Slashdot Mirror
Should Geeks Skip College?
WaldoJ sent us a link to
a Forbes article about
geeks and college.
The question is if college is worthwhile or not. It was a 4.5 year
time vacuum for me. Education can't really keep pace with "modern"
technology, sure, learning theory and getting some practice never
hurts, but if you're already a geek, is it a waste of time? This
article seems to say so.
Things would be different.
I never finished school, but I have never regretted leaving. I am currently looking into going back to finish my BS and get a masters, but I think in terms of real money, four years more of field experience would have been more valuable to me than a degree. Im 24, and well into the upper middle income as a developer. I just don't see the need.
Yeah... he has a free kevin mitnick button on his webpage. And he doesn't have a college degree, which wold probably explain why he thinks highly of kevin mitnick, and his life is designing webpages. That's not even real coding. Yeah, I wanna live a life like that.
I strongly oppose the whole concept of skipping college. I think one could choose program other than computer science, or one could choose to do part time program, or even do it after a year or two of working experience. Skill college is no, especially when one never attended college at all.
Who say you can't study latest technology and attend school at the same time? Most people do.
I've got to say, college was definitely a good idea for me -- there's no way I would have had access to the kind of equipment I did otherwise. Corporate toys are cool, but companies seem to take a dim view of "wasting time" with non-profitable use of their systems. No such problem at a university.
Plus, I went to a tech school; met more incredible geeks than you can shake a stick at. Useful people to know and they tend to make life interesting.
College/university is probably not worth it, if you only measure "worth" in dollars. If you go to college/uni only to learn how to program in C, to make a living in a typical corporate environment, it's not worth it either. However, if you go to college/uni to learn about the scientific method, critical thinking, research, reflection, the theory behind _why_ things work the way they do etc. then it's very much worth it. If you're one of those "if it takes more than 10 mins to explain it, it isn't worth knowing"-"hell, I can figure out everything myself - who needs background and theory" kind of geek, then don't waste your time (or money).
It should be required, otherwise the geeks I know (um) would die from lack of sunlight. At least most colleges require you to go outside, if only to switch buildings.
I have to agree with the others on here that _not_ going to college isn't real smart. College isn't necessarily about learning everything you'll ever need to know (unless you're going to teach it). I found that college was more about socializing and dealing with other people. Sure, I picked stuff up in class, but there's a lot to learn from everybody you meet in the classes you go to.
If you're really into programming, it's nice to have a bunch of friends to sit back with and talk shop. Sure, some people may be 'wasting their time' going to college, but I don't think that's true for everyone.
Hey, did anyone happen to see his creation.... Looks an awful lot like slashdot.org if you ask me!
First sorry about the AC - I am away from home and can't remember my /. password.
Okay, I don't deny that you can make a lot of money without going to college, or that you can be extremely successful without a college degree, but the article seems to miss something about what a college education is for. Colleges and universities are not technical schools. Sure you might not learn the latest web based programming language or what not, but that does not mean that there is nothing to learn.
Take the example given, fortan. I took a class (it wasn't and my degree isn't in CS) that tought fortran, but that was not the purpose of the class. The class taught methods for scientific programing, and I would argue that learning how and when to implement a FFT based algorithim is a lot more difficult than learning the language of the day.
The teaching and learning of abstract concepts such as Fourier analysis, quantum physics, and even graph theorey are on reason institutes of higher learning exist, but there is another equally important role that they serve. The article's author was a liberal arts major. Someone, I don't remember who right now, said that the study of liberal arts is the study of the arts of liberty. It is the classes that we are forced to take in college that can be some of the most useful.
Well, I have a lot more to say on the subject, but I doubt that anyone has read this far, so I'll quit.
I guess I wouldn't have got my first engineering position had I not gone to college -- but it was more a matter of meeting the right people there than learning anything particularly useful. I think a couple of classes in OOP wouldn't hurt anybody, but the rest, well...
Phil
A university education isn't intended to give you knowledge on how to operate the latest version of HTML. It's intended to give you a conceptual basis for solving *any* kind of problem. Focus on theoretical issues and the particular problems will become much easier to handle.
I suppose I could be old-fashioned about this in an age where the hiring monkeys can't tell a good candidate from a bad one by asking intelligent questions rather than relying on a buzzword checklist.
Maybe it's because I'm one of those "older" programmers...
You want to learn tech skills, programming or sysadminning? Don't bother with a formal education, poke around on the net for a couple of years.
You want to get a job which pays well? Same solution. I have never run into any net-related company which would consider a BS to be worth anywhere near as much as four years of actualy experience; not by at least an order of magnitude.
You want to learn to socialize with people your age, enjoy a period of extended childhood, and test the limits of your liver? College may be for you. Then again, most good tech companies will also address these goals.
-Conner
If all anyone could hope to get out of college would be a technical education, then I might agree. However, college teaches a lot of useful skills which geeks generally seem to consider unimportant. (It's clear that many Slashdot readers don't value clear writing and correct grammar worthwhile.) The author of the article made a good point about "learning how to learn;" college does a much better job than overly-rigid high schools of teaching such skills as time management, research skills, etc.
I dropped out of full time college after a year, deciding that most of the classes I was subjected to were crap. I went to work and found that the formal training I'd had in structured programming were rather beneficial. My immediate supervisor hadn't had any and he'd written the software our company used to publish our information. The differences between his coding style and mine were dramatic.
I continued to take just the classes that I wanted to take at a local community college and found that the C programming course I had was very useful as were most of the other computer related courses I took. I now have 10 years work experience and no degree, not that anyone ever asks me about that anymore. Many of the things that I picked up in the Real World I would never have learned in an academic environment, but much of the groundwork for my research came from the academic environments I'd been in.
Even if you do plan on blowing off college, I'd strongly suggest taking any courses that interest you. Usually you can just audit and not waste your money.
Before you even start to consider the question of whether would-be computer folks should go to college, one must answer to one's own satisfaction the question of what college is for. The debate about whether colleges should exist as job training centers to create better workers in specific fields or as more general institutions to create better citizens has been raging for centuries with no signs of stopping. If you take the "better citizen" view, though, then the answer to the original question becomes pretty clear so we'll assume you're thinking in terms of training for a career as an engineer.
What does being a good engineer involve? There's purely technical knowledge such as a particular language or OS or API. There's semi-technical knowledge such as how systems are put together, what sorts of tradeoffs are generally possible (e.g. latency vs. throughput), some basic knowledge of algorithms and their analysis, basic logic, etc. Lastly, there are - and I know this is a shock to many readers here - people skills, such as how to cope when someone else really does turn out to be smarter than you or when you have to implement the result of a group consensus (or technical-lead fiat) when you would have chosen a different approach.
Most of these things are taught pretty well in college, either directly in classes or indirectly in the more general environment. I often bemoan the lack of relevancy in the typical CS curriculum, and I even dropped out myself because I wanted to "get on with it already". I've done fairly well from that decision, but nonetheless it's not one I can recommend in general and never going to college is quite different from going to college and dropping out. At least when you drop out you know firsthand what you're leaving behind and what its value to you might have been.
If you're just going to go to college for four years of drinking and fucking and getting stoned and listening to loud music at parental/government expense, like about 50-60% of the students out there, do us all a favor and just blow your brains out now. You'll make a crappy engineer anyway, in fact you'll be crappy at anything you do. If you're one of the other 40-50%, though, I recommend going to college at least long enough to get your feet wet and see what it's like. Keep in mind that you'll need to learn all the skills I mentioned above - not just how to grind HTML or copy snippets of other people's Java code - over the next several years one way or the other, before you're really any good to anyone. With that in mind, if you seriously think you can do your learning better outside of college then go ahead and do so. It can happen, but even though college does nowhere as near as good a job as it could of preparing people for the workplace it's still the best choice for 90% of people. The alternative is putting up with all the mistakes and costs of ignorant, arrogant, illiterate, overpaid little pricks who thought wrongly that whatever modicum of natural talent they were born with obviated the need for any education.
jdarcy@mediaone.net (still arrogant and overpaid, but rarely accused of the other problems)
I would say that about 1/3 of the classes I took were irrelevant to my goals.
Outside of programming classes, I could see having maybe ONE writing class.
Otherwise, the Humanities, Management, Statistics, and a few others were just filler.
Course loads for Undergrad degrees should be pared down to the essentials and be completable in 3 years.
I've heard from many instructors that employers are looking for more computer people who can work on projects
in a group sense. I think that if you are the average closet-geek you might not have the social skills needed to
work in a team environment. A lot of the classes I've had stress the team project concept. I don't think that
'project management' is a skill that you're going to pick up very easily on your own.
I also think the real financial 'deal' can be had at local 2-year institutions. I don't think that their programming
courses are as stale as some 4-year colleges. I went through a 2-year programmer/analyst program at the
school here, and now I'm working on another one in networking. When I'm done, I'll be able to program both
mainframes and microcomputers. The best of both worlds -- job flexibility wise. There has only been a couple
of classes that I thought were really worthless. The rest have been really usefull.
And if I can do it, anyone can. I've worked full time and taken my classes at night. I've finished my first degree
in 2 years, and the second will be done in 2 years. I also still hold a 4.0 GPA. And I completely "sucked" as
a high school student (lucky if I got D's). I think that the college degree shows a potential employeer that you
can stick to a project, and that you are trainable... Just my thoughts.
I think that college is wasteful only if you make it so. Hell if you are a genius at CS, Go into something else. Do aerospace engineering or physics or business or econ. I suggest some business classes so that startup you create won't crash which is usually the case when you just have individuals who have no business sense but are wizards in computers. Having a foot in both worlds is a good thing.
~cranial tyrant
If taken seriously, is the start of a life-long
journey and a career. If you just want a job and
make money, then skip it if you will. For those
who want to make something more of themselves and
better the world around them, always seek higher
education - you can never learn too much.
I almost didn't go to college because I was a hacker, and thought I didn't need it.
My Dad finally convinced me to go, and I am VERY thankful that he did. My life would probably not be as fulfilling as it is, if I had skipped it.
You meet lots of people, have a wealth of experiences that open up possibilities in your life, and (if you are like me), learn how to work your ass off.
Anyway, I say "go", if you can.
Hmmmm.... I'm an 18 year old hacking it out at an HMO doing UNIX administration, generating reports (with Perl, of course) and doing some of their web stuff. The pays alright, I just wish I could get to college. I pretty much had to leave my insane family around my 17th birthday, and I really only have one year of high school and a GED, but I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of education. Though I'd probably major in CS, there's more to the world than hacking C, Perl, HTML, and Unix machines. Sigh.
Go ahead, skip college. It doesn't matter if all you want to be is a digital monkey.
Being a wealthy drop-out coder isn't all fun and glory. I never even finished high school, and now I make a decent living working in an Internet start-up. And yes, I write real code, not HTML
There are two problems I have come across as a result of never going to school. 1) I encounter 'degreeism' quite frequently. People in the industry (especially in high performance computing) place a lot more emphasis on academic achievement than most of us realize. 2) I occasionally re-invent the wheel because I wasn't exposed to many of the math and computer science theories that my co-workers were.
On the plus side, since I learned everything myself, I have little fear of diving into strange new technologies and coming up with innovative solutions. This type of skill isn't teachable and often makes up for my lack of formal training.
I guess I'm just lucky there are more jobs than coders to fill them. Otherwise, I'm not so sure employers would be willing to take the risk to hire us un-educated flakes
How can they say that universities are not on the
leading edge of technology?? The internet itself
was brought to maturity in universities!!
When I was getting my Master's (94-95), we had access to all of the latest and most expensive technology. We were doing research that had never been done by *anyone* before. If anyone tries to tell me that Universities are "behind the times" I will laugh in their face.
Obviously I don't know about all the colleges out there, but I have yet to see a CS department that is behind the average corporation with respect to advanced technology.
Now if you want to make some money right out of high school you don't need to college, but don't sell yourself short by ignoring the advantages of continuing education. Hackers who know lots of languages are a dime a dozen, but intelligent people who understand the theory behind computer science are a precious resource. And most people can't learn that theory without some kind of formal education. Otherwise you're just assembly-line programmer.
Hey, think of it as evolution in action.
People who don't "get" that there is more to being a human being than knowing the latest language, etc., aren't going to value a college education. Even if they do, they won't listen. They won't get up out of the chair, leave the computer lab, and go to the library to read Nietzsche. If they have any existential dillema in life, they will resolve it by trying not to think about it.
So that's up to them. Society needs lots more clever worker drones, and if these guys want to volunteer, that sounds good to me.
I know I learned 10 times as much in college in informal discussion with professors and grad students, working in labs on my own time, and in the wonderful libraries. I live and learn the same way now, ten years later. I see no reason why I won't still be learning and growing as a human being in my eighties, irrespective of whatever happens to the IT industry.
KM
It might seem like these first few years of the web explosion, that outside of college is better, but I think that will change. In many jobs now, people are stuck in Dilbert worlds where, guess what? They don't learn a thing!
My experience is that college made me better at being a software engineer. Alot of college is learning how to learn, something that never stops in this field. Learning about other subjects (non software specific) has also also very helpful when dealing with end user's and making a system more relevant and useful for them to use. I also make a point of not going into incredible during college so not to be in debt forever when I got out.
For those of you who were never forced to take the class, that's: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming.
:), streams, and computing with register machines, just to name a few.
It was a book I was *forced* to read while going through the CSci corriculum at UofMN. I can most definitely say that I would never have read that book on my own initiative. It also provides a perfect case-in-point in that it teaches the programming language Scheme, which is almost entirely unheard of in the Real World (tm). (Guile may be an exception, but I don't know of any employers willing to hire me because I know Guile.) The point being that it wasn't the specific technology (read: language) that is important, it is the concepts. That one book brings across such competency-raising issues as referential transparency, message passing, OO, first class functions, metalinguistic data abstractions (I love that phrase
Granted, if you spew these terms at your typical employer they just stare at you, glassy-eyed, in complete ignorance. You have to say things such as CORBA, C/C++, SQL, HTML, and Visual Basic in order to really get their attention. But I can guarantee that I would not be able to demand the rate that I get as a C/C++ programmer if I weren't so good at conceptualizing the ideas of OO, coming up with elegant solutions to daunting problems, and abstracting away details by creating modularized code. Yes, much of this comes from natural geek talent, but I have to admit that I owe quite a bit to my formal education.
I don't believe anyone who has taken a course in computer algorithms will implement bubble sort in their programs. Going to university/college/whatever is so much more then just learning C. Heck, C is something one have to learn by oneself just to be able to get that first lab in before deadline.
I wonder if MIT is proud of Bill Gates being a "MIT-drop-out"? I don't think it's any surprise that one of the greatest OS:es came from an university, and one of the worst came from a "drop-out company"..
Um, wow, I can't believe there are actually people on /. that think college is a waste of time. Besides the obvious social benefits, I thought geeks like to _learn_. Am I wrong? Besides, where would *we* be without college? There wouldn't be a linux or a freebsd, or a web or much of the software we take for granted. A lot of this stuff was developed @ colleges.
Well, I decided to go right into the real world straight out of high school, and it hasn't been that bad for me. I'm making good money, learning a *LOT* of skills (picked up Perl, PHP, SQL, and HTML, and a whole lot of database theory).
However, I have decided to go back to college.
Why? Because I hate the way the industry works. I still can't understand why deadlines are so damn important as to make everything a quick hack instead of an elegant solution. And I hate constantly hearing about "Internet Time" from my managers. I don't care if the Internet moves 7x faster than the rest of the economy, people can't work 7x faster because of that without making major quality sacrifices. My father is a tilesetter, and has been for 25 years. I made this analogy to him when he didn't understand why I was complaining: What if the person who owned the building you were doing work for told you that they needed the floor done in three days, and because of that, not to bother with ripping up the current floor, or laying down grout. Instead, just lay the tiles down so it looks like you did it the right way, because this needs to be done NOW. After that, he understood what I meant.
So, I'm going back to school because of this. Hopefully, open source will have changed the industry by the time that I get out of college so I can be pleasantly surprised, but I'm not holding my breath.
As far as what I'm going to school for, it's not computer science. Why bother? I can pick up new programming languages in less than a week sometimes, and I already read more O'reilly books than I would textbooks on the same subjects. So instead, I'm going for a liberal arts degree, and even applying to a strictly liberal arts and science school like Evergreen.
In short, I'd like to expand my horizons. And as far as computing goes, I don't need college in order to do that.
--
Michael Chisari
Now I certainly didn't have the ambition to do all of those things by myself. But I am very glad that my profs made me do each of those things. I'm a sysadmin these days, and I haven't had to write a linked list of hash tables in Modula-2 for a while, but my background knowledge in Computer Science has been very helpful in many situations.
If you have the willpower and self discipline to acquire all of this stuff on your own, then you are a much better person then I am, and I salute you. Most mere mortals need someone to push them along, which is where the educational institutes come in.
Another benefit of an education setting is the labs, i.e. we had structured OS labs where we had to twiddle the kernel of XINU (our playtoy OS) to provide certain functionality. If we ran into problems, we could always go to the prof and get a hand, which is worth a lot.
I'll be the first to tell you that a lot of my degree sucked. A lot of credit hours were wasted on mandatory fluff courses (Arts, Business, etc) and I can't say that I've used a lot of FORTRAN/COBOL/APL/JCL/Modula-2 lately. (Keep in mind that I was in school from '90-95!) But it didn't hurt (much), and learning all of these things gives some perspective, if only to know what you don't want to work with.
Oh, and a lot of schools offer a co-op program, so that you can get some job experience and $$$ during your degree. I highly recommend co-op programs.
-Clover Kicker-
College is only worth it if you wish to work for a large company that may use it as a filtering process. Otherwise you learn about ancient stuff. Hell, 2 years ago, while completing a required EE class, we studied 8088 assembly.
I thought Forbes was a reasonably respectable magazine. This article is terrible. It says that a college education will cost you $120,000 (which a very good one might) and also says that you study things like Fortran (which I don't know of even a technical school that teaches this to CS students, but maybe some of the bad ones do).
You don't learn Fortran in a decent CS program, so don't go to college to learn it. Don't go to college to learn C, C++, Objective C, Perl, Python, SmallTalk, Lisp, Scheme, SIOD, Pascal, or Protel or any other language either. And don't go to college to learn Unix, Windows, DOS, VxWorks, pSOS, ecos, PalmOS, or any other operating system. You go to college to learn about computing. Computing includes things like compiler design, optimization, data structures, coding style, project management, operating system design, and other such things that aren't covered in "The Complete Idiot's Guide to HTML." Despite what this author and his one reference say, these haven't changed all that much in the last few years. And while, sure, you can get a "high paying" jobs as a web "programmer" without a degree, I don't think a systems design firm is going to hire you to help with their embedded OS if you can't show you understand programming and not just some language.
In order to avert the flames that will surely follow this: Sure I know people who couldn't write decent code to save their lives who have college degrees from very highly respected universities. Some people escape with degrees despite not having learned much, but the fact that sometimes parachutes don't open isn't a justification for not taking one when the plane is going down.
...because they couldn't cut it and got kicked out or because they couldn't even get admitted. A college degree shows that you commit to a goal and stick it and work hard to complete it. If you won't do that, why should an employer think you can? Your resume will go right over his desk and into the bin.
