_nist

> Khan offers a free educational service that is very popular. That is a Good Thing(tm)... PERIOD.

Yes, because when something is popular and free, its got to be good. cough religion anyone cough.

If that is considered to be the measure of quality these days, our society is doomed. Education is an important thing, ignoring it and treating this one man as some "messiah" of education when he clearly introduces wrong and obtrusive concepts for the sake of "getting it out to the masses" is not education.

The loss is that people equate people with a college education with no experience. Which is totally false.

Experience relies heavily on ones own bias judgement. It can also lead to doing things without understanding them (i.e. writing shit code that works vs. writing good and efficient code) and can lead to nasty habits. Experience is also a slow teacher.

College is advantageous is that you are taught why things are by an experienced individual. You are able to gain a fundamental knowledge base and terminology that can be applied rather than wasting time being taught on-the-job. Plus you are taught things that won't and can't work in your field and why. All a person with experience can tell you is that they won't work and give some superficial reason why. Thus, the experienced person opens a book and has to acquire fundamental knowledge that they could have learn in uni.

There is a difference between writing software and engineering software. There really isn't anything wrong with being called a software engineer because it follows basic engineering skills rather well.

I wouldn't say that is anything wrong with your education. It probably has more to do with unemployment, the economy, and outdated/ineffective hiring system. And the fact that people on HN think a formal education is worthless, and damn does that non-logic show.

Hint, if you go on to get a Masters, you'd be able to get into a government research lab with minimal hassle.

> Creating useful one-offs is a long, long way from consistently shipping.

Yes it is. There is a lot of software, consistently shipped, that is shit. And if you honestly think creating one off items is useless, please go down to your local universities research department and tell me why one off items like robots, exoskeletons, autonomous quad copters, that came straight out of the university from the work of students means nothing.

>Software-for-fun, without constraints, is really, really cool, and completely unlike software in the private sector.

Yeah, as if students have all the time in the world to produce software without anything like a budget, or schedule, or progress meetings. Yup, we all take one class a term. That's why it takes us 4-5 years to graduate.

> This is the line that separates a very good, but very green programmer from a guru-level senior.

So, you want senior level, but you're willing to start from scratch by pulling people who have no degrees. How can you have any guarantee of a formal knowledge base? Why the hell would you want to waste time fixing things like style and teaching people software engineering (which isn't only about shipping product that you are so gun-ho about)? You do know software engineering is in most computer science curriculum.

> They will be rough around the edges on the CS side, but that's something you can fix with experience and training.

Something you wouldn't have to do if you pulled college students, like me for example.

> You ship product. You ship it a lot, either on your own, or you do it as part of internships with other companies, or you join active open source projects with strong leadership. You do not learn this from hacking on class projects or assignments.

I fail to see how that makes getting a CS degree worthless. It says that either a lot of junk is put out, or you are in the parcel business. Shipping code is something for product managers and sales people if you're working for a company. The Internet if you aren't. If you think that's what separates the men from the boys, see points 1-3. I wonder why I don't see a lot of books on shipping code when I go on Amazon or to the local book store... I wonder why... I guess we can all just forget about good software if "shipping code" is the grand answer...

Yeah, I've done an internship with a company and guess what? There are people without CS degrees that are commercially certified in the languages they develop in and suck. The code they ship is buggy with hardly any input validation and doesn't work according to customer requirements. There are people that don't even know OOP concepts, or even basic design patterns. They don't produce any UML diagrams because they use their own ass backwards design notation and they don't have a consistent development methodology.

> Lots of hustle along with experience are much more valuable than academic knowledge.

Except with my academic knowledge I don't need to be hustled or have basic, remedial things fixed. I can also identify problems with existing systems and solve them competently. I don't need to be "taught" basic practices. I may need to be refreshed from time to time, but I know "what" I need refreshing on and "why".

> And what percentage of CS graduates do you think will commit all of the above sins?

A low percentage. I've committed some, but my professor caught them and I fixed them. I don't have to be told those habits are bad by my boss. I don't need to be told how to do things efficiently. But hey, if you want to spend time fixing problems that programmers are clueless on, go ahead. So I ask the same question, how many programmers do you think can identify such problems and fix them themselves?

