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Post number 7,819,394 talking about how useful or not useful a CS degree is to a programming job. Here are some lessons I learned by going to school that I fin

• ryanong 10y ago
  Not to say school wasn't useful to you but all of these things could also be learned on the job. (As that is where I learned them)
  • capote 10y ago
    That's true, and I completely understand, but it's besides my point. My point is to implore people to stop looking at a CS degree as just a means to get a job. If you look at it that way, of course you're not going to find 100% value in it. Getting a job is simply not what a CS degree is for. It was never declared to be for this purpose—nobody claims it's for this purpose (except maybe some schools for marketing purposes). Yes, we all know that you can do a good job programming without a CS degree. Good job. Whoopdeedoo. Anyone who keeps repeating this point is a broken record. Anyone who tries to scientifically prove this is wasting their time. That's not what a CS degree tries to be. This isn't why I went to school, and it's not why many, many people go to school.
    • elliotec 10y ago
      So what is the point then?
      • capote 10y ago
        If you can't see the point, then maybe university isn't for you. I'm not going to write an essay on what point I saw in school because I don't have time or interest. The point is that I saw value in it. I liked learning about computer science. Why can't people stop shitting on this concept?
        • stale2002 10y ago
          Good for you for being lucky enough to be able to follow your dreams. But you have to understand that other people mostly just care about being able to put food on the table, pay rent, and being able to save up enough to be able to support a family and buy a house.
          • ctrlalt_g 10y ago
            > people mostly just care about being able to put food on the table, pay rent, and being able to save up enough to be able to support a family and buy a house. I think that's what capote is frustrated with. College (traditionally, at least in the U.S.) is one of the only spaces that encourages young people to have dreams at all. It provides an environment where becoming radicalized is accepted as a norm, where young people can dream of a life and of a society other than the status quo.
          • dang 10y ago
            Perhaps, but on a site intended for matters of intellectual substance I think it's fair to expect a bit more of ourselves.
        • elliotec 10y ago
          I went to university, and you're right, it wasn't for me. It also wasn't for the vast majority of people I knew that went. It's great that you saw value in it. I do think you are in the minority. Most people don't like learning about stuff at the same time as working a job and throwing all their money at the university just to teach them stuff. Almost every person that goes to a university is doing it for job prospects. Unquestionably. They think it's the new high school diploma, and in a lot of ways and industries they are correct. You are an outlier, and that's why people are shitting on this concept.
• deleted 10y ago
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• elliotec 10y ago
  These are about going to school, though, not getting a CS degree. And 100% of these things could, and probably should, be learned in the real world and not through paying tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of education. I did not go to school for a CS degree, and that has not hampered me in any way when searching for a job in software. All I learned in college was how to game the system of the institution itself, and that institutions like that are a societal racket and waste of time and money.
  • capote 10y ago
    > that institutions like that are a societal racket and waste of time and money. This is completely wrong. Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity. I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.
    • marcoperaza 10y ago
      Sure, but the other 90% of their budget is going to useless pet projects and bureaucratic waste.
      • capote 10y ago
        This is a very pessimistic and conspiracy-theorist-ish way to look at it. Yeah, most entities in the world don't operate at maximum efficiency or make perfect use of their money. Doesn't make them worthless, or even close to it.
        • marcoperaza 10y ago
          Yes, 90% is me being a little facetious. I don't know the exact number. But I saw the waste first hand. My college ran large parts of its operations for the benefit of the employees, to the active detriment of the students and everyone else. For example, dining employees were easily paid 2x market wage, probably 4x counting fringe-benefits, while students were forced to pay for a wildly overpriced meal plan that robbed all of the local restaurants (which were all within a quarter-mile of the three dining halls) and supermarkets of business. They also ran a fancy hotel that charges many hundreds per night, right in the heart of campus. They consistently failed to make a profit for years and then totally bungled recent renovations, going 3x over budget and delivering behind schedule. Here's an interesting (and admittedly biased) blog post documenting that sorry saga: http://www.dartblog.com/data/2012/01/009957.php http://www.dartblog.com/data/2012/01/009957.php Throughout the country, tuition has risen many times over in the past few decades, but the money isn't going to hiring more professors. It's going to hiring more and more college administrators and staff, and on loss-making sports programs that go well beyond recreational athletics. Every single type of minority possible had at least one administrative department dedicated to them, each with multiple staff members, and often with physical plants. Many (most?) of these were straight-up indoctrination outfits, pushing critical-theory Marxism on students, teaching them that they're the victims of the white establishment, and fanning the flames of campus protests. Don't take my word, ask the American Association of University Professors: >The increase in spending on administrative functions, coupled with a decline in state funding relative to institutional operating expenses, is clearly connected to the continuing increases in tuition prices on many campuses. As we have noted in this report on several occasions in recent years, faculty pay is not driving up tuition costs. In fact, the stagnant salaries paid to full-time faculty members combined with the increasing use of lower-paid part-time and non-tenure-track faculty appointments have been reflected in the lowered relative spending on instruction documented earlier in this section. But don’t just take our word for it. The most recent report from the Delta Cost Project concluded that “faculty salaries were not the leading cause of rising college tuitions during the past decade. Increased benefits costs, nonfaculty positions added elsewhere on campus, declines in state and institutional subsidies, and other factors all played a role.” Source: https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/2013-14salarysurvey https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/2013-14salarysurve... This guy from the New York Times agrees with me: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re... An NPR article: http://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155766786/whats-driving-college-costs-higher http://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155766786/whats-driving-colleg... The LA Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/12/opinion/la-oe-dreifushacker-college-cost-20100912 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/12/opinion/la-oe-dreifu...