Many people require college for one reason or another. However, if you have a strong anti-authoritarian streak, forget it. If you thought your high-school teachers were full of shit, wait until college. It didn't take more than a semester for me to realize that I'd be much better off learning on my own than subjecting myself to the utterly subjective nonsense of college courses.
The basic skills that college can teach you are _absolutely_ skills that you can acquire on your own through skillful observation and practice. You certainly won't learn to be a better person in college. You may learn to be cynical - how else can you withstand the vapid negativity radiated by most American "child-adults" today?
If your field of choice is in the sciences, you're pretty much out of luck, because you'll _have_to go through college to land a job (and good luck even if you do graduate). However, if you want to code, you're better off studying good code.
My best advice to anyone, whether they go to college or not, is to be critical, but know when it's appropriate to voice criticism. A strong critical eye will keep you from doing the same stupid shit over and over again - in work practice and life practice. Knowing when to keep your mouth shut will help you appreciate how careless so many people have become in their speaking. It will also teach you restraint - which will keep you from doing stupid shit to begin with.
A good education provides something that's very difficult to pick out of work: theory. If you go to a shitty school, where you have classes like "Learn HTML," "Learn Visual C++," etc. getting a CS degree is a complete waste of time. However, having a strong theoretical background provides a really good background for more interesting work. Not having it sets an upper limit on what you can do/where you can go. Even if you go to a shitty school without a decent comp sci program, getting a decent math background (diff-eq, discrete math, etc.) and possibly a little physics and biology lets you tackle much more interesting problems (I think quantom computing and/or biological computing will be big fields in the not-too-distant future). You'll get the experience anyways; starting four years later won't change much. Whether you have 10 or 14 years experience won't matter a couple of years from now. How much you know will.
- pmitros@spam.mit.edu
Fact: IS workers with BS's in Comp Sci make (on average) $16K more per year than IS workers in the same jobs who do NOT have degrees. That figure is even higher for those with doctorates, and masters degrees.
That should be reason enough. Wanna take 4 years off your life so you can be handed $16,000 a year more than the next guy until you retire? Yup.
Hey all.. I realize that many have said this sort of thing already, but I thought I would throw my own view into the mix.
,started on an IMSAI 8080, worked in everything BUT the computer field for 6 years.. then went to college for Physics/Mathematics. Eventually found out the lovely wages you get paid in that field on average and struck out into computers professionally, 6 years later I am worth $80 to $120 per hour for Network Engineering, Unix firefighting and hetereogenous systems integration work etc.
;>
My own story, shortened, is Computers since 1979
My college experience was INVALUABLE to me. The things I learned there helped me in ways that I cannot begin to express. For the most part, I learned how to think, to speak, to write, and a bit of psychology. All of these things have served me in good stead over the years, and I will say this about college:
GO. Even if you run out of money.. even if you can't possibly finish a whole degree.. GO. It's worth the time and effort, and $$, and frustration.
I would not have been able to teach myself as much as I have without the college experience I have had. Do the deed.. bite the bullet.
-T
After viewing www.waldo.net I only need to say one thing - This guy needs to take some Web Courses at college.
I decided to bypass the College education and it ain't hurt me none. I think that a couple solid years of experience more than make up for it. Mind you there are some employers types that only look for the diploma/degree and ignore all others... their loss... It's been my experience that many graduates knew more before they went to college.... they knew how to get the job done.
I don't mean to sound cliche, but just do it. I learned a lot of valuable things in college that elevated me from being able to write programs, to being able to design software. I know and have worked with people with a wide range of years of experience (a couple who worked with core memory(!)) and degrees (from none to Doctorate degrees). The ones with both degrees and experience were the better sources of information. The ones with just experience, they were still good sources, it's just hard to get them to think about things differently. Their way is the right way, mainly because they aren't sure about other possible methods. The ones with degrees and experience weren't always better with the criticism, but for the most part, they were more knowledgeable. Plus, if their way was actually better, their reasoning was much sounder.
Another thing I learned in college was life. Not everything thinks in 1's and 0's (gasp) and sometimes you'll be required to create a very complex piece of software based on a vague description. I've seen super geeks who couldn't find out if the button needed to be red or green, but they knew it was going to be a subclass of some other button. Social interaction can be a good thing. It can be as simple as asking your professor what they really wanted in the assignment. A 20 page report on the exact implementation, or a 20 line summary of how it should work.
The upside to working right out of high school is that you can afford to buy your own toys to play on (ie: Dual P2 systems w/ 19" monitors and multiple pentium systems to network w/)
I must agree that you have to be pretty social to find other geeks... but if you find a good job... you get to work with professional geeks.
Ok, I'm probably biased since I'm a chemistry professor, but here's my take.
College is not about learning what you need for a job. It's much more than that: it's learning about learning.
Sure, you can sit down with a pile of O'Reilly's and learn how to be a Unix/C/Java/Perl geek. That's nice. It's also tremendously one-dimensional.
Spend some time in college learning about other things. I minored in Asian religion: some of my most enjoyable classes discussed the role of Buddhism in post-war Burma, not chemistry. I went through ROTC: the experience I gained from that and military time has helped me tremendously in terms of managing people. (Something you will do in almost every job.) I played in the orchestra and took rock-climbing classes. I made friends I still see today, 15 years after I graduated.
Sure, I learned a lot of chemistry. Of course, I've ended up working on computers far more than chemistry, but my degrees have gotten me interesting, challenging jobs that I couldn't have gotten otherwise.
It's not always a way to get rich: it's quite often a way to enrich your life.
Eric
Even if you're interested in just making a living as an HTML "coder" (gack!) like the subject of the article, you will benefit from some sort of degree. You don't HAVE to get your degree in CS, if all you want to be is a techie. College exposes you to lots of different people, many of whom will be smarter than you; you learn things that aren't related to your profession, which is a GOOD thing. And you'll never get a really good job without that degree.
BTW, when there is a glut of people with his skills, two years from now, that guy will not be able to get a high-paying job - no degree. I'm reminded of the guy in my hometown who dropped out of high school to be a gearhead. At age 18, he was driving the cool car, had the girls, etc. Today at age 30 he is a bitter, burned-out loser with a shrewish wife and three kids he can't afford. No possibility of changing careers either, he doen't have an education.
If you're considerring skipping college you should make sure you weigh your options carefully. In my case, the time I spent at college was a waste. Not only am I glad I quit, I also wish I'd never bothered going in the first place.
:)
Ask yourself these questions:
Will I excel or be mediocre in college?
Will I excel at my job, or will I need a college degree to open the doors for me?
Is my tuition taken care of already or will I have to borrow the money?
How long will it take me to pay off the money I have to borrow?
Will I have access to the tools I need to learn without going to college?
Will I be happier at school or at work?
Will I spend the necessary time learning new tech to do well in my chosen career if I don't go to school?
Am I sure I know what career I really want to pursue? (You may find out you hate the job you thought you'd love.)
Am I willing to give up four years of potential partying and gratuitous sex to make money now?
Do I really know what I want out of life yet?
These questions are really just a starting point. And how you weigh the answers has more to do with you than I. It all depends on the person. I spent a lot of time visiting friends and relatives at their colleges. It made me kind of sad to see all the cool stuff I was missing out on by never going to a 4 year school. But for me it was a necessity and at this point in my life I'm happier than I ever remember being. So I really don't complain.
If you're young remember one other thing. Don't kid yourself that you really know what you want. You'd be suprised how quickly your outlook on life can change as you grow older. Don't give up the opportunity to go to college if you have any doubts.
I know I posted this in another discussion but it applies more directly to this one than the other so I hope no one minds... This could be you--for better or for worse:
Age 10-17:
Learned BASIC and 6502 assembly on Apple II+ and IIe. BBS/AE SysOp.
Age 17-18:
Worked in a computer store repairing/upgrading 8088-80386 PC's and attended high school
Part time @ $6/hr
Age 18-19:
Built computers while attending tech school for electronics
Part time @ $6.50/hr
Age 19-21:
Night security guard while attending community college full time for Computer Info Systems
Full time @ $6.50/hr
Age 21-26:
Worked for a casino in Atlantic City.
Started as an AS/400 operator (shift work, print jobs, backups, troubleshooting)
Full time @ $7.50/hr
Promoted to Microcomputer Specialist after one year
~350 PC's, no other PC literate people on site
Full time @ $20k/year
Promoted to PC Programmer after another year
Minimal programming (C, C++, Rexx)
Mostly special PC related projects and communication between PC's and AS/400
DOS, Win 3.1, OS/2
Full time @ $28k/year
Age 26-27:
Worked for small and fast growing software company
Traveled constantly installing their software, phone support while in office
60+ hours/week -- no travel days
Hated it, fired one day short of 6 months
Full time @ $38k/year
Age 27:
Moved to Florida w/girlfriend for the hell of it
Hired as consultant. Worked at large financial company
Replaced 14" monitors with 17" monitors
Not very fulfilling, but good money and improved physique
Laid off of project after ~2 months (along with ~1000 other consultants and ~4000 employees)
Full time @ $25/hr (*150% OT)
Hired next day as a consultant. Started new job the day after.
Working for small company (~1000 employees)--Working at ~5th largest bank in US
6 month job with option to go permanent (my choice)
Helping with migration from OS/2 to NT Workstation in call centers
My employer is paying for my MSCE at request of the client.
Client is paying for my time in classes (I get out of work for classes)
Great work environment, great benefits, great companies.
Full time @ $43k/year
Well, that's where I'm at now. I never finished tech school or college. I'm sure if I were in school today I'd be diagnosed with ADD. I never did well in school. Scored 1290 on my SAT's. My computer has been my teacher. Future plans? Work as consultant until I figure out how I'm going to make my first $10 million.
KN
It's funny (or sad) that the question of skipping school or not automatically assumes the endpoint of school is a good salary. Granted that's a major benefit, but post-highschool education provides much more than employment opportunity. It's a time for growth both socially and intellectually. Rushing into a job after highschool (or even after undergrad) tends to "freeze" one's personality at that age, and I'm happy I went the university route.
I am sure many people, especially geeks, can survive and find a job they enjoy without college training, but they may miss out on a great experience doing so.
My friend used to work as a consultant at Deloitte & Touche. One day she discovered that the interviewee they were considering hiring wasn't going to be paid as much as everyone else. The reason? She didn't have a degree.
Sure it is easy to get a job today without a degree but that has more to do with the huge demand for anyone mildly competent. Once that void is filled people without degrees are going to have a helluva time with job mobility.
Well, at the very least, the connections point is a good one. Look at the top computer/internet players: Amazon (Bezos went to Princeton), Yahoo (Stanford), WebTV(Princeton), MS (Dropouts, granted, but Harvard dropouts nonetheless), Sun (Stanford, primarily)... How many industry movers and shakers can you think of who didn't go to College?
But that point, I'm sure, many of you will dispute. It really comes down to a question of how you view life and learning. I learned to program by messing around in BASIC in 4th grade, but in college I'm learning ways to take computer science and in new directions. Those who just want to write code might laugh at the idea that operations research, set theory, and discrete mathematics are prerequisites for computing success. But hey, if promising computer scientists had all skipped college in the past three decades, where would we be now?
I've been in this field since 1980 (ARGH!). I got in while working on my AS. Without a BS, I *always* was low man on the totem pole. The worst was when I lived in Austin, TX: there I was, with a dozen years experience, and I was a tech level, while I watched an idiot with a BS in geology piss away literally hundreds of thousands of dollars, on a project I could have done better and faster. When my input *was* accepted, did I get any credit? Hell, no - not even a decent raise. Then my wife, who worked for the same co., and had been with them for nearly 9 years as a lab tech (with no degree), got RIFfed...and they were looking for someone to do the *same* job, but with a four year piece of toilet paper.
Catbert, from Dilbert, is no joke. 90% of all "Human Resource" people seem to think their job is *not* to hire people, *not* to promote or transfer people, just talk to 'em, and look busy.
Hell, I once applied to the TX state attourney general's office, and even though I met the *posted* qualifications, with experience for college time, some piece of scum in the HR dept disqualified me, for not having a degree.
So, the bottom line is, without one, they don't give a shit how good oyu are; unless you're real lucky, they'll treat you like a peon (that's pronounced, 'pee-on').
mark (who also spells, and has better grammer, than most HR people)
Sure... if you skip college, you can rush into the industry and by the time your peers are graduating you will be making two to three times as much as them when they apply for their first job. But, without a college degree one will ultimately reach a salary cap. This is unless that same individual starts their own company, ofcourse. But most people don`t start their own company. Rather, they work for other people making between 50 and 100 thousand U.S. dollars per year. So ask yourself, 20 years after you graduate from high school, what will be more attractive on a job application, saying that you have virtually zero formal education but have 20 years of experience, or that you attended 5 years of college earning a degree and also have 15 years of experience ? Unless your diluting yourself you`ll come to the conclusion that the latter is more desireable in a job applicant.
The journalist who wrote this article probably thinks college was a waist of time because he studied a useless subject. Consider this... at 20 year high school reunion, this person, who majored in Physics asks someone, "how does it work" ? Another person there, who majored in economics asks "How much does it cost ?". And the person with the degree in liberal arts asks "Would you like fry`s with your order ?".
i personally feel that college is a life experience, you can learn the thought processes behind everything. while it is possible (and many people do) learn better on their own and much faster, college is an experience. im 22, and havent gone to school yet. im more than a bit of a nerd, and while I do now currently have a job that pays me almost as much as my room mates, (who both have BS, i make $4k/year less than one and $12k/year less than another) im still learning that i have a LOT to learn in terms of programming. im not planning to make a career out of the tech industry, (its an easy place to ,ake a lot of money) i feel that in the role that im in (support) its unfulfilling. i plan on turning my nerdly powers to digital art and animation. I want to be in special effects. and while the rest of you are out there doing database maintenance, ill be out there makine the next Star Wars. :-)
Have Fun!
-ryan
Gumber sez:
This isn't an easy question to answer, because there are a number of considerations.
From a short term financial standpoint, you are almost certainly better off skipping college. College is expensive and if you already have marketable technical skills (and it doesn't take much these days) the you can probably start out making good money, with room for growth.
Personally though, I think if you are a Geek, money is not your first priority. A geek should have a passion for learning and knowledge. A Geek should care as much about broad concepts as they do about instatiations of those ideas in particular technologies (Java, C++, the Internet what not).
None of which necessarily requires college, but it can help. Courses that help you see the broad patterns will help you thoughout your life. Courses that give you a foundation to build on will help you avoid re-inventing the wheel and give you a basis for communicating with other Geeks. Learning old languages and technologies may seem pointless, but they give you a basis for compairison when evaluating new ones that can be very enlightening. Without school, you might not appreciate the ways in which the development of PC operating systems and hardware hase parallels to the evolution of the mainframe and minicomputer systems.
In the long run, this kind of grouding can only help you financially, unless, of course, it turns you into a freakish academic, but even they do pretty well.
There are other benifits to going to college.
If you are an arrogant Geek, it probably wouldn't hurt for you to be exposed to a bunch of people who are as smart as you are. It might teach you some humility, which will help you work better with others and it will no doubt stimulate you intellectually.
Of course, I think the biggest benifits of going to college isn't any of the specific training you get. Rather it is the breadth that it exposes you to. You meet people you might not otherwise meet. You are exposed to new viewpoints and new subjects.
A good introductory to history and literature can enhance your appreciation and understanding of all aspects of your life.
Perhaps you shouldn't study CS at all. If you already know the basics and how to find the details perhaps you should study physics, or chemistry, or, if you think you can grock any computer system, maybe you should turn your attention to biology, which studies systems of almost infinite complexity, and can benifit for all the smart geeks it can get.
Or maybe you should leave the sciences behind. Maybe you should study art, or theater or religion and put the things you learn to work developing tools for artists, or in plotting and designing games.
In the end, I think that looking at a college education through a short term financial perspective is incredibly foolhardy. Unless you absolutely need an income, because you can't afford college, because you have kids to raise, etc, it is worth you while. One thing is for sure, it isn't going to get any easier as you go.
You are going to get addicted to that increacing salary. You will get a car, with payments, then vacations, because you work so hard, then a new home electronics, because you work so hard, then a house, because you need a place to put the stuff, then a spouse, because all the other stuff isn't as much fun as it used to be, then you have to get counciling, and ultimately a divorce, because you are such a narrow-minded geek who has never had to accomodate anyone elses for long. It could be 30-40 years before you have the inclination and wherewithal to actually go to college, by which time, you won't reap quite the same lifelong benifits you might have had you gone.
I did six years in the navy in electronics. Those navy electronics/computer schools were some of the most challenging as far as school was concerned - really nuts and bolts training - things that have stayed with me ever since, and good troubleshooting skill, and that was in the 80s. After getting out, working at Siemens, and other places, working on school in there interim - I learned a lot at each one of those places, as well, and found out about linux and made job contacts. I haven't finished, because I wouldn't learn as much as I am doing what I'm doing now - there just aren't courses having a curriculum that can follow the pace of the technology. Some schools are better than others. Unfortunately, the school I was at has received a lot of money from M$ (it's in Bellevue WA) so their CS classes are M$ centric. As well, there's alot of nonsense classes that one has to take at college that are simply the types of things any intelligent person can read from a book from the library. If I want to learn about the breeding habits of pigmy chimps (bonozobos) I can read a book or watch "animal planet". If I want a dose of liberal politics such as is common in acedemia poly-sci classes, I'll listen to NPR.
I guess what I'm saying, is school can be good, and if you have the means to go, do it. Otherwise, don't assume that it's the end-all-be-all. There's alot of pointy haired types who think that a degree is a determinant of how intelligent, or how employable a person is. How many Poly-Sci grads have I seen at Future shop ? How many Phsyc grads have I heard say "will that be a double-tall mocha?". There's a lot of boneheads out their who get some degree and never learn anything there afterwards.
It all depends on what you can _do_ and what you really _know_.
Everybody's different, and maybe for those four people that's the right decision. But just because they've done well doesn't mean everyone else will, and frankly if you play the odds you'll find the people who finish college are a lot more on the ball than the people who don't. And if college isn't challenging you, you need to a better college.
Besides, it's a heck of a lot easier to meet women in college than it is in the real world, at least in this industry.
In the 1998 SANS salary survey they post some numbers about a lot of things, one of which is education vs. salary. What came out of it was that in general, you always came out ahead with more education up to a PhD, you could never make enough to make up the lost time spent getting that degree. But all the way up to the masters gave you more money in the end. I can't post numbers or give you a web site to look at, it's on paper (or PDF) and I can't reproduce due to licensing restrictions. www.sans.org if you want to buy it :) Surveyed were system admins, network admins and network security professionals. Voluntary poll not randomly chosen, blah blah blah, whatever, I believe it.
Professionally, I've had experience with people with no college degree and a tech school certificate in network admin or programming. Not a single one could think his/her way out of a problem they hadn't seen twice before. Wouldn't ever hire one without 10+ years experience, and yes I get to provide input on hiring decisions. All that theory DOES count for something in the real world.
HTML != programming
These are all in the general case, there are plenty of specific individuals who can make a career fly without a four year degree. They are the exception however.
