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I don't even have a CS degree and this post makes my blood boil. He'd hire a "philosopher" for his company first? Who do you think makes the operating system t
by sthatipamala 15y ago
I don't even have a CS degree and this post makes my blood boil. He'd hire a "philosopher" for his company first?
Who do you think makes the operating system that runs your all-important, "real world" app? Who are you going to pay $100K a year to rework your hack of a database schema if your service ever "goes viral"? Yeah, that's right, it's an engineer who learned all that theoretical knowledge.
A lot of CS majors don't know how to code for their life. A lot of MBAs will stab you in the back over equity. A lot of designers in a post Jobs-ian world are self-entitled brats. It turns out that A LOT of people are incompetent and their occupation has nothing to do with it.
If you don't enjoy your major, change it. If you think a philosopher can achieve your product vision, do whatever is best for your company. But the author is a fool to disparage an entire field of knowledge and its practitioners because it is not immediately relevant to whatever his goals are.
- umrashrf 15y agoI realized you collected right words to put my feelings up.
- einhverfr 15y agoWhen I am looking at hiring someone (and I have a history degree, not a CS one), I never ask about their degree. Why? Because I have rarely found that a CS degree really correlates either way with coding quality. What I focus on instead is past accomplishments. I ask for work samples, questions about what you've done in the past, etc. If you have done open source development even better. Please send me your contributions and I will review them! I have met excellent developers who had CS degrees and excellent developers who didn't. This being said... The article I think illustrates the kind of person who needs an attitude adjustment before starting a company. His overall negativity means he will need to be able to think positively about his ideas before he can even start to think about making them work in the real world. It's hard enough to get such a software project going to a level of self-sustainability when you believe in it. When you think it all sucks it can be very hard.
- PakG1 15y agoHis "philosopher" should be the product guy, and the product guy should usually be the CEO, if not also the lead developer. If the philosopher isn't the lead guy, there will be huge conflicts of vision for the product.
- IsaacL 15y agoI read the comments first, then read the article, and was confused since I thought this comment was referring to a different article. I found it strange that the author is a fool who makes your blood boil solely because he said (in one sentence) he wouldn't immediately hire CS majors. He didn't seem to be disparaging CS degrees, just saying that the non-CS students who'd taught themselves programming tended to be more interesting. This chimes with my experience as well. I am a CS student, but the best CS students seemed to be those who never went to lectures and worked on cool side projects. Likewise, I met a few non-CS students who, naturally, never went to CS lectures, but were also working on cool side projects, and taught themselves programming to get them off the ground. Some were big-ball-of-PHP-mud type coders, some actually became very solid programmers, I would happily work with almost any of them. There's many bright CS students who lack that same gumption, and I'd be less interested in working with people like that.
- trustfundbaby 15y agoHis statement is a little ham-handed. But I think all he's trying to say is that he'd hire programmers with non-CS degrees first.