The 802.11A specification provides 12 nonoverlapping channels in the 5.8 GHz frequency range.
Given that, I expect some interference with phones in the 5.8GHz range.
If I had to guess, I would say that the 5.8GHz band is a fairly popular range, simply because it has been opened up for use in unregulated consumer grade devices, hence the plethora of wireless devices jumping to use it (just like the 2.4GHz band.)
Threats... I have threatened people before, but what I said to you wasn't a threat. It was more like me sharing personal experience. There is nothing you can say here on your employer's behalf that wouldn't get you called into Dave's office tomorrow for a reaming, if he figures who you are. You are representing, so represent.
Threats are not the way to end a discussion you are uncomfortable with. Don't end a sentence in a preposition.
or be ignored. I have been ignored by way better people than you.
It should tell you something that we are even watching Slashdot. Yea it tells me your site got Slashdotted. Actually I'm impressed, most sites don't survive being front paged by/. If you were worthy of posting here with any cred whatsoever, you would have a long history of posts instead of posting from an account created today, used only in this thread.
Do you feel challenged or something? Actually, no. Do you?
More accurately I feel sorry for the guys dropping $60k on a sheepskin quite possibly made mostly of paper. I knew a guy in college that wanted to fast track it, was going to blow right past me by spending $5k on a DeVry certificate. I helped him with some of his lessons - he was a good guy, not too bright but his heart was in the right place. I wanted to see him succeed, but he walked away $5,000 in debt with no credibility and unable to find a real job. Still pumping gas at his father's Exxon station for all I know, that was years ago.
This isn't about $5k, though, it's about $60k. That's about 2.8 million Rupee, to put it into perspective for you. No offense, just a wild guess.
Tell you what - how about we play a game of 'put up or shut up' : how many NU graduates are currently happily employed (what percentage) by IBM, MSFT, Northrop Grumman, McDonald Douglas, NASA, FASA, or any uberEmployer? The current employment stats in America quote a little less than 7% unemployment, so just matching the national average means 93% employment. If NU places 93% of its next graduating class with IBM, Northrop Grumman, NSA, NASA, the CIA, etc... (ie, cool fun jobs) and they stay employed by these companies for a year - I will come out and publicly support NU. If not, you admit publicly that you were wrong.
Totally off topic, given that we are on the last page buried way deep.. just between you and I : go pick up your copy of Doom 3. It is very, very worth it - it has been probably 10 years since I experienced the kind of experience and emotional response that Doom 3 brougth on - I mean... scared. Seriously scared as in watching the movie 'Aliens' by yourself in the dark with two mixed drinks in you scared. We may disagree on the NU biz, but I think we will agree - Doom III is not just a game... it's an experience.
More importantly, a University student might be asked 'Explain (defend) why you wrote the software in the language you used, on the platform you chose, using the methodology you used.'
When all you have is a hammer (a specific tool set or language proficiency) all the world looks like a nail. When all your training is with a screwdriver, the world is going to get screwed.
Why do you find it so hard to believe that learning can occur at a faster pace that it has for the past x100 years?
Perhaps because he has experienced it - and you have not. You have a vested interest in promoting this school - I know this because you created this account today specifically to come to this thread and discuss it, and no other. Java Ape, on the other hand, is Funny, Interesting, and Insightful and has been for many months. I know this because my peers have said so - check his post history. He is one (-1, Troll) post away from being someone I trust explicitly. I don't trust anybody that doesn't occasionally curse behind closed doors in trusted company - and that's exactly what a (-1, Troll) post is.
Welcome to Slashdot, but you aren't one of us. We may someday welcome you, but today you are just a shill that is destroying NU's reputation by pretending to be something you are not. When you hit 50 karma, when you have managed a (+5, Troll), a (-1, Insightful), when you have earned the right to make these sorts of uberPraise... then exercise that right. Until then, your overwhelming enthusiasm is being taken in the worst possible light, like Kerry's Vietnam experiences and bragging.
a. It's not a blog. It's news for nerds. Big difference. b. It doesn't cost $310k to hire and train a new employee. Even a WebSphere and.NET certified guy. c. 'by almost $250,000 per person' would be proper English, 'per each of us' would be perfect Manglish. That's Mangled English, in case they didn't cover that in ESL. d. No, any University isn't a trade school. e. If you are attemping to create a correlation between the NU students and the folks that are getting the outsourced jobs (Indians, for example) you are quickly destroying any cred this school might have had.
