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Comment by suresk | Hacker News Reader

I cringe a little bit in some of these education threads. On one hand, students who chose to major in something that isn't very marketable right now are lambasted for making a poor decision based on what sounds interesting to them, and they get blame heaped on them for being in debt and having nothing to show for it. On the other hand, when people choose CS - a field that has very good earning prospects right now - their intentions are immediately questioned and we ask "Are they just doing it for the money?"

It must kind of suck to be someone entering college right now without natural interest for and aptitude in a STEM field.

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What's wrong with people choosing CS for the money? The more people become literate in our field, the better off we are as a society, probably.

While that's true, I feel like there's going to be plenty of awful programmers in the group that's just in it for the money (although that's not to say there won't be passionate programmers who are also awful - they're just more likely to want to improve themselves).

With much of CS and programming being so collaborative, those that just don't have the talent or the heart for it generally cause more hassle and grief for the rest of us.

Of course, I'm also not assuming that I'm not an awful programmer myself, but I really do love CS and try to improve myself all the time.

CS weeds out the bad programmers so they never graduate. If you can pass Stanford's CS program you are probably pretty smart.

This is totally untrue.

Why's that? Do you have any information to back this up? I'd be interested in that.

Because you're making a fallacious assumption with Computer Science in relation to programming/building webapps, just like many others here. You're assuming just because one is good at CS, he/she must be a good programmer.

Not necessarily smart but more likely to be at least an adequate developer

Getting a CS degree isn't easy - most of the people who lack the interest or intellect for it wash out before too long. I started going back for a CS degree about a year ago, and quickly found this out when I saw people retaking a 2000 level class and still failing to grasp the mechanics of function calls or basic data types.

Sure, there are some people who finish through sheer bullheadedness and others who stop caring after they graduate, but I still think that if you manage to make it through a 4 year CS program (especially if it is at a place like Stanford), there is a pretty good chance you have potential to become a useful programmer.

I'd argue that one reason we end up with CS graduates who don't end up becoming very useful is that our industry in general isn't that great at mentoring, and there are a lot of things you need to know to be a decent programmer that aren't always taught (or taught very well) in college. Good mentors in the first few years that someone is developing professionally can make a huge impact, and we should figure out a way for this to happen more often.

I guess it depends on the person, but I think, many of such people will become bored and unhappy after some time.

I curse the day I chose computer science! If only I was a liberal arts major, my life would be carefree and happy! Woe is me, being able to quit a job on a whim and get a six-figure salary elsewhere a whole week later!

You'd be surprised how adaptable people can be. It wasn't long ago that most of us spent our days finding and growing food. Compared to the skill change in the agriculture to industry transition, learning about computation isn't a big deal.

Not all people like sitting in front of a computer for many hours a day. If you don't like it, its unlikely you'll be good at the job in which case getting a new job is not guaranteed.

Most entry-level jobs involve "sitting in front of a computer for many hours a day".

The difference, for programmers, is that they get to do interesting stuff with those machines.

Yea, but its not what a lot of people like and what seems interesting to us is not necessarily interesting to them. Lot of people prefer interacting with other people than sitting in front of a machine all day.

As I said, it depends on the person. Personally, I can't imagine myself happy as a lawyer or financial consultant for instance, no matter how much money I'd make.

I think people who are entering college with the mindset that a degree is simply an accolade to garner large sums of money are misunderstanding the principal of college and higher-education learning. You go to college because you're interested in something enough to pursue a greater understanding of it. The degree is simply a token that you're not full of shit. So whether you're complaining about student debt or validating your academic decisions with shallow dreams of making six-figures, you're in for a pretty boring 4+ years of passionless note-taking and test-taking (fine by me).

> You go to college because you're interested in something enough to pursue a greater understanding of it.

Except you can already learn as much as you want, for free, on your own time, without limit, forever, without having to spend the money & extra time costs of college. It's like we live in a world with bodies and gravity and yet folks need to drive to a gym where they buy an expensive membership just so they can exercise their muscles and lungs. It's ludicrous from a certain point of view.

Pro-tip to all 18-somethings that are considering going to college: you can buy all those college textbooks, or equivalent, directly, without going to university. Even better, you can get the same instructional material and references cheaper or even free. But then you would already know that IF you truly had a thirst for knowledge and greater understanding. You already would have been self-educating long before reaching 18. (Unless your parents held you back, horrible family life, locked in a box, etc. all the reasonable exceptional cases -- but even then there is almost always a way to learn and gain greater understanding, without spending the big bucks.)

And I love college in many ways. But, "Death to college!" Let's keep the best parts and then trash or fix the rest.

That's one of the things to do in college. Gaining a shiny degree that will help you get a better job is another. Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.

There are many reasons to go to college. Learning interesting stuff is just one of them.

> Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.

I predict the Internet will increasingly replace this traditional function of the college experience. And do it for, essentially, just the cost of Internet access service each month. Yes we'll have to use a web browser and click on the right links to the right sites, chat in topic-oriented forums, and then go do "meetups" in meatspace (Dr. Evil saying "lasers") to meet them face-to-face, become friends, learn from each other, collaborate together, micro-projects, trial projects, earn F2F credibility, put things up on our online portfolios, become ambiant, self-promote, self-educate, iterate, rinse, repeat. Goodbye 4-6 years of grinding and $100K in student debt.

I agree that traditionally going to college was a great way to meet people who've been filtered for certain qualities. But this tradition comes from an era when the Internet didn't exist. Computers didn't exist. Even radios and telephony didn't exist for the earliest periods in which universities existed and operated. But we have all that stuff now. We have frickin FaceTime and Skype and Google Hangouts and Reddit and email mailing lists, oh my! Let's all get to meeting each other, and filtering for the qualities we want, while bypassing that big honkin expensive middleman industry. I'm also seeing this trend with hackerspaces and makerspaces. Meetup.com is a big enabler.

The quantity and quality of programming courses available online right now - completely free of charge - is astounding to me. I taught myself to program in high school in the mid-to-late 90's, and while there was a ton of information available online even then, I still kind of wish stuff like Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, iTunes University and MIT OCW were available back then.

Still, I think the social aspects of college are hard to fully replicate online. For many people, interactions on places like Reddit, mailing lists, etc are somewhat too anonymous and random, while things like Skype and FaceTime are more for people who are already familiar with each other.

I do think the Internet has huge potential to fundamentally change the way we obtain education. It certainly has fundamentally changed the way we obtain information, but it hasn't changed the way we get marketplace-accepted education yet. I think that is coming.

agree on all your points. well said.

Agreement. My "college friends" have all but disconnected, even though we are still nominally linked via Facebook(which arrived on campus around our second year). We've all ended up going in mostly unrelated directions. In the meantime, the internet has done unimaginable things for both my career and social life.

For help and research, there are online references, online discussions, online correspondence...even if it's all "informal" and done in an IRC channel or something, it's all out there and you can, potentially, spend 24 hours a day immersed in a subject.

And in making more connections, there's an odd feedback loop between the local gatherings and the online stuff. It can start at either end, but the two complement each other well by presenting different situations.

>"Are they just doing it for the money?"

It's not that big a deal. If they just want the money but lack the aptitude, CS tends to weed them out pretty quickly.

>It must kind of suck to be someone entering college right now without natural interest for and aptitude in a STEM field.

Well, yeah, it always sucks to lack marketable skills. I guess it sucks even worse when people used to be able to cover up this lack of skill with an easy, fluff college degree, but suddenly that won't work.

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