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Comment by cultofmetatron | Hacker News Reader

CTO of a startup. built the entire cloud backend and added features as a sole backend dev for the first 3 years. Before that I worked for several years in SF as a developer working all the way from a self taught junior to senior engineer to now a CTO with 4 engineers working with me towards out series A.

Some of the best engineers I know don't even have a college degree.

with that in mind, It fills me with general revulsion at the idea that "overlooking credentialism as long as they can do the job to a high standard" is "concerning." I want new engineers to have access to the same Ladder I had access to when I was up and comming.

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A degree used to be a class distinction, a signal that someone belonged to the affluent in-group. The same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society. We were never supposed to be invited to the club, but we snuck in because they were desperate for skilled labor.

> same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy. It's all despair at the perceived loss of status in society

Strongly disagree. I say this as someone who went to a state school and didn’t start reading literature until well after college.

The classics are classics for good reason. Even if one can’t learn to appreciate them, they’re critical for understanding entire epochs of political thought and history. It would be like trying to navigate modern retail politics while ignoring memes.

Well I am pretty much you but maybe several years junior. I went to a state school, was obsessively focused only on my field of study, and scoffed at the idea of exploring anything else (save for some Jung and Nietzsche).

But as I’m “aging” into the real world after grad school, I’ve similarly realized how silly it was to turn my head to literature.

Curious if you’d be willing to recommend a classic, or share the genres that you’ve been enjoying.

I don't understand the "silly" part. Classic lit is amazing and also good for you. I am a late comer to it as well and I'm so glad that I have discovered it. I am finishing Ulysses now and it absolutely rocks.

I realize I mistyped, I shouldn’t have said “turn my head to” I mean “ignore” but was being verbose.

> The classics are classics for good reason.

Yes. They reflected the culture of the ruling strata in their contemporary periods. That's why they are classics. The rest of the society (~90%) had no means to do any literature. That's why the classics were out of touch with their own times - which made Dickens such a difference by the way -, and the upper strata that was educated on them up until today are still out of touch with their own societies.

Regular society had oral traditions, folk tails, stories and songs.

Yep. Unfortunately, they werent the ones that became 'classics'. Even worse, they were hardly documented and a lot of them were lost. That's what I meant - even the elite class were into regular songs for regular fun - its 100% certain that the songs that were being played in the bars that Karl Marx and his friends went through in their famous London pub crawl, weren't playing any classical music...

I strongly disagree agree with the classics having any cultural relevance outside of the elite class. It entirely dismisses the bulk of all media commonly enjoyed by people in the period, which has more significance to society and its politics. Focusing on the classics filters everything through the point of view of the people in power, which is an incredibly poor way of understanding the world.

Besides the classics were elite fashion. Like speaking French or fencing. They were a means to distinguish class, with hard to access knowledge and habits. It wasn't because these things were good, it was because the average person could not easily attain access to them.

The great books canon was partly constructed retroactively by people with agendas about what civilization meant. A real collection of classics would have much more folk stories, common herioc figures and fantasies.

As someone who got a liberal arts degree and is now a self-taught designer-developer in tech, the degree isn't as important as the ability to know how to learn, think for yourself, and teach yourself, something that college greatly reinforces. That being said, after working with many developers with and without degrees, a lot of you need to read more books and learn how to write. If you can teach yourself how to code, you can teach yourself how to communicate effectively and understand symbolism.

> A degree used to be a class distinction, a signal that someone belonged to the affluent in-group.

While I understand and agree to a certain degree, (and as a person with degree) it still fills me with dread where I work with senior developers who don't have a clue what is complexity of their algorithms or lack basic problem solving skills that a degree would instill in them. People can absolutely learn on the job but degree would still give me an idea of what I can expect from given person.

As a side note, LLMs are an equalizer that makes degrees less relevant when near keyboard; still, I want to talk to people that understand the concepts they're operating with when afk

Unfortunately I have seen just as many helpless credentialed engineers. I really think it's a matter of character.

> The same goes for the literary canon that college professors claim as a requirement for real literacy.

Reading a canonical set of old stories gives you shared experience with readers across continents and centuries and civilizations and class and complexion. It's not inclusive of everybody, but its a broader than just the "affluent in-group" it might currently include.

That was a long time ago. The value of a degree for the last fifty years or so, outside of specific technical areas like medicine, was that you could show a prospective employer you were able to carry a long project to completion.

For another perspective, club members must be interested in forming a club for the benefit of the club. Increasingly we get people interested in putting themselves first and screwing over others.

Or the club opened up a lower floor run by interest accruing servicers, who promised the same product with a pay later model.

On the other hand, I know plenty of devs with a degree who are not very good. So should we conclude that have a degree is not very correlated with dev skill?

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