Getting past gate keepers is one thing you get from a degree. But it is not the only thing. Anyone who went far while being self taught probably could have gone even further while getting the degree. Even people like Zuckerberg have to settle for the "dropout who got lucky" title instead of "boy genius".
The main problem with most (not all) self taught people is that they only teach themselves the interesting stuff. There is no incentive to hunker down and learn the boring stuff, the theory, the formulas, doing all the math problems at the end of each chapter, or the stuff that they don't think matters. Further, the self taught person often misses out on the advice and guidance from teachers and mentors, mistakes and bad habits aren't corrected.
Now college is not necessarily going to fix all that. But someone with the motivation to be a great self taught person is always going to be better with school and being self taught. We really don't have a better system than colleges today, because we can't afford one-on-one tutoring for everyone. Yes, college has its problems but lack of college is an even bigger problem. The key thing some people get from college (those who apply themselves that is) is the ability to learn new things and think abstractly, as well as to have a broad base of education instead of just a narrow short term focus.
"Getting a job" is an extremely low goal to achieve. I know many parents think about this, they worry and fret over what the first job for junior will be. However it's more important I think to worry about what job junior will be in at age 50. Do you want a 50 year old doing a job they hate, or a 50 year old who is achieving some dreams, getting promoted, doing the interesting stuff, etc?
Most coders don't actually program. They just write some lines of code that connect libraries together. They wouldn't know where to even begin if asked to write the libraries themselves, or write the networking protocols, or the operating system, or the compilers, or the GUI frameworks, or the browser, or even a simple scripting language.
I see some of these people in interviews, and they say "I do middleware". I ask them how the product they work on actually works and they honestly don't have any idea. They just take data from one layer and pass it to the next layer. They can't even start to describe how they'd be useful to our team since they can't even say how they were useful to their old team.
And if you want to get past the junior coding monkey job and get a better job then all that theory and science is not just a means to get past HR but an actual part of the job itself.
Someone who just codes don't even think "XXX ms", they just think "this is slow, I need to get a faster computer". But hey, that's the future. The current crop of programmers only know how to tie together different parts of a framework, that's not even real programming.
For an automobile analogy, there are car designers and factory floor workers who screw bolts in as the parts go by on an assembly line. The question is asking "does learning how to tighten bolts outweigh learning how to build cars?" We've got a generation of programmers who think the job on the assembly line is their end goal.
But someone who can code AND knows the theory is better than some stupid code-only monkey anyday.
If you just want a 9 to 5 job with no future and no job satisfaction, then skip school and just code. Learn how to fix computers for people making double your salary and hope that your job isn't lost to some outsourced foreign guy with better English grammar than you. But if you want to actually build stuff and create things then you can't take the short cuts.
Nobody in a senior position only does coding. Computer science is being used, physics is being used, mathematics is being used, economics is being used, every science is being used somewhere. You get hired and the first job is "optimize this library", but you don't know the first thing about algorithms because you thought the class was stupid and only for computer nerds, then what do you do? Or you're asked to change the routing protocol, but you skipped all the classes and didn't know that queueing even had a theory. Or you're handed a schematic and told "write me a driver" but can only mumble "um, isn't there a library for that?"
The stuff in Computer Science is not just ivory tower games with no practical purpose. It all gets used by people in the real world with real jobs, including real programmers.
Ignorance is not a virtue!
Sure maybe the majority of programming jobs are just dumb jobs that the majority of people can handle, and if all you want is the most basic job then go for it. But do that damage only to yourself, do not encourage other people to follow you in the paths of ignorance.
I did one of these talks once, in my twenties. Just put a business card in a bowl at a restaurant that advertised "win a free vacation" or such. But it was a time share talk, I just had to listen to a spiel, then spin the wheel and see what prize I got. The sales guy was doing the hard sell, telling me how much money I'd save if I did this now. But it was a for a one or two week a year time share for a cabin in the hills near Gilroy (not well know for being a vacation area). I said it didn't seem like the thing I wanted, as I'd like a choice of places to go when I went on vacation, but he kept pushing the idea of what a great investment value it was and that I could always sell it in the future. But I didn't even have my own home yet, why should I get a mortgage on a time share?
