4 ms·
Biggest mistake of my life, too, but I got off easy. I attended a community college for 2 years, then transferred to a state university, to get a 4-year Compute
by coldpie 5y ago
Biggest mistake of my life, too, but I got off easy. I attended a community college for 2 years, then transferred to a state university, to get a 4-year Computer Science degree in 2011. Complete waste of time and money. I made no friends; I knew more about programming than most of my teachers; and it turns out I hate computer science (enjoy programming, though!). Mercifully, I was already employed in software before my first year, so I made it out without debt, but if I could do my life over again, I wouldn't have wasted that time and money in the first place.
When asked, I now tell young people not to waste their time with college. Almost no one I know works in the field which they studied in college, they're just steeped in useless debt. It's a scam.
- ncmncm 5y agoLearn O(f(n)) notation and caches, and you're good to go. Judging by interviews, they don't teach the caches part in CS.
- coldpie 5y agoTurns out DFAs and Turing machines don't have caches. Wow, what incredibly useful models to spend several semesters examining /s
- ncmncm 5y agoComputer Science has "science" right there in the name: it isn't meant to be useful. But caches are DFAs. So, sometimes it is, by accident.
- anonymoushn 5y agoIs that about memoization, software fixed-size caches, physical caches on CPU dies, or caches that you can put in front of HTTP servers?
- ncmncm 5y agoYes. And many others. If you want to do science of computation, halting problem, P?=?NP, lambda calculus, good. Those are legitimate to study, and to write papers about. But studying them does not prepare you to engineer systems.