4 ms·

I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at u

I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at university.

bnchrch 2y ago
Same. I feel like, outside of the work experience that was baked into my degree, I could've spent those 4 years and all that money in a much more productive way. (Note: I don't regret it, I had a lot of fun, but in terms of becoming a professional I could've been much more efficient) As a result, anyone who's come to me asking how they can "break into" programming, I strongly discourage them from University at all.
_dark_matter_ 2y ago
Idk I have a lot more confidence because I know what I know, that is, fewer known unknowns, and I have high confidence that there aren't unknown unknowns lurking around corners. This helps me drive decision making across the org.
- brailsafe 2y ago
  Ya but if you're really honest with yourself, did you learn what you needed to "drive decision making across the org" in Uni? You may have I guess, but it seems like you really only get that confidence or those skills after you start doing whatever it is that you do. It's hard to imagine how anything I learned or could have learned in Uni, would have at all helped enough with any of even the least complex tasks once getting started professionally, that I didn't learn in technical college or on my own prior. That said, I wasn't a FAANG go-getter trying for a spot that required complexity analysis or whatever, or a game developer with a necessary background in maths and memory. I feel like the stuff you learn in Uni that's valuable, becomes encountered in only some special cases, and even then there's probably better environments for actually learning it rather than just figuring out how to test well on the material. I personally found the humanities and hard sciences a bit more compelling compared to any CS courses; viewing the CS testing and teaching methodology through the lens of having already been in industry, it pained me more than it might have otherwise had I been a naive impressionable student with no professional perspective. Sitting there writing out an ADT in Java with a pencil in a not large enough physical space, thinking "why did I decide to do this crap again?", but also not being able to respond to the artificial pressure of the classroom with a fabricated stress response.
  - _dark_matter_ 2y ago
    I think I agree with a lot of what you said - non-CS classes can be fundamental to learning some job skills (like writing, communicating, and deep thought). However when I say that it helps me drive decision making, I mean that I am literally more confident in what I'm saying because I'm reasonably sure of the boundaries in my knowledge. For example, I went to grad school and studied databases. On that topic, I probably know more than anyone I work with; so if I put forward a proposal that is related to DBs in any way, I can be quite sure that there are no surprising edges that will come back to bite me (i.e. no one will come along and say "well what about this?", at least from a technical perspective). That's because I know what I know, and there are things I don't know, but I also feel like I know what those are (e.g. I don't feel as comfortable with low-level programming, mostly because I actually skipped a machine organization class and never picked those skills up separately).
xeromal 2y ago
Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.
- eYrKEC2 2y ago
  Bingo. A BS is a great filter for hard working and higher IQ. Guess who does really really good in sales? People who play varsity or college sports. Is it a rule? Nope. Is it a great heuristic? Yep. Does football teach you sales? Not really... but it does filter for certain traits, one of which is probably pure animal magnetism and the base desire of humans to be influenced bt the most fit individual.
  - stonogo 2y ago
    Team sports teach you how to work productively with people, including people you might not like. That skill directly transfers to sales.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      And it almost certainly also filters for competitiveness, probably more so than the typical technical curriculum does.
- kjksf 2y ago
  The "washout" would work equally well if they were teaching non-BS. And what do we teach people for 12 years before college? Is college the first time people learn how to learn?
  - xeromal 2y ago
    The 12 years before is mandatory so it's no indication but it used to be when it wasn't. That's why high school diplomas don't matter as much as they did in say 1920
itishappy 2y ago
University can offer two things: 1. Equip students to do a job. 2. Equip students to find a job. These are surprisingly disparate, and I suspect the latter is a lot more significant than most people realize. Put differently: I suspect the real challenge is getting hired without explicit qualifications.
- euroderf 2y ago
  I'm not sure about your #2. Self-promotion is not necessary at university, since the profs receive mandatory submissions. Very different from a job search, putting yourself and your paperwork "out there" in a targeted way.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    I agree about classwork, but I think many universities put a lot of effort into placing their students. Job fairs, resume classes, internships, student research, etc. Personally, I suck at self promotion. The career aids offered by my school made a world of difference.
    - bluSCALE4 2y ago
      Outside of internships, everything else is opt in.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        Of course. Wait, you had required internships?
        ghaff 2y ago
        Some schools do have co-op programs of various sorts. But they're generally opt-in with various degrees of optionality.
  - pintxo 2y ago
    Replace „to find“ with „to be accepted“. There is still a lot of (stupid) company rules about hiring only people with an advanced degree.
screye 2y ago
If 100% of a job is easy enough for a fresh community college grad, then it is easy enough to be outsourced for 1/10th the cost. The 5% of the job that is hard, is what you're paid for. It is what keeps the job onshore, and it is what keeps fresh community college grads from being hired into it.
- ojl 2y ago
  Just because he said he didn’t need a big part of the university courses doesn’t mean that it’s easy. He said that he learned most of the things at the job, which I mostly agree with. For some domains it’s important to have the proper educational background though. But mostly it’s a different kind of difficult compared to how advanced courses are difficult.
codeAligned 2y ago
There's always someone who will reply with something along the lines of "I don't use anything I learned in school on the job" or "Software engineering is not about coding, it's about X" With due respect, in my experience as someone who did not major in CS, it was a rough first few years because I had weak knowledge of data structures, almost no knowledge of computer networking (showed itself why managing containers etc), didn't know even the very basics of bash/linux. Nowadays, when I work with CS majors vs non majors, it has noticeably been more difficult to get the latter group up to speed and productive. Of course there have been notable exceptions (there always are when it comes to people matters)
- hellisothers 2y ago
  100% likely depends on what you’re doing but I work in FAANGY tech and if anything CS majors lag behind people with real work experience, any real work experience. DA&A is not relevant to writing a CRUD app or service. It’s not relevant to collaborating or getting things done.
_vertigo 2y ago
I am a much better "engineer" for having taken the advanced classes, but more to the point, I was a much better programmer for having taken the advanced classes. The total amount of code I had written in my first two years of university was not very much; by the time I had taken some of the advanced courses I had written a lot more code and had thus become a better programmer (still not a good one, but better!). I had written probably 10x more code by the end of year 4 than the end of year 2 thanks to practicum courses, etc.
tuyiown 2y ago
Or, maybe, you learned way more than you think and that let you concentrate on the «important things».
scruple 2y ago
No degree here, 20 years in. Worked in embedded, medical robotics, AAA games...
- satisfice 2y ago
  No degree here, either. Simply not a problem for most work involving software and code.
prewett 2y ago
I was got a non-CS bachelors, and then managed to get into development, partly because I had been programming all my life. But I went back for a masters and shored up the undergrad CS that I missed. Boy was that helpful! It wasn't necessary for 95% of my job, either, but it enables me to solve the other 5% that I would be unable to solve, or end up with something that barely works. I've found compilers useful (for parsing; didn't have time to take finite state automata), the OS class was excellent for understanding and to be able to write threaded programs that work. Data structures is simply essential (but I took a that in undergrad).
nunez 2y ago
100%. The tough let code style interviews mostly cover CS101 and CS102 topics that most of us stopped using the minute after matriculation.