Jesus - how many new shill accounts did the fuckers at NU create today? I was cool with one or two or three... but don't over do it. You are just fucking NU's reputation by doing what you are doing - trust me, stop while you are ahead.
Dude if you are going to shill, at least use an account you didn't create today specifically to come to this thread to shill - maybe post somewhere else on slashdot at least once before coming in here... it's called credibility.
And you are fucking NU's credibility along with FrozNic (803166) and Liotius (739160) by coming here pretending to be 'one of us'. Point out someone here with a year's history (or at least enough karma to post at Score 2 by default) that stands behind this 100% (like you three are) and maybe you can repair the damage you are doing by shilling like this.
Partially because of your shilling (FrozNic (803166) and Liotius (739160) too) it wouldn't surprise me that many will likely summarily dismiss any upcoming NU grads, at least until the good folks at IBM have hired heavily from and retained for employment the members of their graduating classes.
broadly heh, no other university will give you all that, AND certs, and a job at ms or ibm or any other fortune 500 company
And that, as they say, is honestly the only measure that counts. This is a new program, so everything said in this entire thread is purely speculation. Give this new paradigm five years and then pass judgment like this: What was their ratio of students that enrolled to students that graduated? What percentage of their graduates are working for IBM making industry standard pay plus $10,000 (to pay off the $60,000 student loans.) What percentage of their graduates are working for Microsoft? What percentage of their graduates are working for other top flight companies like NASA, FASA, Grummand, etc...
If all their students got great jobs, then you were right. If their best students are serving fries at McDonalds or pumping gas.. then you were wrong. If you are a student there, you are gambling $60,000 - I hope for your sake you are right.
Hell, I mentored a new grad who claimed to have gotten an A in c++ but didn't know what an object was. Talk about wanting to break down and cry.
What you should have done: take your favorite OO methodology book from the bookshelf in your cube hand it to him on Friday afternoon tell him when he walks in on Monday he better be ready to discuss object oriented methodology, from a theoretical perspective
If he was ready on Monday, keep him. If he doesn't take you seriously, can him and hire a replacement from the incredible pool of unemployed senior developers currently available.
What if the college degree wasn't about knowing Calculus, but was simply proof that regardless of the subject, topic, discipline, or language... you could learn it. Employeers don't care if you know Calculus, they only care that when you were required to learn Calculus - you could.
Employers have things to do that you haven't done yet. They are going to need you to learn stuff you don't know yet. A university degree in software engineering tells the employer that you can adapt, grow, learn while under pressure - and dropping out of college for the reasons you expressed tell the employer that you can't.
Luckily you got out before Differential Equations, which is basically Calculus on hallucinogenic drugs. If Calc II is the substance of your nightmares, DiffEQ would have had you jumping off a bridge.
Until you are out at a business function with several corporate officers and the difference between being able to hold an intelligent conversation about the contributions of Manet to the art world instead of babbling on about polymorphism and OOP is going to mean the difference between getting the budget for your development team or needing to cut two guys from your staff of twelve.
It doesn't matter until it matters, at which point it really matters.
Actually the difference was you spending an average of 2 hours on homework and study for every hour in class, and him spending an average of 4-5 hours on homework and study for every hour in class.
Of course he went to school 20 years ago and computers were slower then...
Sounds to me like all your experience has been bottom up coding, and you need to be doing top down coding.
Bottom up coding is sitting down at the computer and starting to bang on the keyboard, inventing your application as you type. This works great for small things.
Top down coding is standing up at the whiteboard with colored markers, drawing squares and circles, lines between them. Then taking one of those squares or circles and sitting down with a pen and paper (back of envelope or cocktail napkin work best) and scribbling notes. Then taking those notes and freehanding in pseudocode on pencil and lined paper, in your own language... then take that outline to the computer and write your code.
