know about many of these questions. In fact I make it a point that if someone puts something like "TCP/IP" or "networking" in the laundry-list of skills/knowledge they have, I ask them a basic question about it -- and a depressingly large amount of time people can't even explain the difference between TCP and UDP.

I've also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they'll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.

Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there's no substitute for experience.

Self taught programmer and I'm strong in all these areas. You can read three books and know all of this. It does not require a college education. In fact the TCP/IP stack and Linux I learned back in high school just by reading two books. It wasn't hard. The Data structures and algorithms I picked up a few years later when I was about college age. Again, you can read books about this stuff. It's not that hard.

If anything, a self-study program with a list of books to read and skills to master would save many self taught / self motivated people quite a bit of time, but its absence is by no means a show stopper.

What three books? (Especially interested in data transfer protocols - I got a little bit into it for game development, but never found anything resembling a good source).

I learned a lot of these things from taking Harvard's CS50 online, reading the blog posts I linked (and doing problems), and I would imagine this book (https://bigmachine.io/products/the-imposters-handbook/) would help out - a friend recommended it, but I never got around to it.

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softw...

^Covers logic gates and the basics of how a computer is built to an incredible degree, but it's VERY time intensive. Still, I really recommend it.

These days CS50 lectures are online. The TCP/IP and Linux books I can't recall. That was some 20+ years ago. I think the TCP/IP/Protocols book was from Sams and the Linux book(s) were from O'Reilly. Algorithms/Data was The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena. Cracking the Coding Interview is great too. Crypto was just a bunch of reading online, I haven't found a good book on that I would recommend, same for data transfer protocols. I didn't just read three books, I'm saying, 20/20 hindsight I could have read about 3 books to garner most of the stuff I didn't learn by skipping college.

Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things.

"Maybe some of us self taught developers should get together and curate a clear path for CS knowledge and ancillary helpful things."

I wouldn't mind spending some time contributing to something like that. There is an endless amount of material to read and classes to take, but narrowing it down and prioritizing is the hard part.

Please share the 3 books that taught you everything on this list. Not being sarcastic, I would love to have them.

Given the timeline he mentioned, the TCP/IP one may have been "Inside TCP/IP". It was an extremely valuable reference at one time, but it's a bit dated now. I'm just about to finally give away my copy.

You wouldn't happen to have a good suggestion to replace it?

You might try the two-volume "TCP/IP Illustrated" set, although I haven't personally read those. Otherwise, no, as far as I know there was never an edition of "Inside TCP/IP" published after 1997, and no book exactly took its place.

Which is a real shame.

If you just want to get a good sense of UDP, ICMP, TCP/IP, datagram headers, and a handful of older protocols (like FTP), "Inside TCP/IP" is still valuable.

I can second this. Self taught programmer and I am weak in all of the above areas. My math skills (only high school math) are also especially weak which has really bitten me in graphics based jobs (simulation) where I have had to calculate view rotations and similar in 3d. I am lucky enough to have made it to the 6 figure club but I probably could have been here a decade ago with the right education. Also imposter syndrome has been a major limiter at times.

I started college (Comp E) and didn't finish and I, can vouch for the fact that the classes I didn't take would have taught me nearly everything on your list (aside from the last 2).

FWIW, I learned all these things on my own, including object oriented programming. My blind spot was SQL, and thankfully I learned that in school. I preferred lower level coding and I had to be pushed to see that the performance overhead of SQL was not important compared with the productivity benefits.

You can get past HR screening without a degree, experience still often matters more - and in my opinion, a 22-23 year old proving they can do multi year projects is of dubious value - what it is useful for is showing that you know how to learn.

I have no degree, but have a boat load of experience in my chosen field, with a couple of notable exceptions, this alone is enough to get my foot in the door. The notable exceptions are government roles, and government contracts with private companies, they want someone who has a degree in any engineering discipline.

I never had trouble finding tech work without a degree. I did however find the door to more interesting jobs was generally closed without one, and that door opened after I went back to school and finished a BS.

I find the doors which are closed by not having a degree to be ones I probably wouldn't have enjoyed. I have no degree and have had Phd's reporting to me, in Silicon Valley.

Some prefer to be the PhDs.

Sure, but it'll be harder. Most places have a stack of resumes for positions, guess who gets weeded out first?

Am I the only one around here who actually learned things in college? I would certainly not be as good at my job nor as aware of things outside my primary skill had I not gone to college.

You missed the biggest reason:

- Networking with people all assumed to be at or above a bar dictated by the college acceptance committee.

This is point is huge, given how spread out the US is many students may have never had that kind of opportunity. The things you learn from your peers, all naturally aligned in the community are orders of magnitude more than what you learn in class and can't easily be replaced by online resources.

Your points are important but at the same time it's inaccurate to discount the educational component. Good universities instill a sense of intellectual rigor in their students that carries across many fields--reading critically, expressing arguments clearly, and perhaps most of understanding what "good enough" really means when working on solutions to difficult problems.

I’m not trying to discount the educational component, just trying to blunt the inevitable replies about how you can learn the same material on your own. The point I’m making is that there are other benefits outside of the education that you can’t do on your own.

Thinking back to group projects, I can honestly say that most of the college graduates whose educations I am most acquainted with cannot complete moderately sized semester-long projects that they don't like without substantial outside help and constant prodding.

The project I’m talking about is the degree itself, not group projects in any particular class.

I'd add:

-. To easily identify a group of friends/peers with common interests and culture.

Probably not worth the egregiously high tuitions now, but I've talked with several other alums from my college and we agree that easily the greatest benefit from college has been networking-related / social ties.

That's honestly probably the biggest reason for why people are so set on sending their kids to elite institutions- in many cases the pedagogy might not necessarily be better than cheaper alternatives (e.g., state schools), but there's a higher likelihood of rubbing shoulders with other influential characters.

Likewise, I would suggest that it's more valuable for someone coming from a lower income/social status background to go to a good school than for someone who comes from higher - those people either already know influential people, or have the financial resources necessary to do things like attend conferences or just up and move to where those people are.

I'd agree with that. Whenever people cite Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as college dropout successes, they tend to overlook the substantial cultural and social capital these leaders had already accrued as students at Lakeside, Homestead, and Phillips Exeter.

Every reason you cited can be had by starting in community college. If I were advising a graduating senior today, I'd advise them to consider a gap year and to go the community college route. You can still get a degree from the most prestigious state schools while paying a small fraction of what you'd otherwise pay for your first two years of school.

Since price is becoming an issue, prioritize junior/senior years since those result in the degree and look to economize for freshman/sophomore.

Those human societal reasons need to change.

Why?

I don't disagree, but if you're saying a change needs to be made I think the onus on you is to propose what the change should be and why it would be beneficial overall.

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