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I don't know how it works in USA but here in Poland you earn like 4 times more as a developer compared to a computer science PhD at an university. The incentive

by ajuc 3y ago

I don't know how it works in USA but here in Poland you earn like 4 times more as a developer compared to a computer science PhD at an university. The incentives aren't exactly healthy. And the programming culture is basically - learn it yourself, go to university so you have a paper proving you can do it.

sfn42 3y ago
University provides much more than paper. What many don't seem to understand is that it is the student's responsibility to learn. The best lecturer in the world can't teach you anything if you don't pay attention, or if you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding. I could attend a lecture on advanced neuroscience and I would be left with pretty much nothing because I have no idea about any of that stuff. In order to gain from it I would need a solid base of knowledge on which the lecturer could build. So university students fall on a spectrum. Some are really interested, they started writing code on their own before they even enrolled. They challenge themselves and do their own projects for fun and learning. Others don't care, they do as little as they can get away with. A trick I picked up that I found very helpful was to study before each lecture. They would publish a list of all the lectures and which chapter the lecture was about, so I would study the chapter before the lecture. This allowed me to much better understand the lecture, and I felt like it really helped me gain value from the lectures and learn the material. My point is nobody can put knowledge in your head but yourself. My experience was that the people complaining most about our studies and lecturers were the people who didn't take responsibility for their own learning. If a lecturer sucked I just skipped the lectures and read the book instead, I didn't care. I don't need a lecturer. Good lectures are just a bonus, they're not supposed to be your main source of learning. You're supposed to study on your own time, even when nobody has given you a specific task and deadline. If you do that, university is a great way to guide your learning and keep you going - and get a paper proving you have put the time in.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > and get a paper proving you have put the time in. Are you apt to forget that you put time into it?
  - sfn42 3y ago
    If I'm hiring a stranger for my company it's nice to have an esteemed institution willing to officially vouch for them having some baseline of knowledge in the field.
    - randomdata 3y ago
      While there are always exceptions, the esteemed institutions in question are generally not willing to vouch for some baseline vocational knowledge in the field. In fact, that's what the entire discussion is about, with debugging being a prime example of baseline knowledge they are often not willing to vouch for. Their esteem does not stem from that sort of offer. No doubt you keep on top of who are the exceptions, and ensure they stay that way on a continual basis, however that is going to be way more work in the end. More power to you if that's what enthrals you, but that's not work I would consider "nice". That sounds like drudgery to me... ...and most everyone else it seems. Indeed, there was those couple of years there where this notion of yours made it into the mainstream, but it disappeared as quickly as it came.
      - sfn42 3y ago
        I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying a university education is useful, or at least that it was to me and I think it will be to anyone who puts effort into it. I have actually remarked to colleagues about this exact topic, I think it's strange that debugging was a topic I had to learn on my own and teach to struggling students when I was a TA. The flip side of that is that debugging is easy. It is definitely a skill that you can develop over time but learning the basics and getting started debugging your code is something you can do in less than an hour. This is a minor criticism, not a justification for declaring universities useless. I learned tons of other useful stuff. I learned multiple programming languages, math, DSA, databases, networking, all kinds of things I use on a frequent basis. Whenever I hear people say they didn't learn anything useful in university i think that says a lot more about them than it does about the university.
        3y ago

by ajuc 3y ago

sfn42 3y ago

University provides much more than paper. What many don't seem to understand is that it is the student's responsibility to learn. The best lecturer in the world can't teach you anything if you don't pay attention, or if you don't have the prerequisite knowledge and understanding. I could attend a lecture on advanced neuroscience and I would be left with pretty much nothing because I have no idea about any of that stuff. In order to gain from it I would need a solid base of knowledge on which the lecturer could build. So university students fall on a spectrum. Some are really interested, they started writing code on their own before they even enrolled. They challenge themselves and do their own projects for fun and learning. Others don't care, they do as little as they can get away with. A trick I picked up that I found very helpful was to study before each lecture. They would publish a list of all the lectures and which chapter the lecture was about, so I would study the chapter before the lecture. This allowed me to much better understand the lecture, and I felt like it really helped me gain value from the lectures and learn the material. My point is nobody can put knowledge in your head but yourself. My experience was that the people complaining most about our studies and lecturers were the people who didn't take responsibility for their own learning. If a lecturer sucked I just skipped the lectures and read the book instead, I didn't care. I don't need a lecturer. Good lectures are just a bonus, they're not supposed to be your main source of learning. You're supposed to study on your own time, even when nobody has given you a specific task and deadline. If you do that, university is a great way to guide your learning and keep you going - and get a paper proving you have put the time in.

randomdata 3y ago
> and get a paper proving you have put the time in. Are you apt to forget that you put time into it?
- sfn42 3y ago
  If I'm hiring a stranger for my company it's nice to have an esteemed institution willing to officially vouch for them having some baseline of knowledge in the field.
  - randomdata 3y ago
    While there are always exceptions, the esteemed institutions in question are generally not willing to vouch for some baseline vocational knowledge in the field. In fact, that's what the entire discussion is about, with debugging being a prime example of baseline knowledge they are often not willing to vouch for. Their esteem does not stem from that sort of offer. No doubt you keep on top of who are the exceptions, and ensure they stay that way on a continual basis, however that is going to be way more work in the end. More power to you if that's what enthrals you, but that's not work I would consider "nice". That sounds like drudgery to me... ...and most everyone else it seems. Indeed, there was those couple of years there where this notion of yours made it into the mainstream, but it disappeared as quickly as it came.
    - sfn42 3y ago
      I'm not saying universities are perfect. I'm just saying a university education is useful, or at least that it was to me and I think it will be to anyone who puts effort into it. I have actually remarked to colleagues about this exact topic, I think it's strange that debugging was a topic I had to learn on my own and teach to struggling students when I was a TA. The flip side of that is that debugging is easy. It is definitely a skill that you can develop over time but learning the basics and getting started debugging your code is something you can do in less than an hour. This is a minor criticism, not a justification for declaring universities useless. I learned tons of other useful stuff. I learned multiple programming languages, math, DSA, databases, networking, all kinds of things I use on a frequent basis. Whenever I hear people say they didn't learn anything useful in university i think that says a lot more about them than it does about the university.
      - 3y ago