http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595594
What is the highest educational qualification that you have completed (i.e., met all requirements and passed)? As different countries and schools use different names for similar qualifications, I've attempted to be generic. Please use the closest match for your response.
My first response was that the key is to do it better, which he acknowledged. The second was that if I was the founder of Google standing in front of him 10 years ago, telling him that I was going to create "another search engine", he would have asked me exactly the same question. His response was: "Well, wasn't that guy working on his doctorate?"
My response was "and...?" He looked at me like I was an idiot. What I should have said was "Sure, doctorates are great and I could get one, but I don't want one. I'd rather spend my time creating wealth than creating a piece of paper that will make me more qualified to create wealth for someone else." Apparently "that Google guy" felt the same way, only it took him longer to make that decision. As an aside, my Bachelor's degree was one of the best investments of my life, so I'm not arguing against formal education here.
He also derided my location as if some guy from a small town in Ohio couldn't build anything worthwhile. Yes, I know pg's thoughts on location and there is some merit to that, but the assertion he made is a bit too over the top for me.
> He also derided my location as if some guy from a small town in Ohio couldn't build anything worthwhile. Yes, I know pg's thoughts on location and there is some merit to that, but the assertion he made is a bit too over the top for me.
Amen.
No. Wrong side. ;)
However, Larry Page got enormous benefits from his PhD: he met Sergey; he had connection with Andy Bechtolsheim; great people around him; and Stanford supported his patent (they own it). Actually, these are mainly contacts acquired through Stanford (similar to "location"), not of a PhD program itself. I don't recall Larry learning anything from doing a PhD itself, as opposed to doing the work independently.
BTW: I had a very critical advisor like that, and it was really unpleasant. Not everything he said was helpful or relevant - but some were. And at the end, I was rightfully grateful - and also rightfully annoyed. I think seeing criticism as impersonal, specific and temporary is helpful; as well as responding only to the factual denotations, not connotations (including attitude and tone); and responding without connotations myself.
Seeing as one major focus of a PhD is to learn to do independent research, this statement is essentially vacuous. It also disregards the influence on his thinking process from his advisor (Winograd) and fellow graduate students.
The distinction is not essentially vacuous: it's possible for the learning of "how to do independent research" to be itself largely independent, e.g. Edison and Einstein.
I said I don't recall Larry talking about this anywhere - can you show where he does? Specifically, about how doing the PhD helped this specific person to learn to do independent research. I'm interested in this.
Maybe a nod is encouragement, but it sounds like Larry had decided to do it anyway - so the statement reads as an absence of discouragement.
On reflection, I think we mean the same thing, your "learned a lot from his advisor and other graduate students", and my "great people around him". There's a question of what a PhD is. It could be the independent work; the academic justification and presentation in terms of literature; the discussions with smart, interested people. (btw I've been doing one for a few years now).
I think our disagreement is about our definitions.
It was a response to my assertion that his argument would have been wrong if I were Larry and it were 10 years ago. Essentially he was saying: "You can't compare you and Larry because he's smarter than you." That may be true, but people dumber than me have created successful companies...I think.
>>However, Larry Page got enormous benefits from his PhD
True, but that wasn't the point he was making.
>>BTW: I had a very critical advisor like that, and it was really unpleasant. Not everything he said was helpful or relevant - but some were. And at the end, I was rightfully grateful - and also rightfully annoyed.
I responded to his (slightly drunken) derision very positively and always had a fantastic comeback, except for the "and...?" response. I was actually very appreciative of his criticism and challenging posture because most people just shine you on when they hear your pitch and tell you everything sounds fantastic. In the end, I won him over and he said he would help me as long as I got a few other influential people on board.
Even though I think he's a bit narrow minded, I liked his no-bullshit attitude and honesty. As I said, I genuinely thanked him for challenging me and giving me the opportunity to change his mind rather than just blow me off.
BTW: my advisor was slightly drunk too. in vino veritas (in wine truth is)... to a point.
* Still in HS
* Still in College
* Still in PhD program
to help weed those out.
(Dropping out of PhD = walking away with a Masters in some places, but not all; I had my Master's degrees before I started the PhD.)
I'll match that against anyone's degrees (including my own).
1 million lines of code written and deployed into production.
But now that you mentioned it, I'll work on putting up some of my favorites that I own. Stay tuned...
Think about it. In order to write 300 good lines of code, you probably wrote 1,000 lines of code before refactoring. Same thing, just that someone else put in all the refactorable lines before you got there.
I brought this up to show that the I have received 10x the education from the code I have written professionally than from all my formal schooling.
I realize as well as anyone here that the best code usually have less lines. At least mine does. But "years of experience" has less meaning, believe me. So do title, company, number of jobs, number of customers, etc., etc., etc.
Just like in basketball, there is no substitute for height, in programming, there is no substitute for actually having written code.
I realize "Lines of Code" isn't a great metric, but it's probably the best to quickly communicate my point.