I’m pretty sure I could do 95% of my job without the advanced classes I took. The important things that I learned since I started my career were not taught at university.

bnchrch 2y ago

Same. I feel like, outside of the work experience that was baked into my degree, I could've spent those 4 years and all that money in a much more productive way. (Note: I don't regret it, I had a lot of fun, but in terms of becoming a professional I could've been much more efficient) As a result, anyone who's come to me asking how they can "break into" programming, I strongly discourage them from University at all.

_dark_matter_ 2y ago

Idk I have a lot more confidence because I know what I know, that is, fewer known unknowns, and I have high confidence that there aren't unknown unknowns lurking around corners. This helps me drive decision making across the org.

brailsafe 2y ago
Ya but if you're really honest with yourself, did you learn what you needed to "drive decision making across the org" in Uni? You may have I guess, but it seems like you really only get that confidence or those skills after you start doing whatever it is that you do. It's hard to imagine how anything I learned or could have learned in Uni, would have at all helped enough with any of even the least complex tasks once getting started professionally, that I didn't learn in technical college or on my own prior. That said, I wasn't a FAANG go-getter trying for a spot that required complexity analysis or whatever, or a game developer with a necessary background in maths and memory. I feel like the stuff you learn in Uni that's valuable, becomes encountered in only some special cases, and even then there's probably better environments for actually learning it rather than just figuring out how to test well on the material. I personally found the humanities and hard sciences a bit more compelling compared to any CS courses; viewing the CS testing and teaching methodology through the lens of having already been in industry, it pained me more than it might have otherwise had I been a naive impressionable student with no professional perspective. Sitting there writing out an ADT in Java with a pencil in a not large enough physical space, thinking "why did I decide to do this crap again?", but also not being able to respond to the artificial pressure of the classroom with a fabricated stress response.
- _dark_matter_ 2y ago
  I think I agree with a lot of what you said - non-CS classes can be fundamental to learning some job skills (like writing, communicating, and deep thought). However when I say that it helps me drive decision making, I mean that I am literally more confident in what I'm saying because I'm reasonably sure of the boundaries in my knowledge. For example, I went to grad school and studied databases. On that topic, I probably know more than anyone I work with; so if I put forward a proposal that is related to DBs in any way, I can be quite sure that there are no surprising edges that will come back to bite me (i.e. no one will come along and say "well what about this?", at least from a technical perspective). That's because I know what I know, and there are things I don't know, but I also feel like I know what those are (e.g. I don't feel as comfortable with low-level programming, mostly because I actually skipped a machine organization class and never picked those skills up separately).

