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It's interesting that you think you need to attend college to be an "intellectual", and that people who didn't attend or chose not to continue must hold "anti-i

It's interesting that you think you need to attend college to be an "intellectual", and that people who didn't attend or chose not to continue must hold "anti-intellectual" views, that should definitely tell you something about your own narcissism. It sounds like you went to college and I think that's great, I hope you learned a lot and got a lot of value out of it, but try not to disparage the people who decided not to stick around and are working in the same jobs as you because they were smart/pragmatic enough to see the college experience for what it was. Personally I thought college was a huge waste of time and money. We live in the day and age of the internet and yet we're paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn things that we can teach ourselves for free and the only reason we do it is because we're too afraid not to. Doesn't that sound ludicrous to you? It did to me, and that's why I saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on my student loans by switching to drop out. And before you hit me with the "It was all about the experience" argument, I'd agree, you paid for a very expensive life experience. I'm now happily employed as a lead software developer making great money. If I need to brush up on my data structures and algorithms for an interview you know what I do? I go online. If I ever want to delve into machine learning you know what I'd do? I'd go online. Need to brush up on some math? You guessed it. Strictly speaking I think you made a bad investment by going to college, does that make me an "anti-intellectual snob"? And as a follow up, does it make you "wince" when you see how much you paid to learn what I learned for free?

ben509 7y ago
> but try not to disparage the people who decided not to stick around and are working in the same jobs as you Theory matters, classic example here[1], and if pointing out that people are making well understood mistakes because they haven't studied it is disparaging, so be it. [1]: https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94 https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94
- sodafountan 7y ago
  That's certainly impressive, though 99% of developers aren't in the business of making high level language design decisions like that. I agree though I think it would be very rare to find a self-taught developer that's studied category theory and other high level mathematical concepts on their own. I think Brian Mckenna made some very convincing points with that article. I don't think college is bad, I think debt is bad and for the vast majority of people entering software development the key is to get things done in a timely and efficient manor, I think it's pretty safe to say you'll never get the opportunity to apply category theory during your daily standup meetings with your scrum team as your managers are trying to meet deadlines for their clients, it's the unfortunate world we live in, if everything was free and nobody had to work hell stay in college your whole life. I wish I had that luxury.
  - ben509 7y ago
    > I think it's pretty safe to say you'll never get the opportunity to apply category theory during your daily standup meetings Theory tends to bite when something breaks, though. Performance problems are often explained through computational complexity, or concurrency theory. Strange values can be due to numerical error. If you see something weird in Javascript transformed by Babel, or really any compiler, you might be dealing with graph theory. If there are problems in a databsae, you're dealing with relational theory. And yes, you can often Google the problem, but you're definitely doing better if you're the person whose answer everyone is searching for. > That's certainly impressive, though 99% of developers aren't in the business of making high level language design decisions like that. I think they do, though, because they get an incomplete spec and have to fill in the blanks. "Agile languages" can be characterized as having concrete types: strings, ints, floats, lists, maps, sets. And the 99% of developers are using these languages and creating data structures using those types, and sharing those data structures, often via JSON. This results in what I call "data pasta" being shipped back and forth between systems. And those ad hoc structures are effectively codified when they become APIs or are saved in NoSQL systems. Does a CS degree help with this? I'm mostly aware of the problem because I've done it and then tried to clean it up in systems I work on. So the theory helps, but you need some practical guidance. What the dichotomy of CS degree or self-taught misses is that the CS degree is aimed at learning the math, and while the math can guide best practices, you don't actually study best practices. > I don't think college is bad, I think debt is bad Yeah, I graudated in '03, so debt hadn't blown up. Even if we stop shoveling money into universities, not working for four years is still a massive opportunity cost, and a partially completed degree is worthless, exposing students to a tremendous risk. And so it makes a lot of sense for people to do bootcamps to get their start in the industry, and regardless of whether you're self-taught or not, it seems like you could benefit from some formal training before you take on a senior role. My degree had some courses on software engineering, but they were focused on requirements documents and UML diagrams and other high level stuff, which I wasn't going to see for year to come. So maybe a software engineering course for people with industry experience could go over best practices and justify them through the math.
honkycat 7y ago
Hundreds of thousands? Most people don't go that deeply into debt. I think the average is like 30k. And that includes loans for housing costs. Also, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Huge chip on your shoulder about something that has nothing to do with you. You are so mad about someone else thinking their college experience was worth it. Don't disparage people who felt like their education was worth it. You have no idea about other people's life experiences and how they came to the conclusions they have come to. So maybe accept that some people got a lot out of college and your experience is not universal.
- sodafountan 7y ago
  Did you even read my post? First of all I said tens of thousands not hundreds. There’s definitely people who go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to attend school but that’s pretty rare. Second I don’t know where you’re getting tuition plus room and board for 30K unless you had some sort of scholarship (which, not to drag race into it, seems to be increasingly difficult to get if you’re a white male). Third I made it a point not to disparage you, I specifically said that I think it’s great if you feel like you got a lot of value out of your college experience. I don’t think anybody should disparage anybody, that’s the point. I’m not “anti-intellectual” because I made the financial decision to opt out of college.
aliceryhl 7y ago
> And as a follow up, does it make you "wince" when you see how much you paid to learn what I learned for free? I find it very unlikely I would have learned the things I know had it not been for university. Besides, I don't live in the US (thank god) so I was actually paid by the state to study.