> Why wouldn't I value real world experience that actually trains shitty habits like this out of people?

Because I don't need real world experience to train those shitty habits out of me.

Because, if you look at it from a business standpoint, why would you hire more employers if you have employers that can convert. Unlike some people, I don't need $90k to make a living. But then again, when has ethics ever been a problem right? Its all about wanting more and more. Not to mention, some engineers are really crappy and since getting a new job isn't particularly easy, especially with a family, pay cuts are an option.

I've seen a lot of things done at the company I work for that wasn't exactly in the companies "financial interest". Its amazing how much money is used for things that aren't needed because a manager felt they couldn't wait an extra month, or something wasn't "moving" fast enough, or other poor excuses that justify spending 50k on a system of which they probably don't even use the majority of the features.

How is my argument absurd? I fail to see how writing code with early exits and having a basic understanding of process memory space, which I've demonstrated on the basis of things people, that don't have CS degrees, have said and done at my work absurd?

What I don't get is why so many people stereotype college as useless because they think you're in a lecture hall scribbling down whatever the professor says and that's it. How such a notion came to be and how people seem to forget exercises, labs, and class projects is very much beyond me.

I laughed when you only pointed out two of the things I listed in what I accomplished for my CS degree and went on to say it was "insufficient" because we don't have budget and time schedules like companies do in order to actually do production scale work. Not only that, the point of doing those things isn't to ship it to the masses, its to create something useful and to sharpen your skills. Case in point, your professor and sometimes the university are your customers. They evaluate your work, give you suggestions, and help you identify things you did wrong or could do better on.

I also laughed at the assumptions you made about me somehow being a lone ranger and not doing group work... I guess I should ask if you've even went to or been in a college.

You seem to have incredibly high and almost unmeetable standards that would actually require a college grad. Yet, you seem so adamant that a degree isn't necessary which is illogical since you usually pick up software engineering experience, group work, and a solid understanding from graduates. Not only that, its a pretty good guarantee they will do well if the have decent grades. If you're telling me you are willing to pick programmers up off the street expecting them to know software engineering concepts like scalability, modeling, and being on a development schedule. Programmers who've got a couple of projects under their belt that probably involved no human contact and probably aren't even that good due to lack of formal training. And you are willing to train them to be up to par, then you must be living in a fantasy world or we have completely different concepts of what programmer and computer scientist/engineer are.

One last thing. If you think god objects, no early exiting of loops, and lack of enum use are "style" problems, then I can see why you are hiring the wrong people.

> Unfortunately, higher education in the US becomes more and more a matter of money and not ability.

I think this isn't a higher education issue, its an issue with careers in general. Most companies go by a resume, an interview, and a few basic tests. The interviews usually last an hour to two hours long and they mostly want to hear about your knowledge of the company, what you can offer, and standard fluff crap.

Problem is: 1) Resume can be filled with lies and is usually a one page ad that doesn't show off any type of value. It also shows no demonstration of ability. 2) Interview can be useless and also promote dishonesty. It, again, also shows no demonstration of ability. 3) Basic tests are usually too easy (fizz-buzz anyone?) or non-existent and, for the third time, don't demonstrate ability.

What do all these have in common? If only you had to take an actual test or show off your skill in some way with a small project or demonstrate your creations?

Oh yeah, evidence shmevidence...

> Ultimately, these companies wouldn't invest in training if there wasn't a return on that investment.

Possibly, but its hard to see a ROI in this situation considering they are paying for training and giving the kids a full-time job, possibly with benefits. That's a couple thousand a person in training + 44,000 salary + a couple thousand in benefits and possibly a union membership. I don't see how there is cost offset over converting engineers who have a base knowledge. Not only that, where are they going to go if they lose their job?

We're also talking about high school students here. They've had stuff taken care of for them all their life (baring extenuating circumstances). Not exactly the most responsible bunch I would guess.

That isn't the work I'm talking about. I'm talking about assignments and exercises. The things you're suppose to be doing in college.

Yeah, never heard anything about a "knowledge economy". Must be made up.

> I don't like to yell, but here it is plainly: YES.