Nobody can go directly from their brain to their keyboard on complex business code that actually works.
Honest young students paying massive tuition bills and genuinely applying themselves to the curriculum set by the school, thinking they are preparing themselves for an honest career in IT - only to be stuck with massive loans and not enough credibility to get through an interview and successfully land a 'real' job.
If you are really good you can stay head down coding for 8-12 hours straight and the food magically appears next to your keyboard through no effort of your own.
If you are really, really good the food that magically appears next to your keyboard during your marathon hack sessions is your favorite food, and not by coincidence.
And nobody that hacks for 8 hours straight does it because someone required it - they do it because it needs to get done and they are self motivated and determined to get it done. 1500 lines in 8 hours is an act of fiction, of course... anything beyond about 60 honest lines of actual original working code (cut and paste doesn't count, nor machine generated code) is pushing it for normal humans. Actually over the entire course of project development I'm proud to sustain or exceed 10 LOC / hour. Anything faster than that means someone isn't taking into account anything besides banging on the keyboard.
For those of you that aren't familiar with DiffEQ, it is an advanced math that is taken in the second half of the pursuit of a degree in software engineering, building on a heavy foundation of calculus. It covers calculating derivatives of equations that are otherwise basically underivable and is probably the most freaky aberration of theoretical math, going something like this: Write down an underivable equation. Take some drugs. Wait until your brain is working on a parallel math universe. Take the parallel universe bizarro translation of your equation, derive it. Write down the answer. Let the drugs wear off. Voila! Turn in the result.
If you can pass DiffEQ, you can figure out anything corporate America can throw at you.
Two things: a. most of us were dirt poor in college. Actually some of us were poorer than that. I hated Wednesdays in college because the grocery store I worked at paid us on Thursdays... and some weeks the money didn't stretch a full seven days (went hungry - it sucked. Too proud to beg, too honest to steal.) There were plenty of Wednesday nights I would have loved some of those 78 cent hotdogs. b. college loans. Apply for more than you think you will need, because you can always give it back. Loans are there to provide you the fiscal support necessary to go to college, and those costs are far more diverse than tuition and books. It also takes somewhere to live, food, a vehicle to get back and forth to class, and clothes.
If you are honest about studying in college, the money is there. You may need to pay it back after you graduate, but the money is there.
Oh yea, and whatever happens, tough it out and graduate. They can take away your hotdog, they can take away your job, they can take away your morale... but once you walk across that stage nobody can ever take away your college degree.
For example, the students were told how to do a quicksort, and how to do a mergesort. They were told that both were O(n lg n). They were told that mergesort requires twice the memory of a quicksort.
Two things on this:
A sierra hotel coder right out of school is going to optimize anything he can get his hands on (I optimized a ceiling fan once, so I'm as guilty as any) and honestly cares which sort routine is faster, knows which is O(n lg n) and which is only O(lg n) for his data profile. A seasoned coder knows that the guys doing maintenance on the code three years down the road are going to be so lame they couldn't find their ass with both hands tied behind their back - much less comprehend recursive code or the subtleties of any sort routine meaner than a bubble sort.
How many students were in the class? 10? 35? 100? And not one of them knew enough to say 'hey, how about this case when a mergesort is a lot better than a quicksort?' It isn't like the class text completely omitted sort routines and the teacher sprung it on them... they are studying numerical methods in college and have a zillion places to prepare for the class in advance. There are plenty of places for the mouth breathers on this planet, maybe advanced degree courses in software engineering isn't one of them.
I would think that joining the peace corps, the merchant marine, one of the military branches or many other experiences will give you the same fascinating breadth of humanity in such a period of time.
They will all give you fascinating breadth of humanity experiences, but they won't give you the same fascinating breadth of humanity experiences. I went to college, got my degree in CS (BS/CS under the dept of Engineering) and it wasn't until I spent a month in Europe behind the Iron Curtain that I saw how rich the lives of the American 'poor' really are, it wasn't until I saw four generations of family living in the same 1 bedroom apartment (about 800 square feet) that I learned to appreciate my little crap garage apartment that I had all to myself. It wasn't until I saw that night's dinner walk into the butcher's area and get hacked up to pieces with a sharp knife... that I learned to appreciate the little white styrofoam trays with meat shrink wrapped on it. I learned a lot of things that month, none of which could have been learned nowhere else.
