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Ask HN: Our college is teaching us outdated technology

17 points by ponyous 13y ago

One of my colleagues just sent me this quote saying "I think this is how our college works": "At the end of your four years of torture in university, there is the tendency to think that "I’ve learned all there is to learn"… only to come out into the real world and realize, "I’ve been learning outdated technology!"" We are basically learning stuff like XML, XSD, XSLT, JSP... I'm not saying anything of this is useless but I think priorities should be somewhat different, like learning JSON instead of XML, PHP instead of XML+XSLT... I wonder what is correct way to tell professors that we are learning something that won't get us job as "easily" as PHP/Javascript would. Are there any other proposals that would improve our college program which I as a student can propose?

Codhisattva 13y ago
First of all, college isn't vocational training. So get over the whole "get us a job easily" thing. Your employment is dependent on the effort you make towards your chosen career. The true purposes of college is to teach you how to learn, to expose you to many new ideas, and to give you the opportunity to focus your life on thinking with the least amount of distraction. If the curriculum is different than what you desire, then write your own curriculum, enroll in independent study classes and discuss with your advisor how you can achieve your goals. If you approach it from your personal perspective you'll have much more success than if you approach it in the way you state "tell professors..." or "improve our college program". Those are bureaucratic battles and who wants to learn about the gnarly dark under belly of academia? You can go that route, but to win you'll end up spending your nights and days formulating presentations to administrative decision makers. YAWN. Institutional change is hard in all the wrong ways and dull in every way. And you know what the most likely outcome will be? A dean will agree with you and promise to look into adding a JS class in the 2015-16 academic year. You'll feel victorious but the dean will forget about in 10 minutes. By taking personal responsibility for your own curriculum you can achieve something greater than a college degree. You will learn and exhibit two of the most important attributes in the software industry: initiative and independent self education. If you master those skills you're well on your way to a great career in engineering.
Codhisattva 13y ago
Also, fix your damn title. "Our college is learning us outdated technology". Really?
- smoyer 13y ago
  I almost commented on the title, but I was guessing the poster might not be a native English speaker. Since you've brought it up, one correct way of phrasing the title would be "Our college is teaching us outdated technology".
  - Codhisattva 13y ago
    I refrained for commenting on it for as long as I could. I weighed the non-native speaker too but finally old George Bush quotes pushed me over the edge. ;)
    - smoyer 13y ago
      George Bush was the decider!
- ponyous 13y ago
  As smoyer said, I'm not native english speaker. I fixed it (hopefully)
  - judk 13y ago
    Part of college is learning to deal with jerks who attack you for no good reason, and to not be intimidated intimidated by them. Good job learning multiple languages, you are way ahead of most of us.
    - smoyer 13y ago
      "and to not be intimidated intimidated by them" I'm not going to fault Codhisattva for calling out the mistake in the title, or even the fact that it irritated him. I'd just like to exhort everyone to also offer corrections with comments like these. If I'm attempting to communicate in another language, having people who are comfortable correcting me (assuming they know what I mean at all) is important. And I'd also like to point out that even people writing in their native language aren't perfect. We type fast, get interrupted a lot and have local dialects, so it's unrealistic to expect perfection. P.S. I sure hope I don't find mistakes in this post ;)
smoyer 13y ago
You're going to have to live with this - the point of college is to teach you how to learn. Longer version: For the last two years I've worked for a major university - one of the top fifty. Prior to working for the university, I spent thirty years in industry. During my time in the commercial market, I thought of universities as ivory towers were everything is the latest and greatest ... because reading research papers only shows you the latest and greatest. When I got here, I was shocked to find that many of our systems were 15, 20 or even 25 years behind those we were using in industry. Not that they weren't stable, but since our primary job is to "educate the youngin's", working systems were valued but there is no competitive advantage to replacing them. My son is a super-senior in college, and I've noticed that the information he's learning is (on average) five to ten years old. And this actually makes sense. Research is bleeding edge, but much of it isn't commercially valuable. Since undergrad degrees are supposed to produce graduates who can obtain jobs in industry, industry generally has to adopt a technology before it's likely to be used in education. Once industry adopts a technology, a professor (or department) has to recognize that adoption, make sure it's not simply a technology fad, verify that it aligns with the theoretical approaches that are valid and develop a curriculum. Your university is actually providing you a valuable education