Gumber sez:
If money is the only way you measure things, I don't think you are a real geek.
You just wait till your father gets home, young man.
You're not quitting school to join a rock band, err...software company...and that's FINAL!
Who put that idea into your head?
You're staying in school and you're gonna get that piece of paper!
Sure, the courses were damn easy. That just meant I could slack off the entire semester and study 2 weeks before the exams and still get great marks.
During the remaining time I learnt about drinking
copious amounts of beer, and exactly where that spot on a girl was that made her go "WHEEEEE-LA!".
Waste of time? I don't think so. I never enjoyed myself as much as I did in college. 5 years of all night parties, drunken nudie runs, sex with many girls, and time to pursue my hobbies.
Sure I never had much money, but now that I have lots of cash I never seem to have the time to enjoy it. I'd trade almost anything to go back to those days when I was broke but happy.
who's going to belive you when you say you know Unix tcp/ip dns nis yp winnt clustering (you name it)
if you can't show em papers like "ive done this before" ?
(thats my case...)
I've seen the way a lot non-college folk write and argue (a good sampling can be found at /.).
These uneducated geeks might code well, but their skills and abilities almost always end there.
*These people miss out on real history (not to be confused with bonehead history you might have taken in high-school). Real history is engaging and enlightening. And it has real world significance (eg, people have looked at history to understand how to conduct the Impeachment hearings of Clinton). Same could be said of literature, philosophy, or any other subject.
*Uneducated geeks (or anyone else) rarely know how to write and argue compellingly. The worst part is that these people don't even realize this.
*They don't know the joy of watching one of their dorm mates, in a drunken stuper, light themselves on fire in attempt to light a cigarrette (the fire went out quickly).
*Professors generally know A HELLUVA LOT. A good one can spin a student off into directions the student never new existed. This happens a lot - if you care to listen.
*Theory can actually be interesting. It's not for everyone, but you won't know until you really get involved in it at a collegiate level.
There's always more reasons. Certainly college isn't for everyone, but if you want to be well-rounded eduation, it is certainly helpful, although not a necessity. College is also super fun (major babes - no matter where you go unless you're at Reed). And you forever have the right to be a smarty-pants with non-graduates.
Lastly I'll add that if you can code you're set with real-world skills that college doesn't teach very well (many college grads have a hard time finding good jobs unless they really know computers, or they have engineering or business degrees). This makes you a superior force in life after college.
unless you are "lucky" you need a fucking
paper degree to get a job. they dont write
"required" on there to make their toes twinkle
they do it cause the paper pushers and bean
counters are more comfortable with their
stockholders if the gear heads runnning
in their little mouse wheels have credentials.
its just like MS certification. it doesnt
mean you know anything, but it means nobody
is going to fire your boss because he didnt
"hire someone with credentials".
ppl who think college is about learning are
incredibly naive and need to wake the fuck up.
I must agree with the statements of the column in some respects. I myself have only one semester of
college. I decided that sense the professor was looking to me for the answers to student questions, I
really did not need to be there.
I am a self educated and self made man. I have worked hard to get to where I am today and am a
fond believer that hard work and persistence pay off. I have walked into many interviews and been
asked if I had a degree. Most did not give me a chance beyond that question. This in and of itself
poses a real problem in my mind. Does the job really need a degreed person? Are you not willing to
consider some one with over 12 years experience in Sun administration, 10 years TCP/IP , 4 years
Cisco experience, etc.? All because he does not have a degree?
There seems to be a stereotype in the general work environment that anyone with out a degree
does not have the drive, motivation, or knowledge to do the work. This bothers me namely because
from my prospective I have the drive, knowledge, and motivation. I spent many years teaching my
self the knowledge. With out the drive and motivation I would have given up many years ago and
taken a job at McDonalds.
I once asked a co-worker (Boss) " If presented with two people (for an admin. job) with the same
qualifications one having a Ph.D. in theology the other with no degree which would you offer the
job to?" The answer was the one with the Ph.D.. Why? only because he had a degree. Think about
it. what does the theology degree have to do with computers?
Well I guess I have rambled enough for today. I hope I made some one out there think.
do it. Pay attention to the people you meet. You can always learn junk from a book, but the people are where it's at.
If you think you're already destined to become one of the world's top programmers, why not get a degree in a "problem domain". If you're a real programming hot shot you can afford it because you'll be worth major bux before you're 30. Why not learn something that will give you a connection to your user community? How's about a degree in Music, Linguistics, Classics (like Latin and Greek, OK?), Philosophy, Math, Physics or Anthropology?
When you come out you'll have learned how to think and you'll be ready to get started on that MSCS...
Me? I'm a drop out after a few years of undergrad study in Linguistics and Math. Been programming ever since (going on 16 years).
(a different AC replies):
Studying a completely non-CS degree could give you
a completely different skillset, which is obviously
going to broaden the range of jobs on offer. Even
something somewhat similar (eg, hard sciences)
would provide a very different persective on how
to go about solving problems and generating models
of the world.
Everyone seems to be assuming that the goal of a Geek in College is to study Computer Science. I believe that the purpose of College is to prepare you for WHATEVER you want to do in life, not just for the job that you get right after graduation. I feel that College was very useful to me and I am not even doing something related to my degree (Economics/English). I guess that this position boils down to becoming a "well-rounded geek" - is that an oxymoron?
I read a study where the vast majority of programmers in every discipline did not have a CS degree. Now, a lot of that may be due to the relative immaturity of programming as a discipline, or just a recognition that the *essential* skills are not unique to CS courses.
There are those (and I am inclined to agree with them) who state that Computer SCIENCE is a misnomer, as the scientific method has absolutely no place in the discipline as taught in University. The same criticism has been levelled at Economics, Social Science, etc..
Do you need a degree to make the dough? No. And this probably holds true in all professions except teacher. My little brother (27) makes quite a bit more than most progrmmers (including me) and he never went to a university (and dropped out of Community College). He manages 4 Johnny Rockets restaurants in Miami.
He's an example of the best and worst of what can
happen to a college drop-out. The good news (for
him) is that he became a super billionaire. The
bad news (for him and the rest of us) is a warped
personality he has to live with for the rest of
his life.
Well i got the cs bs the classes for the most part were a big waste of time. A few were worth it the rest was irrelavant. Your arguements dont hold water. It seems to me your an engineering bigot. The same kind that kept your dad frm moving up to where he should have gone had he the guts to assert his position and ability.
College provided me with a number of interesting women who were quite eager to experiment with their bodies and mine. You tend to get that with very smart women who have way too much free time on their hands.
When I left school the little private world it provided socially was shattered and most of the women in the real world are scared of AIDS or one kiss and they think they are engaged.
You learn a lot in school and most of it is not in the classroom. The problem is you will not get a second change later.
Yup.
Look its real simple..
University is not about learning how to program nor is itabout learning Shakespeare.. The value of a university education is that you are supposed to Learn how to LEARN, learn how to research, formulate ideas and expand upon them.... Sure you can learn how to program hello world on your own in C or any other language...big deal so can a million others...
Without a university degree your chances of developing anything really new or spectacular are less...
Tell if you know how to program but haven't attend university, whats the likelyhood that you could write a program to solve perturbation problems, develop cryto using chaos theory, Develop cellualr automata simualtions ( actually these are really easy ) or a million other worthwhile tasks....
Sure if you just want to be a sys admin... no you probably dont need it provided you are competent enough to do the job...
University is more than just getting a job ( maybe even a better one ) afterward..... Its about learning, expanding your mind ( sometimes at parties via hallucinagens ) and becoming a WHOLE person.....
I've met some people who never attended university but were well read and intelligent people, on the flip side I have met many more who were immensly vacuous, childlike in their thoughts and reasoning, inarticulate as a monkey ( hmm no thats an insult to monkeys ) and the list goes on...
Some people who attend university dont think they got any benefit out of it ( well you get what you put in for one but ), that they just pumped a pile of cash down the toilet, yet if truth be told they most likely grew as a person from that experience, gained a higher level of reasoning ability etc...
I know personally I can compare work I did before university and what I was doing toward the end and there is no comparison.... the stuff I did before was shit.... and I my mark were very high entering university so its not like I was dumb...
For people in the US who dont want to spend 120+K on their education go to Canada or europe where it will be much cheaper, as good or better in terms or quality and just the experience of being away from home will be of benefit...
University is about more than learning how to program or learning alogorithm design or shakespeare or whatever..... its about learning period, personal growth that you cant achieve outside of it...
If you need better reasons than this.... improve your job chances, more respect from peers, "University educated people have more and better sex" -- quote international study on sex, IT will be good for the economy
cheers
The title says it all.
I've been passed over for several jobs because I didn't have a degree. I'm 30, and I'm just now making over 30K a year. A woman who knows less than I got a job I applied for because she had a degree (that job would have meant being able to pay off my 3-year old computer and possibly replacing my 91 Geo Metro.)
People with college and people without college start off making similar saleries, but after a few years, the ones with degrees come out FAR ahead.
As an engineer (civil/engineering: we build roads and builidings and landfills) who now programs, I needed the degree to make the switch. School is also the place where you learn the techniques that
help you become professional. Buildings don't crash like programs do. why?
Without the credetials its hard to get people who don't know you to take you seriously. Even though
I could program I wasn't taken serioisly before I had some programing classes under my belt.
If your hiring and you have a choice between someone who has a degree and someone who doesn't, who are you going to choose.
I know someone who was able to get a job after being out of the workforce for 20 years as a housemom. Because she had a degree (from an excellent school) she was taken seriously.
Skipping education may pay now but who know what will happen in 10 year?
Also college is fun!!!
(even if they couldn't teach me to spell...)
-Aram
I had the opportunity to make $40K+ right out of high school, but I didn't take it, and I'm glad I didn't. I am a sophomore at BC right now, and I've been working at Fortune 100 investment company for the last 5 summers. I've been in IT as a 'LAN integrator' for the last 4. That's since I was 16. So now that I'm in college, I've had a taste of corporate America. But I'm NOT sorry I'm going to college. Why? I'm not going for bleeding edge technology, because that's what I'm teaching myself. I'm doing it for the atmosphere. Yeah, it seems expensive, but the 'learning how to learn' thing is true.
Are you going to be 18, work in some IT dept, and read Nieztsche on your lunch break? Not likely. Will you end up being around classes with 50 other geeks and all laugh at the same dumb professor jokes? Not likely. If all college did was prepare you for a career, then I'd say don't go. But it's not. I fell in love with computers when I started working 45 hr weeks in the summer. Aside from programming, I haven't learned too much stuff in my CS classes that I didn't already know. But I've learned more OUT OF CLASS than within it. Living in an apartment with 7 other guys is something you won't get to do unless the job you get isn't a great paying one. You won't get to scramble to the dining hall right before it closes. You won't get to be a dumb college kid.
Just because you don't have to go to school to make money doesn't mean you shouldn't. I could've taken a cushy job, but instead I'm going to school, for the discipline, for the atmosphere, and for the T1, which is somewhat more satisfying than using the one at work... I can make big bucks when I get out.
If HotWired contains all you want to know, college is a waste of time. Of course, then, you would be a moron as well, but I suppose that's beside the point.
Dont skip college instead pass on High School (or as much of it as you can). Cram as many classes into your freshman & sophomore years and you should easily be able to graduate a year early.
I definitely couldnt say my BS in Computer Engineering at Illinois was a waste but man my last two high school years were just a drunk fest with almost zero intellectual progress. [Ok. My statement is now qualified, get out of high school early if you want to really learn a lot about CS theory & advanced topics. Stay in high school and coast thru your last year or two doing basically whatever you want and drink your butt off if you would rather party.]
For most super bright high school computer nerds, high school is *boring*. The typical day is comprised of dealing with fellow students that are not your intellectual equal, dealing with a lot of teachers that are not your intellectual equal, then you get home and play around on the web or program and *gosh* actually learn something.
When you get to college you will find your intellectual equals and have a lot more fun etc. Plus all the beer drinking and living on your own is way better than the nagging parents.
--JC
I'm a nerd. And I have a message. CS is not about programming.
I really hope this comment gets read, but..
I'm in my second semester of 11th grade, and things are really getting pressured. I need to start doing my college work now.
Basically, I'm a good student, take semi-hard courses, am in the top 10% of my school and still mangage an school-sponsored activity or two. I'm nothing really special as far as my numbers, I feel this is because I try not to take anything too seriously (I do work hard, however) and I like to enjoy life.
I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in Texas and I was wondering if anyone could give me some suggestions as colleges to look into. Basically I'm looking to major in CS or CpE, with a minor in Math or Psych. I want free Ethernet, and a place where I'm likely to get a good bulk of scholarship money. (My SAT's =~ 1400).
Yes, I'm doing my research, but I prefer answers from people, not books. There is no right answer for choosing a college and I would like to know someone's feelings of a particular campus after having spent a good chunk of time there.
I think college is pretty much a waste of most parents' resources. Speaking from my viewpoint when I was 18 I did not really know what I wanted to do, .. if I had gone to college to screw around on either my parents or my own money for 4 years I would not have been any closer to what I wanted to do... I wound up joining the US Air Force and instead getting to play with lots of neat toys, get some serious real world experience, along with lots of opprotunities to switch jobs and play around as I saw fit... on top of that I got lots of free money to go to college if that is what I decided to do.
I am leaving the Air Force next year after being in for 9 years because I want to get on with my own life because they have given me the training(lots of Solaris, Novell, NT, and HPUX) and real world experience, along with leadership skills among many other things...
I think vocational training is really the way of the future as technology becomes more and more important.. traditional colleges cannot keep up, nor provide the real world experience needed for the normal work force.
Also on the money front.. the Forbes article mentioned one family that was looking at the $120,000 it would cost to send their kid to a brand name college for 4 years.. take that same money and invest it very safely, and by the time that kid turns 50 he would have at least $500,000.. as opposed to spending this money on a scdhool for possibly something the kid really did not want to do, and even if he did to get out and get a $35-45000 a year job???... logic just not seem to work out........
I aint need no schoolin - I are a programmor, I shoold know.
I think dats java programmer need college, though - cause dat java are smart - lots of transister and such
Aside from the worship of any spiffy-looking degree by pointy-haired lusers, the real difference would necessarily be what an individual student gets out of their education. A good school will probably be a huge asset to any aspiring computer professional, but a bad one will probably have little value outside of some social growth (pronounced "dating").
I happen to attend a university which is unusually devoted to Linux and free software. Our OS class has just switched over to studying and using the Linux kernel. We even offer a class in administering hetergeneous network systems with Linux, NT, Perl, etc. which can count toward the Computer Science major. If you can't think of a use for that, you're not trying very hard.
My high school, on the other hand, taught me how to sell drugs, look forward to prison, and be a better loser. Does that mean everyone should skip high school? Probably not, unless it's the one I attended.
It's the results that count, not the name of the building.
I used to think that college was BS and all that and I really envied those kids that made it out in the industry. But, one day as I was falling asleep in Discrete Math, I noticed that about 15% of the class was made up of people, well beyond the usual college age group. Yah, they were people in theirs 30,40s and they were here at college. So, I think I'll stick it out so I don't end up like them. BTW, I really admire those kind of people.
I agree what prof. commie and i'm just about to enter college. My majors are history/pol. science and hopefully take some philosophy too. Most of my friends are going to take CS or something related. Their only reason is the money. What kinda of job am i gonna get with history/pol. science? Probaly not a very profitable one. Yet i dont care. I want the most out of the life and money isnt the most important.
I'm just going to college because of the ethernet jacks in every dorm....education of the textbook is second
If you take time to get a degree, technology will pass you by, but if you don't have a degree they wont hire you?....
University of Life works for me...
earlier I said I was going to college just for the ethernet jacks in every room...textbook education is second, I'm going to college for the ethernet jacks and for the kick ass sun/sgi boxes
(dos and UNIX were my first OS's)
There are 2 and 3 year programs. They're at places called "community colleges".
University is not about finding a career, it is about learning. If you can't handle the four years, go to a technical college for 2.
You learn skills other than programming and
experience with particular technologies at school.
I got to work on real projects, learn to solve
problems, learn theoretical backgrounds of things
that I wouldn't have otherwise, meet neat people,
use amazing facilities, and all of these other
things that don't equate to what you do at work.
I don't care about specific experience on college
new hire resumes; I look for how bright people are,
if they can take initiative, etc.
I was lucky enough to have an excellent engineering
school where I was eligible for in-state tuition
(go Purdue!). I think my three years (I tested
out of lots of stuff) came to less than $20k (if
that much).
I could have gotten a job out of high school.
I didn't want to. I wanted to learn.
Brain functioning? Original thoughts giving you headaches? Go to school and learn how to stop thinking for yourself. Your mindaches will cease.
Never had a brain? Need some kind of personal validation? There's a sucker^H^H^H^H student born every minute.
Yes, College is needed - as a remedy for some people.
Remember, "learned men are the cisterns of knowledge, not the fountainheads."
I went to the University to "get smart."
When I got smart, I left.
There is one major topic we have all missed here in these 300+ comments: The Internet.
/.ers out there are depressed from your social deprevation and that is part of the reason you have turned to computers)
More specifically, how it has affected today's youth's learning processes.
I mean, a decade ago, kids did not have access to the Internet like most of the late teens / 20-somethings do today. The Internet gives anyone with a PC, a modem, and a strong motivation to _learn_ infinite possibilities to learn whatever they please.
That is why we have so many anti-college advocates here defending the skip-college route. If it wasn't for the Internet, most of us would have had to go to college for all this information that we aquire daily just by reading sites such as Slashdot, etc. I mean, I know most of you out there in Computer Land [tm] prefer using the Internet to research a topic rather than go to your local public library and pick up some old book from the 60's and flip through dusty old pages of outdated information.
I could go on and on about the REVOLUTION that the Internet has brought us in terms of knowledge advancement and what not, but it should be obvious to most of you and really relates to the whole anti-college point of view that all these Slashdot'ers are making.
Maybe some of you college educated folks could extend on (what's the word again) what I said and bring in your opinions on how the Internet Revolution has affected this whole subject.
=================
As for me, I currently hold a bullshit job, dropped out of junior college because I didn't like it, and now am planning on going back to college (NOT a JC, but rather a residential University). Mostly I have needed a therapists help (due to a fucked up life) and that is the main reason for my stumbles in college so far. But I am hoping everything will change once I get away from living at home and start living with people my age in a dorm/academia type environment. (sorry, I dont know why I included so many personal thoughts, but I'm almost certain many of you
I took engineering at University of Toronto and now do programming at IBM for DB2.
I have to honestly say that most of what I learned at university does not directly apply to what I am doing now. Especially since I took the engineering science option, which has extra emphesis on math and physics.
However, I don't think that it matters too much that I don't directly use all that Math and Physics now -- it was all about problem solving.
I think that anybody who does computer programming knows that it is fundamentally self taught anyhow (at least anybody who is good at it).
Taking a good engineering program can give you the fundamental understanding of all aspects of a computer and computer system functionality that can then be applied to many different areas in the computer industry.
Just my 2 cents.
Peeter Joot
(ps. Am I the only one who thinks this nickname/passwd sillyness for slashdot posts is utterly stupid).
