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"There is a prestigious school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devoted to science and engineering, and while I'm sure that there are some students t
by jwecker 20y ago
"There is a prestigious school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, devoted to science and engineering, and while I'm sure that there are some students there who are majoring in 'computer science,' the science that's taught isn't related to the dirty low-prestige job of creating e-commerce websites using ASP.NET"
That note is interesting to me. A major reason I'm on this site right now, in addition to the discussions and the talk about startups, is the fact that Paul Graham was one of the first authors that I read that laid a very solid case for smart programming leading to good business- which of course validated what I and probably most of you already knew or felt. The author of this article is actually saying that an MIT type education is worthless in the real world where you need ASP.NET programming to get the 'real work' done. The author kind of lost all of his credibility for me at that point.
- Readmore 20y agoI agree that his views on schools doesn't really translate to coding. The author talks about the prestige of programming being low, which in IT it is, but there are obviously coders that have prestige. John Carmack, for one, is very highly regarded in the computer science field, but he never went to a prestigious CS school. What I find interesting is that programmers only get prestige from actually DOING something. This can happen at a big company but more often than not it happens at a startup. Lawyers and Doctors 'get' their prestige from going to school and getting their title, whether it is deserved or not, but programmers have to earn it through solving problems. I find that much more rewarding, it will mean much more for me to be prestigous because of my work than because of where I went to school.
- notabel 20y agoI agree with jwecker here; when I hit that part of the article, I couldn't help but think of Joel Spolsky's "The Perils of JavaSchools" essay. EDIT: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html for anyone who's not familiar. It's a good read.