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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> Degrees are bullshit

The trouble with being self-taught is few manage to teach themselves calculus let alone advanced calculus, and one can have yawning gaps in knowledge and be completely unaware of their existence.

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What the hell does calculus have to do with 99% of all "tech" jobs? Nothing. Nothing at all.

I can't even fathom why knowing anything at all about calculus is going to be useful when automating things, writing APIs, or doing anything that nearly every business wants their "tech" people to do.

Ordering parts out of a catalog and assembling them per instructions is what a mechanic does. An engineer designs the parts and writes the instructions.

Some things you can't do without math: curve fitting, statistics, implementing Shazam, 3D graphics, write a game engine, do data flow analysis, implement a neural net, non-trivial use of floating point, write a lunar lander game, etc.

I'd suggest that even for more mundane problems learning calculus will expand one's ability to think at a higher level. Being exposed to an advanced maths with real theory behind it like calculus gives even the most routine code jockey exposure to concepts and patterns of thinking beyond even the brightest scholars 1000 years ago. Even just the notion of a derivative yields a lot of benefit for basic financial thinking.

You're right.

I remember two pages of math in a college economic textbook. Reading it, I realized they were doing differentiation by going around the horn. Instead of requiring calculus for the class, they taught it.

Except they never mentioned the words "calculus", "differentiation", or "integration". I suppose they figured those words would dissuade people from the class :-/

The amusing thing is the poor schlubs taking the class would never realize that they'd learned calculus!

"You can't Google things you don't know exist" is a guiding principle to how I try to learn things.

FWIW Teaching things yourself is much easier now, i.e. you can get pretty much any textbook for free (nudge nudge wink wink). It's a truly great time to be fascinated by things

I think of the Shazam app. When I first encountered it, I thought "must be using Fourier Analysis". Of course, that turned out to be true.

But if I'd never gone to college, I would not know that FA existed, or if I did, I wouldn't know what it was good for. I'd probably invent some sort of ad-hoc ineffective algorithm for it. I've certainly seen a lot of ad-hoc kludge algorithms from smart people who simply didn't know there were excellent mathematical methods to solve it.

I can count on zero fingers the number of times I've needed to know any sort of calculus working in tech.

I've known many engineers who could have simplified their work if they'd used calculus, but they were afraid of calculus and went to considerable lengths to avoid it.

For example, I know one who was trying to reduce the noise in an electronic circuit. He randomly tried adding resistors and capacitors of various values. Until eventually a coworker looked at it, calculated the right values in a few minutes, and eliminated the noise.

I've seen this sort of thing again and again, in diverse fields.

There is a fellow I know who gives embedded design seminars, and he -- intentionally -- puts up one slide that has an error in showing Maxwell's Equations. He notes that in Europe, especially Germany, almost every time he puts up that slide, someone politely points out his "typo". In the USA? He said about 1 in 50 seminars somebody does the same. If you are doing engineering, and you don't know cold both multi-variable integral and differential calculus, you have no right calling yourself an 'engineer' IMHO.

Sadly, I'd flunk that test. Although I was taught ME, and understood them, and still remember what they are and do, I don't recall the exact form of them anymore.

But if I did need them, I know enough to know just were to look to refresh my memory :-)

Your example will only resonate with a small minority since most of us here are web and CRUD jockeys. Also, your claim to have "seen this sort of thing again and again, in diverse fields," is patently disingenuous. Even the most maths-intensive groups in tech deal largely with discrete methods.

Gamedev will flex those muscles in a fun and rewarding way.

Learned advanced calculus in college in my CS program, never used it in professional life writing code. It was just to weed people out. Just an IQ test.

I’d say for most software jobs calculus is not required?

If you don't work in webdev or the equivalent mobile apps then it is important for quite a lot of jobs. If you work in webdev then I agree there is not many reasons to get a degree, but what if you want to work in some other fields where it helps? I really doubt that the number of people who works in webdev matches how many people have a passion for webdev, feels like many would prefer to work in fields which requires a bit more technical skills than that.

Math is the fundamental building block for doing so many interesting things with programs, so to me every interesting programming job requires boatloads of maths. Sure you can do forms and crud and authorization checks and messaging apps and large distributed systems etc without maths, but that doesn't sound terribly exciting to me.

I used to write device drivers, advanced math never came up. I did devops and wrote applications still no advanced math.

Like I enjoy the fact I know calc but I’m not about to oversell it’s usefulness for most programming. Math is not the fundamental building block of software imho, logic is.

You make it sound as if being formally taught somehow precludes this.

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