I am a teamleader at a leading worlwide systems integrator. I do not have a degree (only missing my thesis - didn't have the time), which proves that you can make career w/o the degree.
However, a few thoughts:
It is next to impossible to get INTO a good company w/o a degree and w/o experience.
Once you're in, everybody is the same. It depends on how good you are and not where you graduated from.
If you have substantial experience, you can always get a job even if the ad says "degree required". My line has always been "Do you want someone who already proved he can do it or do you want someone who has yet to prove that he will succeed in a professional environment?". Always worked.
Your salary will be higher with a degree, but again once you're in it is only your performance that counts and gets you the money.
Bottom line: If I were 18, I'd finish that stupid degree first before I start working. However, some people just can't afford to hang out at college... it's all about money.
I am surprised at the arrogance displayed by many people here claiming that college is a complete waste of time.
I am currently a sophomore college student majoring in biology and/or CS. I plan to go into research.
Now I am not going to debate the merits of college vs. no-college I think there IS NO BEST ANSWER - it depends on the individual making the decision.
I have read far too many posts about how college is a waste, and full of useless morons too stupid to simply make it without a degree in the "real world". Well, whoop-de-doo, so you skipped college and work now. That DOES NOT make you some sort of genius and give you the right to make yourself superior to those who chose college. I attend college to learn the fundamentals and theory, as we to get the experience and knowledge, necessary to be a scientist. I am not saying that it is necessary for every technical person to go to college and I AM NOT saying that those who do are all arrogant jerks, but from what I've read here, they seem to be quite a vocal minority. College degree or not, an attitude like that will get you nowhere in this world.
But this is just the ramblings of an obvious conformist fool who actually wasted money to go to college because he is too inferior, uncreative and stupid a person to go without a "BS" degree.
Respectfully,
Kevin Christie
kwchri@maila.wm.edu
My experience is: First comes the problem, then the techniques and mindset needed to solve it; then the language.
A great programmer will choose the language that best fits the problem.
For all problems requiring heavy number crunching (and there are a lot of them) nobody has figured out yet anything better than Fortran (and Fortran style of programming); so the whole attitude "that language is useless because it's old" is wrong.
That is what a good college is supposed to teach.
I was trying to explain how to use a particular class framework, and how if the equals() method on a class is changed, then the hashcode() method must probably be changed, too. This (intelligent) guy didn't understand why, and hadn't done it, producing a bug. There wasn't really time to explain it, and he wasn't too interested in finding out the details. So, he just rote-memorized the fact that the hashcode() method had to be changed, too.
At another job, a programmer who also didn't have a CS education was arguing that we do all parsing possible in Perl, because it does regexes so time-efficiently. I asked the computational complexity of the algorithm, because that makes all the difference in the world...if you're only going to use the regex once per document, then etc. etc. He wasn't prepared to discuss this, and also not too interested.
The point is, there are fundmental concepts in CS that help build a common language and knowledge base that is very useful. Without these, you'll be relegated to being a 'coder'.
School Sucks. Thats all there is to it.
I feel this is a good point. HTML isn't development. Creating web pages is not engineering. It's a job, yes. And I'm sure it pays OK for now.
The difference is sophistication. This person is probably not suitably trained to contribute (let alone lead) a largish software engineering project.
Actually, I will be quite surprised if the money stays strong for HTML people. The authoring tools keep improving, and the entry barriers are low.
Career decisions really do have some gravity. It's not enough to "get a job" - you want to be able to pick and choose from a variety of offers and you will be working over 30 years. Where will you go after ten years of writing CGI?
Skool sucked for sure - I cannot say that college is truly worth it (I have already graduated). But chucking it all to develop web pages doesn't seem very attractive to me either.
Especially when I could be working on the internals of something big and complicated. And a degree seems mandatory at this level.
first i've graduated high school i have 3 some odd years of experince fixing computers but i keep getting shit jobs because i have not gone to college , but can you guess where i'm gonna be in the fall
I skipped it initially, and now I want to go. Why? ...Well, personally, I've always wanted to take philosophy and art courses. It also serves as an all important buffer period before you have the joy of dealing with the harsh reality of working for the rest of your life.
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Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
Put simply, there are some things that you simply can't teach yourself. I'll glady grant that anyone can teach themselves a computing application or language in far less than 4 years. I'll even grant that I've wasted some time and money in classes that I will never use, and more time and money in classes that I may not use often in my life.
But the cold hard fact is that skipping college will cost you. You won't learn the theory. You won't have professors or even fellow students with more knowledge or different experience to point you in a certain direction or critique your work. You won't know how to work effectively in a team.
How are you going to teach yourself to write above a 12th grade level? Classic literature? Economics? Philosophy? Biology? Mangement? Political science? Perhaps you think those are all irrelevant, and that all you need to know is (Insert industry buzzwords here), you're wrong.
I don't resent that there are people my age (21) who already have $100k in the bank. I don't resent that there are people who never went to college who are far more advanced in a particular area than I will ever be. I do realize that I'm not a genius, that I can't teach myself everything, and that there are subjects not directly related to CS that will help me in my career. Oh, being in an academic setting means I've now got 2 years of true sys admin experience and a year of database programming under my belt, to say nothing of the industry contacts I've made.
2. If I didn't learn to be a great hacker in college, I did learn everything else I needed to be successful and to be an interesting human being. Interpersonal relations, american poetry (LIT 205 and 206), running a small organization (I ran the radio station), logic (PHI 201), ethics (PHI 203), the basic workings of the mind (PSY 101), how society operates on a basic level (ECON 101), how it used to operate before (HIST 106) and so much more.
If you have real motivation, you can sit down and just do it yourself.
Go and read Knuth's Art of Computer Programming. If you feel you're not getting "well rounded" go and read Steinbeck, and listen to Dvorak.
College and "formal education" are no substitute for being alive, and discovering the world around you firsthand.
---------------
Do not discount the fact that you have free will.
> Outside of programming classes, I could see having maybe ONE writing class.
The more, the better. You would not believe some of the writing I've seen from advanced undergrads or graduates. Expressing yourself clearly and professionally is one of the most important skills to have in any field.
> Otherwise, the Humanities, Management, Statistics, and a few others were just filler.
Stats? I wish I'd had more classes in that area!
It's important to be well-rounded. I took a music class my senior year. Even though I was already heavily into the piano and trumpet, it opened up a whole new world. I can't imagine what I'd be doing without it.
I've gained far too much enjoyment from literature, music and the arts to just throw it all away.
If you go read "The Soul of a New Machine," you'll find an interesting discussion of the job interviews for the Data General Eagle team. One of the questions asked concerned hobbies outside of work. It was very important to the team leaders that their workers do something outside the computer world when away from the lab.
If this is all too wishy-washy and non-geeky, then so be it. I'm happy.
Many of the "programmers" I know who are not college educated have a very shallow view of computers. They only know Microsoft products, they only know Visual BASIC, etc. If they are uber-geek types, they will spend hours cutting cycles from within a do-loop rather than coming up with an algorithm that doesn't *NEED* a do-loop.
This isn't to say that college would have turned these sad excuses for programmers into super hackers, but at least they would have been exposed to the concept of O(n) vs O(1) algorithms (and don't forget O(n**2) algorithms!). And at least they'd have been exposed to the concepts of structured programming, rather than slinging spaghetti all over the place.
Having cleaned up after so many non-college-educated programmers during my career, I am probably biased. I'll just note that usually I end up re-writing rather than fixing programs created by non-college-educated programmers, because they are usually unreadable spaghetti with no comments, cryptic variable names, and no structure. Heck, I knew one kid who thought that indenting his code was structure! (And who wondered why I fussed at him when he re-read a table out of the database every time through the loop, rather than cacheing it before he entered the loop -- it took fewer lines of code, after all!). Some of the code I've read by college-educated programmers has been a bit bletcherous, but at least I can fix it without re-writing the whole thing.
This isn't to say that ALL non-college-educated programmers can't structure their way out of a paper bag... just that, in my experience, most of them are woefully ignorant of what really comprises programming -- creating easy-to-use, maintainable code that is easily extensible in the future. All the cycle counting in the world won't help if the program is unusable due to lousy user interface, unmaintainable due to poor structure, zero comments, and slower than mollasses because of ignorance of basic algorithms (Knuth and Sedgewick are the Patron Saints of algorithms, and anybody who dares differ on that shall be cast into the holy flames reserved for heretics!).
Now that I've ticked off every hacker without a college degree, I'll just say that most colleges don't teach what people need to know. I didn't need college to teach me HTML or Pascal or Python or "C" or 6502 assembly or etc... but I did need to know the difference between an O(n**2) algorithm and an O(log(n)) algorithm, and between a b-tree and a hash table. Yet so many colleges see their duty as "preparing kids for jobs in industry", and instead spend their time teaching young people whatever the "hot technology of the day" is -- a technology which will be long obsolete, of course, by the time you graduate.
-- Eric
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
One of them is whether it is important to learn, in any fashion, anything other than what is required for employment. If you're one of those people who hate learning anything not related to your ultimate goals... well... I feel sorry for you. And you should wonder whether your career could have taken other paths if you hadn't specialized so soon.
The second question is whether university is a good way to broaden oneself. I think that's much more debatable.
College instruction is often the fastest way to destroy one's natural enthusiasm. University is often a series of meaningless tasks, impossible work schedules, and assignments which specifically exclude creative (or even correct and complete) solutions. You become more skilled in passing courses than anything else.
The other parts of the university experience are much more important... social experiences, breaking down prejudice, and a chance to enculturate in the presence of some brilliant minds. But it seems odd that one would have to pay US $120,000 for the side effects, rather than the actual "medicine".
Posted by modefan:
Bill Gates was a drop out.
Now he's the one of the richest and most powerful men in the world.
Heck of a drop out if you ask me.
I did a little community college (El Camino baby!) and many of my friends have dropped. Being techies, we know a lot about computers, but we never went to college.
Not bad, I don't have loans to pay back and I am making money with my skills. Only one bad thing: college chicks don't dig guys their age who don't go to school.
But older chicks that have money know where to come =)
Posted by ButtGoblin:
:)
Thats the only reason im bothering gettin my cs degree at a crappy college like San jose state. The magic paper is demanded by all the good game companies i wanna work for out there. the modern cs program doesnt teach u jack about whats important such as design, it takes em 3 classes to teach you c++ and all they talk about is basic crap like trees and lists as far as theory. and theory and menial coding assignments is all you get, no chance to do "real" stuff you'd do as a software engineer for a company. the problem is that this program is designed for idiots who dont give a shit about computers, they're just takin the major cuz they heard its one of the most profitable ones. oh well, one more year and im out of this hell hole
Posted by clementsn:
So if programs ship with run-time libraries they are interpreted? That is faulty logic. How to identify this faulty logic and how to avoid it is the subject of every course of study in a good university (philosophy, economics, even cs).
By the way, Visual Basic now produces compiled code. It still ships with a run-time, but they have better versioning than the Visual C++ run-times (one of the stated goals of COM was to get rid of these versioning problems, but there you go).
Posted by 0x61 0x30:
College is a waste of time and money.
Contrary to what a lot of people say, you can get a job quite easily without being a college graduate in the computer industry. One fine example is network administration. They don't teach networking in college ( unless it's some advanced class, which really isn't all that advanced since most of them just cover TCP/IP fundamentals.
The industry moves to fast to waste time sitting in college. If you're a truly motivated geek you'll do quite fine without college and you'll save yourself lots of time and money.
.A0
Posted by Dr_Sneed:
I think that college is a very important learning tool. I am young (lower twenties), I have not had very much college, but consider myself successful. I've had a year of "Four Year University" & I've probably had a year of Community College. Both were great experiences. When I was at 4yrU, I bombed out, but I learned valuable life lessons, if you will. And since, I've been back to school over the past couple years to work on some classes towards a degree. Do I regret not getting my "Higher" education in? No, because I will go back and get it (unless I die within the next few years). I'm happily married, I work for a very large corporation, they pay me to learn while I work. What isn't better than that. Right now, I'm working on a variety of certifications, that will probably take me farther in the IT field than a degree ever would.
I think right now there is such a demand in this field that if you know how to change the display settings in Windoze you could probably get a help desk job.
I know Windoze fairly well, and am trying to learn Linux right now. I've played with Slackware & am now starting to play with Red Hat to see what diff. flavors are like. I think if you are a geek at heart and have a will to learn you do not need college.
But, why is college important, because you can learn things that cannot be taught elseware. Like what? That's a good question. I learned respect, and that there are other people smarter than me. I also learned the best thing of all: how to learn from others.
Someday I will get my degree, when? When I feel like it. I feel it will make me a more complete person.
So like it or not, there are my unorganized views on the subjects. The only down side to college is the $$$, but don't think of it as spending $$$ for an education, think of it as investing for your future.
I did go to college, but I earned a liberal arts degree. I felt at the time (and still do) that colleges would be unable to keep up with the pace of change in technology and that I could continue to learn much more on my own. I also didn't want to sit in classes being taught things I already knew and could easily teach myself.
There were, of course, other reasons for choosing the path I did and I wouldn't change a thing. However, I am having a hell of a time finding a position now in the fields where I want to be and know that I am qualified to be. Employers do not find self-teaching credible. Part of my problem is where I live. A self-taught geek has greater opportunity in say, California, than in the prehistoric techno backwater called Louisiana.
Nonetheless, I am patient and will prevail. I make a reasonable salary now despite being bored and unchallenged by my position.
There are lots of other reasons besides the degree to attend a University. The experience is well worth it regardless of the degree you end up with.
Okay, it was a different article, and a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (oops, wrong one ;) :)
but we had this discussion before. While US colleges may not be good enough to provide a challenge for geeks, there are still alternatives (European ones)
Anyway, the comment 'Welcome to the Dark Side' in the last discussion about that summed it up pretty well. Quick money, but the lack of theories, and maybe also versatility to move on to a different work later.
Well, I dropped out of college before I completed my sophomore year. I'm now 26 years old and I make around $100,000 a year (counting bonuses) as a Consultant for a software company. You'd think I'd be pretty happy with myself, but I wish I had finished college.
:)
Allow me to explain. College DOES have it's place. It teaches disciplined thinking, proper researching, structured concepts and most importantly, exposure to things other than 1's and 0's. Do I think they should be able to charge in excess of $100,000 for teaching those things? Well, I dropped out, so that tells you my answer. On the other hand, encouraging people to skip college will eventually create a large pool of code drones, and that's a bad thing.
When I use the term code drone I mean someone who lacks vision or understanding of anything but code. Having some exposure to business concepts will definitely help you write that new Front Office Automation package. Understanding communications concepts will definitely help you write that new network faxing application. Exposure to manufacturing is a must to work in the ERP space. No one will sit down with you and dictate business practices to you so you can write software for real business. No employer will give you the time to start from ground zero so that you will pick that up. Knowing how to write code is only part of the job.
I spent a lot of years working shit jobs for next to nothing before I had enough real world knowledge to be an asset to my employers in the software space. If you want to code, it's about more than knowing languages. Yeah, you can drop out/skip college and ride the help desk. But guess what? You're not gonna make much, and there's no real advancement path.
Taco may think that college was a "time vacuum" for him, but as time goes on he'll come to thnk differently. I can safely say this because I'm backed up by a whole 26 years worth of wisdom. (tongue firmly in cheek)
P.S. In the real world you can only have so many 3-day beer blasts and skip work before you lose your job and live in the car they're trying to repossess. College, the four-year kegger!
His reasoning is mostly correct (though colleges aren't nearly as far behind as he makes you think they are behind) as far as it goes.
Problem is he doesn't even know you can reason farther. College didn't teach me much about programing in the real world. College taught me to think. I wouldn't understand the answer to many of the questions I ask now if I had even thought to ask them which I wouldn't have. If you have never taken college level classes in several departments you won't understand and it can't be explained. Calculis seems irrelavent to my daily job, I haven't done a derivative or integral since I graduated. I apply the what I learned in calculis every day. It isn't the math that I apply, it is the reasoning.
So go to college. I don't care what degree you get. Obviously a CS degree is going to make you a better programer while a music degree will make you a better singer. In the process of bettering youself in one area you learn how you can better yourself anyplace you care to. Besides I don't know what I will be doing in ten years, there is no degree that will relate to every job I will ever have.
Note that better yourself will not make you perfect. I'm a much better speller then I was, and my grammer is much better. Both of the above are still horid as you can tell.
I think it's a worth-while experience for geeks. Even if the coursework isn't immediately relevant, you get a good backgrounder on where things have come from. The history of your profession is impt. Add to that the opportunities for future contacts, exposure to other disciplines, a chance to do some work on-campus, etc. Not to mention the possible lure of grad school. College is or should be an adventure. A real good start. If I could, I'd go back and get another degree.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I went for a year and worked at the same time...I learned jack shit in college and i learned a TON about the computer industry from working, so after i finished my 1st year, i just didn't go back. I mean i taught myself, C, C++ (including about a dozen SDKs), Objective C, Perl, all that good stuff on my own by reading and doing. I know that this kinda thing doesnt work for say law students or pre-med or what have ya, but for something like programming, college just distracts and stalls you from learning how cool the real-world industry is.
I don't totally agree with this article. Granted, technology seems to change too quickly for many things to keep up, including books and college courses. There's a lot that can be learned that's not going anywhere, however. On the purely practical side, there are college courses in programming languages like C, C++, Java, and Cobol (still!). Those languages will probably be around for a while. Delving more deeply, degrees in computer science involve slightly more than just learning a lot of computer languages. There are similar basic concepts underlying nearly every programming method.
It might also be prudent to remember that straight programming is not everything. Most programs do something, and you need to understand what needs to be done. It's difficult to write an accounting package (or even maintain one) without a good understanding of accounting principles.
I'll grant that I don't think that I've mentioned anything that can't be learned out of the classroom, but I think it's a lot easier to learn in an environment tailored for learning. (As opposed to having your boss tell you, "I need this done--you said you were a fast learner, right?")
Disclaimer: I'm not majoring in computer science. I'm a physics major, and I have a little less choice about getting a degree.
--Phil (Not to mention that I like learning and enjoy college.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
I've been thinking about this for the past 3 years now. I'm someone who is arrogant enough to think that I don't need a college to teach me compiler design or operating system level programming. I think the entire system is bullshit. But only recently did I decide that I wanted to go.
:)
It sounds like a total waste of time, I'll never get into MIT or whatever at this point, and I wouldn't want to foot the bill for it either. I'm sure there's plenty one can get from it, and if they came up to me and said "here, you can go to MIT for free, on us" I'd probably go for it. Realistically, it's not a future plan.
On the other hand, I've been going to school for 75% of my life. I'm growing so sick and bored of it. It's really disappointing when I learn more during summer vacation than I do the school years between them.
Everyone looks at me as if I'm a loser if I don't plan on going to college. It's really annoying that society has this hardwired into their brain that you have to pay money to an institution to learn anything. I suppose schools are targeted toward the mass populus who this would be applicable for (obviously). It's too bad that their CS degree will be worth more than my lifetime of experience with this technology.
I plan on putting college off for a few years once I graduate high school. I want to experience the world and live on my own. If I see that I've made a mistake, I'll go to town hall university (you know, that building the peons come out of in warcraft2?) and get some degree.
