5 ms·

I see a lot of people online advising against taking CS degrees (in europe, where it's not economically impossible to study). They argue that bootcamps and qui

I see a lot of people online advising against taking CS degrees (in europe, where it's not economically impossible to study). They argue that bootcamps and quick courses are enough, or that chatgpt exists now so programming is a dead profession. I disagree, I think I've had a lot of use from having had education… but I might be biased. But I've had to explain things occasionally.

bruce511 3y ago
The carpenter doesn't need a degree. The architect and structural engineer do. If you plan to be a programmer all your life, and a journey-man one at that, then feel free to learn-programming-in-21-days. If you're planning a career in software, then I think understanding fundamentals (database normalisation, the Order of a solution, the ideas of Coupling and Uncoupling, memory usage versus performance, the impact of CPU cache, multi-threading safely, operating system task priorities, compilers, and a good few more things that underpin the science behind building software, then a degree is helpful. Not because of the books, you can get those at home, but because of the structure (ie the path through the carriculim) the mentorship from professors, TAs and so on, and most of all the exposure to your peers - the wonder of collectively pushing each other to explore beyond the curriculum, beyond just this week's assignment. Most of all it teaches intellectual curiosity- that spark some people have to see something in code they don't recognise, understand the novelty of it, and go and find out about it. It's easy to keep up because you have the structural foundations to absorb new things all the time. ChatGPT can't do the things I do, and even calling it ChatGPT is a shallow understanding of why not. Broadly speaking LLMs are a tool I can use to learn new things, which is great, it knows how to weild many kinds of hammer. But it doesn't understand the nuance and context of building a whole building. One which has never been built before. Precisely because LLMs are good at regurgitating the past, but understand literally nothing, they only replace programmers who are good at regurgitating the past (writing code) but understand very little about what that code -means- (as distinct from what it -does-) Of course each College is different, and YMMV, but if you gave the time, and resources, and opportunity to do a formal degree, then I think it worth it in the long run. But like most things in life you get out what you put in. The curriculum is just the hint of a starting point to what you learn there, don't go to "be taught", go to suck the marrow from each moment, to actively "learn" from the challenges you set yourself.
- logicprog 3y ago
  The way I like to explain the difference between the two approaches — and therefore the two educational requirements — you are outlining here is the difference between being a software developer and a software architect. A software developer is focused on developing a certain feature or fixing a certain bug within the context of an architecture that's already determined, rarely making decisions about how to structure the overall data or control flow of a system or what abstractions the system uses, but accepting what's already there; meanwhile, a software architect is going to be making those more broad abstract philosophical decisions that form the framework of how further features are implemented. This is not to suggest that there is a rigid distinction between the two — all software architects are going to also be software developers in the process of building an architecture, or when new architecture is not needed, and many software developers will occasionally act as software architects. Nor is this intended to suggest that the architecture of a software project must be planned out in advance with all of the concepts and data and control flow either — just that there are points in the process of developing software where these large-scale architectural decisions about what abstractions to use and the flow between them must be made. But there do seem to be two somewhat distinct "hats" people who program wear.
  - leemcalilly 3y ago
    does what you’re making matter to people or not? It’s like that no matter what you’re doing. Y’all can sit around here and discuss, “what is a software architect” all you want.
    - bboygravity 3y ago
      Reminds me of the architect we have at work. By the time he was done formalizing what needs to be done and philosophizing about the best approach (while actively trying to prevent the engineers from hacking away), the programmers and hardware engineers delivered a production prototype that works just fine and that people want to buy.
      - 59nadir 3y ago
adamredwoods 3y ago
I've done both, degree first, then years later bootcamp, when I needed to update my skills. I liked both. IMO, people should choose what suits their needs best.
kirso 3y ago
The problem is that bootcamps were incentivised to churn out graduates within 3 months to get ISAs. This contributed to a junior coder market where people are not ready. I only found a handful of resources out there which are really preparing everyone for a long journey. Long gone are the promises of a $500k job after 3 months of studying...
- namaria 3y ago
  Churning out scripters and giving them script frameworks and building whole products and businesses on top of those products has got to be the worst approach to labor shortages ever in the history of work. Oh the single process isn't a good load bearing structure to rest your entire network workload on? Let's create asynchronous abstractions and pack everything in portable process isolation environments and oh now we need a whole distributed OS to orcherstrate these processes etc...