Really? I must have went to the wrong college then or you're interviewing the wrong people. Yes, there is a reason UML is used. Its used because its a standard. Its used because its unambiguous if you know it. Its used to identify relationships, areas of repeated code, state of objects in your code, and it can easily be used to generate code, if it is learned and used properly. I have yet to see any software development book or methodology that doesn't use some form of UML knowledge. Unless you code with no design.

> Your school projects do not in any meaningful way approximate a real software project in the real world. Your design docs are held to a completely different standard than real design docs, and the process by which they are synthesized, iterated upon, and approved is also either completely absent in academia or heavily bastardized.

Likewise, programming exercises you see your typical CS or engineering program are incredibly simplistic compared to what you would run into the real-world once you're hacking on production systems at-scale. This is why open source experience is valuable, but class projects are not.

Here is what I've done as part of my CS degree: - Wrote linked lists, binary search trees, graphs, stacks/queues, and most of the well know sorting and searching algorithms used everyday by programmers FROM SCRATCH. - Wrote my own linux shell, complete with scripting interpretation, variable substitution, I/O redirection, and most of the features you find a normal bash shell. - Wrote several built-in linux commands and other commands (i.e. tail, ps, pstree, etc.) from scratch using only the linux kernel and system calls. - Designed a new calendar system for my university using the agile development methodology with all documentation produced (i.e. SRS, UML documents, requirements etc.) - Wrote a lexer and compiler, with a partner, for a made up language. - Experience implementing RDMS in mySQL and constructed tables and views for it. - Wrote a SMS text messaging system using uC/OS-II using a motorola HCS12 microcontroller complete with ring tone, memory management, clock, and serial communication. - Designed and implemented a solar charging station with COTS parts and arduinos to measure charge voltage and current (meter essentially) - Designed and implemented an RC tank, controlled via Wifi with a webcam and some small autonomous functionality - In the process of designing, implementing, and documenting a airborne particle counting network that uses rs-485 as a backbone and a control program written in C#

If this isn't enough experience, then I must be living in a fantasy land. By the way, I've done no open source, but many of these projects (ones with arduino and linux) could qualify.

> They can talk a lot of shop about algorithms, but to get them to implement their own algorithms (and do it well) is nigh impossible. Code quality is on the whole probably worse than fresh undergrads.

Go figure, they know a lot about algorithms that the programmers probably just use API calls to do. Also, implementing complex algorithms in an interview isn't exactly easy or time conducive.

All I know is, I've seen some crap code from programmers (with no CS degrees) that were commercially certified in the language they were running in. I mean I'm talking extreme no-no's (i.e. magic numbers, lack of enum use, lack of comments, no early exiting loops, god objects etc.) stuff that I actually got marked down for in my college assignments.

Since when did people going to college not "work"? Have you even been to college?

>I trust a few million people who enjoy watching sports as to what the proper allocation of that money is than I trust you.

What value do they deliver that requires them to add several more zeros to their income? Do you really trust people that waste their time paying hand over fist, listening to the next person sing when there are real problems in the world worth solving?

Actors aren't rare. Singers aren't rare. I can do tradesmen work with less training that's needed to start someone from square one like this article suggests. If companies are in real need of tradesmen, why not just convert engineers over?

> The pay structure is aligned with value delivered and the rarity of the skills in question. Your opinion that education is what should get compensated is deeply uninteresting.

I never said people should be compensated based solely on education. Nice strawman. But the fact that you find the value of education "deeply uninteresting" just tells me that you're lazy and really shouldn't even be making claims about tradesmen who require at least some form of education. Its just there education is extremely compartmentalized. Their job isn't meant for design, innovation, and flexibility.

> Baseless assertion.

A plumber making $90k/yr may not have the exact same IQ you have, but he's likely smart enough to buy a house, save for retirement, etc...and a lot less likely to gamble his entire future on one "hot" startup.

I've known a lot more tradesmen with second and third houses (for the rental income) than I've know engineers.

