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Comment by __abc | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't necessarily hold true for technology.

In fact, the longer in the field the the more dated the education becomes. Our field is changing and knowledge is turning over so fast that a ten year old degree is borderline irrelevant vs someone who has experience in "today's technologies, methodologies, etc".

There are fundamentals which hold true from college, but a large majority of the technologies, techniques, etc are no longer relevant.

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I completely agree. The issue is that in order to get a decent paying job you either need a lot of experience or a college degree (most of the time you need both). From my experience its just the way it is.

If you drop out of college for a startup you will have some experience but not necessarily the kind employers are looking for or enough of it.

This would be true if you got a degree in FORTRAN or Java 1.5 (and if you did, then that's a bummer!) instead of Computer Science. The vast majority of things I learned with a computer science degree are language-agnostic, and the only reason we used any language at all was because pseudocode is hard to compile.

Agreed. For me, it was a big shift at first transitioning from a more vocational mindset (learning the language/framework of the day) to the theoretical (design patterns, paradigms, architecture).

As an aside, just got through Martin Fowler's musing on architecture (http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/). Highly recommended!

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