Even if I do finally go to college, I'm not taking CS. "Here, I'll give you money to teach me something I already know!" What fun that would be. I'll probably double major in Math and Physics. Yea.
You might be saying "Why don't you teach that to yourself too, assmaster?", I would, but it'd be easier on me (motivation/laziness) to just sit back and buy an education. "Town Hall University" is rather cheap.
Well, with 322 comments and counting, I doubt anyone will read this. I am a HS senior and a certifiable (MCSE? Who needs it?) major computer geek. I could probably hit the market and pull in >$40k right now, straight out of school. But I'm still going on to college. Why? I'm looking forward to learning something other than geek stuff. Well-roundedness is good and my bottom line is not the sum of my existence, no matter what any industry reports say. Wish me luck!
I'm one year ahead of you in about the same position (graduating in June), and here's what I've found:
- MIT -- Duh. Good, expensive, a bit snobby, and not much other than technical fields
- Carnegie Mellon -- wishes it was MIT
- Cal Tech -- Again, very techie but not as snobby/expensive as MIT
- UC-Berkeley, Duke -- Good CS, also has many more diverse offerings
- Rensaeller, Cal Poly -- decent, but I didn't investigate too much
What I actually found (and I can be backed up by several sources) is two things: if you read and follow Slashdot, you already know more about computing than 50% of CS majors, and if you go to a good school (as you're likely to get in to), then you don't even need to be a CS major to get valuable computing experience. I am planning to do Biochem wherever I go next year (U of Chicago, Berkeley, or UW-Madison), with CS as either my minor or dual major. I stayed away from big-tech schools like MIT and CMU because they had little to offer outside of computing--British Literature is a possible major but nobody goes to MIT to write papers contrasting Pope and Swift. My recommendation: unless you're an absolute hard-core geek (like you'd wire a 100BaseT port to your brain to reduce keyboard lag), find a college you like and a major you like, and pick up computer experience as part of the fun of college (ie, play around with your box hooked up to the Ethernet, help other people, and mess with your accounts on the ancient UNIX systems most universities have). CS/EE tends to be one of the most obsessive majors; I know a few people who burned out so much in 4 years that they didn't want to get a job in it, but couldn't go anywhere else that paid well because that's all they knew.I went to a big name, private school. Graduated with an B.S. in a hard science other than CS. Went straight into unemployment.
That degree won't guarantee you a job, anywhere. Some graduates find employment. Most don't, depending on what major you were, how competitive your grades are, and whether you graduate when the time is ripe in that field. If you're scraping by already, bag the college education and keep working until the next recession.
College, for right now, is still an indespensible resource for learning core disciplines that you wouldn't otherwise learn. College puts you in to a different "frame of mind" than if you were studying only the things that YOU want to study.
... a 4 year degree will cost you with living expenses (out of your home town) around $50,000. About 60-70% of that can be handled through government loans and/or student lines of credit. If you're a computer major, there shouldn't be a problem repaying that debt within 3-4 years after graduating.
Canada's college/university system seems to be a *lot* better in terms of $$$
A lot of people don't get tangible benefit out of college, but some people do.. I know I am. I guess it depends on your goals & what your program offers... a concentration on _fundamental_ concepts and strengthening students' capabilities really should be what college does.
Down the road... 30 years maybe, there probably will be better alternatives to College to get the same level of education.
The primary problems with college right now are related to its accessibility: you have to be living in a certain area (near a good college) with a certain income bracket in order to get a good college education. This shouldn't have to be the case: education should be available to everyone across the world, AT ANY AGE LEVEL.
The world of tomorrow is going to be less of a world of monetary haves and have-nots; the world of tomorrow will be about who is educated and who is not. A degree probably won't matter: your ability to learn and retain knowledge will.
In the final analysis, the problems with college go far deeper than "keeping up with technology" and cost... the U.S. educational system in general is broken, and is in dire need of some real management vs. bureaucratic administration.
-Stu
Long version: There's a lot more to an education than learning professional skills. At least part of it is learning how to think; how to distinguish the excellent from the merely adequate; how to understand and appreciate the work that has been done before you, as well as the project you're currently working on; and so forth.
If you, O reader, are a "geek" looking at college in the future, I strongly recommend that you get a good liberal-arts education as well as any CS/EE/etc. you're planning on taking. "Well-rounded" isn't just some idea that your high school guidance counselors invented to mock you. Very few of the great geek heroes are nothing but computer geeks.
Take Larry Wall, for instance. When he began his studies, he and his wife went into theology and linguistics, seeking to become translator-missionaries. And while I can't recommend theology as a responsible discipline, one can't help but notice the positive influence of Wall's linguistic work on Perl.
And don't bother trying to do real programming without at least some theoretical CS. Where else are you going to learn that you really shouldn't sort directory listings with bubble-sort? The early programmers of MS-DOS never learned that...
Sure, you can get a job without a degree. Is it a good idea for your life? No. Consider again Gates and Torvalds. Which do you think is better in the sack? Where do you think you're going to get more practice at that -- in a full-time tech job at age 19, or in college?
If you've found yourself someplace during or immediately after high school that can teach and carry you into a career you're looking for, I would probably stick with that. If you're just the computer geek type who spends most of his/her time in the computer lab and works fast food on the weekends, I would suggest you plant yourself in college.
..." or "technical support for ..." crap), you will tend to be passed over in favor of someone with likely less experience but with a college degree.
In my opinion, "real world" experience in the field you want to be in for four years is more valuable than a four-year computer degree ESPECIALLY if you have a tremendous amount of computer background and experience already.
BUT: For those script kiddies and IRC junkies that just have passing knowledge of the various aspects of computers, DO NOT delude yourself into thinking that that is a solid core of computer experience. You are a dime a dozen and will not make it in the real world with only those skills. If you still think that you are pretty smart, be an intern at some real places. Most people will quickly find out that there's a lot more they don't know.
By the time I had finished high school, I was working for an Internet provider (starting off doing tech support but quickly moved into other more intimate areas of networking/programming/writing, etc.). I learned more in the two years I worked there than I would have learned in two, three, or even four years at college.
I do not, however, think that field experience is a perfect replacement for college.
In college, you are taught a way of thinking, of problem solving. While real-world experience can be extremely valuable, most people with degrees have a stronger foundation of problem-solving skills than others. Besides teaching you how to program and how an operating system works, college teaches you how to think. For this reason, I believe a college background can be a valuable thing to have.
Additionally, many corporations (for whatever reasons) MANDATE that their employees have a college degree. You can have all the experience in the world, and could be absolutely perfect for a job, but without that degree, they simply can't hire you. College degrees also tend to be beneficial when it comes to "first impressions". Someone browsing over two resumes without any real knowledge of either applicant will tend to give the one with a college degree more thought. Unless you've accomplished a lot and have a good, strong amount of resume material (none of this "designed web pages for
If you do decide to go the college route, you don't even necessarily have to finish. Sometimes employers will see that you've got a good core knowledge base from a few university courses, and they will be satisfied with that (assuming you held a good GPR and didn't flunk out). Don't, however, drop out after the first year simply because you don't think you're learning anything. In all likelyhood, you won't actually start learning anything useful until your 2nd or even 3rd year.
If you don't decide to go to college, and think you're making it fine now and can only advance your career, I would still consider taking some college courses. I find that good writing skills are hard to find among computer people that haven't been to college, so some english and/or technical writing courses could be helpful there. Some courses in secure programming or databases might be useful. Most "computer people" out of high school tend to have the same computer background. They might be able to program in C, might have some unix experience, but lack some other, very necessary, skill sets. Try to explore your weaknesses and patch them up. Push yourself out and beyond what your peers are all gravitating towards. And, most importantly, do NOT be arrogant and assume there isn't anything out there for you to learn. Quite a few slashdotters and annoying high school geeks have made that fatal mistake. You do NOT know everything, and in most all cases, everyone with a degree knows more than you, in most areas.
Whether or not you choose to get a degree, ALWAYS KEEP UP WITH THE TECHNOLOGY. I cannot stress this enough. A ten-year-old CS degree is usually worthless if you haven't kept up with the news, the trends, and the new technologies. If you can find a company that is technologically stale and has no desire to innovate or keep up, then you might be okay, but the real successful people are the ones that keep themselves on the edge of the latest technologies. This applies to both people pursuing and not pursuing college degrees. The instant you graduate from college, many of the things you've learned there are already out of date. Keep up!
So if you're leaning towards going to college, do it. If you're not sure, you'd might as well start off in college. You can always quit later. If you're leaning towards skipping college and going straight into a career, think carefully. Unless you've already got a decent amount of background and something besides generic "computer skills", you aren't likely to find anything but PC "grunt work" (tech support, repair, etc.).
Having a college degree (or at least some experience) doesn't hurt, but not having one can.
Yep - the bugs would be more structured.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Then again, I don't classify myself much among the geeks (much less among that disgusting class of ``nerds'' Rob seems so fond of), so perhaps what I have to say isn't worth much to this discussion. ;)
That makes two of us..
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Some places already have 3 year degrees. But then again, those places also have better education at a younger age and so their students are 2 years ahead of most Americans by the time University arrives. University is a place to specialise... not continue a rounded education because the system has already failed.
When it comes to computers, I've developed such a proficiency that when I need something done, I do it myself. I started out with a 486/25 when I was 14 (I'm 21 now), and since then I've been hooked. Whether it's hardware, software, or troubleshooting, I can take it no problem. A year and a half ago I learned about Linux and all the great GNU tools and since then I've spent most of my computing time with them.
The only things that I haven't mastered when it comes to computers is networking and programming. Heh, when it comes down to it I'm just a power luser.
I graduated high school in '95, and since then I've had a couple decent jobs, and now I'm considering two options.
1) I can work for myself and make $50-100/hour as a PC repair tech, which I could do with my eyes closed.
2) I can go to college and get an associates in programming locally and later xfer that to a bachelors of business administration at the same school for fairly cheap, or I can go to a big U and lose my ass in debt.
I think as long as I learn the theory and logic behind coding, and get the academic introduction, and basically learn how to learn, that's what's important. As far as I've seen that's what going to school for CS is about, and all the languages you learn basically becomes self-taught.
Anyway, the school programs I was looking at are here: baker college. they're local, they're cheap. I've still gotta talk to the counselor and find out about some stuff before I decide,
So what do ya think? should I stick w/ the pc tech skills I have, or go on to CS and IT stuff? If you think CS and IT is worth it, would a good Associates be good or is a bachelors a requisite? I'm not getting any younger, so it's about time I do soemthing. I'd really love to be a "real" geek =)
[ If progress is to move forward, is Congress to move back? >8-} ]
dunno. I mean, I was a geek before college, but college brought a few veerreee important factors to bear on my geekhood -- access to technlogy (hadn't even *heard* of 'NIX before college) two, relevant employment (first admin job in college) and three, education/well-roundedness. Without college, I'd probably be a dumpy aspiring nerd working at McDonalds. Thank you college!
-- adr
Definitely take a pass on going to college. It's quite optional. I'm over-educated myself, and it's never done me a damned bit of good.
-russ
if you want to pretty much throw your life in the shitter... Not everyone is going to make it ok like this guy... And the days are fast approaching where a college degree will be a necessity in the computer field.
And please don't bitch about schools not being able to teach the most up and coming technology. That is not their job. The prime lesson you should get out of school is how to learn and pick that stuff up on your own. Most people don't get their hands held in the real world.
Egads. Some people really need to see the real world. It can almost make you go to college...
While much of what I learned in the course of obtaining my BS in Computer Sciences was extraneous to my daily work, I think that an exposure to academic CS is a good thing. It's important to know some basic theory, to determine if a given problem can be solved in polynomial time, or how to write a compiler from the ground up.
Universities also tend to be places with a lot of opportunities for geeks, such as really nice hardware. The hacker community has a tradition of being tolerated around academic institutions in a way that isn't possible in business. The sense of community provided is also important; many user groups initially take root at universities.
College may not be for everyone, but currently there is no other venue to learn the fundamentals of computer science, which are the difference between being a computer operator and truly mastering the machine.
--Gus
I don't think you refuted the claim, you merely showed A.C. has more work to do before he can jot down quod erat demonstrandum. With that, I heartily agree.
Normally, Slashdot doesn't make me laugh (too much, anyway). This article almost made me snarf the Dr Pepper I had drunk.
Anybody with ½ a brain, and even two nanoseconds of a real college education knows this guy is full of crap either because he's completely moronic, or hasn't been to a real school.
His picture looks like he spends his time sitting in front of a sticky keyboard looking at alt.binaries.erotica.* and 'coding' HTML. Another fine candidate for the "Why Couldn't Social Darwinism Take This One" award.
But really... If you seriously think you're going to get anywhere significant in this world, without that piece of paper, you're going to end up nothing but a bench-drone or a tech somewhere useless, fixing a useless piece of hardware, broken by a worthless collegeless geek, just like you.
For those of you who were never forced to take the class, that's: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming.
:) All hail the holy Red Book!
I am holding the book in my hands as we speak. Damnit, I love the MIT press.
From my experience in college (thus far, I'm not done quite yet) college has been exactly what I've made of it. Granted, I'm not a typical geek, I'm a little more ambitious when it comes to outside stuff than that. Anyway, here are my observations on people who have dropped out of school to enter the work force (from the ones that I know):
The last issue is the one that I imagine most people may have a little qualm with. But here is how I see it. In college, a good computer engineering degree will teach you about software and hardware along with math and natural sciences and some lib arts here and there. One of the things that is taught that is fairly hard to learn on your own is hardware design, simply because its not something even the bright 15 year olds can understand that well. Not to mention, it has an initial cost, while most non grads pick up skills with no cost.
Also a lot of people (or from my view at least) drop out with the ambition of become game programmers. Hate to break it to most of them, but to design a good 3d engine you need a good deal of physics and vector calculus, most of the stuff you can't really get in high school.
Anyway, for me, I could have easily decided not to go to college and go right into the real world and start working for $30-$40k a year, but I chose not to. It was the right decision. Most of the people who enter the work force don't see its the college experience that is so great, not nescessarily college itself. I've chosen to make a lot of it and as a consequence I've gotten opportunities for projects that would never be offered to me during work, and the variety is awesome.
Maybe if you are one of those people who is thinking that college isn't for you, you should change what college you are looking at.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Here's a different perspective: I manage several people in a web/unix/network-intensive shop. A couple of people went to college for a year and dropped out. While their technical skills are excellent, they lack the broader base of knowledge that comes from a full college education. It may be trite, but the point of college isn't to teach you the specifics of the technology, it's primarily to teach you how to think on a variety of levels.
Some questions I face:
Would I prefer to fill a lead sysadmin position (something that comes with a essentially unlimited access to other people's work) with a person who has 100% of the required skills but no college education, or someone with 90% of the skills and a couple of college philosophy classes in ethics? Would I rather hire someone with 100% of the technical skills for a programming position, or someone with 75% of the skills, but a good writing background from a minor in English Lit that would make our documentation effort easier? On a small staff, would I rather have an advanced software architect with a minor in business, or a non-degreed balls-to-the-wall code god?
In each of these cases, the person without the college education will get you farther for the first few steps. But you quickly realize that in order for the individual and the organization to advance, you _must_ have a broader base of skills. Sure, I can get more out of that code god in the short run, but what happens when I want to collaborate with another company? I run into a great big skill vacuum, and either the organization suffers, or I hire someone over the code god's head (which casts me as the bad guy).
IMHO, good, sucessful technical people focus on the convergence of fields. For example, a network security specialist is worth more than either a network admin or a business security person. A programmer-writer is worth more than a programmer or a tech writer. Web design people who have database design/coding skills are making loads of money in e-commerce right now; far more than the run-of-the-mill webgeek or database admin.
Finding this convergence requires having multiple perspectives that are built through a well-rounded education. This is why companies that pay no attention to education are doomed, and individuals who skip college, as a general rule, relegate themselves to a relatively low position in the organization. Those who skip college because it is truly beneath them are few and far between, but shine brightly enough to draw others into a dead-end or vastly handicapped career.
On the bright side, however, my organization (a top-50 corporate monolith) and many others like it provides generous resources for continuing education, and tuition reimbursement for degree completion. So, for those that skipped college to get a jump on a career, there are ways to eliminate the handicap. The point is, it isn't easy to do -- the years you saved by skipping college are eaten up by slow career growth and concurrent schooling later. It's not a position I would want to get into without giving it a lot of careful thought.
I think not...(*poof*)
I bet the dean of the engineering department would love to see that cmdrtaco got nothing out of his private college education. It is sad to see someone who should be full of knowledge and promise is jaded about their experience.
I think whether college is a 'good thing' or not is a question that has a lot of interesting answers. But it mainly boils down to two significant factors:
1. The quality of your college. Who is to say that Hope is any good or that it's computer science department has anything going for it.
2. The amount of effort and time you put into your college experience. No doubt Rob spent a lot more time working on slashdot then he did studying for his classes. Granted it seems like time well spent. But who is to say that constructive energy couldn't have raised his opinion of his college experience if he had spent that time on his classes.
Remember that most of those people you admire in the open source community all have college degrees and almost all of the internet was spawned from university projects so do not so quickly dismiss the college experience. It is more important then just it's social aspects although that is a big selling point. Next time you decide to discuss this topic think about what you put into your college education because ultimately you are the person who learned something while you were there.
Well, I'm working as a programmer with only a High School Education but unfortunately it's not too easy getting another job with out that BS degree so I've decided to go back and get it.
I don't think that anyone necessarily needs it but Upper Management seems to like everyone have as much BS as possible.
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
My god. If people think college exists so you can learn stuff to make a ton of $$$, they are missing the point.
College is (hopefully) a growth experience. A well-rounding of a person. Oh yeah, you learn job skills. But most importantly, you learn *to think*. I got more out of my History / Sociology courses than I did any tech course (BS in Chemistry).
As far as CS experience, I think you do need to learn the theory to be good in the field. You can be a so-so hack who makes OK money with no grounding in the fundamentals, sure. But if you don't ever learn the more abstract concepts (whether in college or on your own initiative), you probably will hit the limits of your knowledge sooner or later...
Anyway... if you can go to college, *do it*! The worst thing you'll get is a lot of hangovers, and a student loan to pay off for 10 years (but you'll probably make an extra $250 a month to cover that, so financially it's not bad). Learn for the sake of learning, spending 4 years to improve the quality of the rest of your life isn't such a bad deal!
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
Then I don't think I would hire you.
I think that there is a whole lot to be said for my post graduation, work force experience, but college was definitely no waste of time. The learning that I did in and out of class on everything including and beyond technical subjects was so worth the time I spent there. The technical classes gave me a firm foundation in the field that I work in and without it I would have had nothing to build on. The other classes gave me something to be interested in besides computers. I would do my undergraduate studies again in a heart beat. I would do them even better than I did.
I dropped out of the e- program after two months, and switched to a "general studies" course, with English and music as my focus. I did OK, when I went, and when I did my homework, which wasn't often. The second semester, I started out with a full load and a theoretically renewed charge to do it, but wound up all but dropping out, and finished the semester with two classes (a music class and a speaking performance class) that I'd not attended through most of the semester.
