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I think you mean only impeccable academic credentials. Self-taught developers do enter MIT graduate school, including after several years of working in industry

by dalke 12y ago

I think you mean only impeccable academic credentials. Self-taught developers do enter MIT graduate school, including after several years of working in industry. For that matter, Chumby hired Andrew "bunnie" Huang as a freshly minted MIT PhD in EE. Or perhaps you mean that the types of problems you work on, like the vast majority of problems in the world, don't require knowing Knuth and "PCIS", or a PhD education? I develop algorithms as part of my work. For example, given 20 molecules, find the largest substructure which is in at least 15 of them. I opened up v3 of Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming" last week because it has several pages about a topic that I don't understand. It would take a lot longer to train you to the point where you could be effective at the task, than a Knuth-knowing MIT grad. Which is quite reasonable - I'm in a rather obscure corner of the programming world. Though it's one where Knuth plays a much larger role than SICP. Forgive me if I sound touchy ;) but I'm self-taught, followed by education, followed by experience, and feel exactly the same as you.

MichaelCrawford 12y ago
Among my gripes is that not only does no one care that I've studied Knuth, it is uncommon for those who might hire me, to have even heard of Knuth. Consider that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start facebook. Now he has the idea that he knows more about computer programming than I do, despite the fact that I had been in the industry for six years before he was even born. I'm working on an iOS version of Conway's Game of Life. The vast majority of hiring managers I demonstrate my app to, not only have never heard of Conway's Life, they don't have a clue about cellular automata - nor do they see the point of my app. I find that hard to understand, as Conway's Life is a widely studied artificial intelligence research tool.
- dalke 12y ago
  It's like this for every single subject. Griping about the ignorance of others is awfully hard to distinguish from boasting about your superiority. For the vast majority of problems, knowing Knuth is about as useful as being able to quote Tacitus, compose a Petrarchan sonnet, describe the Krebs cycle, or recount the details of Australia's 1882 victory at The Oval. You would have had the same blank look if you demonstrated your microkernel operating system, LALR parser, or Needleman–Wunsch-based sequence alignment tool. Why should they care? If you can't explain to them why it's important, then perhaps it actually isn't important for the job. My previous comment objected to the idea that people should be rejected solely because they know esoteric knowledge. Your gripe seems to be that uncommon knowledge makes someone somehow special. You'll get no empathy from me.

by dalke 12y ago

MichaelCrawford 12y ago

Among my gripes is that not only does no one care that I've studied Knuth, it is uncommon for those who might hire me, to have even heard of Knuth. Consider that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to start facebook. Now he has the idea that he knows more about computer programming than I do, despite the fact that I had been in the industry for six years before he was even born. I'm working on an iOS version of Conway's Game of Life. The vast majority of hiring managers I demonstrate my app to, not only have never heard of Conway's Life, they don't have a clue about cellular automata - nor do they see the point of my app. I find that hard to understand, as Conway's Life is a widely studied artificial intelligence research tool.

dalke 12y ago
It's like this for every single subject. Griping about the ignorance of others is awfully hard to distinguish from boasting about your superiority. For the vast majority of problems, knowing Knuth is about as useful as being able to quote Tacitus, compose a Petrarchan sonnet, describe the Krebs cycle, or recount the details of Australia's 1882 victory at The Oval. You would have had the same blank look if you demonstrated your microkernel operating system, LALR parser, or Needleman–Wunsch-based sequence alignment tool. Why should they care? If you can't explain to them why it's important, then perhaps it actually isn't important for the job. My previous comment objected to the idea that people should be rejected solely because they know esoteric knowledge. Your gripe seems to be that uncommon knowledge makes someone somehow special. You'll get no empathy from me.