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"If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers?" Of course not. People shoul

by CrLf 11y ago

"If all I want to do is build bird houses, do I need to learn everything a structural engineer has to learn to build sky scrapers?" Of course not. People should have the choice on how and what they want to learn. I just disagree when choice is turned into equivalence (i.e. formal education providing no value over self-learning / disguising knowledge to build bird houses as knowledge to build skyscrapers). In some cases (some people) it may not actually matter, but in the general case, looks like it does.

tracker1 11y ago
I will say that it depends on the person... I've taken from learning how to do simple scripts in the 80's/90's and actually done reading on lower-level CS, and although I don't write C/C++ day to day, I do understand the concepts. And while I don't have to think about such things.. understanding memory constraints and how caching and process swaps work in the CPU has come in useful even for higher level language projects. But isn't that why we're supposed to have "Junior" and "Senior" level positions? I think that what software development really needs is a loosely structured guild system where you gain rank not by attrition or seniority but by reputation, where you gain/lose reputation based on who you back for seniority and how well they do. It seems that beyond CS education, it's a constant learning process. You cannot make a career only with what you learn getting a degree in CS.
- CrLf 11y ago
  That's difficult to achive without the reputation system being overrun by politics sooner rather than later, I guess. It's true that a degree in CS doesn't make a career, and that it's mostly a constant learning process. After a while the difference between having a degree or not having one is difficult to measure and junior/senior levels become defined by experience. But everything else being equal, the person with the degree will have forgotten a lot that the person without the degree wasn't exposed to in the first place. Many people will be exceptions to this, but I'm just talking about the general rule here. Once you enter an organization, you build reputation there. This is the only thing that matters. To transfer this reputation between organizations, the organizations themselves must recognize the transfer (a form of trust). When you have long and convoluted interview processes, it means there is no such trust. The organization you are trying to join is basically starting from scratch in evaluating you skills, disregarding infomation that says that even if you can't balance a binary tree now, you once did and so can do it again if required. University degrees are supposed to provide this information. They provide knowledge but also provide a path that is known to be difficult and with a known level of "reputation" once completed. Experience alone cannot possibly provide this, because work at company A says litte to company B if the inner workings of A is an unknown quantity to B. This is the theory at least. If universities aren't doing they work properly, this whole system collapses.

by CrLf 11y ago

tracker1 11y ago

I will say that it depends on the person... I've taken from learning how to do simple scripts in the 80's/90's and actually done reading on lower-level CS, and although I don't write C/C++ day to day, I do understand the concepts. And while I don't have to think about such things.. understanding memory constraints and how caching and process swaps work in the CPU has come in useful even for higher level language projects. But isn't that why we're supposed to have "Junior" and "Senior" level positions? I think that what software development really needs is a loosely structured guild system where you gain rank not by attrition or seniority but by reputation, where you gain/lose reputation based on who you back for seniority and how well they do. It seems that beyond CS education, it's a constant learning process. You cannot make a career only with what you learn getting a degree in CS.

CrLf 11y ago
That's difficult to achive without the reputation system being overrun by politics sooner rather than later, I guess. It's true that a degree in CS doesn't make a career, and that it's mostly a constant learning process. After a while the difference between having a degree or not having one is difficult to measure and junior/senior levels become defined by experience. But everything else being equal, the person with the degree will have forgotten a lot that the person without the degree wasn't exposed to in the first place. Many people will be exceptions to this, but I'm just talking about the general rule here. Once you enter an organization, you build reputation there. This is the only thing that matters. To transfer this reputation between organizations, the organizations themselves must recognize the transfer (a form of trust). When you have long and convoluted interview processes, it means there is no such trust. The organization you are trying to join is basically starting from scratch in evaluating you skills, disregarding infomation that says that even if you can't balance a binary tree now, you once did and so can do it again if required. University degrees are supposed to provide this information. They provide knowledge but also provide a path that is known to be difficult and with a known level of "reputation" once completed. Experience alone cannot possibly provide this, because work at company A says litte to company B if the inner workings of A is an unknown quantity to B. This is the theory at least. If universities aren't doing they work properly, this whole system collapses.