Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_miller | Hacker News Reader

> "[Top schools] don’t make you a great UX designer or programmer."

I've found this statement to be false, at least at my alma mater(UT Austin). My Honors OS class unquestionably made me a better programmer, teaching me about how programs I wrote interacted with the OS to a very deep level. My algorithms class gave me an extremely deep understanding of how algorithms+data structures worked, giving me a better intuition as to what tools to use when confronted with a problem. My HCI class made me acutely aware of how users interact with software.

I'll agree that the purpose of universities is not vocational. Without a doubt, a lot of classes I've taken will have absolutely no impact on my career (unless Buddhist Art becomes an in-demand field!). But a good school gives students the opportunity to gain applicable skills that are needed in the world.

If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer. You can't do well in the class unless you truly understand code. Using a coarse grained filter of "Harvard University" is bad, but using a "Passed CS50 with an 'A'" filter is a very good metric to use.

What kind of intuition did you get from algorithms class? What's an example of the kind of intuition you feel like you got that you wouldn't have gotten on-the-job?

I don't believe there's any intuition I got from my algorithms class that couldn't be gained on the job. However, the class does provide intuition in an accelerated manner, and it proves to employers that I have the intuition. Some examples off the top of my head:

- Memoization / DP

- Divide and conquer

- Using a bounded approximate algorithm in place of an exponential one for NP complete problems

I feel like it would have taken me a lot of time to internalize those types of algorithms on the job, but seeing them presented in my algorithms class made it easy.

Ok, actually, those first two do sound like things I'd have learned more effectively in a classroom. Point conceded.

i would not hire anyone who does not know about these sorts of basic algorithm and how/what they are used for - whether they learnt it themselves, or via tiertiary education is irrelevant. Unfortuantely, its common to use a good school as a proxy for such knowledge, but finding out later that the employee lack such knowledge could be costly. Learning what i would consider "basic" things on the job is both wrong and bad for business!

There is a line to be drawn somewhere tho - what is considered basic isn't basic to some. I would draw it where 'basic' means you could have learnt it in a 3 year undergrad CS course - essentially what is covered in the text http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/ would be all i need from a grad, and domain specific stuff can be trained on the job.

I was just discussing this with some coworkers the other day, and it resonated because later that afternoon I read the "farewell to bioinformatics" post [0].

In my experience, people who don't have a formal computer science education, who haven't taken any classes (or at least worked through the material in their own time) in algorithms or data structures, will muddle through and _will get things done_. They may also shrug their shoulders when it comes time to scale up their dataset input and their code takes 6 days instead of 6 minutes.

When the person lacking this education finds himself in a three- or four-level deep "for (...) { for (...) { for (...) { ... } } }" structure, (I guess) he feels mildly uncomfortable and thinks "yeah this is going to take a long time".

When the person with this education finds himself there, he has at his (I hate to use the word, but: intuitive) disposal some ideas for reducing some of the necessary computation ("I can keep a min-heap instead of scanning the list to find the minimum every time."). He has a toolbox of algorithmic knowledge that helps him without him consciously knowing about it. Some people reduce the complexity as much as they can and are still not satisfied, causing them to restructure the larger program or try to invent a new algorithm for this particular problem.

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5123022

> If someone got an 'A' in UT Austin's honors OS class, I wouldn't even hesitate to interview them. It's a very good proxy for a good programmer.

Ihave no idea if UT Austin is a good comp sci program or if you're being sarcastic. This is the first I've heard of it.

Assuming you're being serious, then Joel Spolsky mentioned something similar in one of the stackoverflow podcasts.

His point was that a "top" school wouldn't get you hired directly but it would get you interviewed before someone else all other things being equal.

I was not being sarcastic. If you buy ranking metrics, UT Austin has a top 10 CS program [1]. We have some of the best Systems researchers in the country [2], a professor from our dept won the Turing Award in 2007 [3], and Bill Gates + Michael Dell just donated a new CS building for our campus [4].

[1] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

[2] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/lasr/

[3] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/emerson_1671460.cfm

[4] http://apps.cs.utexas.edu/goto_gdc/

Ssshh, don't tell anyone that UT Austin is a top 10 CS program :-)

I would strongly encourage any potential competitor to never recruit from UT Austin (or any UC school, U of Washington, UWisc Madison, Waterloo, etc...). Oh, and amongst Ivy League schools please be sure never to recruit from Brown.

Maybe it's due to the fact I graduated from the UT system, but I thought it was well known that UT Austin had a top notch CS program.

Well for my part it's probably because I'm Canadian and don't need to know this type of knowledge:)

Though judging by the negative votes on my post I guess I'm being punished for my ignorance.

I thought I made a decent contribution to back up the original posters claim. I guess its true that no good dead goes unpunished:)

Sorry to hear about the response. Hopefully I didn't come off as being negative. I thought maybe I was learning something as well. Different people have different experiences. I myself don't know much about Canada except that it appears to be a beautiful place I want to visit some day.

I think it's probably if you go to a top 10 school, you know of the other top 10 schools for your program. As a CompSci undergrad at Georgia Tech I knew of UT, etc. Even if you don't go there for undergrad, there's still a possibility of going there for post-grad and people talk.

Plus, you had dijkstra.

> Ihave no idea if UT Austin is a good comp sci program or if you're being sarcastic. This is the first I've heard of it.

UT Austin actually does have a wonderful CS program.* The reason you likely haven't heard about it is that it is notoriously difficult for out-of-state students in the US to get into UT Austin, so you don't have as diverse a student body (geographically speaking) as you do at many other top schools. Less than 10% of undergrads are not Texans.

* I didn't go there myself, but I've worked with people who did, and they are top-notch.

I feel the same way about discrete math and numerical analysis (a mix of calc 2 and algorithms). These are the first things I look for on a transcript.

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