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Not wanting to insult, but im often called as a firemen to projects that have been run and run-into-the-ground by self-tought people. I do not believe that uni

Not wanting to insult, but im often called as a firemen to projects that have been run and run-into-the-ground by self-tought people. I do not believe that university fullfills a really good role when it comes to filtering for intelligence, it rather filters for familys who put pressure to preservere on kids. But they do a really good job, on forcing people through stuff, that a self-tought person might skip- because they found it useless or not applicable. Algorithm theory and the limits of computation? That is a dry topic and tough to get through without beeing forced too. Software-architecture? Cant see me using that- those small projects i worked on always worked well without. And so on and so forth. University does one thing right, it forces you to be interested in stuff you do not know you should be interested in. I do find the filtering out of people who go to university - either by school grades or by monetary parent background really nasty though. In my eyes, anyone who is shown to apply himself, should be able to stay at a higher education.

vtange 8y ago
This is a good point, though for most people, valuable skills are often "dry" and undesirable like plumbing, so someone who was really passionate might've persevered on his own anyways. Even if academia has the merit of making you persevere through a class you wouldn't have on your own, it's not efficient; Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes. Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning. The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.
- elihu 8y ago
  > Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes. There's no way to know in advance which of those classes you won't need, though. Programming has become very specialized; it's no longer possible for a University to provide an education sufficient to prepare a student for the work they'll be doing in the "real world" because there's so much variability from one job to the next. Having a broad education, though, puts a person in a situation where they can more readily adapt to a wide variety of roles than they would without that background knowledge.

vtange 8y ago

This is a good point, though for most people, valuable skills are often "dry" and undesirable like plumbing, so someone who was really passionate might've persevered on his own anyways. Even if academia has the merit of making you persevere through a class you wouldn't have on your own, it's not efficient; Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes. Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning. The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.

elihu 8y ago
> Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes. There's no way to know in advance which of those classes you won't need, though. Programming has become very specialized; it's no longer possible for a University to provide an education sufficient to prepare a student for the work they'll be doing in the "real world" because there's so much variability from one job to the next. Having a broad education, though, puts a person in a situation where they can more readily adapt to a wide variety of roles than they would without that background knowledge.