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Comment by jchrisa | Hacker News Reader

Really smart hackers should go to college, if they want to, but it is hard to find a college that won't be boring for them. There are a few out there, usually small. Don't study computers, it's a waste of time, you already know them. Study something else, like Art or History or Philosophy. Keep hacking on the side (because you can't help it, you're a hacker).

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I agree on not studying computers. Happily, despite the odd name, Computer Science isn't actually about computers. Or a science. Even if you "know computers" chances are you don't know computer science. And if you do there's always abstract mathematics :).

Also, I think the advice to go to a small college is exactly backwards. If you're really smart and can teach yourself, go to a large research university. Compared to little colleges, these universities focus quite a bit more on novel research and less on teaching students. The professors are chosen on their aptitude in the field, not as teachers. So you get to work on ground-breaking stuff with brilliant people, but have less instructional support. This is a great compromise if you are something of an autodidact.

After all, the classes are not the most important thing you should get out of a university education. It's working with other extremely smart people, doing novel and nontrivial research and being able to pursue very specialized and advanced topics of interest. And the classes that are the most important--the most advanced ones, naturally--are the sort that aren't offered at little colleges anyhow. For example, I'm going to take a class on program synthesis next semester; I don't think I'd have that same option at a small college, and it's certainly a very exciting topic!

Besides, an engineering, mathematics or CS program at a good research university is more than challenging enough for anyone. This sort of education is a great complement to the average hacker--it ensures you have breadth even in topics you don't like (CPU design may be icky, but I had to learn the basics all the same :P), gives you depth in the subjects you do like and supplies a very helpful sort of systematic organization. It really helps draw connections between otherwise disparate areas of study and gives you a good base to pursue more advanced interests.

I agree completely. The truth is that there are simply techniques that have been finely crafted over decades that you are simply unlikely to discover from your own hacking. There are algorithms that are subtle and the product of pure academic research. For example, a self-taught hacker probably wouldn't even know that there are methods to build a self-balancing binary tree. This is because, in the course of your own hacking projects, you may never encounter datasets that are large enough and ill-conditioned enough for it to matter whether you used a self-balancing node insert algorithm or the standard algorithm that any clever highschool student could roll up. How many self-taught guys can code quickly and even bug-free, yet don't know that there are better algorithms for sorting than bubble-sort? These are the type of things that someone with a formal education would be aware of, even if they couldn't code the algorithms themselves or very well.

I used to think that just being a good hacker was all it took to be a good developer but the fact is that you don't know what you don't know. There are things that you are forced to learn in academic courses that you may not have chosen on your own but which end up being valuable in unpredictable ways.

This comment shouldn't be in the gray. We, as hackers, shouldn't place as much importance as we do in our college diplomas. Very few of use are computer scientists. Very few of us learned as much in 4 years as you did at your first startup (or even hacking on the side, for that matter)

It's one thing to say that we shouldn't place so much importance in diplomas in the context of hiring. It's quite another thing to claim that "really smart hackers" will be bored if they take Computer Science at MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford, etc.

I actually sort of followed this advice. When I started college, I was working towards a CS degree. I already knew as much programming as I wanted to learn and quickly got bored with it. Some friends recommended I switch majors to something I didn't know and actually still had an interest in learning. So I switched to networking. Now I'm employed in information security and I keep my coding only on projects I want to work on.

It's actually sound advice (and like all advice, you should think it through fully), if you know something already why pay $80k to get a piece of paper to prove it? Many people are employed in jobs they know but didn't major in.

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