That was.. 1994. After that, I worked in politics for a while and found myself on the wrong side of the "Republican Revolution" that year, which soured me from politics. My skill had always been with computers, and after the 94 election, I got a job at a local Macintosh store (MacGalaxy... hi Mark! ;-), where I worked for about a year before starting my "consulting career" -- unemployment. :)
While consulting, I managed to both starve and accrue valuable experience -- I set up networks, did troubleshooting, and learned the value of a dollar. All my consulting experience eventually added up, and after working for about six months in 1997 at a big credit union organization doing tech support for an MS-DOS product (pretty good for a Mac guy!), I got a job as a sysadmin at an ad agency, where I was until August of 98. I'd met my future business partner about a year and a half before, and actually started working on linuxppc.org in March or April of 98. In August, I quit the ad agency (best move I ever made!) and moved to Savannah, Georgia (second best move I ever made!), and I now work for LinuxPPC Inc., aka LinuxPPC.com. :)
And that's been a truly remarkable experience. Pretty good for a guy without a degree! I hung around college people during what would be my normal "college years," and sometimes I feel a little deprived of some experiences, but I really feel that I've taken my own path through life, and I'm now doing what I've always wanted to do: bringing software development to a really cool platform and being my own boss -- which is invaluable. No degree can confer that!
Do what's best for you. Follow your heart. If school's not right for you, work. If work's not right for you, perhaps school is. It's different for everyone. School and I never quite got along, and I'm doing fine independantly. I might go back some day -- most of my family actually started college later in life and then did great -- but for now, I'm happy.
-- haaz.
i'm a geek who started hacking on a ZX81 at 12 y/o... i now have a Ph.D in computer science, sure it was a waste of time, i learned quite nothing i didn't know before, some theory or things like that, but never in programming stuff... sure i "discovered" unix at university in 1990 and "man" learns me tons of things before teachers do! as "everyone" i tried to get root privilege in university and have success some times ;-)
anyway, going to school and university lot of years help to find a job, having a master and ph.d in system enginering (especially unix, i never touched a novell or nt box) and networking enginering, i found a good job in less than 2 months, and well paid!
have fun to school!
--
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
and was quite boring. When you get to grad school though, things change. like your company could be footing the bill :-) and you get to take courses that are much more interesting and more usefull. A lot of the stupid people that were present and dragging down classes are gone. For me, grad school has been like taking all electives, all the time.
/dev
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
ESPECIALLY if you're a geek. Where else can you:
1. Live on your own in an environment especially designed to comfort, support and entertain (and occasionally inform) young, clueless innocents, such as yourself, fresh out of high-school, (on Mom and Dad's dime, in most cases)
2. Drink with your (new) friend's (WAY cooler than the old one's) 'til the wee hours, (on Mom and Dad's dime, in most cases)
3. Smoke pot with your Philosophy teacher, (on Mom and Dad's dime, in most cases)
4. Meet beguiling members of the opposite sex (?) who have NO IDEA how much of a nerd you were in 5th grade and win their love with gifts, (on Mom and Dad's dime, in most cases)
5. Get awards, adoration and ALTERNATIVE CREDIBILITY for flouting opinions/life-styles that got you BEAT UP in high school
6. Get access to computers / equipment you could never afford on your own and learn NEW, EXCITING ways to use/abuse them
7. Come to the Amazing Realization that there's more to life than your Olde Hometowne.
8. Meet OTHER people your age, who also secretly enjoy watching "Ally McBeal", and SHARE YOUR PAIN
9. Become the Linux Nut/Guru/Advocate of YOUR campus, and gain more ALTERNATIVE CREDIBILITY
10. Finally get those damn parents off your back, (on Mom and Dad's dime, in most cases)
**>>BELCH
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/ cat13wi.htm
Even though they are ranks of Engineering schools, they're pretty to how I'd rank them for CS/CompE programs though, although of the bunch ranked six I'd put CMU and Cornell higher than Georgia Institute of Technology or Purdue.
As for learning from books vs. learning from people, based on my expirience at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, which is tied with a bunch at second on that list, it depends on the prof and sometimes upon the TAs. I doubt you will find any school where the way you learn (or don't learn as the case may be) varries a lot from course to course and often even semester to semester.
As for free ethernet, in dorms that's pretty much universal. I can't speak for private schools, but at a public university the issue is how long you can live with another person in esentially a closet without going completely mad.
As for hard courses, you haven't taken hard courses until you take one get a 45% and have your grade after the class is curved, be a B. Done that twice, it's kind of fun actually.
I think the college experience can help prepare you in some non-technical aspects of work place. College was my first real taste of working with a group on a project as well as giving a presentation/talk in front of an audience. I'd much rather look like an idiot in college and gain some experience than screw up in front of my bosses at work.
In addition, I know some companies require you to have a college degree (in any major) before they'll hire you (full-time employee - I think it's usually a little more lenient for consultants). Of course, exceptions are always made if your really good at what you do.
In my case, I got a BS in Engineering and a MS in Computer Science. While I don't remember/use 90% of what I was taught, I still feel getting the BS was a worthwhile experience for the reasons stated above. In addition, it was through a friend I met in college that I got my current job.
One thing to note, the college I went to was tuition free, so the monetary factor wasn't as important in my case.
The MS in CS, I'll grant, was a big pile of crap. Part of it was the lack of courses relevant to my interests. Another part, was my choice of schools. I was interested more in network protocols, design and management. The school, it turned out, was geared towards programmers doing research work - mostly database work, distributed processing and user interfaces. (I was working full-time and going to school part-time.) However, by the time I decided it was a waste, I was about two-thirds of the way through, so it would have been silly not to finish and at least be able to put it down on my resume.
-- Winston Yen
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits."
Y'know, University and College aren't the only places where you can get a highly valuable (both knowledge-wise and employability-wise) I personnaly have just graduated from high school and am enroling in a Flight School to become a commercial pilot. University is not the only way to get a good job.
Sorry, but if you don't think you learned anything important in college, then either you weren't paying attention or you didn't go to a real school.
"Until an $85-a-copy textbook is written, they can't teach a course, and by the time the book is published, the technology is out of date," Waldo says. "I could go to HotWired and master Dynamic HTML in five days, or I could spend a year in college and would leave knowing Fortran, which is an out-of-date computer language."
Crap. You don't go to school to learn to hack; you go to school to learn Computer Science. As Brian Harvey said at the beginning of CS61a (the first CS class at UCB), CS knowledge is not tied to any particular language and technology. The knowledge you get from these classes is applicable to any language, platform, or technology, with only a quick skim of the reference manual to learn the particular syntax.
"For geeks, colleges have become like those cheesy technical schools offering courses on refrigerator and auto repair that advertise on Dukes of Hazzard reruns," Waldo says.
Sure, if you go to those schools, where the textbooks are probably from the "For Dummies" or "21 Days" series. At a real school, you don't learn the specifics of JavaScript, DHTML, or whatever the latest "hot" technology is supposed to be. Of course those skills have "the shelf-life of a banana", especially if you have to wait for them to percolate into a college curriculum. Instead, you learn theory: NP-completeness, formal language theory, graph theory, data structures and algorithms, operating system concepts, databases, etc., and, perhaps most importantly, problem-solving skills: you learn how to analyze a problem and come up with a good solution. For anything non-trivial, you just can't pick this stuff up on the street.
A lot of the people out there with MCSEs, etc., making big bucks are not even aware of the existence of this stuff. They think that writing efficient code means reusing variable names instead of DIMming a new variable in VB (I actually had this conversation once -- the same guy also once asked my friend "How do you sort an array?" I guess he couldn't find the function in the VB manual, so he was stuck). They also think it's necessary to go to expensive training seminars to learn each new technology. Maybe for them it is, since they don't have the theoretical background to look at a "new" technology and see it in terms of those basic concepts.
It's probably true that if you're reasonably smart you can make more money, at least in the short term, by skipping school, learning a few "hot" technologies, and going to work. In most jobs, all that theoretical knowledge is not used much anyway. However, there are times when you can make big mistakes if you don't have a proper background. Besides, "real nerds" find that stuff interesting and worthwhile in its own right. I don't know that one way is necessarily better for everyone, since not eveyone has the same values, but I for one thought school was extremely worthwhile. I went to work instead of graduate school in order to get some real-world perspective and because of the bucks I could make, but I fully intend to go back in ~5 years.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I find it odd that so many people have the mentality that university is all about learning to program. I've taught labs in first year computing science classes, and one of the things I always tell my students is "We aren't here to teach you how to program. We're here to teach you how to think. If you want to learn how to program, go to a technical college."
So this Waldo guy can pick up a book every five months when Web standards change and make a good living. Good for him.
Me, I've taken courses in algorithmics, graph theory, programming methedology, assembly, fundamental computer design, non-procedural programming languages, operating system design, etc. Because of this, I can make informed and rational decisions on how to design programming projects, what the advantages and flaws of points in an operating system are, and I can map out network flows in a graph. Eventually, I plan to go to grad school, and do research in parallel and massively parallel operating systems. I'll write a thesis, and try to get a job (or perhaps create my own company). While Waldo tries desperately to keep up with the pace of technology, I'll be doing my best to create technology. I'll be contributing to the world's store of information, rather than merely tagging along, waiting for someone to do the thinking for me. Who knows, maybe one day Waldo will have to read a book that *I* wrote. I'm not in university so much to learn, but to learn enough so that I can *create* later. That's what university gives us.
I was a programming professionally before I went into college. What I did learn in college is (1) alot of math that I'd never sit down and learn by myself and (2) lots of CS and EE theory, some of which I might have picked up on my own.
However then I went to grad school chasing the elusive spectre of Artificial Intelligence. I remember sitting down with NCSA Mosaic and saying "gee, if it just had cryptographic security, people could do credit card transactions." A few months later, Netscape happened, while I was busy studying for a Ph.D. exam. After that I decided I had to do some part-time Internet work. Eventually I realized that it was time to leave grad school and do Net stuff full-time. Now I'm self-employed and happy!
Here in WA state, a cool program called 'Running Start' allows those of us who are bored of High School to skip the last two years and replace it with community college. I did that, and recommend it highly.
A few days after High School graduation, I started a job at a government-run institution doing Macintosh computer support, and was soon making around 30k a year in an area with a fairly low cost of living.
However, despite the occasional foray into something more interesting, this gets boring after a while and it seems that advancement here is not very likely. Help desk techs here are quite underpaid, and even talented troubleshooters are considered fodder (burn-out is a given - they just replace us every 18 or so months).
I've been working on my Associate's degree, and am about ready to finish it up. It's not a BS or Masters degree, but it's the first step in showing that I have initiative outside of work. I've been teaching myself Perl, MySQL, DHTML, C++, etc. and have a great degree of familiarity with MacOS, BeOS, Linux, Windows, etc.
My point is, the degree certainly doesn't hurt. Where I work, degrees are required to get anywhere. Although I don't plan on being here forever, I understand that many other places are the same. If anything, get *somewhere* before dropping out. Having been involved in the hiring process on a few occasions, I understand that 'putting college on hold' looks much better than never starting.
But as a counterpoint, I'll exhibit the following webpage for a very talented Mac coder who has done quite well without a traditional educational background:
http://www.nwlink.com/~colen/
(you might want to click on his 'resume' link for the details, although Colen is an interesting kind of guy as is)
- Darchmare
- Axis Mutatis, http://www.axismutatis.net
- Jeff
I dropped out of college, and was unemployed for ages before I was finally able to convert my Linux programming skills into a job as a web developer. I was able to learn all the programming languages I needed just by reading manuals and example code, and then playing around. However I have not been taught much about existing comp.sci. theory, so I have probably "reinvented the wheel" many times. (and it has usually ended up triangular :-)
If you care about programming, and have the knack for it, you will do just fine without college. Some of us download every new language and write a "hello world", pick up projects on our own to hone skills we didn't have previously, make ourselves learn about sorts, trees, graphs, and how to write a compiler. We do it because we like it, and with that sort of drive, you will make a place for yourself any place you would like to be.
I don't think I am doing too badly for myself, and I am not an HTML drone.
Some people need college. There is a lot of research that is happening that even most hardcore hackers won't have the resources to do on their own. If you just want to be a good coder, know a lot of stuff, and make good money, consider skipping college.
Some of you won't believe this...but there is more to life than your linux box. Most Universities require you to take classes in English, History, Philosophy, Speach, Languages etc... in order to graduate. This is called general education and in my opinion makes for a more informed, aware individual. You probably don't need a CS degree to be a good programmer, but you will probably be a better overall person (employee) with some sort of college degree.
I'm no super coder, but I am a Mechanical Engineer with a Master's degree who does a little programming for fun now and then.
In my experience, college opens doors and creates opportunities. There are many fields you wouldn't even know about unless you had went to college. Anybody can drop out of school to do html, cgi scripting, or database UI development. There is a need for these things, but you may get stuck doing them with little opportunity for advancement.
I don't think Joe Hacker is going to be able to come out of high school and create an industrial strength finite element analysis program and be able to keep it up to the state of the art. To do FEA well you really need to have an engineering degree to understand the engineering and advanced mathmatics that you are using to try and simulate the real world behavior of some material under various loading conditions. This is just one example of a type of program that requires a college education (unless you are a genius and there are not many of those).
Not all types of programming are easily picked up on your own. Not everyone can learn well on their own without the basics being presented formally.
Undergraduate studies will not be the most up to date with technology, and they are not intended to be. Undergraduate education teaches well established and stable techniques and concepts. It also intends to provide a foundation from which you can learn the latest tools and technology. Technology is moving especially fast in the computer industry, so undergraduate education will seem even further behind until the industry stabilizes.
Graduate school is the place to learn the latest and greatest; getting a Master's degree will do a good job here. A PhD is intended to go beyond the current knowlege and technology of the industry to create new things. A PhD also focuses on skills needed to explore into the unknown and verify your results. Graduate school is where you get to play with the latest toys and learn how to do research and present it in an understandable way to your peers.
I'm sure many students considering mechanical engineering in the Industrial Revolution could have had the same feelings as computer hackers of today. The technology is so new and the need is so great, that you can easily get into the market and find work and advance with technology on your own. However, there is no way a high school student could enter the mechanical engineering world today and be able to work on the latest and greatest technology and analysis techniques on his own and be able to keep up without a formal education. The field has stabilized well enough that the barriers for entry require a college education.
Potential surgeons during the Civil War working on the battle fields could have had the same attitudes as the hackers of today. The technology had not advanced far enough to prevent someone from learning all the necessary techniques from peers or on his own. With the state of the art in medicine today, would you want a self taught "learning by experience" surgeon working on you?
Someday the computer industry will stabilize just like the mechanical engineering industry, aerospace industry, or medical profession did after awhile. When it does, it will be much more apparent how a college education is an advantage then.
As software systems become larger and more complex, it will be much harder to keep up with the latest technology without a college degree. A college degree gives you a head start and teaches well thought out techniques without having to learn it by trial-and-error/experience.
I consider my mechanical engineering education to be worth every penny, and I think it can apply well to computer technology.
Grad school was MUCH more fun and interesting than undergrad classes. I also got a research assistantship which paid for my tuition and enough money to live on. I also participated in the co-op program where I got a year of experience in industry before graduating with my B.S. degree. My employer was going to credit me with 3 years of experience (1 year co-op + 2 years grad school) when raises came around so the time was not wasted in my case.
The decision to go to college or not is not trivial. Be sure you think it through and talk to those with lots of experience in the industry you are interested in to get advice.
Your password has expired, please login to change it.
I'm still an undergrad, but I'd argue that college so far has been a good experience for me. Classes have given me some experience working on big projects (e.g. writing a compiler); we get to work in teams, learn about testing, etc. with all the pressures of a Real-World (TM) big project but without the threat of, say, losing your job if you fail. In the Real World (TM) they don't make you do things like read the original papers about Unix or Ethernet. Punting college means you'll probably have more real-world experience, but you won't necessarily be clueful about the major successes and failures about the past 20 years.
Since there has been so much publicity that Comp Sci majors make shit loda dough after they get a job, lot of hot women (you know, the cheerleaders from your highschool etc) are joining CS. There are two in my class of 20. But if you're good, you know who sits with them all night helping them finish the project...
(Please don't take this seriously, for the sake of your sanity!)
I dropped out of college to start working. In looking back, I'm glad I had the college experience that I did (friends, drinking, what-have-you). But if you only look at it financially, it wasn't worth it.
So I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I quit.
Jordan
And I have one too! Lots of people probably will think it stinks. I spent two years at a Big Ten school before dropping out and becoming a "working geek". Since then, my experience has brought me much more than my so-called education. While in college, I was employed by the IS department and worked as a graphic artist/network administrator (really wierd position) for the campus cable station. These two experiences alone, not the fact that I took a handful of worthless CS and telecom courses, landed me my first job in the "real world". On my resume, education is listed last. I think that if you are fortunate, as I have been, to land some good working experience, then college may not be the way. But if you aren't as lucky, college is definitely an avenue to break into the world.
out.
the amazing bc
just another guy doing IT
webnaut, music junkie, holes-in-head
I may be biased, but it is my experience that people without college degree tend to write bad code.
This is the Microsoft way: up until at least Win3, what came out of M$ was badly hacked stuff. All the things we still endure, like BSoD, have their roots in bad design. And designing software is what you are supposed to learn in college. Programming is still important, and you can learn that without college, but coming up with a decent design is what distinguishes people with degree.
One limitation: I was educated at a European university. American colleges may be different.
JoeF
I've spent three years so far at UWO, learning what is bascially CS theory.
The article summary talks about colleges "keeping pace" with technology, but how much is that really necessary? OO hasn't undergone major changes since it appeared... basic OS, networking, and database theory are all still the same.
A focus on techniques instead of tools is important to me; I can learn a tool in hours by digesting a manual, but techniques I learn best from working with experienced programmers and designers.
The choice of whether or not to go to college is almost purely socio-economic. All that is required to educate oneself is a desire to learn and access to knowledge. University can provide that access. So can a library card and a web browser. But college cannot give you the desire to learn and think. Without that, college is just four years of beer and parties.
So the college decision has little to do with whether you want to learn, but more:
1. What kind of job do you want? Some jobs require college (like teaching!)
2. What kind of social groups do you want to be in? Some snobby groups won't take you if you aren't Dr. you. Others will look at you cross-eyed if you have parchment.
3. Money. Who's paying? If you are, can you afford it? Could you make more working in the long run?
For me, nothing was more frustrating than being forced into classes where the teacher knew less than I did, and grades were not based on intelligence or knowledge but attendance and sycophancy, and I have no desire to work for a corporation that embraces such policies. Keeping to contracts and independant work will never make me rich, but I'm far happier doing what I want.
And BTW, 20 years into your life is far too late to "learn how to think". If you haven't been thinking critically since you learned to speak, your education is already a decade behind. Still, better late than never.
-Vince
Linux help for beginners to advanced users: Control-Escape.com
My, aren't we cynical.
Clever people can get jobs through the back door. There is an art to landing a job - going through the "proper channels" is for the mindless robots who went to college just because mommy and daddy told them to.