• j45 10y ago
  People without CS are miss out, and also, some CS programs come up short: Learning soft skills are as important as any technical chops. Learning how to learn and realize you're never really done learning how to solve problems. This is one of the reason some self-taught people often have more people skills than those who self-select to hide behind a keyboard most of their university years instead of getting out there, becoming more well rounded, and through it solving problems. The ability to work in a group as you've mentioned is a critical and transferrable life skill that many people simply don't grasp. If you can't solve university group problems, guess what kind of co-workers you'll be stuck with in my 20's. Having some structure in the start is important and valuable especially for those who don't have the discipline to do things that need to be done and instead jump from one shiny toy or problem to the next. At the end of the day it's not just what your education (or lack of education) makes of you, but what you make of your ability to learn every day. Discipline is the master skill that most people at any age in or out of school in our 20's are missing.
  • curun1r 10y ago
    It's funny that you mention working in a group because that's one area where I've found where academia isn't really preparing CS grads. It seems that the most our new grads have been exposed to is an ad-hoc group that was supposed to work together and threw something together which they made work but with complete disregard for having to maintain the code 1+ years in the future. They then enter an environment where the group isn't ad-hoc, meaning there's a hierarchy and people, especially new CS grads, get overruled. They're expected to comply with policies and processes that they had no input into. And they're expected to write code that doesn't just work, but is understandable and maintainable by every member of the team. I find that most new grads are very able to come up to speed on the code and the structure of our project. This likely comes from having a very malleable mind and never having seen a well-organized codebase. But it takes a good two months of almost constant corrections before they're contributing to the team in the right way and many more years before the understand why that type of contribution is necessary. Teamwork is more than just not writing the entire project yourself and it feels like CS grads are never taught any of the skills necessary to collaborate in the real world.
• InclinedPlane 10y ago
  I have a degree in Mathematics, I think my educational experience has made me a better developer than if I'd have pursued a pure CS degree alone. Does that mean that I think everyone who wants to develop software should get a math degree? Not even a little bit. But I also don't think they should pursue a CS degree either. In the end the answer is "it's complicated, and there isn't one good answer yet", but we don't get from where we are now to a better state by pretending nothing is wrong with the status quo. Moreover, I question whether or not each of your seven points are worth about $10k each, because a lot of students are paying that much.
  • capote 10y ago
    You're still, in this post, trying to extract the value of a degree in terms of job power. That's what I'm arguing against. I paid $180,000 to go to university and I think it was 100% worth it, regardless of my job or how much it helped my job. My selection of 7 points was mainly to make a point, that point being that I see a lot of value in university, many people do, and we should all stop trying to fit all of this into employment, because they have very little to do with each other.
    • ctvo 10y ago
      In what world do we live in that a university education has nothing to do with employment? Not all of us are lucky enough to spend 180,000 on an education and not care about its impact on our job prospects.
    • twillirvy 10y ago
      Interesting. I was with you until this post--I'm curious if you haven't wondered, even a bit, if 180k was too steep of a price tag? I'm a fan of university in general, but find the sky-high prices of private institutions hard to stomach compared to similarly-good in-state options.
      • capote 10y ago
        Yeah... it's definitely a high price tag. I should've probably gone to a state school to save that money. But I still find it worth it because I see what I got from school as priceless, as silly and dramatic as that sounds. As an aside, I am of the opinion that university should be free. But in the US, it's not. It's super expensive. That's a bummer, but like I said, it's worth it to me, money or not, job or not.
• woodman 10y ago
  The things you listed are pretty much everything you learn on the way to adulthood, which for a lot of people occurs when they move out and go to college, so you might want to consider that. I worked as a programmer long before the formal education, and the only thing I really learned is the only thing that is really needed to make it a worthwhile endeavor: a shallow but wide exposure to the body of knowledge out there. I accidentally reinvented poisson regression, I didn't realize that I had wasted a month of my life until going to college in my late 20s and finding out that somebody had already done the work (and a much better job).
