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The thing is, if you search for something enough you will end up learning it. It's a natural way to learn things. This is how people become software engineers
by willio58 4y ago
The thing is, if you search for something enough you will end up learning it. It's a natural way to learn things.
This is how people become software engineers these days. They _constantly_ look stuff up, watch videos, and learn by doing that. Yes, you can still go to college and take tests that require you to "know" things, but honestly the vast majority of what I "knew" in college turned out to be short-term knowledge stored for tests.
By searching and learning, you
- godshatter 4y agoA person can certainly become a software engineer without a college education, but I worry that constantly learning things just in time for using them will give them disconnected snippets of knowledge in a lot of areas rather than a good concept of how the underlying system functions. I guess it depends on if they are studying computer architecture, complexity theory, and whatnot in those videos or if they are just copying snippets of code from SO. I learned by doing, initially, because I started learning programming with minimal resources before going to college and had to unlearn or restructure a lot of the knowledge I had gained up to that point once I did. I would probably have gotten there in the end, but it would have taken me a lot longer. The world was different then, though. Instead of easy access to info before going to college I was lucky to find a book somewhere that someone threw out that talked about things in a peripheral way that I needed to know, or ran into someone I could discuss things with that were as info-deprived as I was. That's where my skepticism of this approach comes from, I guess. But I didn't live in a world where knowledge was at my fingertips from a very early age, so who knows?