by focusing on the technologies that are valued in industry, albeit a little behind the curve. Why? Because JSP is still used by a huge number of corporations and as a mark-up representation it's a pretty good example of many comparable technologies. Furthermore, JSF has been strengthened in the latest JavaEE releases and many large corporations have adopted these changes. What if you don't want to work for a big stodgy corporation? You probably didn't need to go to a big stodgy corporation, but I question whether you're really following the technology trends very well. "PHP instead of XML+XSLT" sounds like a horrible way to do ETL, even for a start-up. Why wouldn't you pick NodeJS in that instance? There are thousands of technology stacks and it's not practical for your university to teach all of them to you. how invested are you in learning the ones you're curious about outside of your classwork? You do realize you're responsible for your education and career right? If you don't learn new technologies on your own in the corporate world, you'll be quickly outdated. So finally, my suggestion: Learn one of the technologies you're interested in, then go have a discussion with the professor about how that technology compares with what he's teaching you. I'm hoping he'll be intellectually curious and engage deeply in a conversation like this - recognizing that he can also learn something in the process. If not, your professor has indeed failed.
sergiotapia 13y ago
Everybody has gone through this - it's a staple of college. You're there to learn the basics and to learn how to learn. If you aren't working on your thing and researching your own technology stack during college you're doing it wrong. Of course you're going to come out of there knowing nothing but old tech.
adrianhoward 13y ago
There's also the fact that older doesn't necessarily mean outdated or unused. There are still many jobs out there that require XML, XSD, XSLT, JSP, etc. Organisations have software that's been around for many years, in many instances decades. Curiously they don't rewrite everything just because COBOL or Java or C++ or whatever has become unfashionable among some portions of the dev world ;-)
- ponyous 13y ago
  As I wrote in original post: "I'm not saying anything of this is useless but I think priorities should be somewhat different"
  - adrianhoward 13y ago
    Why? Genuine question ;-) What utility value will you get out of PHP rather than Java? Why should priorities favour the PHP over Java, or C, or Lisp, or whatever? I still have this vain hope that folk will get back to teaching programming - rather than specific programming languages. During my degree back in 1988-91 we built non-trivial programs in all of: Pop-11 (yes - nobody has heard of this ;-), Prolog, Lisp, ML, Modula-2, C, plus some stack-based assembler whose name escapes me at the moment. Not to mention trivial playing Smalltalk, Occam, shell scripting and probably others that I've forgotten. And this wasn't even a straight CS degree! Sometime between now and then the universities started chucking out people who were just taught Java, or Python, or some other single-language. Sigh. I seem to have ranted a little off-topic... I'll shush now ;-) Sometime
roberte3 13y ago
I'd worry more about the general topics that your learning, rather than the technology that your using to learn it. Are you in a Computer Science class or a bogus how to use technology X class. Are you learning Discrete Math, Big O, how to write a compiler, assembly language (doesn't really matter what platform). If your learning CS, then you will have the tools you need to tackle any job using whatever tools you have at hand. The "huge" differences between JSON and XML, don't really matter, if you can write a parser...
0verc00ked 13y ago
I sympathize with how you feel, and I think some of these responses miss the point and are kind of inappropriately harsh for someone asking a perfectly legitimate question. I know plenty of CS students/grads feel the same way. I certainly do. I definitely agree that college is partly about exposure and teaching you how to learn, but it's ridiculous to say that it's not their responsibility to teach you technologies that you'll be using professionally. Yes you should take it upon yourself to learn what you want or need to know. But with the cost of tuition - they should definitely be doing more than they are. I know at my college (graduated in 2011), there seemed to be a disproportionate offering of courses that one would use if they wanted to become a video-game developer or an enterprise software engineer. They taught us very little about how to actually program for the web. Getting back to your question.. heres' a couple things to keep in mind: - It's not the same anywhere. There's a range in curriculums depending on what school you're at (and even within the same school). Some specialize in different things. Some have different philosophies. And some are better than others. - The truth is, there's so many languages, libraries, frameworks, and technologies - and they're expanding in all directions faster than anyone can keep up. The only thing you can do is try and pick the ones that matter to you (based on what your aspirations are) and specialize. Anyways, given all this - imagine how hard it is for the universities to keep up themselves while designing a curriculum that can fit all of their students. As far as what you can do - I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do within the confines of your university, unless you were super adamant to the point