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CS teaches a lot of underlying stuff that almost none of the self taught programmers I know have yet learned There seems to be two approaches to knowledge acqu
by seiji 11y ago
CS teaches a lot of underlying stuff that almost none of the self taught programmers I know have yet learned
There seems to be two approaches to knowledge acquisition: school method vs. self-taught method.
School method: learn everything you can, then learn to ignore what doesn't matter since you probably know a lot of things now.
Self-taught method: know nothing, only learn exactly what you need. (e.g. try to do something. learn what you don't know. make one thing work. now you have a very narrow knowledge. repeat process until your goal is obtained.)
The self-taught method still produces capable people, but sometimes their capabilities and experiences are more narrow than others who have been through purpose-designed curricula.
The self-taught method is also a favorite of YC. Who needs business school when you can learn it as you go and pay people to understand parts you don't comprehend? You probably won't hire a YC self-taught-CEO to run Bank of America or JPMorgan, but they can competently bounce around startups for the next 20 years with no problems.
- arihant 11y agoI agree on self-taught method, don't get me wrong. Which is why I said I wish there were better resources. But what is missed from the argument is that any good CS program includes a lot of self-teaching. You're expected to write an OS, large torrent softwares, networking protocols, parallel systems that run on supercomputers, distributed databases like Hadoop, web apps like Twitter. And that is just the top of my head. And most of these extended projects don't have any top end requirements. They only have minimum requirements which is pretty high. And people usually try to one up everyone else. Not to miss that self-taught method almost completely neglects theory method, a lot of the times. Ask a self-taught programmer if his algorithm could be made better, then wait a couple years till he learns huge amount of discrete math, complexities, and proving optimality before his answer can be trusted without everyone else looking. Again, not everyone values these skills. And that's OK. The article was written in reponse to a guy who said he won't hire CS graduates.