Intelligence, networking skills, experience, and persistence are all you need, although luck certainly helps. God help you if you think perusing job ads is the best way to find the spots. By the time the ad is placed the employer probably already knows who he wants to hire. Our industry is an exception - but demand outstrips the supply by so much that it's *real* simple to get a tech job w/o a degree if you're smart and don't act like a reject in the interview. C'mon, man - most of the people I know who work in tech are college dropouts. How exactly did they get hired if that piece of paper is so precious? They might not be working at Microsoft, but guess what? They don't want to work for Microsoft. Plenty of folks are happy working at smaller companies that just want skilled people any way they can get them.
There are plenty of good, well paying companies out there that aren't public, and don't have shareholders to answer to. Pretty amazing, huh? My company is one of them.
L. Ron
P.S. Anyone who goes to college to get the bucks and not to learn ain't someone to admire IMHO. Geniuses who make a point by using profanity with the caps lock depressed aren't too cool either. But I guess your point was that you don't need to be sophisticated as long as you have the piece of paper, right?
I'm officially a junior-and-a-half, after finishing my classes last Spring ('98). I started an (unofficial; went banging on doors until I got one) internship in the summer of '97, started getting paid in the fall, and worked there until fall of '98.
I moved from the internship which was really a part time job with a large IT department to a full-time sysadmin job at a medium-sized ISP. I kept telling myself that I'd finish school part-time, but now I'm starting to wonder if it's worth jumping through the hoops.
I now have a fair amount of real-world experience for someone of my age, which gives me a big leg-up on fresh-faced grads with little or no real experience. The only downside I can think of is that there are some employers who rely on the HR department to weed out non-grads. Is it worth spending more money and time that I could use on something else just so that I make it through those filters? Dunno. Depends on where I want to work, I suppose.
I did most of my gen-ed stuff, so I got all of the humanities and other crap that people say makes college worthwhile. I got about half of the CS requirements, so I have lots of basic theory and programming skills, and some advanced theory like DB admin and network engineering. One calc course, so my head was slightly stretched around new concepts.
The way I see it, all that's left is the dead-end knowledge. I'd actually have to take a COBOL course. Yech. a. The COBOL prof at my school hates CS majors (she's a BIS bigot) b. COBOL will be useful for only as long as there's outdated code to be fixed or migrated to a new system. Who wants to do that?
I may take some more classes that interest me, like philosophy or film classes. I'm leaning more and more toward just bagging the rest, though. On one hand, it's a waste of 2.5 years of credits, on the other, it's a gain of 1.5 years of doing something other than writing silly programs in dead computer languages.
Since I'm paying for my education, my parents don't really have any input other than that it's nice to finish what one's started. They have a point. Ack.
Anybody else agonized over a similar decision?
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
I will agree that the pressures are different (a lower grade vs. looking for another job), but your assumption about not learning history is incorrect. Just because something is not required reading for a class assignment doesn't mean that someone who is on top of things won't read it on his own.
Perhaps your CS classes are/were different than mine, and bully for you if they are more well-rounded. Mine were pretty dry theory, so almost all of the interesting bits and history I learned on my own.
I don't think most people here would agree that there are no benefits to attending university. I do think that there is a growing number of people who are challenging the notion that to be successful in the technology field, one has to get a degree from some school.
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
So not having been to college equates to making crackers into heroes, and both equate to being a fool?
Your elitism is showing. Feeling insecure because you're wasting time in college?
--
Infuriate left and right
Is this guy kidding? Comparing someone who skipped college and is *completely* self-taught to someone with a computer science degree and background in the theory of computer science is like comparing a car mechanic to the engineer who designed the car.
Sure, this guy may be able to program ActiveX and whatever new buzzword bullshit web "programming" technology there is... But could he even come close to performing some kind of *real* computer science task? I seriously doubt it.
My grandma could learn HTML... He may be able to make a fine living off of making web pages... But it *certainly* isn't people like waldo who are going to lead the information revolution into the 21st century....
-Josh
I still remember... not long ago... when I'm still a university. 50% of time I wonder WHY the hell I'm there, 25% of the time look for something that could excite my life (Linux?!), and only 25% do some studies. To me, ya' university is quite a waste of time.
B5 Ghost
I (the subject of the article) am not going to skip college entirely. I'm simply planning on delaying it until I've worked to my satisfaction in the computer world.
I still don't know SQL, and there's plenty more that I can learn in perl. My Java is lacking. But at least my C and assembly are up to par. But until I find a college that I actually teach me Lingo or Python, I'll be sticking it out on my own.
It's been interesting to read complete strangers draw conclusions about me based on a tiny little interview in a small column on a website of a magazine. It's funny, what people try to figure out. :)
So, for the record:
And, now that 4 days has passed since the article appeared, everybody can forget me now, if you haven't already.
Best,
Waldo
I've been changing the font on a TI99-4A at 11.
I had soldered a parallel cable onto the 6501 of
my C64 floppy drive within the first week of
getting it. I've done a 250.000 dollar military
project at 17, and I didn't have a girlfriend
until I was 21. Does that count as geek?
However, I've started a BA in CS in 1992,
graduated in '95 and am close to completing
my PhD in distributed OO databases. I believe
I have both perspectives.
Uni taught me things that I wouldn't have
considered before:
- skyscrapers (built by engineers) typically don't
fall down. Can we say that about software?
- what is the difference between patent/copyright?
- would I be able to sleep after building a
medical system and not doing proper testing?
(Ethics)
- why are Mac-Fans so fanatical over their toys?
- can you write programs without using variables
(functional programming)
- what does a secretary think how the windows
desktop works?
- can you name 10 different ways to sort data and
what the tradeoffs are?
- programming using randomness
- why are neural networks NOT like the brain?
- what are the similarities and differences of the
phone and an ethernet? (packet/vc, in-band/
out-of-band signalling, flow control, statistical
multiplexing, etc.)
- what is the fundamental difference between the
mode of communication in phone and fax?
- do you understand the difference between
identity and equality?
- how could one parse natural language?
- how does human vision work and what can we learn
from it?
- programming by specifying the problem (prolog)
Now besides those clear questions, I learned a number of invaluable skills:
- traversing a hierarchy of levels of abstraction
- understanding tradeoffs
- understanding what my goal is or should be
- planning time
- why memorisation is as important as
understanding
- talking to non-technical people
- that technology and politics are intermingled
I hope that at least people out there agree with me.
so long,
os10000
In the United States that I am from (which is Southern California) there is a difference between college and university but it is generally ignored. Colleges are either small(er) specialized schools (ie. Bob's College of Music) or parts of an university (ie. College of Science at UCSD) while universities offer many subjects and fields.
The big however is that people are lazy and it is easier to say "I am in college," "What college do you go to," etc.. than university, hence the apparent similarity.
That's why I'm trying to get OSS like The GIMP into the art school I'm studying Interaction Design at!
But it's not easy getting designers to switch platform. So tips and suggestions are welcome!
The learning opportunities are plentiful at a university. Plus, attending school allows one to make friends and contacts- very useful.
Most importantly, I doubt many high caliber tech companies would consider hiring somebody with no college education.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Zathras have over 100 credit hours towards a degree in Software Engineering (SWE). Had to drop out after 4 semesters in a one and ahalf year time span. Zathras, knew going into college, didn't have enough money to finish. Zathras make plan to take all elective requirements (programming, compiler design, operating system design, etc.) first. Plan to return over the years to finsh off core requirments (english, history, etc.).
Zathras been working over 16 years as a SWE. Never finished degree. Zathras make 6 digits now. Looking to retire soon. Zathras has worked double hard to educate himself and work through the years instead of getting all the education done up front. Education is part of life. It continues as one works.
Zathras work with too many degree'd/geeks who think they know all. Only to show them how much they have yet to learn. But Zathras will never discourage one from going or completing college. Must work harder if you do not.
Zathras only say, "Never stop educating yourself. With or without a degree."
--- "Zathras talks to dirt, sometimes talks to ceiling and walls, but dirt is closer."
I've noticed a general pattern in the Comments made so far. Of the people who advocate college, and have graduated, their comments tend to be:
organized, well thought-out, persuasive, and spelled correctly with good grammar.
Of the people who have skipped college (whether they advocate it or not), their comments are more:
disorganized, full of spelling and grammar errors, and confusing.
There are a handful of exception, but these facts in themselves make a strong statement for college. In a job, you must be able to work with, and communicate with, many other people. Much of this communication is, by necessity, written. If you have a good idea and you want your boss (or venture capitalists) to fund it, you need to write it down and be persuasive. If you design a new system, you need to describe the design and document it so that others can use it, or else they _won't_ use it. If you write code, you need to comment it in a succinct yet understandable way.
You don't need to get a writing degree to do all these things. Any CS degree worth the paper it's written on will have required you to work (and communicate) in groups, write designs, construct organized and understandable mathematical proofs, and mark up code with good comments.
Writing clearly (or in general, communicating) about ideas forces you to clarify and refine those ideas, and clear ideas are enhanced by good writing. All of the above-named tasks build thinking and writing skills, as well as the connections between them. You'll have a hard time replicating those experiences working as a Webmonkey, and your boss (or VCs) probably won't allow you to play catch-up on the four years of experiences you've missed.
If you really want to do something meaningful in your career, go to college.
If you go to a university, and study a *scientific* degree, you are learning something that you *probably* won't learn elsewhere.
If you go to a university, and study a *technical* degree, then I agree, you might be more successfull by starting work as early as possible and learning on the job.
Note here, that I'm not really slamming a technical degree here, I'm just saying that work experience is a pretty decent option in that case. In science, though, it's not quite as valid.
The rationale for education doesn't always have to be 'to get a better job', 'to make more money' or, 'to feel superior'...
In my view, university is the best place to *learn*, not neccessarily to 'develop technical skills'.
there's my $0.02
Theory
I am not a programmer.
I am not a coder.
I am not a sysadmin or a linux geek.
Actually, I am all of those things, but the are side-effects of getting a degree in computer science. (and I mean a real 4 year degree from a real university, not some 2 year piece of crap from Devry).
I am a software engineer, and there's a lot more to that than knowing how to code a web page. I learned theory and methodology that will serve me well for the rest of my life. I know how to write a raytracer, do proofs on automata, and design systems way to complex for a single programmer to complete. No matter how the programming languages change over the years, I'm still going to need that knowlege. I wrote the first raytracer in Java (actually the second, but that's another story). Someone who had just read up on Doom code in their BlackMajik Of 3D Coding book wouldn't be able to do that. What I got out of college wasn't skills. It was meta-knowledge. That I also got a whole lot of applicable skills at the same time is simple a nice side benefit. Because of my degree I'll never be just a coder. I'm a software developer; designing, implementing, and dictating to programmers below me. (sure hope no one from work reads this.
The Process
The act of completing a degree, particularly a computer science degree from a good university, is a learning experience in it self. When it comes down to a deadline at work and we have to ship something by the end of the week, I know that people who completed a degree have experience working under pressure. Ship time at a startup company is very similar to the end of quarter pressure of Dead Week and Finals. Someone who can take that stress each quarter for four years (sometimes 5 or 6
The People
I met my best friends in college. Some of them will be with me for the rest of my life. I plan to start companies with a few of them in the future, long after my years at Tech are but a distant memory. When you start a company you need people who have proven themselves under the same circumstances that you have. It's a rough world out there and you need people you can trust.
BTW. To whoever it was that said that CS majors are a dime a dozen, you're wrong. There are something on the order of 180,000 jobs openings for IT people and only 25,000 IT people graduating each year. And only a portion of those 25k are actual CS majors. Real CS majors are hot items and the pay reflects it (usually 10k more to start, but sometimes a lot more). Plus there are some jobs that require a degree even better than a CS bachelors. I'd like to work at Be (www.be.com, one of
To make a long story short (too late), college is a lot more than just learning to program. It's about becoming a college graduate and (depending on your degree) an engineer.
- joshy "a helluva engineer"
Prop me up beside the jukebox if I die.
Having done my undergrad work while working a coding job (okay, it was for the government, but it was still coding), I know that experience can teach you a lot. But here's the difference:
Finding God in a Dog
There's a theory that what a lot of college students consider "theory" is actually just what they can't think of applying right now. :)
Finding God in a Dog
I am a strong proponent of the liberal education followed by the technical specialization model. College is overpriced; there should be strong public support for free college education (i.e., a liberal bachelors). Then, one can chose a profession and specialize to one's heart's content. Alternatively, one can pursue a technical education/experience program instead of a liberal education. I was a comparative literature and philosophy major as an undergrad and loved it; I wrote a lot of poetry too. I loved those years. In law school, in my solitude filled hours researching law on the internet, I discovered linux and now I play with debian all day (and study in my spare time). I have a long way to go before I can claim to be a geek. One thing liberal education teaches you is to learn a lot of information fast. One can do it without college. But the content one absorbs in college makes one think. That is a good thing. Some people prefer work filled hours; such people can choose our protaganist's
path.
Yet, it is indeed a crime that one must pay such exorbatant amounts for an education that has mainly personal value v. any real monetary value. Theoretical education is a social value, technical education is an economic value. The fact that liberal education does not translate into dollar returns for the investee does not mean there are not net gains for the society. Society is the more appropriate investee for theoretical education, and the student is the more appropriate investee for technical education.
College (or University as its known to us Aussies) is damned important. You can sit around and code to your heart's content, but by doing a variety of problems in different disciplines you can develop creative problem solving skills which are invaluble. To me the most important skill one can have is the ability to solve problems they've never seen before.
:)
Admittedly, the cost is far higher in the US than it is in Australia for tertiary education, but even if all you get out of it is a piece of paper, that piece of paper could be the difference between you and another candidate for the job you're applying for.
Degree holders also stand out from the pack since the exhibited the dedication and commitement to do so. Something employers will consider when they want you on a 2-3 year project.
On another note, most IT professionals will find it hard to be taken seriously when they still have achne. There are worse places to be whilst maturing.
StyxLord BE(Hon), BSc, MIEEE
If you want to go, fine, go. I have missed out on jobs because the managers wanted that CS degree. Now, my resume speaks pretty well, but I hear all the time "why didn't you go to college?". The best thing, I think, is to wait a while then get one of those "adult BS degrees" and treat it like just another item on your resume. Its all what you want out of it, what you need.
ZOMG I WOULD LOVE TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR FEELINGS ON MACINTOSH VERSUS WINDOWS, VI VERSUS EMACS, AND HOW YOU'RE NOT A DORK
This seems to be a pretty passionate subject. I guess I'll throw in my take as well.
The one thing that bothers me about college is the reason that many people go. Too many people go to college because they are expected to, and have no idea what else to do anyway. They're told that they can't get a good job without it. There's this huge push for kids to go to college, instead of them thinking about what is right for them to do. They don't start thinking about where they should be headed in life while they are younger. They just assume to goal is to get into college, and put off any other "life-planning" until they get there. That's dangerous, and I've seen the result of it. Many graduates have a hard time finding a job anyway, or realize that maybe they picked the wrong major. And go back again and again, spending even more money.
Before you flame me, realize that I am by no means knocking higher education. I think its one of the most valuable things a person can have. But there are some misconceptions.
1. You can't get a good job without a college degree.
2. If you have one, you'll get a good job.
3. College is the only place to get higher education.
4. Only accept college graduates while hiring, because they're the only ones who know how to learn.
The point of all of this? Don't go to college because someone says you should. Go because its what you want for yourself. Don't go so you can get a good job. (It by itself won't get you one.) Go for learning. That's what it's for. Don't go until you're fully prepared, ready, have some goals, and know what you expect to get out of it.
College can be a very valuable thing, as stated by many people in previous posts. You can't argue with any of them. I agree that it's not there to teach you the latest&greatest. It's to teach concepts and theory and "why", instead of just how. It's ideas, not just "type this and it does that." I just urge you to go for the right reasons, and you'll be sure to get more out of it.
As for me, yes I plan to go someday. 4 years in the US Marine Corps got me started in this business, and the rest has been self taught. I'm glad I waited. My experience has kept me employed, and I don't think going to college first would have helped me much. I think I would get much more out of it now.
I'm going on way too long... that pretty much it. Later.
This guy has it sooo wrong.
This kid doesn't have a clue what an education means. While I agree that most colleges can't keep up with the technical aspects, that is NOT true for all colleges. Most computer science programs are easy, but let me say that there are some that are above the others.
Second of all, this kid knows HTML. HTML, pardon my french, is NOT programming (although some would like it to be). It's a language, but it does not require any major leaps in programming. Even Java for the most part is NOT programming (although it can certainly be), because most people do not use it as a true programming language. This 'geek' probably does not even understand what a reentrant linked list is or even an AVL tree (all subjects contained in the first year at U.C. Irvine - my university).
I'll admit I have a bias being in college right now. But, that little piece of paper is worth SOOO much. I can not tell you all the people I've worked with who are in computers without a degree who have told me that the stupidest thing they did was NOT to pursue college. Without a degree (any type), they hit a glass ceiling at most places. With a degree, you will not see as many glass ceilings.
Now, the only rational way you could succeed without a degree (or being lucky) is to start your own business (i.e. consulting, web design, etc.). However, most businesses are flops. But, if you can make it, godspeed. You saved yourself your tuition. (BTW, for most successful 'geeks' $120k is a pittance and that is an absurdly HIGH figure - Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, MIT figures...)
Lastly, who said you had to study computer science at college? Study Shakespeare. College is a great place to broaden your horizons.
Later,
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
Did you get in here and post without reading any of the pro-college arguements? I have bypassed college for numerous reasons and feel that it has been one of my biggest mistakes up to now. You learn so much in school: how to meet a deadline in a structured environment, how to interrelate with peers, how to write, speak, analyze, etc. There is something to be said in having a bunch of bright people teach you general knowledge skills.
This often cannot be replaced in the workplace. I once had an attitude like yours. It makes me sad to see people so arrogant that they think the system is out to get them by "making" them get degrees in order to grab that killer job. College genuinely helps you become a more complete, rational and teachable product. That's what it's all about: producing for your company. If you think it's anything else you are the niave one my friend.
ET
Eric Taylor
College really can't teach you much about the newest Technologies or Methodologies, if you are a Computer Science major. It will teach you some fundamentals like Algorithms, Data Structures, theories on Operating Systems, Compilers, some languages like C, Java, C++, Databases, and Computer and Network Architecture. Or at least that is what I learned in College. :-) Makes me wonder what kind of CS majors we are graduating nowadays.
Or maybe not. A College senior who was a potential intern for the company I work for, did not know the basics of a Linked List. He knew Java and Linux though
But hopefully thats an exception.
Well I think the best thing you can get out of college, is that it teaches you how to learn, and it enhances your teamwork skills. And someday all those other courses will come in handy, especially the mathematics courses if you really are into Computers.
Man
The only reason I considered college in the first place was credibility for possible employers. Most HR departments look for either college or job experience in candidates for their I/T departments, even in entry level positions. I took the other road, and joined the US Army Signal Corps for four years, which leveraged me into a comfy desktop support job at a major corporation making $36/hr.
I'm not saying this is the easy way out, I spent a lot of those four years developing my personal skills in the field, and not sitting on my backside waiting for the Army to train me. You have to go out and get your education, but at least you have someone willing to vouch that you have experience in your field.
College here is too tough?
Try 5.5 years in Russia and 5 more in
Ph.D. here..
;((
But it did not cost me a penny.
