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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

I'm 50/50 on this. Part of me really agrees with you -- you need time and practice and mistakes to learn this stuff. But also, I'm not sure it has to be wall clock time.

Four years at university gets you breadth that is probably good for you as a human, and probably important for contextualizing your work as an engineer (oh hey, history might be a valuable lesson for your understanding of ethics. Art and literature might combine with your computer science degree to inspire projects natural language processing or generative art.)

I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven. And honestly, I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.

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>oh hey, history might be a valuable lesson for your understanding of ethics. Art and literature might combine with your computer science degree to inspire projects natural language processing or generative art

For what it's worth, this is a very American approach to college.

You generally wouldn't spend more than 3 years on an undergrad course as a student in the UK - because you tend to spend the vast majority of time on your chosen degree subject. There's maybe room for one or two optional modules in an unrelated field.

Possibly because the U.S. provides the "best high school education in the world.. It's just a shame you have to go to college to get it."

-- Alan Kay, some anecdote I forget how to locate

From the very proper English lady across the table from me at a supper at Douglas Adams' house: "You Americans have the best high school education in the world -- what a pity you have to go to college to get it!"

I think that depends on the country and the type of uni. I have some friends that have been at top notch schools, and I have taken the time to see how they did things, and the trivium and quadrivium seem to be the cornerstones for elite education (which I was trying to self-replicate). That said, it feels like public schools (which are actually private... why this silly naming?) in the UK do this better than private ones, which is why in the UK you spend less time on those things in undergrad and above.

In the US I don't think they hardly reference the trivium or quadrivium, but the structure is loosely based on the principle, so because they have lost the reasoning behind it their course load is much more wild and varied, and sometimes unnecessary.

This is also my main beef with those who claim we should just do vocational training or very narrow course loads... the benefit of wide but shallow knowledge is large when applied properly. The US just doesn't apply it very properly. One thing the US does do much better, I must say, is the egalitarian culture though, which offers people the opportunity to laterally move in education much more freely.

> That said, it feels like public schools (which are actually private... why this silly naming?)

Because of the nine originally-charity schools investigated by the Clarendon Commission, they weren't the two that established that they had constitutions guaranteeing their private character which made them immune to the kind of publicly-directed reorganization the other seven were subjected to under the Public Schools Act. That is, they are "public" in the sense that their basic organization was redirected by the State to correct problems found by a government investigation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Schools_Act_1868

In Australia, most of the technical / science subjects requires four years to reach a Bachelors degree. I think this is the norm for most universities.

I think if you want to do a great job, a four year CS degree should take about four years. You could maybe shave off a year by working through the summers and really pushing.

I’m pretty smart, and I worked HARD in my degree program. I did do some extracurriculars in adjacent fields that I could have skipped: psychology courses, a handful of advanced writing and math courses. And I took a handful of masters level classes that required a lot more time and focus. So probably there’s an easier path. But overall I would say doing a great job in serious CS classes is a full time job for all but the most exceptional students.

Sure there are genius types who could do it all in 18 months, and yes you could skim through it as a C-student on much less time. Or even as an A-student who just did the minimum to get the grades.

But if you really want to learn the material, it’s not easy and there’s plenty to occupy your time.

On top of that, there are all kinds of side projects that your education should be spurring, and which will feed back into your coursework. I learned PHP, SQL, and webdev in my spare time.

I just don’t look back and think “wow, there was a lot of wasted time there”.

In fact, for many courses (Statistics with Calculus, Electrically Engineering) I regret just doing enough to get a grade and deeply wish I had strived to understand that material deeply.

But I guess I’m kind of disproving my point... maybe with no extracurriculars, no graduate classes, and no side projects I could have done it in 2 years?

I guess, but I wouldn’t have gotten nearly the same benefit. Those things were part of what really made my degree formative.

> I just don’t look back [at school] and think “wow, there was a lot of wasted time there”

I can’t edit that post, but I want to add...

I DO look back the majority of coding jobs I’ve had in the Bay Area, and do very much think “wow, there’s a lot of wasted time there.”

Half or more of my time as a pro coder is spent undoing work I just did because the task wasn’t specced correctly, deciphering someone else’s bug because they merged it and left the office, dealing with the same broken infrastructure over and over because new features are always more important, building something that some Dir. Eng. wants, but is totally unproven and won’t matter to any metrics, etc.

I’m not passing the buck here, one of the main goals of my career is to become a better countervailing force to that stuff. But I want to highlight that making it into the workforce doesn’t mean you’re automatically spending all your time doing “real work”... sometimes it’s just the opposite.

I went back for my CS degree after working as a programmer for several years, and I agree 100%.

You can skate by in many schools with a C average taking the easiest classes and the easiest professors, but doing well is hard work.

(And for this reason, ai generally want to see a transcript for new grads.)

Sure, I don't think I disagree with any particular point you are making.

> I think many, many people's careers would benefit from going partway down the computer science path -- being able to script repetitive tasks or diagnose computer issues methodically will help you wherever you land.

