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author here! I had a whole paragraph on the importance of a formal education. But removed because the post was too long. it's very important!
by glommer 3y ago
author here! I had a whole paragraph on the importance of a formal education. But removed because the post was too long.
it's very important!
- glommer 3y agofor posterity, here's the deleted piece: Don’t neglect academic knowledge. One of the unhelpful discussions I see online is the suggestion that you may not need to have academic knowledge to be a “developer”. After all, can’t I just watch some React tutorial, code a couple of websites, and be done with it? That usually takes the form of the infamous “In real life never have I have ever inverted a binary tree”. Well, I did. Many, many times. I implemented binary trees, B-Trees, red-black trees, tries, learned indexes, linked lists. And I am not saying this to brag: the challenge here would be to find a single systems developer who didn’t. Much of what you do at system level is adapting data structures to new environments, where just using standard data structures won’t do. Big-O notation is another example. They are part of systems level discussions all the time. By “academic knowledge”, I don’t mean you have to sit for 5 years in a university classroom. I mean the kind of knowledge that you acquire by going through the books and exercises one goes through in the “boring” courses in university. If you can learn that by yourself, that’s all good too. I have a great friend with whom I worked for years that never went to school, but he could run circles around everyone in the Linux Scheduler. In my experience, though, few people can, and sitting through 5 years of university does help a lot. Unfortunately.