My experience is that people who are self-educated put too little stock in formal education, and people with formal education put too little stock in self-education.
My experience is that (by and large) the people who are self-educated will learn more about a subject when their existing knowledge doesn't allow them to proceed with their task, learning enough to let them get back to being 'productive', and the people with formal education will attempt to aquire at least a cursory familiarity with as much about the task as possible in a predetermined time frame (couple of hours, day or two maybe) before performing it (having learned where to find complete details about whatever pops up during implementation.)
The practical examples of what happens next are things like: -Setting up security on a new machine - one guy will add his 5 users and grant all 5 of them the necessary security rights, where another guy will add his 5 users, add a group, add the users to that group, and assign the rights to that group. -A coder will write the exact same (or a similar) statement 8 times in a row, but another coder will enclose the statement in a loop.
At the time of delivery, all those examples are 'the same' but in effect they are not 'the same' when you consider the long term ramifications (maintainability for example) of doing it one way over the other.
Note - I'm not bagging on the self-taught. I have a strong respect for the guys that have 5+ years of professional service in software programming, systems administration (network administration, hardware, deployments) in particular is full of great performers and guess what - they don't have 4 year degree plans for Sys/Admins. I'm just saying that I have seen two distinctly different approaches and I can often identify between the two who are who.
Slashdot Mirror
Are slashdot readers that ignorant?
You're new here, aren't you?
The 802.11A specification provides 12 nonoverlapping channels in the 5.8 GHz frequency range.
Given that, I expect some interference with phones in the 5.8GHz range.
If I had to guess, I would say that the 5.8GHz band is a fairly popular range, simply because it has been opened up for use in unregulated consumer grade devices, hence the plethora of wireless devices jumping to use it (just like the 2.4GHz band.)
You mean like the 802.11a wireless networks?
But the first guy hit it right on the head. 900MHz phones are the best bet if you are running a regular wifi network and don't want interference.
Welcome to Slashdot.
...
/. If you were worthy of posting here with any cred whatsoever, you would have a long history of posts instead of posting from an account created today, used only in this thread.
... (ie, cool fun jobs) and they stay employed by these companies for a year - I will come out and publicly support NU. If not, you admit publicly that you were wrong.
.. just between you and I : go pick up your copy of Doom 3. It is very, very worth it - it has been probably 10 years since I experienced the kind of experience and emotional response that Doom 3 brougth on - I mean ... scared. Seriously scared as in watching the movie 'Aliens' by yourself in the dark with two mixed drinks in you scared. We may disagree on the NU biz, but I think we will agree - Doom III is not just a game ... it's an experience.
Threats
I have threatened people before, but what I said to you wasn't a threat. It was more like me sharing personal experience. There is nothing you can say here on your employer's behalf that wouldn't get you called into Dave's office tomorrow for a reaming, if he figures who you are. You are representing, so represent.
Threats are not the way to end a discussion you are uncomfortable with.
Don't end a sentence in a preposition.
or be ignored.
I have been ignored by way better people than you.
It should tell you something that we are even watching Slashdot.
Yea it tells me your site got Slashdotted. Actually I'm impressed, most sites don't survive being front paged by
Do you feel challenged or something?
Actually, no. Do you?
More accurately I feel sorry for the guys dropping $60k on a sheepskin quite possibly made mostly of paper. I knew a guy in college that wanted to fast track it, was going to blow right past me by spending $5k on a DeVry certificate. I helped him with some of his lessons - he was a good guy, not too bright but his heart was in the right place. I wanted to see him succeed, but he walked away $5,000 in debt with no credibility and unable to find a real job. Still pumping gas at his father's Exxon station for all I know, that was years ago.
This isn't about $5k, though, it's about $60k. That's about 2.8 million Rupee, to put it into perspective for you. No offense, just a wild guess.