After awhile the sales guy went to get his manager. The manager took a look at me, the kid, and said "are you interested?" I said "no". The manager said "ok". Then I got the spin the wheel and I don't even remember what I got (something insignificant).
(later my parents sat on a spiel and got a 4 inch portable black and white television out of it, which I used in grad school)
Is this really a forgery of a court document? It's only a forgery of a facsimile of a court document, with no possibility whatsoever of it being confused by anyone of being a real piece of paper from a court. Likewise, you're not forging money if you have a GIF of a dollar bill.
Except Amazon is just a "me too!" player, after Netflix and Hulu Plus. I don't see what they're doing that's revolutionary and is going to make the big content providers change their act.
Prime needs to change. It's a yearly subscription, and a hefty one too, so it's a major hindrance for people just to try out Amazon. If after a few weeks they think it's not worth the cost then they don't get refunded for the remaining unused time (and no, I won't use that much free shipping on Amazon in a lifetime).
I am ready to subscribe, as soon as the shows I want show up there. But they're late. Two weeks and still no new doctor who. The whole point of hulu plus was to be seeing shows very soon after original air time. I've already got netflix if I wanted to wait until the season was over. I don't mind the ads that much because what it replaces was chock full of ads too (well, I've never had hulu plus so can't be sure how obnoxious they are).
What these services are missing is 'service'. They're very short on information, such as easily searchable databases of what they have. They also do not tell us what programs they will be adding in the future or when they'll be added. Broadcast meanwhile will say some show starts a season in two weeks, but no such promotion on the steaming channels. I'd like to see 'wish lists' too, to be notified if a missing movie shows up in the future or to give the channel a hint about what customers want to see. Granted this is all very very low budget stuff, but a little customer friendliness would go a long way.
It's stuff that matters. And it shows up here before enough interest on social media causes it to make the main US news (for those who don't head to bbc or others).
The west also causing much of the unrest in the middle east by trying to stop it, by support of dictators, by policies, by drawing artificial lines on a map, by colonization, etc. In the last thousand years, Europe is a much more violent place than the middle east.
Why is it hard to believe Russia would invade? They did exactly the same thing in Crimea and actually admitted that this is what they did after the fact.
Actually the media is almost subverted now by social networks perhaps. People in the West may ask "why isn't this being reported on" in various cases, when those stories are indeed being reported but they're not becoming popular stories because they don't make waves on the social media. People are tired of war, they skim past those stories in the paper (if they still bother to read papers), or if they self-select their news online then they don't select those stories. We're basically permanently removed from the style of news in the 60s and 70s when most Americans sat down to listen to the full half hour of broadcast news which covered a range of topics, where enough watched it that even Walter Cronkite reporting negatively on the Vietnam war was enough to affect the war and get the administration moving towards pulling out. Instead today people are in a bubble of news that is only what they want to hear or that reinforces that they think they already know.
It was also Colin Powell, not NATO and not speaking for NATO. Yes, it was the US administration's viewpoint that it was trying to push, though there is evidence that the administration was fooling itself though bias to see only what it wanted to see rather than trying to fool the world. And the US administration also is not NATO and not even dictator of NATO, it still has to do a lot of wheedling and diplomacy to get NATO to act.
Protests in US don't typically get you a 15 day detention for no reason and no trial. Non violent but resisting orders to disperse might get you an overnight stay, and it makes it to the local media.
Slashdot Mirror
Getting past gate keepers is one thing you get from a degree. But it is not the only thing. Anyone who went far while being self taught probably could have gone even further while getting the degree. Even people like Zuckerberg have to settle for the "dropout who got lucky" title instead of "boy genius".
