Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

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I would like to see a study that indicates that dropouts working in a professional environment are less "well-rounded" overall. I don't dispute that something exists, but I haven't seen one.

I'm obviously biased, but I have a lot of interest in linguistics, history, political theory, moral philosophy, and a lot of other non-coding fields, for which I have purchased and read many of the college textbooks. I also do not have a degree, as I dropped out after two years towards a math degree, and work as a "senior" software engineer (I think titles are kind of stupid but it works for my point).

I typically did well on the tests, but for various reasons too elaborate to get into in a post, I had trouble focusing on and completing a lot of the homework, leading to poor grades, and then me dropping out.

Of course a lot of dropouts don't have much curiosity, but once they get to a professional level, it's basically impossible to avoid learning a fairly diverse set of skills.

I think most people who want to work in a professional field should probably go to college and get their degree, but college is not for everyone who joins. Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges.

For example, I greatly dislike how concurrency is taught in the undergrad level. It seems like with many curriculums, the students learn a bit of some locking glue, what a semaphore is, and then they promptly forget any of the safety mechanisms that follow, at least in the people I've interviewed.

Conversely, a significant portion of the students in my class when I was attending university were only there to get a degree & didn't care about anything but the easiest way to get a passing grade.

Yeah, I forgot to mention that; I have no doubt that the top student from Harvard or Yale is dedicated to learning new things and at some level wants to be there. However, the bottom 25% who graduate probably are doing it simply to obtain the piece of paper and the letters "B.S." or "B.A." after their name.

I mean, you get what you put into college. I sort of veered off my senior and took a bunch of business classes after finishing my CS requirements. I wish I took extra CS classes because there's a lot I had teach myself. Motivated people can teach themselves a lot, but there IS something to be said for having a credential.

I can see why recruiters and business-owners prefer it; it basically implies "Person X has at least this much discipline to get through this degree".

However, a sort of consequence of this is you create a sort of inadvertent filter of "normal" people, e.g. the people who passed the classes designed around them.

Nevermind that many students just go for buying their papers so that the party can go on. I remember boasts of this at U of T back in the day—there was even signage above shops on Yonge St offering the service. They haven't even had to leave their seats for a long time—they can just purchase them online:

2001: https://slate.com/human-interest/2001/12/how-to-buy-a-good-c...

2019: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2019/02/19/cheating-at-u-of-t/

Not to say it's universal, but it's rampant—the view that they're just there to pick up their ticket to an easier life. (if it's accurate, or not!)

>Autodidacticism can lead to new perspectives on projects, and allows people to focus on things that are important, but not emphasized in most colleges.

It also allows people to veer into becoming cranks, without appropriate teachers to guide you along the way. As long as we're exchanging anecdotes, in my undergrad I've met my fair share of "physics autodidacts" who seem to believe they've "solved" massive problems related to engineering/physics.

That's fair; there's no doubt that self-teaching can lead you down an incorrect rabbit-hole (though I do think most grow out of that eventually), and I'm not an exception; I once thought I could write an entire OS kernel on the GPU because clearly no one has ever tried that.

I think my point still stands, however.

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