Tell you what - how about we play a game of 'put up or shut up' : how many NU graduates are currently happily employed (what percentage) by IBM, MSFT, Northrop Grumman, McDonald Douglas, NASA, FASA, or any uberEmployer? The current employment stats in America quote a little less than 7% unemployment, so just matching the national average means 93% employment. If NU places 93% of its next graduating class with IBM, Northrop Grumman, NSA, NASA, the CIA, etc
Totally off topic, given that we are on the last page buried way deep
More importantly, a University student might be asked 'Explain (defend) why you wrote the software in the language you used, on the platform you chose, using the methodology you used.'
When all you have is a hammer (a specific tool set or language proficiency) all the world looks like a nail.
When all your training is with a screwdriver, the world is going to get screwed.
Why do you find it so hard to believe that learning can occur at a faster pace that it has for the past x100 years?
... then exercise that right. Until then, your overwhelming enthusiasm is being taken in the worst possible light, like Kerry's Vietnam experiences and bragging.
Perhaps because he has experienced it - and you have not. You have a vested interest in promoting this school - I know this because you created this account today specifically to come to this thread and discuss it, and no other.
Java Ape, on the other hand, is Funny, Interesting, and Insightful and has been for many months. I know this because my peers have said so - check his post history. He is one (-1, Troll) post away from being someone I trust explicitly. I don't trust anybody that doesn't occasionally curse behind closed doors in trusted company - and that's exactly what a (-1, Troll) post is.
Welcome to Slashdot, but you aren't one of us. We may someday welcome you, but today you are just a shill that is destroying NU's reputation by pretending to be something you are not. When you hit 50 karma, when you have managed a (+5, Troll), a (-1, Insightful), when you have earned the right to make these sorts of uberPraise
Welcome to Slashdot.
.NET certified guy.
a. It's not a blog. It's news for nerds. Big difference.
b. It doesn't cost $310k to hire and train a new employee. Even a WebSphere and
c. 'by almost $250,000 per person' would be proper English, 'per each of us' would be perfect Manglish. That's Mangled English, in case they didn't cover that in ESL.
d. No, any University isn't a trade school.
e. If you are attemping to create a correlation between the NU students and the folks that are getting the outsourced jobs (Indians, for example) you are quickly destroying any cred this school might have had.
Jesus - how many new shill accounts did the fuckers at NU create today? ... but don't over do it. You are just fucking NU's reputation by doing what you are doing - trust me, stop while you are ahead.
I was cool with one or two or three
Dude if you are going to shill, at least use an account you didn't create today specifically to come to this thread to shill - maybe post somewhere else on slashdot at least once before coming in here ... it's called credibility.
And you are fucking NU's credibility along with FrozNic (803166) and Liotius (739160) by coming here pretending to be 'one of us'. Point out someone here with a year's history (or at least enough karma to post at Score 2 by default) that stands behind this 100% (like you three are) and maybe you can repair the damage you are doing by shilling like this.
Partially because of your shilling (FrozNic (803166) and Liotius (739160) too) it wouldn't surprise me that many will likely summarily dismiss any upcoming NU grads, at least until the good folks at IBM have hired heavily from and retained for employment the members of their graduating classes.
broadly heh, no other university will give you all that, AND certs, and a job at ms or ibm or any other fortune 500 company
:
.. then you were wrong. If you are a student there, you are gambling $60,000 - I hope for your sake you are right.
And that, as they say, is honestly the only measure that counts. This is a new program, so everything said in this entire thread is purely speculation. Give this new paradigm five years and then pass judgment like this
What was their ratio of students that enrolled to students that graduated?
What percentage of their graduates are working for IBM making industry standard pay plus $10,000 (to pay off the $60,000 student loans.)
What percentage of their graduates are working for Microsoft?
What percentage of their graduates are working for other top flight companies like NASA, FASA, Grummand, etc...
If all their students got great jobs, then you were right. If their best students are serving fries at McDonalds or pumping gas
Hell, I mentored a new grad who claimed to have gotten an A in c++ but didn't know what an object was. Talk about wanting to break down and cry.