The main problem with most (not all) self taught people is that they only teach themselves the interesting stuff. There is no incentive to hunker down and learn the boring stuff, the theory, the formulas, doing all the math problems at the end of each chapter, or the stuff that they don't think matters. Further, the self taught person often misses out on the advice and guidance from teachers and mentors, mistakes and bad habits aren't corrected.
Now college is not necessarily going to fix all that. But someone with the motivation to be a great self taught person is always going to be better with school and being self taught. We really don't have a better system than colleges today, because we can't afford one-on-one tutoring for everyone. Yes, college has its problems but lack of college is an even bigger problem. The key thing some people get from college (those who apply themselves that is) is the ability to learn new things and think abstractly, as well as to have a broad base of education instead of just a narrow short term focus.
"Getting a job" is an extremely low goal to achieve. I know many parents think about this, they worry and fret over what the first job for junior will be. However it's more important I think to worry about what job junior will be in at age 50. Do you want a 50 year old doing a job they hate, or a 50 year old who is achieving some dreams, getting promoted, doing the interesting stuff, etc?
Most coders don't actually program. They just write some lines of code that connect libraries together. They wouldn't know where to even begin if asked to write the libraries themselves, or write the networking protocols, or the operating system, or the compilers, or the GUI frameworks, or the browser, or even a simple scripting language.
I see some of these people in interviews, and they say "I do middleware". I ask them how the product they work on actually works and they honestly don't have any idea. They just take data from one layer and pass it to the next layer. They can't even start to describe how they'd be useful to our team since they can't even say how they were useful to their old team.
And if you want to get past the junior coding monkey job and get a better job then all that theory and science is not just a means to get past HR but an actual part of the job itself.
Ability to put up with classes on theory is a big plus. Who wants to hire someone who's attitude is "this is boring and I'll never use it"?
Someone who just codes don't even think "XXX ms", they just think "this is slow, I need to get a faster computer".
But hey, that's the future. The current crop of programmers only know how to tie together different parts of a framework, that's not even real programming.
For an automobile analogy, there are car designers and factory floor workers who screw bolts in as the parts go by on an assembly line. The question is asking "does learning how to tighten bolts outweigh learning how to build cars?" We've got a generation of programmers who think the job on the assembly line is their end goal.
But someone who can code AND knows the theory is better than some stupid code-only monkey anyday.
If you just want a 9 to 5 job with no future and no job satisfaction, then skip school and just code. Learn how to fix computers for people making double your salary and hope that your job isn't lost to some outsourced foreign guy with better English grammar than you. But if you want to actually build stuff and create things then you can't take the short cuts.
Nobody in a senior position only does coding. Computer science is being used, physics is being used, mathematics is being used, economics is being used, every science is being used somewhere. You get hired and the first job is "optimize this library", but you don't know the first thing about algorithms because you thought the class was stupid and only for computer nerds, then what do you do? Or you're asked to change the routing protocol, but you skipped all the classes and didn't know that queueing even had a theory. Or you're handed a schematic and told "write me a driver" but can only mumble "um, isn't there a library for that?"
The stuff in Computer Science is not just ivory tower games with no practical purpose. It all gets used by people in the real world with real jobs, including real programmers.
Ignorance is not a virtue!
Sure maybe the majority of programming jobs are just dumb jobs that the majority of people can handle, and if all you want is the most basic job then go for it. But do that damage only to yourself, do not encourage other people to follow you in the paths of ignorance.
I did one of these talks once, in my twenties. Just put a business card in a bowl at a restaurant that advertised "win a free vacation" or such. But it was a time share talk, I just had to listen to a spiel, then spin the wheel and see what prize I got. The sales guy was doing the hard sell, telling me how much money I'd save if I did this now. But it was a for a one or two week a year time share for a cabin in the hills near Gilroy (not well know for being a vacation area). I said it didn't seem like the thing I wanted, as I'd like a choice of places to go when I went on vacation, but he kept pushing the idea of what a great investment value it was and that I could always sell it in the future. But I didn't even have my own home yet, why should I get a mortgage on a time share?
