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I use literally nothing I learnt in college in my day to day work. At the same time, I’m almost 100% sure I wouldn’t be half as good at my job if it wasn’t for

I use literally nothing I learnt in college in my day to day work. At the same time, I’m almost 100% sure I wouldn’t be half as good at my job if it wasn’t for the stuff I learned in college. Right from technical courses which taught me to analyze, and convert words and images (documentation) into actual working products, to the writing courses which mean I communicate much better than I would have otherwise to the economic and financial courses that help me understand the dynamics of the company that I work for.

Izkata 7y ago
For me it's very close to that. Nothing is directly used, but for those of us who really payed attention and didn't just do assignments to get them out of the way, the underlying principles of the stuff from college has help significantly. With a BS in CS, I have two explicit examples: * Understanding time complexity has helped with a couple performance issues, but one big one was recognizing a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm [0] that multiple other devs (including a senior) hadn't noticed - fixing it brought one process's the nightly runtime from something like 2 hours to 5 minutes. * In an information retrieval course, we built a basic inverted index as a semester-long project. That experience has helped with understanding how Lucene and Solr do things under the hood, which helped with various things relating to it - understanding why it's fast, understanding why doing certain queries things didn't improve performance, and understanding what people are even talking about online when trying to diagnose memory issues. If some of this (particularly the time complexity one) sounds basic, it kinda is. But that's the problem - my experience is that people who get into software development through bootcamps or are self-taught end up missing this foundational knowledge, because they don't even know it's something that's out there. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/

Izkata 7y ago

For me it's very close to that. Nothing is directly used, but for those of us who really payed attention and didn't just do assignments to get them out of the way, the underlying principles of the stuff from college has help significantly. With a BS in CS, I have two explicit examples: * Understanding time complexity has helped with a couple performance issues, but one big one was recognizing a Schlemiel the Painter algorithm [0] that multiple other devs (including a senior) hadn't noticed - fixing it brought one process's the nightly runtime from something like 2 hours to 5 minutes. * In an information retrieval course, we built a basic inverted index as a semester-long project. That experience has helped with understanding how Lucene and Solr do things under the hood, which helped with various things relating to it - understanding why it's fast, understanding why doing certain queries things didn't improve performance, and understanding what people are even talking about online when trying to diagnose memory issues. If some of this (particularly the time complexity one) sounds basic, it kinda is. But that's the problem - my experience is that people who get into software development through bootcamps or are self-taught end up missing this foundational knowledge, because they don't even know it's something that's out there. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/11/back-to-basics/