:
What you should have done
take your favorite OO methodology book from the bookshelf in your cube
hand it to him on Friday afternoon
tell him when he walks in on Monday he better be ready to discuss object oriented methodology, from a theoretical perspective
If he was ready on Monday, keep him. If he doesn't take you seriously, can him and hire a replacement from the incredible pool of unemployed senior developers currently available.
What if the college degree wasn't about knowing Calculus, but was simply proof that regardless of the subject, topic, discipline, or language ... you could learn it. Employeers don't care if you know Calculus, they only care that when you were required to learn Calculus - you could.
Employers have things to do that you haven't done yet. They are going to need you to learn stuff you don't know yet. A university degree in software engineering tells the employer that you can adapt, grow, learn while under pressure - and dropping out of college for the reasons you expressed tell the employer that you can't.
Luckily you got out before Differential Equations, which is basically Calculus on hallucinogenic drugs. If Calc II is the substance of your nightmares, DiffEQ would have had you jumping off a bridge.
Until you are out at a business function with several corporate officers and the difference between being able to hold an intelligent conversation about the contributions of Manet to the art world instead of babbling on about polymorphism and OOP is going to mean the difference between getting the budget for your development team or needing to cut two guys from your staff of twelve.
It doesn't matter until it matters, at which point it really matters.
Include the time you spend studying, doing reports, working on class assignments and recalculate the number.
I bet it exceeds 10,000 hours.
Actually the difference was you spending an average of 2 hours on homework and study for every hour in class, and him spending an average of 4-5 hours on homework and study for every hour in class.
...
Of course he went to school 20 years ago and computers were slower then
Code from the other direction.
... then take that outline to the computer and write your code.
Sounds to me like all your experience has been bottom up coding, and you need to be doing top down coding.
Bottom up coding is sitting down at the computer and starting to bang on the keyboard, inventing your application as you type. This works great for small things.
Top down coding is standing up at the whiteboard with colored markers, drawing squares and circles, lines between them. Then taking one of those squares or circles and sitting down with a pen and paper (back of envelope or cocktail napkin work best) and scribbling notes. Then taking those notes and freehanding in pseudocode on pencil and lined paper, in your own language
Nobody can go directly from their brain to their keyboard on complex business code that actually works.
Nobody.
Honest young students paying massive tuition bills and genuinely applying themselves to the curriculum set by the school, thinking they are preparing themselves for an honest career in IT - only to be stuck with massive loans and not enough credibility to get through an interview and successfully land a 'real' job.
these were the big firms (Accounting) that had consultant (IT) wings
And they all suck ass. No offense, but I wouldn't trust a 'programmer' from any of those companies to program my VCR to tape that evening's news.
If you are really good you can stay head down coding for 8-12 hours straight and the food magically appears next to your keyboard through no effort of your own.
... anything beyond about 60 honest lines of actual original working code (cut and paste doesn't count, nor machine generated code) is pushing it for normal humans. Actually over the entire course of project development I'm proud to sustain or exceed 10 LOC / hour. Anything faster than that means someone isn't taking into account anything besides banging on the keyboard.
If you are really, really good the food that magically appears next to your keyboard during your marathon hack sessions is your favorite food, and not by coincidence.
And nobody that hacks for 8 hours straight does it because someone required it - they do it because it needs to get done and they are self motivated and determined to get it done. 1500 lines in 8 hours is an act of fiction, of course
No Differential Equations either.
:
Damn.
For those of you that aren't familiar with DiffEQ, it is an advanced math that is taken in the second half of the pursuit of a degree in software engineering, building on a heavy foundation of calculus. It covers calculating derivatives of equations that are otherwise basically underivable and is probably the most freaky aberration of theoretical math, going something like this
Write down an underivable equation.
Take some drugs.
Wait until your brain is working on a parallel math universe.
Take the parallel universe bizarro translation of your equation, derive it.
Write down the answer.
Let the drugs wear off.
Voila! Turn in the result.
If you can pass DiffEQ, you can figure out anything corporate America can throw at you.
