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Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

As a self-taught developer myself, I too am lacking in these areas and to be quite honest, I think the best way is to continue to self-learn the areas you believe you are lacking in. I've been doing courses over at Udemy myself to learn about algorithms, structuring data and other things. You should go browse the courses over there, you might find something that'll help you out like it did for me.

The problem with studying a CS degree is you're made to learn a lot of what I deem to be useless information. I have friends who have undertaken CS degrees and the general consensus is they learned a lot more when they left university and are quite envious of the fact I took a shortcut in path to employment without any kind of student loan debt. I work with people with degrees mostly and I feel as though I am on the same playing field as everyone else.

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It's true that CS is more theoretical and not that useful for the majority of paid programming work out there. However you can go get a job anywhere building CRUD apps and acquire the knowledge to build a Rails app or whatever is the flavor of the day, but finding a job where you can, for example, build a compiler is rare. In a good CS program you get to do dozens of such projects from implementing a ray tracer to a network stack to hand optimizing decompiled assembly.

Aside from feeding your curiosity, the practical advantage of a CS degree is that it gives you the lay of the land of computation in general, so that if you are lucky enough to work on something novel and challenging that requires more advanced data structures or algorithms then you'll at least know where to start researching. Without CS you won't know what you don't know and so you are likely to miss entire avenues of exploration.

The idea that you will learn more in industry than in a CS degree only applies if A) you are in a shitty CS program or B) you aren't trying hard enough to learn anything. If you are so eager to get out into the real world, do a startup in your spare time—you'll never have as much spare time available for projects as in college.

Granted the ever increasingly extreme expense of college throws a major wet towel over the whole value proposition, but let's not conflate that with the unique learning opportunity that it represents.

"The idea that you will learn more in industry than in a CS degree only applies if A) you are in a shitty CS program or B) you aren't trying hard enough to learn anything."

Disagree. If you learn more in 3 years of college than you do 3 years on the job, you are a shitty employee.

You get out of college what you put in. Businesses have no interest in your intellectual growth, your professors (at least some of them) definitely do if you do.

This comment cannot be repeated enough. You can graduate with a high GPA from a respected CS program and still be able to do next to nothing. You have to choose to learn and being in college does not do that for you.

Note: my hindsight is 20/20

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