3 ms·
I’m a senior engineer at one of the big tech companies. Sharing that because that’s all I have to back my opinion. I don’t agree with you. I don’t think you ne
by tracer4201 7y ago
I’m a senior engineer at one of the big tech companies. Sharing that because that’s all I have to back my opinion.
I don’t agree with you. I don’t think you need a four year degree for these concepts. I think many of the concepts you outline are very critical especially as you work on larger and more complex systems. However I’m not even convinced college does a good job at teaching these concepts. College introduce me to some of them but didn’t actually help me build any intuition at all. I regurgitated the things my professor said and that’s how I pass through my courses with straight A’s. I didn’t really understand distributed systems until I worked on them. I didn’t really understand them well until I read about distributed systems not from a textbook but by other people who had worked on them and this was mostly online papers or YouTube videos or conference videos where are companies presenting on their lessons learned.
I think the course of the classes you need for a computer science curriculum such as data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networks, languages and compilers, databases and distributed systems - These can all be self taught. I’m not convinced a four year degree that’s full of fluff with various elective courses adds any value.
- jki275 7y agoYou can literally read four books and get all those concepts. You won't be an expert in them, but taking a college course on them won't make you one either.