Notice I said probably, as in I'm not really sure, but since you trust a few million people that spend tons of money on sports than myself, it makes your position debatable. So it leads to the question, does a plumber need to make $90k/yr to buy a house, save for retirement, etc? And by the way, just because you know more tradesmen with retirement homes than engineers, doesn't make it true unless you perform a study with appropriate sample size and statistical rigor to suggest a correlation. Something usually done by college grads.

> Have you met many tradesmen? Any?

Yes I have. In fact I came from Flint, MI. You know that city that use to have a bunch of trades and union workers making cars? You know that city is pretty much dead and infested with crime. You know why? Because such workers walked out of high school, demanded high wages for menial work, and coupled with GM's miss management, caused the plants there to be wiped off the map. And, unfortunately, because the people who worked at those plants decided to forgo the "deeply uninteresting" education and just walk into the plant to get a job, they've screwed themselves.

>> I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned.

Does this mean that there will be more code I have to fix as a result of my CS degree? I've still got people at my job that write loops with no early exit when they are searching. I learned that as a freshman. They write code that iterates through the entirety of arrays, constantly, which is a complete waste most of the time.

Hell, I've got people that justify writing memory intensive code due to the computers abundant memory because they don't even realize that program space is limited by the kernel. I can thank my OS class for that.

The point is, do you want to waste time looking up basic stuff on Google all your life, or do you want to get hands on, spend time studying things from a reliable source, and not have to look up things online and write crappy code just to get by?

>> The economy is moving towards knowledge-based jobs.

>> A programmer with a CS degree and no internships, no open source, no working under experienced talent, is (nearly) worthless. An English major aspiring to write for magazines who has never published anything nor worked with a professional editor is (probably even more) worthless.

Seems you contradict yourself when you claim there is a move towards knowledge based jobs, yet in the very next sentence, advocate that knowledge without experience is "nearly/even more than" worthless.

So are you implying that a person with a CS degree who probably did tons of programming exercises and at least 1-3 projects (i.e. requiring design, doc., etc.), who was taught by these "under experienced" PhD's who have studied the subject, wrote about it, and have done projects for 10+ years of their life produce something that is "nearly" worthless?

Holy cow, either the students priorities were very screwed up or there goes logic and rationality out the door.

>> To put this in comparison, my nephew at 17, was a deckhand on a tugboat in a mining port making $120K+. Now that he has a license to captain a vessel up to 25 metres I believe he's rapidly approaching if not exceeding $200K.

I think the major problem is salary. Who the hell pays a captain $200K a year? Managers at high end companies don't even make that much, especially mine. Its not just that, celebrities, sports coaches, and the entertainment industry in general are over paid. Its only a lucrative business because most people don't care about being smart or learning things, they care about their next fix of football or basketball or any other stupid game or TV show that does absolutely nothing for society.

The pay structure isn't aligned with education and experience and that's what promotes high standards of living and a lot of the problems with jobs. People that aren't well educated and have limited experience (like in a trade), probably don't spend their money wisely. Not only that, the cost of training for a tradesmen vs. a college grad is next to nothing because a college grad, like a computer science grad, doesn't need to be taught how to program, design, or use software development tools because there is already a general foundation of understanding. As a tradesmen, there is hardly any foundation. For example, this girl has be taught how to read blueprints and run machines on the job where I don't have to be taught any of that (outside of internal company knowledge) because of my engineering education.

Might as well just forget about a technical section then.

Read through a couple of comments and all I see is people bitching about phone and cable companies.

The problem is, you can only get Google fiber if you get enough people in your neighborhood that want it and you meet a preregistration goal. Then you can choose the DSL crappy free internet, or the gigabit one for 70/month which is comparable to the Comcast rate, except faster speeds. Of course, the more people that choose Gigabit, the more demand there is to justify a price increase.

And, to be honest, my employer is running on fiber with a link speed of 1 Gbps and there isn't that much of a difference between Internet browsing at home.

>> Common answers: better tests, cleaner code, better design.

I wouldn't be so keen to say that these help "avoid mysteries" in the first place. Many algorithms that have better time complexity and space complexity are often much harder to understand than writing algorithms that sacrifice those qualities, but can be understood at first glance. For example, is it easier to understand code that performs a lot of bit wise operations, which is probably better designed and more cleaner than a piece of code that performs operations with strings and object?