Spending a few months working on hard problems without a functional debugger can compleatly change how you aproach programming. But, so does finaly understanding how to use a debugger. Spending a few weeks reading other peoples code to document a working system was also an incredably valuable experence.
PS: The closest thing to a single nuber I can think of is "how many diffrent months of experence do you have?"
100+ million users have utilized code that I've written.
The Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.) degree is an applied doctorate on the same level as (in alphabetical order) the D.B.A. (Doctor of Business Administration), D.D.S. (Doctor of Dental Surgery), D.Div. (Doctor of Divinity), D.M. (Doctor of Ministry), D.M.F.T. (Doctor of Marriage and Family Therapy), N.D. (Doctor of Naturopathy), D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathy), D.P.M. (Doctor of Podiatric Medicine), D.R.E. (Doctor of Religious Education), D.S.M. (Doctor of Sacred Music), D.S.W. (Doctor of Social Work), D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine), Ed.D. (Doctor of Education), M.D. (Doctor of Medicine), O.D. (Dr of Optometry) and other applied or specialty doctoral degrees. Most of these degrees do not require either a master's level thesis or a doctoral dissertation.
Guess it depends on your definition of 'sacred'...
Additionally, consider the LL.M. degree. It further complicates things because it is awarded after the J.D.
Thanks to the popularity of physical injury or wrongful death lawsuits, the J.D. will be with you soon regardless of who else is around when the bus hits you.
But ethical rules are questionable as to whether you can call yourself a "doctor," because it's potentially misleading. So US lawyers are in the strange position of having doctorates, but being unable to say so.
Here's some more info: http://abajournal.com/magazine/lawyers_are_doctors_too/
Now, on to grad school.
Its interesting to see the number of PhD's here. Always considered doing one but was put off when told that I had to defend my PhD 4-5 times a year and the PhD I was offered sounded very interesting but not quite my cup of tea (it was Planning in AI)
For the PhD's out there, was the experience worth while? Did you enjoy it?
It may not have been worthwhile in terms of career benefit (jury is still out). I don't want to be an academic, though I may follow that trajectory a few more years if the market stays bad. I may be able to spin off a research related startup, but that isn't guaranteed yet.
Regarding opportunity costs, I definitely missed out on getting into finance during the bubble.
(Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a python/c++ dev with solid quantitative skills, feel free to contact me.)
I tried to avoid getting my high school diploma (skipped my graduation), but they mailed it to me.
I tried to avoid getting my college diploma (skipped my graduation) but they mailed it to me.
I've got to come up with better tactics to avoid credentials...
You do, however, manage to get out of spending an afternoon wearing robes and a squareish hat.
It is a college town, though.
More info (french) : http://www.cmaisonneuve.qc.ca/iti/aec_web-commerce/aec_web-c...
bachelor's: in the top 75%
master's: in the top 33%
doctorate: in the top 10%
Might finish one day, just because I don't like having things unfinished.
I've actually done all bar a few units of a Bachelor's Degree (Engineering), but quit and went travelling for a few years instead
15 years kicking ass (built my first website when Mosaic ruled the roost).
Greater than any other "qualification...."
;)
Granted, it would have been better to provide some prove as to why it is notable that I personally do not have a college degree, but being here at HN counts for something.
But yeah, I have probably taught myself 6 programming languages (PHP, Ruby, Java, Python, Javascript, Perl, and some software specific programming tools like Lawson Process Flow, TSQL, etc). I have over 10 years of tech / business experience, own 2 retail clothing stores, took statzen.com to TechCrunch50 DemoPit last year, am about to launch http://gpsaAssassins.com, yada yada.
I was going to go back and finish my BS, but something better keeps coming along. Now I am at a point where it doesn't seem worth it. So I am thinking I may one day clep out of a much of stuff and go get my MBA. Of course, by the time I have the time to go back to school the MBA probably won't seem worth it either.
So, hopefully that adds a little more to the conversation. (Better late than never)
I think in the long run it wont matter what level of education I've "completed", I'm always going to be learning and I'm always going to try to be good at what I do. Taking classes might help me one day, you never know.
For what it's worth, I have a PhD and was not a "rich kid" - I was fortunate enough to grow up in the UK at a time when the government gave grants to people who would not otherwise be able to afford a university education (I'm not sure if they still do this - I know a lot has changed).
The fact you can get off paying if you're from low income families I'd bet still deters a lot of people from going to university, who would have otherwise gone which is a shame.
Without their generosity, it would have been very difficult to pay $40k/year to go there.
People compare school vs "not-school" as if the alternative to school is sitting on your butt. In truth, one can accomplish a heck of a lot with that time and money.
It's a hugely personal decision of course.
Give me that time and money now, and I can hopefully accomplish something useful.
Give me that time and money when I was just out of high school, and chances are very good that it would have gone to waste. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life (still don't, but a bit less so than back then), I had no idea how to work hard, and only a vague idea of how the world works. Those are things I started to learn in college.
The opportunity cost goes both ways.