xeromal 2y ago

Not sure about your school but part of college is a washout tool. Can someone handle BS for 4 years without giving up which is a good indicator of their character. Another is that most of the classes should eventually teach you how to teach yourself. You're given progressively harder challenges but you have to fill the gaps with your own study and research.

eYrKEC2 2y ago
Bingo. A BS is a great filter for hard working and higher IQ. Guess who does really really good in sales? People who play varsity or college sports. Is it a rule? Nope. Is it a great heuristic? Yep. Does football teach you sales? Not really... but it does filter for certain traits, one of which is probably pure animal magnetism and the base desire of humans to be influenced bt the most fit individual.
- stonogo 2y ago
  Team sports teach you how to work productively with people, including people you might not like. That skill directly transfers to sales.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And it almost certainly also filters for competitiveness, probably more so than the typical technical curriculum does.
kjksf 2y ago
The "washout" would work equally well if they were teaching non-BS. And what do we teach people for 12 years before college? Is college the first time people learn how to learn?
- xeromal 2y ago
  The 12 years before is mandatory so it's no indication but it used to be when it wasn't. That's why high school diplomas don't matter as much as they did in say 1920

itishappy 2y ago

University can offer two things: 1. Equip students to do a job. 2. Equip students to find a job. These are surprisingly disparate, and I suspect the latter is a lot more significant than most people realize. Put differently: I suspect the real challenge is getting hired without explicit qualifications.

euroderf 2y ago
I'm not sure about your #2. Self-promotion is not necessary at university, since the profs receive mandatory submissions. Very different from a job search, putting yourself and your paperwork "out there" in a targeted way.
- itishappy 2y ago
  I agree about classwork, but I think many universities put a lot of effort into placing their students. Job fairs, resume classes, internships, student research, etc. Personally, I suck at self promotion. The career aids offered by my school made a world of difference.
  - bluSCALE4 2y ago
    Outside of internships, everything else is opt in.
    - itishappy 2y ago
      Of course. Wait, you had required internships?
      - ghaff 2y ago
        Some schools do have co-op programs of various sorts. But they're generally opt-in with various degrees of optionality.
- pintxo 2y ago
  Replace „to find“ with „to be accepted“. There is still a lot of (stupid) company rules about hiring only people with an advanced degree.

screye 2y ago

If 100% of a job is easy enough for a fresh community college grad, then it is easy enough to be outsourced for 1/10th the cost. The 5% of the job that is hard, is what you're paid for. It is what keeps the job onshore, and it is what keeps fresh community college grads from being hired into it.

ojl 2y ago
Just because he said he didn’t need a big part of the university courses doesn’t mean that it’s easy. He said that he learned most of the things at the job, which I mostly agree with. For some domains it’s important to have the proper educational background though. But mostly it’s a different kind of difficult compared to how advanced courses are difficult.

codeAligned 2y ago

There's always someone who will reply with something along the lines of "I don't use anything I learned in school on the job" or "Software engineering is not about coding, it's about X" With due respect, in my experience as someone who did not major in CS, it was a rough first few years because I had weak knowledge of data structures, almost no knowledge of computer networking (showed itself why managing containers etc), didn't know even the very basics of bash/linux. Nowadays, when I work with CS majors vs non majors, it has noticeably been more difficult to get the latter group up to speed and productive. Of course there have been notable exceptions (there always are when it comes to people matters)

hellisothers 2y ago
100% likely depends on what you’re doing but I work in FAANGY tech and if anything CS majors lag behind people with real work experience, any real work experience. DA&A is not relevant to writing a CRUD app or service. It’s not relevant to collaborating or getting things done.

_vertigo 2y ago

I am a much better "engineer" for having taken the advanced classes, but more to the point, I was a much better programmer for having taken the advanced classes. The total amount of code I had written in my first two years of university was not very much; by the time I had taken some of the advanced courses I had written a lot more code and had thus become a better programmer (still not a good one, but better!). I had written probably 10x more code by the end of year 4 than the end of year 2 thanks to practicum courses, etc.

tuyiown 2y ago

Or, maybe, you learned way more than you think and that let you concentrate on the «important things».

scruple 2y ago

No degree here, 20 years in. Worked in embedded, medical robotics, AAA games...

satisfice 2y ago
No degree here, either. Simply not a problem for most work involving software and code.

prewett 2y ago

I was got a non-CS bachelors, and then managed to get into development, partly because I had been programming all my life. But I went back for a masters and shored up the undergrad CS that I missed. Boy was that helpful! It wasn't necessary for 95% of my job, either, but it enables me to solve the other 5% that I would be unable to solve, or end up with something that barely works. I've found compilers useful (for parsing; didn't have time to take finite state automata), the OS class was excellent for understanding and to be able to write threaded programs that work. Data structures is simply essential (but I took a that in undergrad).

nunez 2y ago

100%. The tough let code style interviews mostly cover CS101 and CS102 topics that most of us stopped using the minute after matriculation.