I apologize that I didn't make it clear, but I'll clarify now: if you want to make your current job better, then these "teach yourself to code" things are probably great. You'll probably learn a lot to make your job less boring.

> I think it's possible to condense down from 4 years for someone who is highly motivated and self driven.

Yeah, as I said I'm a dropout, I do ok after ~1.5 years of regular school, then straight to the working world, so clearly it's possible to do these things, but I think this path is just sub-optimal. I feel like I had to practice stuff a lot more than I would have if I had just stayed in school.

But I will concede that it's possible, and school isn't for everyone; I just don't want to encourage the trend of people dropping out, and then thinking they'll make a ton of money in Silicon Valley. Yes, it does happen, but it's hard, and you'll have a much easier time if you just finish school.

The 4 years of college includes a lot of non-college time during summers, breaks, holiday vacations, etc. There is no reason why a serious student shouldn't be actively learning 50 weeks a year, minus holidays, and putting in the same work time as his peers who entered the job market after high school. In which case, 3 years is easily enough. However, 3 * 50 * 40 is only 6000 hours, which won't make you an expert.

The coursework listed on github for the OSSU is likely thousands of hours if pursued diligently.

> There is no reason why a serious student shouldn't be actively learning 50 weeks a year

Except... being a human? Having a family? Decompressing from the stress of studying? Earning a living? (I worked 35 hours a week in school so I could eat...)

The newly graduated BS-CS is going to be expected to work at least 40 hours/week, with two weeks vacation, and to study outside work hours to get up to speed with his co-workers.

And his cousin, the apprentice electrician has been working 40 hours/week, with two weeks vacation, studying to become a journeyman and doing all those other things.

Why are college students given such a light schedule?

(I also worked my way through college, but that seems to be less practical now, since the price of college has risen much faster that wages for jobs that students can get. Although I think it is a good idea for students to have jobs off campus to get an introduction to real work.)

> The newly graduated BS-CS is going to be expected to work at least 40 hours/week, with two weeks vacation, and to study outside work hours to get up to speed with his co-workers.

Wasn't my experience at any of the major or minor tech companies I've worked at. I've never been expected to study outside of work hours, and most places pretty quickly gave more than two weeks vacation.

> Why are college students given such a light schedule?

Presumably because they have hours of coursework every day, they should be socializing and networking, they have to work to feed themselves and pay tuition, they have a family to see to, and practicing/exploring their domain on their own?

I was enrolled in 20 credit hours/semester and worked 35 hours a week. Nothing about my schedule was 'light'. I think it's wrong to assume that college students necessarily have it 'easy'.

No, you're not allowed that!

From a physical standpoint there are enough hours in a week to work 40 hours and pursue 40 hours of university.

Except universities aren't something like an evening school that is explicitly designed around this idea. University lectures do not follow a nice time table that allows that. Lectures start at different times depending on the day of the week. Therefore your workday will start at a different hour every day, except all your colleagues still work their 9 to 5 schedule which will make you significantly less productive than them because you don't get to meet them every day. There can be gaps between lectures but you can't just go back and forth between university and work. It takes time to travel and even if you can do it in a reasonable amount of time you will end up doing multiple context switches per day. This makes working significantly more than 20 hours per week extremely hard.

That "10000 hours will make you an expert" thesis has been debunked. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121114-gladwells-10000-hou...

I find the "10,000 hour rule" odd (after reading both Ericsson and Gladwell). It's often misinterpreted as "10,000 hours of X will make you an expert in X", but that's not how I interpret the claims by Ericsson or the simpler repackaging by Gladwell.

I read the article you linked and was hoping it contained new research to clarify or refute the work done by Ericsson, but it didn't. The linked article regurgitates two of the key points in The Road To Excellence by Ericsson:

* You need to be engaged in deliberate practice (e.g pushing yourself outside of your current area of expertise). Not mindless work. I'm not an expert driver from my 10,000+ hours of commuting. * 10,000 hours isn't a set figure. It's an average at best. The premise is claiming that people in the top-tier (2%-5%) spent a lot of time consistently practicing their area before reaching the top-tier.

The "10,000 hour rule" hasn't been debunked. It just doesn't mean what some people assume it means when first hearing it refereed to as the "10,000 hour rule".

Yes, you might be engaged in "deliberate practice" , but that does not account for individual talent. Someone might take 5000 and another 20000. Gladwell dumbed it down.

Isn't it obvious? Learning how to hold a spoon takes less time than learning how to drive a car.

At the risk of being too self promotional.. you’re describing what we’ve done at Make School. An accredited 4 year bachelors condensed into 2 years of intense study, primary focus is project-based CS but we have a robust general education component as well.

As another commenter points out, the prototypical 4 year degree (which many in the US actually complete in 4-6 years) is a fairly American phenomenon. There’s plenty of precedent elsewhere for college as 2-3 years of rigorous study.

You're right, that was too self promotional.

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