I never understood review sites like Rotten Tomatoes and the like. Don't sites like Amazon, where you can actually buy the product, already accomplish this? Unless you have actual authors or news critics writing critiques for a book, there isn't much that makes it different from sites where you can buy the product.

Anyway, why no technical literature section? Why isn't there a genre on text books? Novels are fine, but I like learning something when I read.

I don't think that using a debugger = you don't understand whats going on in your code. I've had many situations where it helped me understand a great deal what was going on. Plus, its a built in tool, so I don't have to waste time writing logging code or anything of the sort. I've also had situations where I worked with another programmer, who rarely used it, and often times got his understanding wrong when he puzzled it out. He eventually figured it out, but it was debatable whether it saved time from using a debugger.

> All court cases are held in public, so if you are interested in the full evidence, etc, you can attend the hearing in person.

Space is limited in a court room. That's why I was talking more about televised sessions.

> Once you get a decision, you can fix it. You appeal it.

Good luck with that. That's all I can say.

> They probably practised as lawyers before becoming a judge so made quite a bit and therefore they have nothing to gain and everything to loose if they accept being corrupted.

That's the problem. Lawyers aren't very good and the laws aren't very clear in a majority of the cases. I have yet to see a judge lose their reputation from having one of their cases appealed. Also, private deals are made with lawyers all the time that are protected by client confidentiality. Do you honestly believe that they would have nothing to gain by exploiting such deals?

> I think America may be a bit of an exception actually since you guys elect your judges. That sounds ridiculous to me. It is like electing your doctor or your engineers. Some things simply are best left to technocrats.

Except for federal courts. All federal court judges are appointed by the president for life after confirmation from the senate. Only state courts have an election process, in some cases.

> That final hearing was held in public, as all hearings are, it was televised, again as all hearings are, you can read the judicial decision, as with all judicial decision. No one was corrupted. You can't corrupt them, because there is complete transparency.

Not all court hearings are televised, as you stated. The court hearing for repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was not televised. Most federal trials aren't televised.

Also, just because you can read the judicial decision, doesn't mean that it wasn't a result of corruption during the trial. And once you get the decision, its not like you can fix it if something wasn't right in the decision. Complete transparency would only occur if all court cases were televised and unedited, giving the people access to all evidence.

> Without facebook, I'd have no idea cousin X is having a baby...

You mean you can't use a phone to stay in contact with your family and friends? That's a bit strange...

What bothers me the most is that a lot of the comments have totally forgotten about MySpace. That was a site where you could truly customize your homepage with a little html knowledge. And they didn't force things like retarded timelines where I can basically see your entire Facebook history recorded on your page. Now that's creepy...

To be quite honest, those valuations are probably way WAY to high. After all, Facebook just went public so that 100 billion dollar valuation is probably stretching it since companies are starting realize that Facebook adds generate little value.

Its good that you have a sense of perspective about this and you don't let the money aspect go to your head. After all, I find it enormously grotesque that these Internet companies are valued so high since one change of management or one new thing can make you become obsolete (MySpace and Yahoo are good examples).

Don't let it get to you, the whole point is that you have your own business and its still there. You can also just think of it as $100 billion of inflated currency. (21.8% to be exact when Facebook was created in 2004 to now).

People do realize that this is an apology right? You do realize that they did this twice right?

Why in the world can't be just accept it and move on. It literally boggles the mind that people ARE STILL OFFENDED after an apology.

Get over it! Geez...

I've never consistently rated myself as "above average" on anything but a few things. Does that make my ignorance and knowing it half the battle?

I think part of the problem is that American's don't read enough. They don't seek knowledge and understanding outside their own field. I mean it doesn't take a lot to read a book about the scientific method, or a book about statistics and try and learn it. Sure you won't be as good as someone who studied it, but you can at least try and be well versed in the concepts. I frequently read text books and do the exercises in them on my spare time. However, American's are so enthralled in media culture that you can probably make a good guess that most American's don't read on a regular basis, or read those $2.00 novels you get at the gas station. In other words, what they read doesn't have much substance.

Has anyone on here even looked at the source code?