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Comment by _nist | Hacker News Reader

>> I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned.

Does this mean that there will be more code I have to fix as a result of my CS degree? I've still got people at my job that write loops with no early exit when they are searching. I learned that as a freshman. They write code that iterates through the entirety of arrays, constantly, which is a complete waste most of the time.

Hell, I've got people that justify writing memory intensive code due to the computers abundant memory because they don't even realize that program space is limited by the kernel. I can thank my OS class for that.

The point is, do you want to waste time looking up basic stuff on Google all your life, or do you want to get hands on, spend time studying things from a reliable source, and not have to look up things online and write crappy code just to get by?

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Your argument is absurd because you are making a lot of incorrect assumptions.

I don't spend all my time looking up stuff on google, I've learned the examples you've given and I don't write crappy code.

In my experience, I write better code than most CS majors I've worked with. It may be that in very few and far between instances, a CS major will have some knowledge that would have helped me, but it is definitely not a daily, weekly or even monthly occurrence.

How is my argument absurd? I fail to see how writing code with early exits and having a basic understanding of process memory space, which I've demonstrated on the basis of things people, that don't have CS degrees, have said and done at my work absurd?

What I don't get is why so many people stereotype college as useless because they think you're in a lecture hall scribbling down whatever the professor says and that's it. How such a notion came to be and how people seem to forget exercises, labs, and class projects is very much beyond me.

It depends on what kind of job you want, I suppose. If you want to work on the more esoteric aspects of technology (OS or Database development) then your CS degree will be more relevant than if you want to make end-user-facing applications. Application development in the industry is far more about the product than it is about the technology.

As far as your experience with your less educated coworkers, if you look around you will find bad programmers of all backgrounds. You will find great programmers of all backgrounds. It's a fair question to ask if college is worth the incredible cost.

Considering the fact that if you apply for scholarships, get good grades is high school and good ACT/SAT scores, and you can get funding from the government, college can be relatively inexpensive. I went to a private school with comparable tuition to MIT and I walked out with only around 50k in debt. If I went to a public university, it would have been much less. So, I have about as much debt as this company took to train a bunch of high schoolers.

Although I agree that college costs are high, they aren't insurmountable if you apply for scholarships, government funding (FASA), and you do well in school or sports.

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