I hear this fallacy a lot.
A lot of people seem to give it a pass and nod along with it, maybe because it makes them feel better or maybe because it seems like the politically correct thing to say in a room full of talented hackers, only some of whom went to college.
While you in no way need to go to college to be a developer, I think people should be highly skeptical of this claim.
Look at the claim this way. Given two people with equal skill and ambition:
* the first one spent four years learning computer science and software engineering in school while hacking
* the second one spent four years hacking
The claim is that those people more or less have the same skill set.
It just seems unlikely that there's "very little" that the computer science program gave to the developer. It certainly doesn't match what I've actually seen in-field.
Of course, I'm biased: I went to school for computer science. Does anyone actually have evidence to support the other side of the argument?
Or is your argument that all people who go to college are "rich and naive kids" as you implied earlier in the thread?
You're exposing a pretty huge chip on your shoulder.
Now if only I could become as classy as you, injecting ad hominem jabs, bitter snark, and class warfare into the argument as a replacement for actually backing up your points.
[edited for wit]
[edit below]
However, as you're egging me on, I will rebut your flimsy argument, the crux of which is this anecdotal beaut:
"It just seems unlikely that there's 'very little' that the computer science program gave to the developer. It certainly doesn't match what I've actually seen in-field."
If that's all you have to lean on, I don't understand how your comment was upvoted so much. Absent in your analysis is a thorough inventory of what college gives you: While it provides new opportunities for learning, it also does not provide things that you get in the working world, such as
* Business sense and professionalism
* Assuming you don't live at home, a sense of independence: Knowing how to take care of yourself at 22 when everyone else is just figuring out is a huge advantage, believe it or not
* Documented experience
* References from others with working-world experience
On the other hand, there are indeed negatives of going to college. To me, the greatest one is the massive time drain: I work in the day, go home, teach myself more, read history, learn chess, and basically provide my own education. This is not by design, but rather, by my nature. It's unfortunate that so many take education to be the exclusive realm of educational institutions.
Sitting through lectures and working to verify for your professors that you are learning, to me, is a waste of time, when I know damn well if I've learned it properly. If I haven't, and it's important, it will show quickly back at work.
Oh, and college costs tens of thousands of dollars.
That was kind of the point. I was trying to be classy, like you.
Perhaps you should take the high road next time and assume that I am just stating my own opinions, not trying to argue with anybody.
I didn't mean to start an argument, I was just responding to your post. You said that a degree in computer science adds nothing to how someone develops software. I replied that this seems false, gave my reasons why, and asked if anyone had evidence to the contrary. You took offense and started flaming.
[yadda yadda yadda ... you insulted my argument then said a bunch of other irrelevant stuff ... yadda yadda yadda]
My argument was short because what you said is prima facie false: you more or less said that years of training in software development adds nothing to one's software development skill set. It doesn't take much to rebut that.
The rest of what you said was all well and good, but you're now attacking a strawman. We're not talking about a cost-benefit analysis of going to college, so your points aren't really germane here. We're talking about your claim that college adds nothing, which you still haven't backed up ... probably because it's a completely untenable position. Four years of anything will add something to your skill set.
But flame on ... I'm done with the thread.
To quote As Good as it Gets
"Last word freak."
That said, I really appreciate all of the other topics I learned in more breadth and/or depth while in college. I learned far more about psychology, linguistics, literature, history, etc., than I would have any time soon on my own. I enjoy reading, and enjoy learning a wide variety of topics, but I tend to hyperfocus on what I feel interested in at the time. I doubt I would have bothered to learn anything about Russian culture or listened to recordings of Jelly Roll Morton if I hadn't been required to for course credit... and I feel better about myself for having learned these things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts
edit:link added
Successful people without college degrees tend to take a few more years to move up the development food chain, they're basically opting to do on-the-job training.
Successful people with college degrees tend to have a stronger foundation in theory, which is useful; whether or not people want to admit it.
I don't believe they have the same skill sets, but they both bring something to the table.
Disclosure: My highest level of education is High School. I dropped out of college in my second semester to go work as a programmer. Over the years, I've hired lots of developers for various companies, and worked with hundreds of developers as well - with and without degrees.
The problem with most self-taught people is that the knowledge is deep, but narrow. To be an excellent, innovative, developer you need breadth in order to be able to consider alternate approaches to a problem, but with sufficient depth in certain key areas to be able to do analysis when necessary.
College provides in 4 years what could otherwise take decades of "on the job" learning.
PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) MD (Doctor of Medicine) JD (Juris Doctor)
I (almost) decided to study law once which is how I know. I was so enamored with Cole Turner (Julian McMahon's character in 'Charmed') I very nearly decided to pursue an online law degree, since Cole was a lawyer. Who knows. Maybe I still will one of these days, but since all my experience is in SQA, it would not be the most logical thing in the world in the long run I don't think.
But anyway, LLD is also another kind of doctorate, along with Ph.D. MD, DDS, DVM, etc.