of organizing events/rallies or pestering the hell out of your professors and school until they make some changes. And even then, who knows if it would work and in all the time you'd spend - you could probably have taught yourself a few of the things you're pushing to have them teach you. Here's a couple other solutions: - Find a professor/TA you like and knows some things you want to learn, and try to get them to tutor/mentor you. (In my experience, this one is hard because everyone's busy) - Transfer schools. But do your research first to make sure you don't wind up in the same situation. - Adapt by teaching yourself the things you want on the side. Tackle small projects, each with one or two new things you want to learn. (this is what the other responses were advocating, and I think you need to get in the habit of doing this regardless) Hope this was somewhat helpful.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
shrikrishna 13y ago
tl;dr Use your college life to build cool stuff, just because you can. You won't have that liberty once you come out > I might drop out next year. My guess is that you are serious about this. As a student myself, and having been thinking on similar lines over three of four years of my college, my opinion is - finish what you started. It is absolutely true that what you learn in college is outdated. But, what you get in college and don't get once you come out is the sandboxed environment. In college, you are free to explore your will, do whatever you want (even find co founders, if you are enterpreneural); there is no pressure. The pressure palpably increases once you come out. You can do that (do cool stuff for fun) even after college, but it's infinitely harder. > since I already know a lot of stuff/tech You might be the best in your college, but never let it get into your head (I'm not saying you are) PS: It became a long reply in the end. My apologies
- ponyous 13y ago
  I think I have this luck, that in my country I can repeat one year of college (free of charge), so I will probably drop-out (fail one year intentionally) next year and will experiment for a year - hopefully I will be successful as I plan. "even find co founders, if you are enterpreneural" - I'm trying this the whole time not just in college but with everyone with IT interests. People in my country are just not that ambitious - they just want a safe job and an average salary. This one student to whom I've been talking too seems to be someone who I should hang out with.
  - notduncansmith 13y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what country are you in?
    - ponyous 13y ago
      Slovenia (Southern part of Central Europe)
sn 13y ago
Personally, I would be way more interested in someone who came to me and said "Here is a class project originally written in X that I rewrote in Y because your job description included Y and not X" then someone who had originally learned Y in school.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
If you feel uneasy with college, and you already have the skills you need, skip a quarter, semester or whichever time measure your college uses. Your college should have a head professor, talk with him, explain him your feelings, and scrutiny the curriculum with him. He should give you more insight about where you might not be as good as you believe, and you will get valuable hints about where to start learning on your own. Take the time you skipped to experiment what is to be a self-educated person, try to research on your own, read books, attend online courses, build projects, and everything else you find comfortable with to learn at your own pace. If you are completely sure that you don't need college anymore, and you feel comfortable being a self-educated person, drop. EDIT: In the country where I live (Mexico), there is an institution named CENEVAL[1], where you can graduate by knowledge acquired through job experience and self-education. Maybe in the country where you live there is a similar institution. [1] http://www.ceneval.edu.mx/ceneval-web/content.do?page=1927 http://www.ceneval.edu.mx/ceneval-web/content.do?page=1927
danpalmer 13y ago
I was taught about XML, XSD and XSLT. When I got to industry, this made me wonder why we stuck with unstable JSON APIs and hand-coded validation, instead of using schemas for validation. I was taught about SQL. When I got into industry and started using MongoDB, I wondered why data would go missing, and then realised it's because transactions are often a very good thing to have. I learned some Modula 2, in 2011. Not because we were writing Modula 2, but because we were writing a compiler for it. I've found quite a few times that while the technology we learn is old, there are many beneficial lessons to take away from it. Not just general theories and processes, not just learning how to learn, but there are actually some seriously good ideas in software development that new technologies haven't got, and often we in the startup/SV scene either haven't learnt them, or don't think they are important because they're 'old'. I have several times found myself speaking to engineers who proudly 'didn't go to university' or taught themselves, to be hugely behind in terms of knowledge, and they just end up re-inventing things which have been around for decades, usually in Javascript. Re-invention isn't always a bad thing, it often injects new ideas, and the new versions can be really great to use, unlike some older technologies, but I think a significant number of people who think colleges are teaching outdated technology probably need to go to college. Disclaimer though, this is based on my experience at one university, in the UK. I understand it might be different in the US and at other universities. I just find it frustrating when I know that my degree has taught me a huge amount of very useful stuff that I know some people in industry are lacking. As far as getting a job goes, if you actually look at what most places want, it's Java, XML, C#, etc. Maybe not in the startup world, but the enterprise market is considerably larger, and ultimately where many people end up working.