;)
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Well, coding is like sports. As in there isn't much TOO know, but you just have to know how to do it.
Like, you can teach someone to catch a football, that's not hard. But you can't teach them to be a Jerry Rice. Same thing goes with coding. You can teach someone C, but that doesn't mean that they can go out there and code the next killer app either. What you REALLY need to know now, a college just can't teach you.
And as more and more people are learning, college isn't nessecary. It's like the fact that college athletes are learning that they don't need their full 4 years to go to the pros. This is just an idea that is boiling over to other areas like computing now.
That, and it also used to be that if you had a degree in computer science it ment something. Now they are a dime a dozen and employers are looking for people that actually know what they are doing unstead of a piece of paper saying they do. And for the most part, these are people without degrees.
from person to person. I went to college for two years. Failed math 101 three times, and my gpa is somewhere below .5... More to do with me being so anti-social rather than smarts. (I'm not making myself out to be a closet-genius here, I'm not very bright.)
I druther sit home and study programming books.
Going to college, and a good college at that, can give you skills that allow you to think, communicate, write. It gives you the ability to be effective.
Sure, you may be a 20-year old who can code away, drink coke all night, and make your comfortable salary. But you know that the only reason that you get paid what you do is because the person who hired you doesn't know any better about technology, and chances are that you were able to BS your way through the interview. I have known people who did this, and were lousy at the output of their work.
I have seen the difference between people with an education and those without one, and they are great. If you can get by in life without one, you are lucky, but later on you will be easily replaced by younger losers and will not be able to use any other skills that you might have gotten from a college education.
Its alive
College is a decision that should be made on a per-person basis. You can't say "Person X has lots of computer skills, so he/she doesn't need college" because college teaches more than just skillset. It teaches things like organization and responsibility, which are both needed in the professional world, and usually niether are found in an 18-year-old HS grad.
I agree that 90% of the academic information taught in school is not applicable to a career (especially regarding, but not limited to hi-tech) but the other "soft skills" are worth the price of tuition.
Of course if you already have these soft skills, hit the road, Jack.
A formal education, such as that provided by college, is absolutely essencial.
It is the difference between having a handgun, and being a trained sniper. It's the difference between flailing fists and a black belt.
Some people have a talent, a pure inherent ability with all things geeky. Some people simply already have "the edge". A college education focuses and sharpens those talents. It channels them, and imparts onto them a disciplined approach.
It makes the difference between a Mitnik and a Ritchie, a Gates and a Torvalds. It grants the wisdom to tell "do now" from "do right". It teaches patience, commitment and sacrifice. It requires that we set aside instant gratification for the sake of a long term goal.
It can not replace talent, and it is not a substitute for serendipitous learning a'la hacker. It does, however, provide a scaffod upon which the talented can climb higher and reach farther then a quick-study with an O'Reilly under his arm.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
College was a waste of 3yrs for me. The best thing I took away from UIUC was my present girlfriend. Bah-humbug to CS degrees. When I interview people, education is the last thing I look at.
Let's do a poll to see how many people this a degree is necessary to succeed in the tech sector!
I vote 'No'.
i find it fairly interesting how we've got those, like myself, that are in the "have nots", defending our decisions, while those in the "haves" are, generalizing, criticising it.
i personally feel that everyone should at least *TRY* their hand at the higher-learning IFF they are of persistent enough character to make it a worthwhile investment of their energy. I, personally, should never have wasted the money.. I was far too immature when college started to get anything of worth out of it. My time and money were much better spent (after i bailed) purchasing college textbooks and reading...
i think it's important to note that every human mind learns in an ENTIRELY different way. Some need personal attention from teachers, while others need nothing but time and maturity, etc.
for some, college is a necessary step in their plans for what they see as success...
for others, college is the embodiment of all that is what they are (say professional students)...
for others, college is a step that can likely be avoided, as they've matured beyond this point through other means...
for yet others, college simply CAN NOT BE AFFORDED for one reason or another.
i can without question say that i was FAR too immature when i entered college to truly understand or appreciate 95% of what was learned in the first 3 years... (not counting the computer science courses, which were mostly review)
it's amazing how now, years later, all of those concepts when reviewed (as i read my old textbooks, etc) make PERFECT sense...
that type of subconscious learning is that which, in my opinion, is probably responsible for many of the intellectual breakthroughs of the last 5 centuries...
the human mind can crunch away beautifully in the background....
anway, a long winded synonym for:
try it. if it's obvious that it's not for you, move on, but DO NOT TAKE THAT DECISION LIGHTLY...
cheers!
Peter
I'm 18 and I'm CIO of an HMO. I got this job by perseverance, and basically started as a tech, but I outlived the rest of the IT staff, and have not screwed up as of 2pm January 11. I'm not happy though, and isn't that what counts. Cliche? too bad
One thing the article never talks about is the isolation of not attending college. When the youngest person you see before 6pm is in their late twenties and they think you are a punk kid making too much money. When you go out with all of your friends and no longer identify with them. When money just is not enough.
I'm going to start college spring of 2000, but I realize I will never really fit in now that I've took this time off. Living in a fast-paced yuppie real world will inevitably jade an 18-year-old kid.
It's only going to take me three years to get through college, but the first year will be spent acclimatizing myself to the environment. I'm not sure why I'm writing about this, but if you are thinking about taking a year off there are a few things to definitely consider:
You will not fall into a job that pays enough to give you happiness, and probably to really support yourself and live better than if you were going to college for the first year.
If, like me, everyone else you know is going to college, you will no longer truely relate to them like you are used to. If you're friends are not going to college, then you probably can not talk to them on the same level about their careers either.
Perhaps my experience is unique: the general feeling of no longer being a kid, and no longer relating to your friends, but all the money I may earn will probably not make these years off school worth while.
Dinyar
espace@io.com
College is not a waste of time, especially for academia-loving realworld-hating geeks like me. Maybe it's corny, but I think college is an experience where a young student meets people who challenge their ideas about the world, where a kid out of high school who doesn't know much gets a chance to grow up and learn at the same time -- DON'T SKIP IT, even if it's only 2 years at a community college. The impatient part of me can't wait to get my BSEE at Rutgers, but mostly I want to savor my college time and I'm going to make sure my future kids go to college (and dorm and go to parties etc etc).
Go for it, and have fun!
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
Granted, I'm biased as I'm on the verge of entering a university, but personally I like to be able to know as much about as much as possible. I taught myself an awful lot when I was younger (about computers, physics, ...) but there were tremendous gaps in what I knew. College gives the opportunity to fill in the blanks. (The social life argument holds no water for me. "The University of Chicago: where fun comes to die.")
/. readers; I may love computers but I'm planning to be a physicist, and one sort of needs a Ph.D. for that.
Then again, I probably have a different perspective than most
Regardless of whether you think college is worthwhile, many employers won't give your resume a second look without a BS. If you have 2+ years of truly relevant experience, it's a different story. But it's hard to break into the industry without a bachelor's.
Papa
Ok, well I have my own little bit to post, so here it goes. I am 19 and make $40k+ a year, Unix/NT Sysadmin at a major corp. I did not go to college, but I wish I had. I missed out on some great parties, dorm living, etc. But, i have my own car, pay my own bills, go on vacations, etc. (none of my college friends can afford to order pizza, much less a airplane ticket) Three of my very good friends also skipped college and started working, they are pulling $30k+ @19. Not bad if you ask me. Two of them do helpdesk, but one is a Cold Fusion dev. doing intranet applications. I've taken a few classes at the local community college, but working 50+ hours a week & going to school did not work for me. All in all, I think we are doing fine now, but eventually I will go to school, who wants to be a techie all their life? I know that what I really want to do is project management.
I have to say that I disagree with what this guy has said, he is wrong about the technology @ schools. I would love to have gone to MIT and played in a devl. lab all day, but I chose instead to start my career. Oh well, we'll see how it all goes!
Another option everyone seems to have skipped is signing up for some type of military service, getting 1.5-2.0 years of schooling while in the service, and then finishing up college at a respected school when you get out of the service, with everything paid for. I for example am joining the United States Marine Corps, with an MOS (job) in the computer programming/network systems field(s). I will get about 1.5 years of CS schooling while in the service, at a 'respectful' school, and also serve my country. I really don't have to worry about dying (god forbid), since they are spending so much to teach me, I will be one of the last to be sent of if we had some type of major war/conflict. After I have put in my four years of service, I will go to a respected college of my choice to finish up the rest of my CS degree, with it all paid for. Not a bad deal to me IMHO.
Force Recon Half-Life TC: Check it out
mcox.com - Useful Information re: IT, Running, Fitness, Finance, or Ann Arbor!
A good Slashdot poll, how many real FSF contributers have degrees? How many kernel patches have come fro non-schooled hackers vs. educated hackers...
Colud be interesting!!!
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
Well, technically I never went to college, but I learned a hell of a lot at various universities. Mainly I used to sneak into the Unix labs and IRC around on the vt100s around when I was 14, because talking to people all over the world facinated me. Of course, I had to learn how to use the VTs, and I had to learn how to use Unix, and I had to learn how to hack (not crack!) it, and work with it, and in it, and around it.
I have this friend with some fancy degree in Computer Science. He took one course which actually had anything to do with computers. The rest were math classes. He's not a geek. He spent 4 years studying CS and he'd be lost if you took the Silicon Coated Rubber Ball out of his mouse.
People have always told me that not having a degree will impact my career, but, to be honest, I don't want to work for a place that cares more about what degree I have than what experience I've got. That kind of place would probably make me cut my hair and frown upon Pink Floyd T-Shirts.
I kind of miss not going through the whole 'college experience', but I don't drink so I don't really know how much of an effect it'd have had on me (:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
If nothing else, university gave me several years of access to medium-to-high-end UNIX systems which I could play on and learn stuff. While few of my classes actually gave me the expertise I use at work, the stuff I did between my classes helped a lot!
My SO had to drop out without getting her Master's degree, and has done fine (14 years in the industry), but then she went right into doing IT work *for* a university, which helped a lot.
-- Meet the Residents -- http://www.residents.com/
You see, that's where you continue to
miss the point of all of these comments;
college *isn't* about learning the
newest computer language that's
hot shit.
Its about learning the ideas behind
the languages, about learning general
problem solving techniques, the
scientific method, etc.
If you're passing up learning about
order-of-growth analysis or
system design techniques just because
the school in question doesn't teach
you Python, you're not getting it.
arvind rulez
I understand the thought of not going to college because the technology curve is so high.
I disagree with this belief because many engineers I know cannot write a technical paper or any other document to save their life. When your dealing with geeks it's easy to talk because we all know most of the lingo. Other's who use the technology we create don't always know everything we do and we can confuse them even more if we don't know how to talk technically to non-technical people.
Also the belief that one cannot keep up with the technology curve at a institution is ludicrous. There are many prgramming languages out in the world today and the funny thing about them is that most use the same basic structure, but different syntax. Therefore once you learn one or two high level languages you've learned the basic concepts for most.
The other big plus of college is group/team work. I don't know many office places where you are not working within a team. Most people don't learn this before college because they are trying things on there own or with a group of other geeks, but what about working in a team with non geeks on a development project? That's a bit harder.
My college experience was worth the money and I wouldn't skip it so I could start earning by buck early. Also the things you learn when you're out of the class room is worth more that what one can learn inside it.
I like college. Maybe you will or do or did or won't or don't or didn't. There's no way for me to know. College was good for me, but, to be fair, I liked school so much I got a Ph.D. I went to a great public university when tuition was cheap, and only ended up with a few thousand dollars of college loan debt. I got a researchy/software engineering type job at the university where I went to grad school, and am in a great position where I can take off in the middle of the day to attend classes, talk with my old professors, run errands, see a movie, or just go home and sleep (as long as I get my job done, of course). College has been very, very good to me. I can't guarantee the same for you.
Apart from everything everyone else has said about 'learning about learning', learning to socialize, the monetary value of a BS degree, etc., it is important to recognize the difference between life before 18 and life with a full-time job. To summarize, and assuming you have a good job, the main difference is that before you are 18, you have more time than money. When you have a full-time job, you have more money than time. The transition can be jarring and difficult to handle. Whereas before you could spend a day playing video games or watching TV or goofing off, when you have a job you find yourself wondering about how to eat quickly and when to go shopping and oh god I haven't cleaned the bathroom in 3 months. Money can be used to solve some of these problems, but it's unlikely you'll be making enough money to pay someone to drive you to and from work or do your grocery shopping just right, or buy you the perfect pair of pants.
The great thing about college is that it is as close to the pre-18 state you will get once you've become an adult and until you retire. It thus serves two purposes. First, it allows for a transition period between the two. Second, it provides a benchmark in the time/money continuum. When you're working at your job, you can think back to your college days, and figure out whether your increased salary now is worth your loss of time. If you never go to college, you'll never know how much free time you could have (and likely, how little money you can live on). In the meantime of your college existence, you will have the time to see movies, or plays, or concerts, or to read books, climb mountains, surf, whatever. About the only thing I can safely guarantee about an 18-year old is that they can't be sure exactly what they'll want to be doing in four years time. College gives you the freedom to decide.
Conversely, it might be a good idea while in college to do some work. Preferably as a fulltime summer intern, to see what the 'real world' is like, and to make money for the rest of the year, when you'll be in starving student mode. One thing I don't really recommend if you can avoid it is to work during the school year. Do your best to get scholarships, or get money from relatives, or work during the rest of the year, so that when class is in session you can devote your energies to learning.
I couldn't agree more. I've been programming in C since I was 10, using UNIX sice 13(!) and I'm currently working as a Systems Engineer. BUT, I'm still doing a CS degree. A lot of people might ask why, when I can get a well-paid job and so on.
The reality is, university will provide you with knowledge and insight that you can't get from just learning on your own (believe me, I've been there). There is so much more to working in IT than writing HTML and C. And there is a huge difference between 'good' and 'bad' C (The fact that it works doesn't neccessarily mean it's 'good').
Still, It's your choice. If you don't go, that'll be one less major, which means demand will go up, which means all of us who finish will get paid more :-).
I went a local College for Telecommunication Technology. I dropped out after a couple of months because I thought I was too good at what I did. I regret it now 2 years later. I see where my computer skills need to be rounded out and employers in Canada almost insist that you have gone to College or University. I'm probably signing up for the course again this Sept.
As my sister always says (usually when the failing grades arrive in the mail and all hell is breaking loose)
"Don't let school get in the way of your education"
School doesn't work for some people. And god knows for us people who like alternative learning (aka ADD in medical circles) that college is a waste of money... 4 years for me and while it's been education and fun, I'm not going to be working in the field. I think the most important thing you get in college is social interaction and independence... If it was just the classroom, then let me sit at my terminal and do interactive courses... back to the regularly scheduled programing...
I went to University and got a good maths degree,
... English, Philosophy, Political ... not relevant to programming, but
and this has been very useful for computer
programming later on, as I keep finding the
skills I learned there are very helpful,
particularly when it comes to algorithm design.
(A computer program and a mathematical proof
have a lot in common, and the skills are somewhat
transferable). These are skills that I would have
been unlikely to have gained without the
mathematics. I have worked with several people
who have done very little mathematics, and I
have definitely found that I have an edge in
some areas, particularly at the design level.
I recommend that anyone who wants to be really
strong in the computer field should do some
mathematics (particularly algebra) to second
year level. It won't seem all that relevant
at the time, but my experience is that it did
in hindsight. Analysis is good too, but only if
you already have a strength in mathematics.
I also did a fair bit of CS, and didn't learn
very much new there, but helped fill some corners,
and exposed me to paradyms (sp?) such as logic
and functional programming that are valuable to
have.
My regret is that I never studied any arts
subjects
Studies
certainly would have helped contribute to a
broader education.
As a final thought, if you are considering going
to University, its the skills that you learn
that are important, not the tools. Learning tools
in this area is best done as you need them.
Roy Ward.
I'm 19, a 10th grade dropout, and I have no formal training, yet I'm a level 2 pc tech working for a fortune 100 company making as much as my 40 year old stepdad. my company is paying for my A+ and my MCSE, and after that Novell and UNIX Admin certifications. many tech recruiting companies don't care where you learned your stuff as long as you know it. they start you off as level 1 pc tech, doing helpdesk or whatever, and after you sign a contract they pay for your complete training. there are more jobs than there are techs so it's pointless to go to college, and usually pointless to go to even a tech school. maybe I just got lucky, but I posted my resume on yahoo and the very next day I had 3 companies bringing me in for contract negotiations, and to be honest I'm not all that skilled. please note however, my willingness to relocate, my professionalism, and my 4 years as an independant consultant might have something to do with this. good luck to all those deliberating...
....when the next recession hits, those who hung in there for the college degree will be glad they got theirs.
When there are more applicants than jobs, possession of a college degree is one of the first criteria used to cull the stack of resumes. There are a few exceptions to this, but the general rule is that mere possession of a college degree gives you an advantage in tough times.
Well, if you're spending more than 4 years (even that can be too long) then you are wasting your time. Get your shit done, take your damn classes, learn how to deal with life, how to reseach, etc, and then get a job. Anyone who says that college is a waste of time for geeks isn't going to last very long. Yeah, sure, I'd like to see someone learn complex algebraic algorithm functions without school.
"Where is my mind?"
Ummm, what's wrong with trying to get Kevin Mitnick a fair trial? I say lets put your ass in jail for a few years without a trial and see how you like it. Even OJ got a speedier trial. I don't think highly of Kevin Mitnick, but I think he needs to be treated fairly and like a human being.
... but how would you know unless you'd gone?
:)
The assumption here is the colleges can teach CS well. I'm sorry, I don't think they can. It's really tragic. It bothers me so much I often waste several hours thinking about it. It really is a tough problem... the central skill IMHO is not a technique or an algorithm, but just having a mindset that can efficiently solve problems. How to teach people to be better problem solvers is beyond anything I know about. Lots of logic games?
Darron
learn and grow from it. The best thing that college can do for you, if you approach it right, is to get you into the habit of thinking. Working so hard you can't think, or doing lots of work without thinking about it, is not the point (though some profs give homework like that anyway)...
The next best thing a good education gives you is the opportunity to explore other things. Really. After CS, and the math prereqs I needed to get the Combinatorics class the CS major required, I got the most credits from Philosophy and Religious Studies. For the MS, my favorite area was operating systems, but I took everything from verification to real-time and embedded systems.
Thirdly--but strongly feeding the first and perhaps the second advantages--the maturity the whole experience can give you, especially when there's a thesis at the end of a degree. It's a different kind of maturity than living on your own and having to pay for your own food and housing, but it's there nonetheless; I give more importance to a good BS than to an MS without a thesis.
Lastly, something you can't necessarily get from college but can definitely benefit from: the artistic or intuitive approach. Computer programming is definitely an art as much as a science, with many good ways to accomplish a given task and strong impact of style. A strong intuition can turn general understanding into an answer very quickly, incorporating more factors than you have the brainpower to conveniently analyze by brute logic. You still need the reasoning ability, as there's plenty of stylistically beautiful drivel in the code base, and intuition is as quick a route to a wrong answer as it is to the right answer.
None of these--especially the intuition--are things that just happen to you by the time they hand you the diploma...but college is a good place and time to pick them up.