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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 ap

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.

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.