- draker 13y ago
  >to be hugely behind in terms of knowledge, and they just end up re-inventing things which have been around for decades, usually in Javascript. I have taken a few university courses, but have primarily taught myself and would greatly appreciate if you could expand on this.
  - mickeyp 13y ago
    A good University will teach you things you would almost never come into contact with on your own. I will give you some random examples from my own degree. Some concepts are quite practical and others are theoretical, but all of the examples below taught me -- as someone who had started programming when he was 12, back in the DOS era -- something new. - Data structures. I had played around with them myself before I went to university, but being formally introduced to the concept of data structures: lists (Queues, Linked Lists, Stacks); trees (Binary, B-Trees, Heaps, etc.) and the performance characteristics of each and how you would apply them. In my university it was first taught with mathematical notation followed by practical implementations in Pascal. - Learning Prolog in my first year. An entirely procedural language that uses back tracking to 'solve' relations based on rules and facts. I loved this class. Prolog's not terribly practical but it taught me a lot about abstract data types and 'recursion'. The idea that a list is defined as a head (the item in a list) and the tail (the rest of the list) which can be iterated over recursively was a major eye-opener to me, an until then hobbyist coder. - Haskell. A stark contrast to Prolog and Pascal, I learnt the power of composability and the ability to capture complex ideas with very powerful constructs and a very strong type system. The language is lazy so you can operate on infinite 'streams' of items which is another interesting way of thinking about the theory of computation. - We were taught how to specify a PDP-11 (RAM banks, CPU, I/O) using an academic language that uses "rewriting logic". It was a very theoretical yet practical way of specifying a computer using only mathematical principles. The idea that the number 0 and the successor function is all you need to define the natural numbers and, combined with recursion, basic arithmetic was again the sort of thing you never ever do outside University. - Compilers. I wrote compilers using lex and yacc. I have used that theory -- and the theory of regular languages -- to great effect since then to formally construct grammars and parsers for tasks I needed later on in life. And I could do it effectively and efficiently without reinventing the wheel or coding myself into a corner -- which is easy to do with compilers. - Computer graphics. Basic convolution filters; image processing and the general theory of 3d graphics. - Graph theory. When I first took it it seemed utterly "useless" but it has since then been one of the most useful things I know. I grasped the concept of Git right away thanks to that knowledge. - Operating systems. Networking. Basic security. Complexity theory (the study of algorithm complexity) -- and the list goes on. I remember maybe 30% of what I learnt but I can quickly jog my memory or pick up where I left off. I consider my degree invaluable from an academic sense... ... but it did nothing to make me a better developer. That, unfortunately, is something you have to work hard at. I got lucky: I had already been programming for 10 years by the time I graduated.
eshvk 13y ago
> We are basically learning stuff like XML I find this hilarious because before I can go further into hacking into fancy cutting edge deep learning models, I have to process years and years of XML data from an external party. As someone else said, the only purpose of University is to teach how to learn. Everything else is up to you. Again, there are places that teach you specific skills that are job relevant now (Codeacademy/Bootcamps). You could very well do them and get a high paying job too. However. Figure out what you want to eventually be in life. Do you want to be a high paid janitor who can be easily replaced? Or do you want be the guy who can see through all the bullshit frameworks and design solutions that are robust. The guy who remains relevant at 40.
27182818284 13y ago
The stuff you're learning isn't outdated. It just might be more career-focused rather than front-page-hacker-news-or-reddit-worthy. The example I like to bring up over and over again on HN is Union Pacific, because it is a great example. You will probably never see an article on the top of HN about railroad .NET or Java code, but it helps drive the US economy. (and they pay well. I have younger friends out of college that made $55 immediately and more experienced devs making $100K, which is insanely great compared to California given the cost of living differences. You're talking about owning the equivalent of a million-dollar CA home at 25 with cash to spare. )
exabrial 13y ago
The most valuable lesson you will learn in college is "how to learn." Put the attitude away and start learning.