• deleted 10y ago
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• mwfunk 10y ago
  Also, while people like to argue that it's possible to get programming jobs without a CS degree, it is guaranteed to be some value of harder to get those jobs. Especially if you dream of working in less common and more specialized areas, like (for example) working on compilers or doing HPC stuff, etc. Yeah, in theory someone can get a job without a CS degree. But it'll be a lot harder, and it's very likely that doors will be closed to you that you would prefer be open. It might be unfair, it might be an injustice, but it's still part of the equation. You might overcome it, but it is still a thing to be overcome that was taken on as an additional burden in exchange for losing a different burden (college). I have no problem with people with passion and talent skipping college and going straight into the workforce. And it's very clear up front what they get out of it- they get an additional 4 years of professional life, and they never rack up student loans. I just object to people claiming that there's no cost to it. There is a cost: maybe a negligible one, maybe just a little, or maybe a lot if it means you don't get to do the things you really want to do. Or if you never even find out about the stuff that you would have been incredibly passionate about because you were never exposed to it. By not going to school, there is guaranteed to be a cost in missed opportunities. Maybe those shut doors and lost opportunities are all for things that the person didn't want to do anyway. The part that bites people is that when they are making the decision to skip school, they're probably in the 18-20 age range and most likely do not have the capacity to evaluate what those lost opportunities even are, and whether or not each one is OK to discard as a long term life decision.
  • pacaro 10y ago
    I'm not sure. So I'm going to ramble on about myself a bit... I have a mediocre degree in an unrelated subject (History and Philosophy of Science) from a good school (Cambridge). I learned to program as a child by messing with 8-bit computers. My first job was very much an apprenticeship, I found a small company that was willing to employ me based on some level of aptitude, a modicum of demonstrable programming ability, and a willingness to work for very little (£12k in 94) Three years later, I was able to move to a more interesting, still not brilliantly paid (£23k in 97), job at a startup, which was acquired by MS a couple of years later. I spent 14 years at MS, and was a Principal Engineer by the time I left. My experience since then is that there are no doors closed to me. There are two places where I got lucky, 1) finding a company that was willing to make a bet on me. 2) joining a top tier company through an acquisition. but with regards to 1, over a 9 month period in 93-94, I applied to over 100 companies, and had three job offers in the end - so it was good luck to find a job based on my resumé at the time, but the jobs were out there And with regards to 2, not everyone who joined through that acquisition was successful at MS, regardless of education. Some hated the idea of working for MS, others weren't suited to a large corporation, and many other reasons. Comparing myself with peers, I find that their CS degrees possibly gave them a 3-5 year head start on me, they could go straight to better jobs, but the value of the apprenticeship type job, is that I was already pushing 10000 hours (or equivalent) by the time I was ready for the better job.
• xyience 10y ago
  #5 and #7 are great, I too don't like the anti-intellectualism a lot of degree seekers seem to have. But the typical tuition these days is a large price to pay for intellectualism. I paid a high price for my CE degree, which I entered into in large amount for the intellectual curiosity of understanding hardware, knowing full well I'd probably end up in some web dev software engineering job afterwards (that pays better anyway) since I already had prior experience with that, and in any case as long as I had some job in the tech industry I'd be making enough that student debt wouldn't cripple me. I would only encourage people to make the choice based on a sober calculation of expected costs (including opportunity costs) and gains rather than because "it's the thing to do". Before I went to my school of choice I planned out the course sequence for my entire time there -- of course it ended up being different but not hugely so. Unexpected things will come up (#1 and #2 should have been learned by high school, what I didn't expect was that for me continuing the related path of "shut up and get BS work done" through college would result in burning out my tolerance for BS work in general and it's taken a long time to build that back up enough that I can perform ok in enterprisey roles) but that in itself is a useful thing to learn. If past me had future me as a mentor, I'd encourage past me to skip school and satiate his curiosity more directly, but not everyone has access to a mentor.
• syngrog66 10y ago
  I can confirm from direct/life experience that all 7 of your points can be learned/reinforced both on the job and outside/beyond job/college/school. Folks, just use your brain. Observe, read, study, converse, imagine, think, analyze, hypothesize, apply, try, test, revise, repeat, carry on. Good general process regardless/before/after/outside school/college/job. You can spend either $100k and 4-6 years, or, $0 and N years -- you get to decide.
• imtringued 10y ago
  >7. That a lot of people seem to think that the only things in life worth learning or paying for are those that will be useful at a job. This is a sad one. Where is the money supposed to come from? If you're paying 50k or more for your education you might want to at least break even. If there is no ROI then it's just regular consumer debt which is both bad for you and the economy as a whole.
• deleted 10y ago
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• Waterluvian 10y ago
  I went to school for non CS STEM and now I do software engineering as a career. You're absolutely right. All that stuff was totally critical to me.