Two things : ... and some weeks the money didn't stretch a full seven days (went hungry - it sucked. Too proud to beg, too honest to steal.) There were plenty of Wednesday nights I would have loved some of those 78 cent hotdogs.
... but once you walk across that stage nobody can ever take away your college degree.
a. most of us were dirt poor in college. Actually some of us were poorer than that. I hated Wednesdays in college because the grocery store I worked at paid us on Thursdays
b. college loans. Apply for more than you think you will need, because you can always give it back. Loans are there to provide you the fiscal support necessary to go to college, and those costs are far more diverse than tuition and books. It also takes somewhere to live, food, a vehicle to get back and forth to class, and clothes.
If you are honest about studying in college, the money is there. You may need to pay it back after you graduate, but the money is there.
Oh yea, and whatever happens, tough it out and graduate. They can take away your hotdog, they can take away your job, they can take away your morale
For example, the students were told how to do a quicksort, and how to do a mergesort.
:
... they are studying numerical methods in college and have a zillion places to prepare for the class in advance. There are plenty of places for the mouth breathers on this planet, maybe advanced degree courses in software engineering isn't one of them.
They were told that both were O(n lg n).
They were told that mergesort requires twice the memory of a quicksort.
Two things on this
A sierra hotel coder right out of school is going to optimize anything he can get his hands on (I optimized a ceiling fan once, so I'm as guilty as any) and honestly cares which sort routine is faster, knows which is O(n lg n) and which is only O(lg n) for his data profile. A seasoned coder knows that the guys doing maintenance on the code three years down the road are going to be so lame they couldn't find their ass with both hands tied behind their back - much less comprehend recursive code or the subtleties of any sort routine meaner than a bubble sort.
How many students were in the class? 10? 35? 100? And not one of them knew enough to say 'hey, how about this case when a mergesort is a lot better than a quicksort?' It isn't like the class text completely omitted sort routines and the teacher sprung it on them
I would think that joining the peace corps, the merchant marine, one of the military branches or many other experiences will give you the same fascinating breadth of humanity in such a period of time.
... that I learned to appreciate the little white styrofoam trays with meat shrink wrapped on it. I learned a lot of things that month, none of which could have been learned nowhere else.
They will all give you fascinating breadth of humanity experiences, but they won't give you the same fascinating breadth of humanity experiences. I went to college, got my degree in CS (BS/CS under the dept of Engineering) and it wasn't until I spent a month in Europe behind the Iron Curtain that I saw how rich the lives of the American 'poor' really are, it wasn't until I saw four generations of family living in the same 1 bedroom apartment (about 800 square feet) that I learned to appreciate my little crap garage apartment that I had all to myself. It wasn't until I saw that night's dinner walk into the butcher's area and get hacked up to pieces with a sharp knife
Hell with that - I want to know how he is managing to score 8.5 hours a night of sleep, seven nights a week.
My experience is that people who are self-educated put too little stock in formal education, and people with formal education put too little stock in self-education.
:
My experience is that (by and large) the people who are self-educated will learn more about a subject when their existing knowledge doesn't allow them to proceed with their task, learning enough to let them get back to being 'productive', and the people with formal education will attempt to aquire at least a cursory familiarity with as much about the task as possible in a predetermined time frame (couple of hours, day or two maybe) before performing it (having learned where to find complete details about whatever pops up during implementation.)
The practical examples of what happens next are things like
-Setting up security on a new machine - one guy will add his 5 users and grant all 5 of them the necessary security rights, where another guy will add his 5 users, add a group, add the users to that group, and assign the rights to that group.
-A coder will write the exact same (or a similar) statement 8 times in a row, but another coder will enclose the statement in a loop.
At the time of delivery, all those examples are 'the same' but in effect they are not 'the same' when you consider the long term ramifications (maintainability for example) of doing it one way over the other.
Note - I'm not bagging on the self-taught. I have a strong respect for the guys that have 5+ years of professional service in software programming, systems administration (network administration, hardware, deployments) in particular is full of great performers and guess what - they don't have 4 year degree plans for Sys/Admins. I'm just saying that I have seen two distinctly different approaches and I can often identify between the two who are who.