17 points by ponyous 13y ago

Codhisattva 13y ago

First of all, college isn't vocational training. So get over the whole "get us a job easily" thing. Your employment is dependent on the effort you make towards your chosen career. The true purposes of college is to teach you how to learn, to expose you to many new ideas, and to give you the opportunity to focus your life on thinking with the least amount of distraction. If the curriculum is different than what you desire, then write your own curriculum, enroll in independent study classes and discuss with your advisor how you can achieve your goals. If you approach it from your personal perspective you'll have much more success than if you approach it in the way you state "tell professors..." or "improve our college program". Those are bureaucratic battles and who wants to learn about the gnarly dark under belly of academia? You can go that route, but to win you'll end up spending your nights and days formulating presentations to administrative decision makers. YAWN. Institutional change is hard in all the wrong ways and dull in every way. And you know what the most likely outcome will be? A dean will agree with you and promise to look into adding a JS class in the 2015-16 academic year. You'll feel victorious but the dean will forget about in 10 minutes. By taking personal responsibility for your own curriculum you can achieve something greater than a college degree. You will learn and exhibit two of the most important attributes in the software industry: initiative and independent self education. If you master those skills you're well on your way to a great career in engineering.

Codhisattva 13y ago

Also, fix your damn title. "Our college is learning us outdated technology". Really?

smoyer 13y ago
I almost commented on the title, but I was guessing the poster might not be a native English speaker. Since you've brought it up, one correct way of phrasing the title would be "Our college is teaching us outdated technology".
- Codhisattva 13y ago
  I refrained for commenting on it for as long as I could. I weighed the non-native speaker too but finally old George Bush quotes pushed me over the edge. ;)
  - smoyer 13y ago
    George Bush was the decider!
ponyous 13y ago
As smoyer said, I'm not native english speaker. I fixed it (hopefully)
- judk 13y ago
  Part of college is learning to deal with jerks who attack you for no good reason, and to not be intimidated intimidated by them. Good job learning multiple languages, you are way ahead of most of us.
  - smoyer 13y ago
    "and to not be intimidated intimidated by them" I'm not going to fault Codhisattva for calling out the mistake in the title, or even the fact that it irritated him. I'd just like to exhort everyone to also offer corrections with comments like these. If I'm attempting to communicate in another language, having people who are comfortable correcting me (assuming they know what I mean at all) is important. And I'd also like to point out that even people writing in their native language aren't perfect. We type fast, get interrupted a lot and have local dialects, so it's unrealistic to expect perfection. P.S. I sure hope I don't find mistakes in this post ;)

smoyer 13y ago

You're going to have to live with this - the point of college is to teach you how to learn. Longer version: For the last two years I've worked for a major university - one of the top fifty. Prior to working for the university, I spent thirty years in industry. During my time in the commercial market, I thought of universities as ivory towers were everything is the latest and greatest ... because reading research papers only shows you the latest and greatest. When I got here, I was shocked to find that many of our systems were 15, 20 or even 25 years behind those we were using in industry. Not that they weren't stable, but since our primary job is to "educate the youngin's", working systems were valued but there is no competitive advantage to replacing them. My son is a super-senior in college, and I've noticed that the information he's learning is (on average) five to ten years old. And this actually makes sense. Research is bleeding edge, but much of it isn't commercially valuable. Since undergrad degrees are supposed to produce graduates who can obtain jobs in industry, industry generally has to adopt a technology before it's likely to be used in education. Once industry adopts a technology, a professor (or department) has to recognize that adoption, make sure it's not simply a technology fad, verify that it aligns with the theoretical approaches that are valid and develop a curriculum. Your university is actually providing you a valuable education by focusing on the technologies that are valued in industry, albeit a little behind the curve. Why? Because JSP is still used by a huge number of corporations and as a mark-up representation it's a pretty good example of many comparable technologies. Furthermore, JSF has been strengthened in the latest JavaEE releases and many large corporations have adopted these changes. What if you don't want to work for a big stodgy corporation? You probably didn't need to go to a big stodgy corporation, but I question whether you're really following the technology trends very well. "PHP instead of XML+XSLT" sounds like a horrible way to do ETL, even for a start-up. Why wouldn't you pick NodeJS in that instance? There are thousands of technology stacks and it's not practical for your university to teach all of them to you. how invested are you in learning the ones you're curious about outside of your classwork? You do realize you're responsible for your education and career right? If you don't learn new technologies on your own in the corporate world, you'll be quickly outdated. So finally, my suggestion: Learn one of the technologies you're interested in, then go have a discussion with the professor about how that technology compares with what he's teaching you. I'm hoping he'll be intellectually curious and engage deeply in a conversation like this - recognizing that he can also learn something in the process. If not, your professor has indeed failed.

