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Disclaimer: I come from America, so what I am saying may not be applicable to other countries I would say that the mathematics taught before college is incredi

Disclaimer: I come from America, so what I am saying may not be applicable to other countries I would say that the mathematics taught before college is incredibly useful in day to day life. Without knowing how to add/subtract/multiply/divide, life becomes much harder. Life without algebra is not as much of a loss, but I use algebra for daily task. I would say calculus is not a big deal (unless you are in a science), but once in a while I will find it to be helpful. To me, programming is roughly on the level of calculus; for some professions/people it is critical. For others it may only be useful once in a while.

BWStearns 10y ago
>> To me, programming is roughly on the level of calculus; for some professions/people it is critical. For others it may only be useful once in a while. But programming is a hammer that turns almost everything into a nail (in a good they-really-are-nails kind of way). Many programmers may not realize this because their jobs have always been to program. Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn't really find a compelling reason why. You (assuming you can program) will have a bunch of scripts that do all your boring shit. You will run most of these scripts once a day in the morning, and spend the rest of the day on Hacker News pretending to work and waiting until a believable number of hours has passed before turning in the spreadsheet that one of your scripts produced. When you want to mess with someone you will give them something immediately after the script runs and not tell them how. There's still plenty of stuff that you can't bespoke automate, but the boring automation-friendly stuff takes up most of the day in most jobs. When you don't know what a hammer is, nails look like twigs that rust.
- stuxnet79 10y ago
  >> Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn't really find a compelling reason why. I worked at one of those jobs as part of work-study while I was still in school. It's funny there was another kid I used to work with there who was studying CS like me. Our supervisor had given him tasks in secret for him to complete and he had all these fancy scripts doing the work for him. I was floored. There were all kinds of useless tasks we were assigned that would have taken seconds to complete if any of the office drones had the competency and foresight to write a script. Me and the other CS kid always used to muse and laugh about this.

BWStearns 10y ago

>> To me, programming is roughly on the level of calculus; for some professions/people it is critical. For others it may only be useful once in a while. But programming is a hammer that turns almost everything into a nail (in a good they-really-are-nails kind of way). Many programmers may not realize this because their jobs have always been to program. Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn't really find a compelling reason why. You (assuming you can program) will have a bunch of scripts that do all your boring shit. You will run most of these scripts once a day in the morning, and spend the rest of the day on Hacker News pretending to work and waiting until a believable number of hours has passed before turning in the spreadsheet that one of your scripts produced. When you want to mess with someone you will give them something immediately after the script runs and not tell them how. There's still plenty of stuff that you can't bespoke automate, but the boring automation-friendly stuff takes up most of the day in most jobs. When you don't know what a hammer is, nails look like twigs that rust.

stuxnet79 10y ago
>> Go work for a couple months at one of those terrible office jobs that require a college degree but you couldn't really find a compelling reason why. I worked at one of those jobs as part of work-study while I was still in school. It's funny there was another kid I used to work with there who was studying CS like me. Our supervisor had given him tasks in secret for him to complete and he had all these fancy scripts doing the work for him. I was floored. There were all kinds of useless tasks we were assigned that would have taken seconds to complete if any of the office drones had the competency and foresight to write a script. Me and the other CS kid always used to muse and laugh about this.