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Academia is not the only place to learn. >The tech giants whose founders and engineers were trained in these institutions, whose core technologies were incubat

Academia is not the only place to learn. >The tech giants whose founders and engineers were trained in these institutions, whose core technologies were incubated in these research environments There is a reason many of those founders dropped out than continue. It turns out that what you learn is useless and inefficient compared to picking up the knowledge externally. Practical experience is a much better teacher than the people at universities. Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day. Also notice how those core technologies are not listed because it would weaken there point. It's natural for universities to argue for why they are still relevant in the 21st century. They don't want to be disrupted.

gdulli 1y ago
I would love to see a list of those lies. I may have picked them up at university too and could be naively believing them myself.
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  Or you could be naively believing the list you receive attributes them correctly. You don't need a list. You need to research the subjects on which you care to be informed.
  - gdulli 1y ago
    I wasn't taking them seriously, I just thought the list would be entertaining.
cs_throwaway 1y ago
> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day. In your computer science classes? What/where were you studying?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Yes, and the rate was higher the more practical the content was. So for example explainations about git would have a lot and explainations about automata would have few.
  - lokar 1y ago
    Your computer /science/ class taught source control? Wild.
    - coldpie 1y ago
      Software engineering programs have come around in the past 5-10 years, but prior to that and probably still to this day at many schools, computer science is pretty much the only program for people entering industry to develop software. So, it's very common for them to teach the programming languages and tools that industry wants people to know.
      - lokar 1y ago
        I wonder what that is at the expense of
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      Yes because amazingly enough, most people go to college to get jobs to support their addictions to food, clothes and shelter and most jobs want software developers and not “computer scientists”.
- coldpie 1y ago
  I had a professor tell the class, in response to a student's question, that the "0x" in the "0x1" memory address on the slide meant "a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter," like the "x" was a stand-in for some unimportant portion of the memory address that had been elided. I stopped attending that class. That professor was not significantly below the average at my school (University of Minnesota, late 2000s). Blowing 4 years and a bunch of money at university getting a computer science degree is one of the biggest regrets of my life. Luckily I already had a software job during my 1st year, so those years weren't totally wasted.
MeetingsBrowser 1y ago
> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day. If you were smarter than all of your professors you either went to a very bad college or you are experiencing something like Dunning Kruger
- lokar 1y ago
  Also, many many topics need to be taught in “layers” where early on you teach a simplified (and this a bit wrong) version. It’s not practical to start off with 100% fidelity.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Knowledge is not one dimensional. And I'm not saying I would be able to have done a better job of teaching the material.
- coldpie 1y ago
  I think there's a third explanation, which is that computer science professors are made to teach computer programming courses to students who want to learn computer programming and not computer science. If you're a skilled computer programmer when you enter the course, you're probably already more knowledgeable about computer programming than the computer science people who are supposed to be teaching you. I'm sure my professors knew their computer science niches just fine, but they knew very little about programming & software engineering. Programming was my main hobby growing up. In high school I was already using Linux, had written dozens of websites for myself and friends, had written a 3D platforming game from scratch, and had made and published several homebrew games for real video game hardware. Having to then spend a semester "learning" C++ and operating system basics, from someone who has spent their whole life in academia and never published any real software, was godawful. They barely knew what they were talking about and made all kinds of beginner mistakes. I definitely knew way more than my professors about the subject I was there to learn, computer programming.
  - trust_bt_verify 1y ago
    Well you certainly sound _incredibly_ gifted and it’s truly a shame you pushed through a CS degree that was clearly beneath you. Any reason you didn’t change course once you clearly evaluated college was not for you?
jmuguy 1y ago
I dropped out of college after a semester. I also didn't see the value in it. Because I was a stupid kid. Twenty years later its one of my biggest regrets. We don't need more self righteous "founders", convinced they know everything.

gdulli 1y ago

I would love to see a list of those lies. I may have picked them up at university too and could be naively believing them myself.

bilbo0s 1y ago
Or you could be naively believing the list you receive attributes them correctly. You don't need a list. You need to research the subjects on which you care to be informed.
- gdulli 1y ago
  I wasn't taking them seriously, I just thought the list would be entertaining.

cs_throwaway 1y ago

> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day. In your computer science classes? What/where were you studying?

charcircuit 1y ago
Yes, and the rate was higher the more practical the content was. So for example explainations about git would have a lot and explainations about automata would have few.
- lokar 1y ago
  Your computer /science/ class taught source control? Wild.
  - coldpie 1y ago
    Software engineering programs have come around in the past 5-10 years, but prior to that and probably still to this day at many schools, computer science is pretty much the only program for people entering industry to develop software. So, it's very common for them to teach the programming languages and tools that industry wants people to know.
    - lokar 1y ago
      I wonder what that is at the expense of
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    Yes because amazingly enough, most people go to college to get jobs to support their addictions to food, clothes and shelter and most jobs want software developers and not “computer scientists”.
coldpie 1y ago
I had a professor tell the class, in response to a student's question, that the "0x" in the "0x1" memory address on the slide meant "a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter," like the "x" was a stand-in for some unimportant portion of the memory address that had been elided. I stopped attending that class. That professor was not significantly below the average at my school (University of Minnesota, late 2000s). Blowing 4 years and a bunch of money at university getting a computer science degree is one of the biggest regrets of my life. Luckily I already had a software job during my 1st year, so those years weren't totally wasted.

MeetingsBrowser 1y ago

> Every day at class I would keep a tally of how many lies and incorrect statements and explainations would get made every day. If you were smarter than all of your professors you either went to a very bad college or you are experiencing something like Dunning Kruger

lokar 1y ago
Also, many many topics need to be taught in “layers” where early on you teach a simplified (and this a bit wrong) version. It’s not practical to start off with 100% fidelity.
charcircuit 1y ago
Knowledge is not one dimensional. And I'm not saying I would be able to have done a better job of teaching the material.
coldpie 1y ago
I think there's a third explanation, which is that computer science professors are made to teach computer programming courses to students who want to learn computer programming and not computer science. If you're a skilled computer programmer when you enter the course, you're probably already more knowledgeable about computer programming than the computer science people who are supposed to be teaching you. I'm sure my professors knew their computer science niches just fine, but they knew very little about programming & software engineering. Programming was my main hobby growing up. In high school I was already using Linux, had written dozens of websites for myself and friends, had written a 3D platforming game from scratch, and had made and published several homebrew games for real video game hardware. Having to then spend a semester "learning" C++ and operating system basics, from someone who has spent their whole life in academia and never published any real software, was godawful. They barely knew what they were talking about and made all kinds of beginner mistakes. I definitely knew way more than my professors about the subject I was there to learn, computer programming.
- trust_bt_verify 1y ago
  Well you certainly sound _incredibly_ gifted and it’s truly a shame you pushed through a CS degree that was clearly beneath you. Any reason you didn’t change course once you clearly evaluated college was not for you?

jmuguy 1y ago

I dropped out of college after a semester. I also didn't see the value in it. Because I was a stupid kid. Twenty years later its one of my biggest regrets. We don't need more self righteous "founders", convinced they know everything.