sergiotapia 13y ago

Everybody has gone through this - it's a staple of college. You're there to learn the basics and to learn how to learn. If you aren't working on your thing and researching your own technology stack during college you're doing it wrong. Of course you're going to come out of there knowing nothing but old tech.

adrianhoward 13y ago

There's also the fact that older doesn't necessarily mean outdated or unused. There are still many jobs out there that require XML, XSD, XSLT, JSP, etc. Organisations have software that's been around for many years, in many instances decades. Curiously they don't rewrite everything just because COBOL or Java or C++ or whatever has become unfashionable among some portions of the dev world ;-)

ponyous 13y ago
As I wrote in original post: "I'm not saying anything of this is useless but I think priorities should be somewhat different"
- adrianhoward 13y ago
  Why? Genuine question ;-) What utility value will you get out of PHP rather than Java? Why should priorities favour the PHP over Java, or C, or Lisp, or whatever? I still have this vain hope that folk will get back to teaching programming - rather than specific programming languages. During my degree back in 1988-91 we built non-trivial programs in all of: Pop-11 (yes - nobody has heard of this ;-), Prolog, Lisp, ML, Modula-2, C, plus some stack-based assembler whose name escapes me at the moment. Not to mention trivial playing Smalltalk, Occam, shell scripting and probably others that I've forgotten. And this wasn't even a straight CS degree! Sometime between now and then the universities started chucking out people who were just taught Java, or Python, or some other single-language. Sigh. I seem to have ranted a little off-topic... I'll shush now ;-) Sometime

roberte3 13y ago

I'd worry more about the general topics that your learning, rather than the technology that your using to learn it. Are you in a Computer Science class or a bogus how to use technology X class. Are you learning Discrete Math, Big O, how to write a compiler, assembly language (doesn't really matter what platform). If your learning CS, then you will have the tools you need to tackle any job using whatever tools you have at hand. The "huge" differences between JSON and XML, don't really matter, if you can write a parser...

0verc00ked 13y ago

I sympathize with how you feel, and I think some of these responses miss the point and are kind of inappropriately harsh for someone asking a perfectly legitimate question. I know plenty of CS students/grads feel the same way. I certainly do. I definitely agree that college is partly about exposure and teaching you how to learn, but it's ridiculous to say that it's not their responsibility to teach you technologies that you'll be using professionally. Yes you should take it upon yourself to learn what you want or need to know. But with the cost of tuition - they should definitely be doing more than they are. I know at my college (graduated in 2011), there seemed to be a disproportionate offering of courses that one would use if they wanted to become a video-game developer or an enterprise software engineer. They taught us very little about how to actually program for the web. Getting back to your question.. heres' a couple things to keep in mind: - It's not the same anywhere. There's a range in curriculums depending on what school you're at (and even within the same school). Some specialize in different things. Some have different philosophies. And some are better than others. - The truth is, there's so many languages, libraries, frameworks, and technologies - and they're expanding in all directions faster than anyone can keep up. The only thing you can do is try and pick the ones that matter to you (based on what your aspirations are) and specialize. Anyways, given all this - imagine how hard it is for the universities to keep up themselves while designing a curriculum that can fit all of their students. As far as what you can do - I'm not sure there's a whole lot you can do within the confines of your university, unless you were super adamant to the point of organizing events/rallies or pestering the hell out of your professors and school until they make some changes. And even then, who knows if it would work and in all the time you'd spend - you could probably have taught yourself a few of the things you're pushing to have them teach you. Here's a couple other solutions: - Find a professor/TA you like and knows some things you want to learn, and try to get them to tutor/mentor you. (In my experience, this one is hard because everyone's busy) - Transfer schools. But do your research first to make sure you don't wind up in the same situation. - Adapt by teaching yourself the things you want on the side. Tackle small projects, each with one or two new things you want to learn. (this is what the other responses were advocating, and I think you need to get in the habit of doing this regardless) Hope this was somewhat helpful.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

