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In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge. For example, the Shazam app. I knew right a
by WalterBright 1y ago
In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge.
For example, the Shazam app. I knew right away it must be using Fourier analysis. But if one was self-taught, one might have never understood what the point of FA was, or even have been aware of its existence, and instead used kludgy, inept methods.
For a personal example, I was once given the job of taking the graphic display on a CRT and mapping it onto a printer page. The addressing was different, the axes were different, the pixels/per inch were different. I knew what the tool was - a transformation matrix. Had it ginned up in an hour and it worked first try.
A co-worker was completely baffled at this. He didn't know what a transformation matrix was, and likely would have otherwise spent a couple weeks on the problem and done a crappy job.
I.e. one doesn't know what one doesn't know. The advantage of an accredited degree program is the curriculum is selected by people who know what you need to know, and the order in which information is best presented.
- greazy 1y agoBut does that apply to business management?
- WalterBright 1y agoI do not have formal training in business management. But I'm pretty sure that formally learning it is not useless knowledge, if one intends to manage a business. For one example, learning accounting. A lot of people try to run a business without understanding how double-entry bookkeeping works. This gets them into trouble with the IRS, for one result, and with bankers, for another. During summer vacation, at loose ends, I signed up at the local college for a course in double-entry bookkeeping. It's paid off for me ever since.
- greazy 1y agoMy personal opinion is that BM is a weird world and I don't know how it can be standardized and taught in a formal setting. It is domain specific and sometimes even company specific. How such a thing can be standardised and formally taught is the question I'm interested in.
- WalterBright 1y agoI'm not the right person to ask that of. Maybe an MBA from Harvard.
- conductr 1y agoAlmost nobody in a business needs to know double-entry except for the accountants. You need to know accounting concepts (what can be expensed verses capitalized, how does bad debt get treated, etc) and how to read your financial statements. If you're a solo person, maybe how to reconcile accounts. But, all that can be taught in a workshop or simply by doing some online research on the topics. Double-entry accounting isn't necessary if you plan to hire a bookkeeper/accountant, it's kind of the sausage making part of company financials.
- WalterBright 1y agoI have this issue myself. I was trained as a mechanical engineer, not a computer scientist, not a programmer. I'm pretty much self-taught as a programmer. I run into peculiar gaps in my knowledge that a formally educated computer scientist would consider basic knowledge. One of the reasons Andrei Alexandrescu and I worked well together as a team designing D is that he had the formal training, and I had the practical experience. Our abilities complemented each other's.
- WalterBright 1y agoP.S. I once invented a concept, and proudly did a presentation on it. It was rudely brought to my attention that this was well known in computer science. Very, very embarrassing.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoWhich is funny because everyone and their mother in software development is eager to show off something that has existed since the '70s. The phenomenon is so common in tech--something I, too, have experienced despite computer science having been my major--that it should practically just be a right of passage for software engineers.
- momojo 1y agoWhat was the concept?
- WalterBright 1y agoSorry, it was too humiliating for me to bring up again :-/ It pains me to even think about it.
- sethammons 1y agoI'm pretty happy about "inventing caching", independently, all on my own as a teenager, some 40 years after it was actually being introduced.
- DoneWithAllThat 1y agoAs someone who never went to college: one thing I know I’m missing is knowing patterns and the commensurate pattern matching. What you describe perfectly illustrates this. Knowing what are effectively standard tools, best approaches to known challenges, and what’s truly novel is something almost no one without a formal education can do. You’ll hear protests to the contrary but it’s just a fact.
- lazide 1y agoOne common problem I’ve seen with people with a lot of formal education (conversely) is difficulty handling situations outside of the norm or that are truly novel.
- WalterBright 1y agoI call those people "formula-pluggers". If they cannot find a formula, they are dead in the water. That wasn't the kind of education I received.
- JadeNB 1y ago> In my experience, people who are self-taught or who learned by experience tend to have odd gaps in their knowledge. On the other hand, people who learn from experts learn, in addition to the experts' wisdom, also the experts' biases and blind spots. Or, to say it differently, being taught by experts is a good way to learn how to do what the experts already know how to do, but not how to do what they don't. (And I say this without casting any shade on the idea of education by the experts—I am a professor by trade.)
- WalterBright 1y agoThat's why one needs both academics and experience. It's not either-or.
- hn_acc1 1y agoYes, this. Study (in my case computer engineering) but work in co-op (multiple 4-month internships). Graduated ready to be hired by several employers.
