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While I also attended college, I sometimes wonder if a college degree is really needed to learn these general stuffs. I learn a lot while doing projects complet

While I also attended college, I sometimes wonder if a college degree is really needed to learn these general stuffs. I learn a lot while doing projects completely unrelated to schoolwork, before registering for the course. I still have to register for the course because of graduation requirements, but I just skipped all the lectures and only took the exams. There are nice materials and textbooks available, and I think anyone motivated enough can learn them without needing a college degree, and probably have a better understanding than most college graduates. I really hope that colleges can just allow students to take an exam and skip some of the courses, so to not waste everyone's time. This is 2023, not 2003, most people have access to internet and CS education is widely available. No need to force everyone to attend introductory courses that are not well designed anyway. Regarding abstractions, I think the craziest thing is that frontend projects are probably the most complicated beasts that I have ever dealt with. I worked with compiler written in Python, embedded system projects where pointers are everywhere, numerical algorithms which are notoriously hard to debug, but still frontend projects still managed to be a lot more complicated than them. I generally stay away from frontend stuff recent years...

figassis 3y ago
I think it's dangerous to think in this way: I succeeded without college, so everyone can, so college should be abolished. Not everyone has the discipline to self learn through a course. Not every one knows how to properly and effectively absorb and retain knowledge, and not everyone knows how to make that knowledge useful. What college does is provide structure and a favorable environment for learning where you're among peers, sharing the same experience and learning together "how to learn". Some people are able to get fit by themselves, others need structure and guidance, so you have a whole industry of gyms and personal trainers and programs that require attendance. My point is that this attitude towards college (or other forms of structured/formal learning) might be what is creating large numbers of full stack developers, devops who only know terraform, etc, who couldn't debug the first networking issue even if the error message was right in the browser. Moreover, the official point of college is that it provides some level of confidence to your peers, employers and customers that at the very least you know the fundamentas of your profession, because without them it is not enough that you're a react wizard, or a microsservices expert. I think if there were a baseline of required knowledge, most products we build would perform better, consume less resources and fail less.
- pca006132 3y ago
  Yeah I don't think college should be abolished, I just think that college should adapt to this trend of online education, instead of just acting like 100 years ago where there is no internet. And they should probably try to make better use of online education materials instead of offering their own courses that are worse...

figassis 3y ago

I think it's dangerous to think in this way: I succeeded without college, so everyone can, so college should be abolished. Not everyone has the discipline to self learn through a course. Not every one knows how to properly and effectively absorb and retain knowledge, and not everyone knows how to make that knowledge useful. What college does is provide structure and a favorable environment for learning where you're among peers, sharing the same experience and learning together "how to learn". Some people are able to get fit by themselves, others need structure and guidance, so you have a whole industry of gyms and personal trainers and programs that require attendance. My point is that this attitude towards college (or other forms of structured/formal learning) might be what is creating large numbers of full stack developers, devops who only know terraform, etc, who couldn't debug the first networking issue even if the error message was right in the browser. Moreover, the official point of college is that it provides some level of confidence to your peers, employers and customers that at the very least you know the fundamentas of your profession, because without them it is not enough that you're a react wizard, or a microsservices expert. I think if there were a baseline of required knowledge, most products we build would perform better, consume less resources and fail less.

pca006132 3y ago
Yeah I don't think college should be abolished, I just think that college should adapt to this trend of online education, instead of just acting like 100 years ago where there is no internet. And they should probably try to make better use of online education materials instead of offering their own courses that are worse...