shrikrishna 13y ago

tl;dr Use your college life to build cool stuff, just because you can. You won't have that liberty once you come out > I might drop out next year. My guess is that you are serious about this. As a student myself, and having been thinking on similar lines over three of four years of my college, my opinion is - finish what you started. It is absolutely true that what you learn in college is outdated. But, what you get in college and don't get once you come out is the sandboxed environment. In college, you are free to explore your will, do whatever you want (even find co founders, if you are enterpreneural); there is no pressure. The pressure palpably increases once you come out. You can do that (do cool stuff for fun) even after college, but it's infinitely harder. > since I already know a lot of stuff/tech You might be the best in your college, but never let it get into your head (I'm not saying you are) PS: It became a long reply in the end. My apologies

ponyous 13y ago
I think I have this luck, that in my country I can repeat one year of college (free of charge), so I will probably drop-out (fail one year intentionally) next year and will experiment for a year - hopefully I will be successful as I plan. "even find co founders, if you are enterpreneural" - I'm trying this the whole time not just in college but with everyone with IT interests. People in my country are just not that ambitious - they just want a safe job and an average salary. This one student to whom I've been talking too seems to be someone who I should hang out with.
- notduncansmith 13y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what country are you in?
  - ponyous 13y ago
    Slovenia (Southern part of Central Europe)

sn 13y ago

Personally, I would be way more interested in someone who came to me and said "Here is a class project originally written in X that I rewrote in Y because your job description included Y and not X" then someone who had originally learned Y in school.

Aldo_MX 13y ago

If you feel uneasy with college, and you already have the skills you need, skip a quarter, semester or whichever time measure your college uses. Your college should have a head professor, talk with him, explain him your feelings, and scrutiny the curriculum with him. He should give you more insight about where you might not be as good as you believe, and you will get valuable hints about where to start learning on your own. Take the time you skipped to experiment what is to be a self-educated person, try to research on your own, read books, attend online courses, build projects, and everything else you find comfortable with to learn at your own pace. If you are completely sure that you don't need college anymore, and you feel comfortable being a self-educated person, drop. EDIT: In the country where I live (Mexico), there is an institution named CENEVAL[1], where you can graduate by knowledge acquired through job experience and self-education. Maybe in the country where you live there is a similar institution. [1] http://www.ceneval.edu.mx/ceneval-web/content.do?page=1927 http://www.ceneval.edu.mx/ceneval-web/content.do?page=1927

danpalmer 13y ago

I was taught about XML, XSD and XSLT. When I got to industry, this made me wonder why we stuck with unstable JSON APIs and hand-coded validation, instead of using schemas for validation. I was taught about SQL. When I got into industry and started using MongoDB, I wondered why data would go missing, and then realised it's because transactions are often a very good thing to have. I learned some Modula 2, in 2011. Not because we were writing Modula 2, but because we were writing a compiler for it. I've found quite a few times that while the technology we learn is old, there are many beneficial lessons to take away from it. Not just general theories and processes, not just learning how to learn, but there are actually some seriously good ideas in software development that new technologies haven't got, and often we in the startup/SV scene either haven't learnt them, or don't think they are important because they're 'old'. I have several times found myself speaking to engineers who proudly 'didn't go to university' or taught themselves, to be hugely behind in terms of knowledge, and they just end up re-inventing things which have been around for decades, usually in Javascript. Re-invention isn't always a bad thing, it often injects new ideas, and the new versions can be really great to use, unlike some older technologies, but I think a significant number of people who think colleges are teaching outdated technology probably need to go to college. Disclaimer though, this is based on my experience at one university, in the UK. I understand it might be different in the US and at other universities. I just find it frustrating when I know that my degree has taught me a huge amount of very useful stuff that I know some people in industry are lacking. As far as getting a job goes, if you actually look at what most places want, it's Java, XML, C#, etc. Maybe not in the startup world, but the enterprise market is considerably larger, and ultimately where many people end up working.

