CS Degree Won’t Make You A Great Engineer, Your First Job Will

I had to smile at old timer = > 4 years - the best one I heard was from one of our DBA's at BT oh my first boss was "dijkstra"

'The advantage of joining Google/Facebook/Twitter for 2-3 years is that you’ll be encouraged to develop more reliable systems, and learn how to build things which are designed for scale from the beginning.'

He should say it's good to have a job working on scalable, reliable systems from the beginning. It's kind of ridiculous that he's implying google/facebook/twitter are the main ones working on that. I guess every other company in the world designs their code to work in a single python process...maybe SQLite as the backend right?

Now wouldn't it be nice if colleges told you this before taking your money, instead of cheerfully telling would-be programmers that a comp-sci diploma is all they need.

It's like any job. The theoretical way to most securely cross a valley is to fill it with earth. The typical real world way is to make a bridge.

I think it's worth saying that a CS degree won't do a whole lot for you practically if you're not going into theory. At least, that's what I've noticed over the last 3.5 years... I've learned a lot, sure, but a small fraction will follow me into the real world.

Nice try, Google recruiters.