After awhile the sales guy went to get his manager. The manager took a look at me, the kid, and said "are you interested?" I said "no". The manager said "ok". Then I got the spin the wheel and I don't even remember what I got (something insignificant).
(later my parents sat on a spiel and got a 4 inch portable black and white television out of it, which I used in grad school)
Is this really a forgery of a court document? It's only a forgery of a facsimile of a court document, with no possibility whatsoever of it being confused by anyone of being a real piece of paper from a court. Likewise, you're not forging money if you have a GIF of a dollar bill.
Prime is absolutely not free, if you never use Amazon for other stuff. It's pretty damned expensive. I average one package every two years.
Except Amazon is just a "me too!" player, after Netflix and Hulu Plus. I don't see what they're doing that's revolutionary and is going to make the big content providers change their act.
I'm watching all the old shows on netflix, lots of stuff worth watching in the wayback machine.
I just avoid those sites. Nothing is requiring me to be a customer.
Prime needs to change. It's a yearly subscription, and a hefty one too, so it's a major hindrance for people just to try out Amazon. If after a few weeks they think it's not worth the cost then they don't get refunded for the remaining unused time (and no, I won't use that much free shipping on Amazon in a lifetime).
I am ready to subscribe, as soon as the shows I want show up there. But they're late. Two weeks and still no new doctor who. The whole point of hulu plus was to be seeing shows very soon after original air time. I've already got netflix if I wanted to wait until the season was over. I don't mind the ads that much because what it replaces was chock full of ads too (well, I've never had hulu plus so can't be sure how obnoxious they are).
What these services are missing is 'service'. They're very short on information, such as easily searchable databases of what they have. They also do not tell us what programs they will be adding in the future or when they'll be added. Broadcast meanwhile will say some show starts a season in two weeks, but no such promotion on the steaming channels. I'd like to see 'wish lists' too, to be notified if a missing movie shows up in the future or to give the channel a hint about what customers want to see. Granted this is all very very low budget stuff, but a little customer friendliness would go a long way.
It is doubtful Ukraine ever will be a part of NATO. Just having these troubles makes it utterly ineligible as a practical matter.
It's stuff that matters. And it shows up here before enough interest on social media causes it to make the main US news (for those who don't head to bbc or others).
The west also causing much of the unrest in the middle east by trying to stop it, by support of dictators, by policies, by drawing artificial lines on a map, by colonization, etc. In the last thousand years, Europe is a much more violent place than the middle east.
Right, Putin had nothing to do with it, and Kiev was full of love for the Russian dominance until the bankers started acting up.
No, we always knew it would come from a crazy person.
Why is it hard to believe Russia would invade? They did exactly the same thing in Crimea and actually admitted that this is what they did after the fact.
So you're basically saying no evidence is enough evidence for you, if it's reported in the west.
Actually the media is almost subverted now by social networks perhaps. People in the West may ask "why isn't this being reported on" in various cases, when those stories are indeed being reported but they're not becoming popular stories because they don't make waves on the social media. People are tired of war, they skim past those stories in the paper (if they still bother to read papers), or if they self-select their news online then they don't select those stories. We're basically permanently removed from the style of news in the 60s and 70s when most Americans sat down to listen to the full half hour of broadcast news which covered a range of topics, where enough watched it that even Walter Cronkite reporting negatively on the Vietnam war was enough to affect the war and get the administration moving towards pulling out. Instead today people are in a bubble of news that is only what they want to hear or that reinforces that they think they already know.
It was also Colin Powell, not NATO and not speaking for NATO. Yes, it was the US administration's viewpoint that it was trying to push, though there is evidence that the administration was fooling itself though bias to see only what it wanted to see rather than trying to fool the world. And the US administration also is not NATO and not even dictator of NATO, it still has to do a lot of wheedling and diplomacy to get NATO to act.
Protests in US don't typically get you a 15 day detention for no reason and no trial. Non violent but resisting orders to disperse might get you an overnight stay, and it makes it to the local media.
Well, that's because there was danger to the profits.