draker 13y ago
>to be hugely behind in terms of knowledge, and they just end up re-inventing things which have been around for decades, usually in Javascript. I have taken a few university courses, but have primarily taught myself and would greatly appreciate if you could expand on this.
- mickeyp 13y ago
  A good University will teach you things you would almost never come into contact with on your own. I will give you some random examples from my own degree. Some concepts are quite practical and others are theoretical, but all of the examples below taught me -- as someone who had started programming when he was 12, back in the DOS era -- something new. - Data structures. I had played around with them myself before I went to university, but being formally introduced to the concept of data structures: lists (Queues, Linked Lists, Stacks); trees (Binary, B-Trees, Heaps, etc.) and the performance characteristics of each and how you would apply them. In my university it was first taught with mathematical notation followed by practical implementations in Pascal. - Learning Prolog in my first year. An entirely procedural language that uses back tracking to 'solve' relations based on rules and facts. I loved this class. Prolog's not terribly practical but it taught me a lot about abstract data types and 'recursion'. The idea that a list is defined as a head (the item in a list) and the tail (the rest of the list) which can be iterated over recursively was a major eye-opener to me, an until then hobbyist coder. - Haskell. A stark contrast to Prolog and Pascal, I learnt the power of composability and the ability to capture complex ideas with very powerful constructs and a very strong type system. The language is lazy so you can operate on infinite 'streams' of items which is another interesting way of thinking about the theory of computation. - We were taught how to specify a PDP-11 (RAM banks, CPU, I/O) using an academic language that uses "rewriting logic". It was a very theoretical yet practical way of specifying a computer using only mathematical principles. The idea that the number 0 and the successor function is all you need to define the natural numbers and, combined with recursion, basic arithmetic was again the sort of thing you never ever do outside University. - Compilers. I wrote compilers using lex and yacc. I have used that theory -- and the theory of regular languages -- to great effect since then to formally construct grammars and parsers for tasks I needed later on in life. And I could do it effectively and efficiently without reinventing the wheel or coding myself into a corner -- which is easy to do with compilers. - Computer graphics. Basic convolution filters; image processing and the general theory of 3d graphics. - Graph theory. When I first took it it seemed utterly "useless" but it has since then been one of the most useful things I know. I grasped the concept of Git right away thanks to that knowledge. - Operating systems. Networking. Basic security. Complexity theory (the study of algorithm complexity) -- and the list goes on. I remember maybe 30% of what I learnt but I can quickly jog my memory or pick up where I left off. I consider my degree invaluable from an academic sense... ... but it did nothing to make me a better developer. That, unfortunately, is something you have to work hard at. I got lucky: I had already been programming for 10 years by the time I graduated.

eshvk 13y ago

> We are basically learning stuff like XML I find this hilarious because before I can go further into hacking into fancy cutting edge deep learning models, I have to process years and years of XML data from an external party. As someone else said, the only purpose of University is to teach how to learn. Everything else is up to you. Again, there are places that teach you specific skills that are job relevant now (Codeacademy/Bootcamps). You could very well do them and get a high paying job too. However. Figure out what you want to eventually be in life. Do you want to be a high paid janitor who can be easily replaced? Or do you want be the guy who can see through all the bullshit frameworks and design solutions that are robust. The guy who remains relevant at 40.

27182818284 13y ago

The stuff you're learning isn't outdated. It just might be more career-focused rather than front-page-hacker-news-or-reddit-worthy. The example I like to bring up over and over again on HN is Union Pacific, because it is a great example. You will probably never see an article on the top of HN about railroad .NET or Java code, but it helps drive the US economy. (and they pay well. I have younger friends out of college that made $55 immediately and more experienced devs making $100K, which is insanely great compared to California given the cost of living differences. You're talking about owning the equivalent of a million-dollar CA home at 25 with cash to spare. )

exabrial 13y ago

The most valuable lesson you will learn in college is "how to learn." Put the attitude away and start learning.