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Paul Graham (remember him?) had an essay about 20 years ago that may be relevant to this: https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
by 7402 1y ago
Paul Graham (remember him?) had an essay about 20 years ago that may be relevant to this: https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html https://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html "What You'll Wish You'd Known"
It says when trying to figure out what to study, think about what might give you most options for the future, a future that you might have almost NO way of predicting now. He calls this "staying upwind." He gives an example:
Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get into grad school in math.
And given a choice between studying two subjects that interest you, but one is easier for you and one is a bit harder (but still within your abilities), opt for the harder one:
The best protection is always to be working on hard problems. Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't. Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard enough. There has to be suspense.
You don't have to automatically agree with everything in his essays as Great Truths, but it's worth considering his ideas.
- adt 1y agoWhile we're wandering down memory lane, here's a good one by Joel Spolsky (remember him?): 'Advice for Computer Science College Students' (2/Jan/2005) https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/02/advice-for-computer-science-college-students/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/02/advice-for-compute... The moral of the story is that computer science is not the same as software development. If you’re really really lucky, your school might have a decent software development curriculum, although, they might not, because elite schools think that teaching practical skills is better left to the technical-vocational institutes and the prison rehabilitation programs. You can learn mere programming anywhere. We are Yale University, and we Mold Future World Leaders. You think your $160,000 tuition entititles you to learn about while loops? What do you think this is, some fly-by-night Java seminar at the Airport Marriott? Pshaw. The trouble is, we don’t really have professional schools in software development, so if you want to be a programmer, you probably majored in Computer Science. Which is a fine subject to major in, but it’s a different subject than software development.