ben509 7y ago

> but try not to disparage the people who decided not to stick around and are working in the same jobs as you Theory matters, classic example here[1], and if pointing out that people are making well understood mistakes because they haven't studied it is disparaging, so be it. [1]: https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94 https://github.com/promises-aplus/promises-spec/issues/94

sodafountan 7y ago
That's certainly impressive, though 99% of developers aren't in the business of making high level language design decisions like that. I agree though I think it would be very rare to find a self-taught developer that's studied category theory and other high level mathematical concepts on their own. I think Brian Mckenna made some very convincing points with that article. I don't think college is bad, I think debt is bad and for the vast majority of people entering software development the key is to get things done in a timely and efficient manor, I think it's pretty safe to say you'll never get the opportunity to apply category theory during your daily standup meetings with your scrum team as your managers are trying to meet deadlines for their clients, it's the unfortunate world we live in, if everything was free and nobody had to work hell stay in college your whole life. I wish I had that luxury.
- ben509 7y ago
  > I think it's pretty safe to say you'll never get the opportunity to apply category theory during your daily standup meetings Theory tends to bite when something breaks, though. Performance problems are often explained through computational complexity, or concurrency theory. Strange values can be due to numerical error. If you see something weird in Javascript transformed by Babel, or really any compiler, you might be dealing with graph theory. If there are problems in a databsae, you're dealing with relational theory. And yes, you can often Google the problem, but you're definitely doing better if you're the person whose answer everyone is searching for. > That's certainly impressive, though 99% of developers aren't in the business of making high level language design decisions like that. I think they do, though, because they get an incomplete spec and have to fill in the blanks. "Agile languages" can be characterized as having concrete types: strings, ints, floats, lists, maps, sets. And the 99% of developers are using these languages and creating data structures using those types, and sharing those data structures, often via JSON. This results in what I call "data pasta" being shipped back and forth between systems. And those ad hoc structures are effectively codified when they become APIs or are saved in NoSQL systems. Does a CS degree help with this? I'm mostly aware of the problem because I've done it and then tried to clean it up in systems I work on. So the theory helps, but you need some practical guidance. What the dichotomy of CS degree or self-taught misses is that the CS degree is aimed at learning the math, and while the math can guide best practices, you don't actually study best practices. > I don't think college is bad, I think debt is bad Yeah, I graudated in '03, so debt hadn't blown up. Even if we stop shoveling money into universities, not working for four years is still a massive opportunity cost, and a partially completed degree is worthless, exposing students to a tremendous risk. And so it makes a lot of sense for people to do bootcamps to get their start in the industry, and regardless of whether you're self-taught or not, it seems like you could benefit from some formal training before you take on a senior role. My degree had some courses on software engineering, but they were focused on requirements documents and UML diagrams and other high level stuff, which I wasn't going to see for year to come. So maybe a software engineering course for people with industry experience could go over best practices and justify them through the math.

honkycat 7y ago

Hundreds of thousands? Most people don't go that deeply into debt. I think the average is like 30k. And that includes loans for housing costs. Also, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Huge chip on your shoulder about something that has nothing to do with you. You are so mad about someone else thinking their college experience was worth it. Don't disparage people who felt like their education was worth it. You have no idea about other people's life experiences and how they came to the conclusions they have come to. So maybe accept that some people got a lot out of college and your experience is not universal.

sodafountan 7y ago
Did you even read my post? First of all I said tens of thousands not hundreds. There’s definitely people who go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt to attend school but that’s pretty rare. Second I don’t know where you’re getting tuition plus room and board for 30K unless you had some sort of scholarship (which, not to drag race into it, seems to be increasingly difficult to get if you’re a white male). Third I made it a point not to disparage you, I specifically said that I think it’s great if you feel like you got a lot of value out of your college experience. I don’t think anybody should disparage anybody, that’s the point. I’m not “anti-intellectual” because I made the financial decision to opt out of college.

aliceryhl 7y ago

> And as a follow up, does it make you "wince" when you see how much you paid to learn what I learned for free? I find it very unlikely I would have learned the things I know had it not been for university. Besides, I don't live in the US (thank god) so I was actually paid by the state to study.