bruce511 3y ago

The carpenter doesn't need a degree. The architect and structural engineer do. If you plan to be a programmer all your life, and a journey-man one at that, then feel free to learn-programming-in-21-days. If you're planning a career in software, then I think understanding fundamentals (database normalisation, the Order of a solution, the ideas of Coupling and Uncoupling, memory usage versus performance, the impact of CPU cache, multi-threading safely, operating system task priorities, compilers, and a good few more things that underpin the science behind building software, then a degree is helpful. Not because of the books, you can get those at home, but because of the structure (ie the path through the carriculim) the mentorship from professors, TAs and so on, and most of all the exposure to your peers - the wonder of collectively pushing each other to explore beyond the curriculum, beyond just this week's assignment. Most of all it teaches intellectual curiosity- that spark some people have to see something in code they don't recognise, understand the novelty of it, and go and find out about it. It's easy to keep up because you have the structural foundations to absorb new things all the time. ChatGPT can't do the things I do, and even calling it ChatGPT is a shallow understanding of why not. Broadly speaking LLMs are a tool I can use to learn new things, which is great, it knows how to weild many kinds of hammer. But it doesn't understand the nuance and context of building a whole building. One which has never been built before. Precisely because LLMs are good at regurgitating the past, but understand literally nothing, they only replace programmers who are good at regurgitating the past (writing code) but understand very little about what that code -means- (as distinct from what it -does-) Of course each College is different, and YMMV, but if you gave the time, and resources, and opportunity to do a formal degree, then I think it worth it in the long run. But like most things in life you get out what you put in. The curriculum is just the hint of a starting point to what you learn there, don't go to "be taught", go to suck the marrow from each moment, to actively "learn" from the challenges you set yourself.

logicprog 3y ago
The way I like to explain the difference between the two approaches — and therefore the two educational requirements — you are outlining here is the difference between being a software developer and a software architect. A software developer is focused on developing a certain feature or fixing a certain bug within the context of an architecture that's already determined, rarely making decisions about how to structure the overall data or control flow of a system or what abstractions the system uses, but accepting what's already there; meanwhile, a software architect is going to be making those more broad abstract philosophical decisions that form the framework of how further features are implemented. This is not to suggest that there is a rigid distinction between the two — all software architects are going to also be software developers in the process of building an architecture, or when new architecture is not needed, and many software developers will occasionally act as software architects. Nor is this intended to suggest that the architecture of a software project must be planned out in advance with all of the concepts and data and control flow either — just that there are points in the process of developing software where these large-scale architectural decisions about what abstractions to use and the flow between them must be made. But there do seem to be two somewhat distinct "hats" people who program wear.
- leemcalilly 3y ago
  does what you’re making matter to people or not? It’s like that no matter what you’re doing. Y’all can sit around here and discuss, “what is a software architect” all you want.
  - bboygravity 3y ago
    Reminds me of the architect we have at work. By the time he was done formalizing what needs to be done and philosophizing about the best approach (while actively trying to prevent the engineers from hacking away), the programmers and hardware engineers delivered a production prototype that works just fine and that people want to buy.
    - 59nadir 3y ago

adamredwoods 3y ago

I've done both, degree first, then years later bootcamp, when I needed to update my skills. I liked both. IMO, people should choose what suits their needs best.

kirso 3y ago

The problem is that bootcamps were incentivised to churn out graduates within 3 months to get ISAs. This contributed to a junior coder market where people are not ready. I only found a handful of resources out there which are really preparing everyone for a long journey. Long gone are the promises of a $500k job after 3 months of studying...

namaria 3y ago
Churning out scripters and giving them script frameworks and building whole products and businesses on top of those products has got to be the worst approach to labor shortages ever in the history of work. Oh the single process isn't a good load bearing structure to rest your entire network workload on? Let's create asynchronous abstractions and pack everything in portable process isolation environments and oh now we need a whole distributed OS to orcherstrate these processes etc...