- JadeNB 1y agoCertainly agreed. As I say, I'm an educator, and I'm not trying to talk my position out of experience; but neither do I want to diminish the potential of the self taught.
- JadeNB 1y agoSorry, "I'm not trying to talk my position out of existence", not "… out of experience".
- ambicapter 1y agoThis makes sense working backwards: self-taught individuals are motivated to learn what they need to know from the problems they face, and degree-earners are taught a curriculum that a bunch of different people agree covers, broadly, a cross-section of everything that matters in their field.
- WalterBright 1y ago> self-taught individuals are motivated to learn what they need to know from the problems they face The problem is not knowing what one needs to know.
- conductr 1y agoAs a self taught person at many things, I will know what I need to know when I need to know it. I’m resourceful. The idea that you have to have some prior knowledge to recognize and solve a problem is bonkers to me. There may be some problems like that, but the vast majority of things have already been solved and therefore can be discovered by self learners being inquisitive when seeking solutions to their problems I personally have narrow interest in a lot of subjects. This means I have a fairly wide vocabulary for digging deeper when I want to. And I have the internet as a shovel.
- WalterBright 1y ago> is bonkers to me I've seen it in action plenty of times. The trouble is not being aware of what you don't know, and wasting time going down an unproductive path. You may never realize there is a better solution. (You'll see this in programming where the self-taught programmer uses a bubble sort instead of, say, a qsort. Or using polling instead of interrupts. Or not being aware of hash tables. Or not being aware they shouldn't roll their own crypto.) For example, I enjoy making things with tools. Sometimes I struggle with a tool. When I have a craftsman over to the house to do some task, I ask "mind if I watch?" They always say "sure", and I watch them do it. They're happy that someone finds their work interesting and love to explain what they're doing. I keep track of the tools they use, and how they use them. Many times I didn't know those tools existed and they make the job a lot easier. I also will note down the manufacturer and the model of those tools, so I can acquire the professional version of a tool. (Yes, I look at yootoob instructional videos. Watching it in person is far more instructive.) BTW, the number of people who seem to be capable of self-teaching themselves calculus seems to be very small.
- nitwit005 1y agoUniversities aren't set up to efficiently teach people that already know much of the material. If someone has a decade of experience, its likely faster and cheaper to hire some associate professor to identify the gaps and teach it directly. But, people rarely care about actual knowledge, and want that degree checkbox checked.
- WalterBright 1y ago> But, people rarely care about actual knowledge, and want that degree checkbox checked. That may be true for recruiters, but it is not true for the manager who needs a specific skill set.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoI'd still argue that the time to make a focused curriculum to close those gaps (even if it's just a pamphlet of topics to research) is much less time and money than the prospect of paying for more schooling. I'll definitely take the latter if the company is paying for it, but it just seems to be another one of those micro-inefficiencies in US Labor.
- WalterBright 1y ago> less time and money Caltech has a large course catalog. I could only take a certain number at a time. Other than what was required for the degree, I carefully selected courses I anticipated would have the largest payoff in my desired career. The usual course was 3-0-6, meaning 3 hours of lecture a week, 0 hours lab, 6 hours study. I don't regard any of it as wasted time and money. Except the economics class. Here's my class load for one semester in my junior year: AMA95 Intro Methods Applied Math 12 AM97 Analy Mech Deform Bodies 9 ME5 Design 9 ME19 Fluid Mech & Gas Dynamics 9 CS114 Micro Process Systems 9 BEM106 Business Econ Sem 9 That comes to an estimated 57 hours/week of work. For me, those estimates were pretty accurate. If you want to point out the waste of time and money, have at it!
- dgacmu 1y agoWhat you're describing can definitely be done, but it would be really expensive. I charge around $1k/hour for executive education with a custom curriculum, and even that is usually amortized over a small room full of people. My guess is that according having to design a custom curriculum saves an awful lot of money.
- missingcolours 1y agoI agree with this to an extent, but I've noticed that this type of knowledge is much more prevalent in people who attended the top X% of schools, e.g. Stanford and MIT. I'm not convinced that getting a degree from Midwestern State University gives you much knowledge that being a tinkerer and self-taught technologist doesn't.
- WalterBright 1y agoYou can get a good education at regular universities like UW. But, you have to be careful in what courses you select. The easy A courses should be avoided like toxic waste. Don't bother with the weeder classes.