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Right. I could even see someone spending months to learn Java in a structured fashion. But how many people are going to sit down and spend months studying in
by Ologn 13y ago
Right. I could even see someone spending months to learn Java in a structured fashion. But how many people are going to sit down and spend months studying in a rigorous fashion things like the theory of computation, or complexity theory, or lambda calculus, or graph theory? Recently I had to make a hash from a list of numbers, and thought to use a Gödel number for the hash. How many self-taught programmers will do this? I mean, how many self-taught people really sit down and learn a decent amount about even slightly complex things more immediately practical than pushdown automata, such as about critical sections and mutual exclusion?
- FLUX-YOU 13y agoThey might learn it if everyone required knowledge like that to get a job. Are junior level, self-taught staff really going to be hired to fix those problems? Maybe at Google, but not everyone's Google. Most of the self-taught crowd are gunning for web dev or design positions or bolting on some skills to do useful things and never need to make their own 'tools for the job'. If you're on your last leg for a shot at a career (like I am), there's a pretty big pull to get the minimum knowledge first so you're useful to someone and then go for advanced CS topics once you can pay your bills. A decent position allows saving for a CS degree.
- bcbrown 13y agoI do. It's paid amazing dividends for my career. I studied Physics in college, spent a couple years writing test automation, and am now a software engineer. I'm almost-completely self-taught, and have spent the past two years going through all the undergrad CS curriculum. All I have left are Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, and Advanced Algorithms and Data Structures. I use textbooks for when I want to dive deep into the details, and Coursera lectures for higher-level overviews of topics I don't need to know in detail, such as Networking or Compilers.
- selimthegrim 13y agoI was a chemistry major at Caltech but got the opportunity to learn about mutual exclusion by taking the CS department's operating systems course.