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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

I didn't do a coding bootcamp, but I have the fear that teaching "expiring skills" instead of "permanent skills" like it's done at university, will set us back in the long run.

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Agree, a lot of guys complain about the "nonsense" that is taught at universities, and sometimes they are right, but other times it is just the core of things/other approaches/historical facts that don't have a clear objective but are very important in the long run. Normally I find it hard to learn those on my own through internet, not because they are not available but because you don't clearly see what to do in the next day with them. While at university you may not care much at the moment but you get to explore them because otherwise you fail.

At the same time, universities could sometimes do a better job of letting students see why it's important to learn something. A great example is matrix determinant, which at first glance seems like an entirely arbitrary invention.

The 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel does a great job with this, introducing the determinant in terms of geometry. It puts the geometric meaning of the function first, introducing the strange looking formula later on. edit And of course, it does all of this with excellent visualisations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip3X9LOh2dk

After graduating and spending some years in the real world, I am quite astonished that this is more often than not a rule in the academia. Going through courses deeply rooted in computer science without learning clean coding skills and interpretation of computer programs (clean code and SICP) is crazy.

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