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Comment by heroHACK17 | Hacker News Reader

I struggle with this and I am only two years into my career. I look back on my CS education and miss it so much.

About three months ago, I started a ritual where I would spend 60 minutes before work every morning reading books about the internals of popular software or programming languages, histories of technology, etc. It rekindles my love for computing that brought me to CS in the first place.

Instead of constantly fearing another day of drudgery, I now wake up every morning excited to learn more about something that I know piques my interest. The attitude change has been pretty profound.

Currently reading: The Elements of Programming Style by Kernighan and Plauger (1978)

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Interesting. For me it's the opposite. I hated university with a passion. The synthetic problems, the fake currency of citations, the dogmatic and first-principle free way of learning.

It took me all of quitting, years of depression and accidentally restarting my career through a tech support gig to rediscover the massive joy I had solving problems with code.

I hated university too.

I mean, I thought it would be a walk in the park and fun to boot. Computer Science - the computer part was cool. Science was cool too, so a Computer Science course would be amazing!

Except... it's not really about computers. And it's not about science either. It's a complete misnomer. Only after the sunken cost fallacy had taken full hold I realized that it was actually a math course.

If you took most of the Computer Science curriculum back in time, to a monastery hundreds of years ago, with no physical computers, it could still be taught in the exact same way! That's great, but not really what I thought I had signed up for.

Was it useful? Yes. Was it worth 4 years? No. And, for a while, I had a very dim view of myself, as I didn't excel like my peers did. This had negative and long lasting impacts. Took a long while to realize that it had nothing to do with my ability, just my lack of interest.

For sure; I found it pretty stark how a given Computer Science curriculum doesn't cover much of what you actually need to be successful in the field: architecting, engineering, planning, testing, wiring services/api's together, etc.

I do the same.

The current one I'm reading which I really like is The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming.

You can find it on Stripe Press: https://press.stripe.com/

Right before that I read The Making of The Prince of Persia (also stripe press and also good).

Would you mind sharing some more books from your reading list?

Depending on your employment terms, I would argue that the daily hour of 'indenpendent study' should be billed. (after all, it's in you employers benefit that you keep up and continue learning, isn't it?)

designing data intensive applications is quite excellent

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