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I'm sorry, but no. Absolutely not. This is not "toxic" for anybody. "Waste up to a year of their life?" When I was 16, my friends and I thought we were goin
by blhack 16y ago
I'm sorry, but no. Absolutely not. This is not "toxic" for anybody. "Waste up to a year of their life?"
When I was 16, my friends and I thought we were going to take over the world by starting a "tech company". We knew we were all nerds, and we knew we wanted to own a "tech company". We got together, thought up a cool name, made a cool website, and got some cool business cards.
Was this a stupid idea? Yes.
Did I learn a lot from it? Yes.
Do you consider 4 years spent in business school a waste of time? Toxic? Do you consider time spent going to school for computer science, learning to program a "waste"?
How many times have computer science students written "cash register" programs in java? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? Was this time all wasted?
I would say no.
- tptacek 16y agoYes, business school is a waste. Yes, Java cash register programs are a waste. Yes, doomed Craigslist competitors are a waste. People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Aspire to that, not to rationalizing very expensive learning experiences.
- blhack 16y ago>People too young to go to business school have cashed out of YC companies. Did these people crawl out of the womb with a keyboard in one hand and an apache server in the other? How do you suppose they learned how to program?
- tptacek 16y agoPresumably the same way I did. I have 1 semester of school, and I took liberal arts classes.
- shadowfox 16y agoThis has turned in to a strange discussion :|
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoNot by trying to turn a Java cash register into a business. There's nothing particularly wrong with writing a Twitter clone as an exercise (although I could think of more interesting exercises), but trying to turn it into a business - with everything that entails - is such a large distraction from coding that you'd better skip it (if your goal is to be a good programmer; I'm certainly not a sufficiently good businessman to judge whether it's effective training for that, although I would go to work for someone else and observe.)
- Egregore 16y agoI have never had a class on apache server, nor on keyboard and still I know how to use both, so the desire to learn is much more important than attending classes.
- kahawe 16y agoSo basically you are trying to say any kind of education and learning process is a waste unless you go and aim straight at multinational multibillion dollar success or what is your point?
- tptacek 16y agoYes, that must be exactly what I'm saying; the only other alternative would be that a 4-year education in computer science followed by a 2-year business school degree is the only authentically valid way to commence a career in software development. Right?
- petsos 16y agoHow about being both right and wrong and having other options in the middle too? (like most things in life)
- kahawe 16y agoMaybe my sarcasm detector is off but to me you are not making any sense at all in this whole thread here but you sound a lot like you are on a very special quest of altering the way people think about education and programming so good luck, I'll just forget whatever it was you were trying to get into people's minds.
- tptacek 16y agoYour sarcasm detector is off. Sorry.