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I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there

by noloqy 13y ago

I think there's quite a strong divide between the creators and the consumers of (low level) technology, even in San Francisco (even though I've never been there). From what I can tell, there is a shift going on in the sense that the number of consumers will grow relative to the number of creators. This all is the (natural) consequence of the successes of SV. These days, enough kids aspire to be the next Zuckerberg, rather than the next great sports player. These kids will move to SV and consume existing technologies, in the sense that they will follow a couple of a rails tutorials and build the "next great webservice" by combining a couple of the patterns they've learned and create a twitter-bootstrap website that goes along with it. They may create some trivial extensions and post it to Github, but that's about as far as their direct contribution to technology goes. This isn't necessarily bad, some of the world's problems will be solved by this new generation of entrepreneurs. The presence of more high level developers may also make SV even more attractive to the developers that can actually create cutting edge technologies, which would make SV an even 'richer' place in the sense of talent. However, the number of times I hear people say "I've wasted 4 years at university, and wish I dropped out after the first month" makes me think that they have not understood what university is all about, and makes me wonder if they will be among the ones pushing forward the frontier of technology.

roguecoder 13y ago
I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.
- p_l 13y ago
  I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields. The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".
- ars_technician 13y ago
  You are misrepresenting CS degrees. There are very few classes based on memorizing facts. It looks like your degree has taught you how to create strawman arguments pretty well though... Let me show you how it looks from the other side. I got two technical degrees (one of which is CS). I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others, how to model complex problems via abstractions, and how to apply logic and mathematics to those abstractions to solve the underlying problems. I have very few concrete facts memorized because I know where/how to find them. However, the liberal arts students just sit around and have pseudo-intellectual conversations about art/music/whatever, but never gain the discipline required to discover an 'actually correct' solution to a complex problem. This is why they can't get jobs.

by noloqy 13y ago

roguecoder 13y ago

I think the fault in your last paragraph falls to universities. I have a liberal arts degree and have never once questioned the value of my education or its applicability to my work. I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others and developed a broad base from which to understand modern society, whereas the CS graduates I know learned many concrete facts that are useless in their day-to-day lives.

p_l 13y ago
I think that there's a significant number of people who didn't do the learning you apparently did, and instead tried a let's call it "vocational" approach. Funnily enough, such approach is at the core of the jokes about a so-called "humanist" studies leading to a job at McDonald's - the difference being that you can usually get by enough to start in STEM fields. The other group of people complaining about university, to whom I sometimes belong, is grumpy due to how easy it is to be self taught, even if you might miss some of the more theoretical stuff that you won't use unless you work on a harder problem than most software in the world. Sometimes it's not even about education as much as it is about finances - I quite often found myself looking at job ads and thinking "I could do the job right now if I dropped uni, and I would have no more problems with money".
ars_technician 13y ago
You are misrepresenting CS degrees. There are very few classes based on memorizing facts. It looks like your degree has taught you how to create strawman arguments pretty well though... Let me show you how it looks from the other side. I got two technical degrees (one of which is CS). I learned how to learn, how to understand the ideas of others, how to model complex problems via abstractions, and how to apply logic and mathematics to those abstractions to solve the underlying problems. I have very few concrete facts memorized because I know where/how to find them. However, the liberal arts students just sit around and have pseudo-intellectual conversations about art/music/whatever, but never gain the discipline required to discover an 'actually correct' solution to a complex problem. This is why they can't get jobs.