Comment by robfitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robfitz | Hacker News Reader

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On the one hand, I haven't used a resume since my college internships (5 years founding startups, then freelancing through the network built up during the startups).

On the other, I still think it's worth the time. Being forced to write big, gnarly programs (like a compiler or collaborative text editor or puzzle AI) will give you experience that you'll never get from tutorials online about dealing with big, scary codebases. Or working in teams. Or whatever else.

If you learn as you go, each of those problems will get you fired when you hit it, because they're not exactly intuitive to deal with and you won't notice it until shit has already hit the fan.

There's not a 1:1 mapping between academic and real world problems, but I guess I'm saying it's still going to help. It also puts some extra items in your toolbox in case you want to do something other than vanilla web dev.

That being said, I have no way of evaluating the financial or chronological opportunity costs, as those are unique to you. It also depends how keen you are to get involved w/ your professors and students.

Plus, universities are where co-founders live!

You commented before my edit, but everything you've said is still very relevant. Thanks.

The thing about the big, gnarly programs thing is that I don't think that's what happens at our CS department. The older kids in the department always talk about how the teachers can't actually code too far beyond the level required to teach the intro classes because the focus in the higher level classes is not on programming but on abstraction and theory.

I once brought a web app to my CS advisor that I'd spent a great deal of time on, testing over and over again and polishing it so that anyone who saw it would recognize it not as some sketchy work in progress but something that could actually be a finished project. His response? "I don't know anything about this kind of programming." Not "what sorts of challenges did you face?" or "what are your next steps, what are you planning on doing from here?", just that comment, some disinterested staring, and "this looks nice." I was later told by a senior in the program that any other professor would only be less interested.

I want to build things that people actually use, and that really doesn't seem to be the focus of the program. At all.

You seem to have a misunderstanding about what an undergrad CS degree is about. It's not vocational training. If you want that, you can probably find something better at a community college.

If you want to "build things that people actually use," do it. No one's stopping you, and there's not a college major for that - you just do it. Most bright CS majors learn programming on their own time. Completing a CS degree will give you skills and knowledge that will help with your goal but building web apps is not the focus and it's not supposed to be.

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