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Do Geeks Need College?
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Mon Apr 12, 1999 10:50 AM
from the debate-rages-on dept.
from the debate-rages-on dept.
Manuka writes
"Salon has a neat article
debating the issue of whether college is worth bothering with
for geeks." The article references
an old Slashdot thread
and throws out some interesting comments and statistics
on the subject.
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Do Geeks Need College?
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College is Not Technical School (Score:3)
I was a finance major, and that degree helped land me my first job. So from a voc-tech perspective, college helped me wonderfully. My first employer would never have considered me without a degree. For a more pure programming role, having a "resume" that includes hacking accomplishments in high school might be enough to get your foot in the door. Once you've been in the work force any period of time, the college degree drops off the recruiting radar scope. Some employers probably care that you do have one, but few care what it is in or where it is from. Even for one that wants you to have a degree, you can save money by getting it part time at a local college instead of spending big bucks on a full time four year program at a prestigous university.
But I am not satified with the voc-tech view of school. I very much have a vision of the university providing a undergraduate with a classical liberal arts education that enriches the mind, imparts a basic body of knowledge all educated people should have, and prepares the person for a lifetime of continued learning. I wish I had been more oriented towards this when I was in school. Fortunately I am an extremely strong self learner and so today I am able to educate myself despite not getting the best general preparation for it in school. I would like to see this more emphasized than the "learn these skills and you can get a job" curriculum the Salon article seems to be talking about.
college and university (Score:3)
Now.. I enjoy university a lot, but I tend to have a different perspective towards school than my peers - many of them are in it for the paper and don't see the point of the courses that we take.
I enjoy what I'm learning because I know it *matters*.. if people in school actually remembered the concepts during a concurrency or OS course, they'd be considered expert programmers (compared to the majority).
Of course, the down side to my enjoyment of school is that I tend to get crappy marks in areas that I'm less passionate about.. CS. I love CS. I ace CS all the time... Math. I like math, but I'm not good at it, and it's pulling me down. So I'm faced with the threat every term of being bumped out of my honours degree to a general degree e... The question is: do I really need MORE CS courses, or have I learned enough that I can just take the easier degree & get out?
I really like higher education, but I think it always comes down to personal choice.. if you want to have a career doing web development, don't go to college. But don't cry if the economy turns sour and you wind up unemployed. If you want to be an expert programmer in enterprise systems, or distributed systems, or graphics, or.. etc, college will do you good, and it provides security.
Soon, having "a job" isn't going to matter as having a "career" and a way of distinguishing yourself from your peers. You have to be able to say - "THIS IS ME, This is why I'm the best at what I do, and this is why I command a high salary." Otherwise your voice will be lost in the herd, and you won't stand out. Contributing free software is uplifting, but not very much so when you're forced to settle for a poor salary because you're just "another C programmer" or another "VB programmer"....
The only way to differentiate yourself is through knowledge - and higher education is one way (not the only way) to get it. I think in future college/univeristy may become obselete because of the rampant incompetence of the majority of them, but that doesn't mean that "higher education" will die - it will just take other forms.
Geeks, go to college. (Score:5)
Go to college to learn about culture, or history, or philosophy, or literature. Go to college to sit up late nights screaming at your best friends about what an idiot Rene Descartes was. Go to college to watch your best friends do the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Go to college to find out what the hell this postmodernism thing is that Larry Wall's always on about. Go to college to refute postmodernism, and to be called postmodern for doing it. Go to college to meet people who will be impressed with your intelligence instead of thinking of it as threatening.
Don't go to an easy college, and don't go to a place that lets you get by doing nothing but technical stuff. Go to a place that makes you do a lot of heavy reading and writing. Take tough courses. Learn to write well; not only will it help when your boss asks you to document your project, but it'll also help you sound better on Slashdot and USENET. Don't scorn "well-roundedness" or "communications skills"; the stars of geek culture are no bunch of illiterates.
Study music. Music, as Pythagoras demonstrated, is a form of mathematics, and musicians, like hackers, keep pounding on their work in search of the Right Thing. Study psychology and sociology. They represent our attempts to figure out how the systems called the human mind and human society work, so that we can make them work better.
Read Nietzsche. Refute your parents' religion. Then refute your refutation.
Get into politics. Which politics don't really matter -- be a socialist, or a libertarian, or even a Republican if you have to. Go to activist events. Take politics courses. Insist on bringing up free software in the middle of your classes. Derive the Debian Free Software Guidelines from the works of John Locke.
(Damn. I'm rambling. I sound like that fake Kurt Vonnegut graduation address email forward that whoever-it-was turned into a song. Use sunscreen.)
yes (Score:3)
it taught me theory that made java old hat when i first saw it four years later.
it taught me practical things, so that the technical side of developing was easy.
it taught me subjects outside of cs, which sadly included ethics. (sad that it was outside, not that it was something i learned)
it exposed me to other cultures, and other people.
i suppose it would be better to say that "i learned," rather then "it taught." college provided me with access to those things, it was up to me to take them.
it might not be for everyone, but i find it interesting to note that bill gates dropped out and has spent the past 20 years reinventing the wheel badly. linus completed his degree and (due to licensing issues) recreated a well known wheel and used it to sringboard experiments in not very well known wheels: scheduling, memory management (well researched in low memory eras, but not well covered in high memory situations) and smp.
College Has Its Uses, But... (Score:3)
In my career, I've seen plenty of people with degrees (some advanced) in the field who couldn't code their way out of a brown paper bag. I've also seen people with training in wildly divergent fields, indeed, some with no degree at all, who were and are outstanding software engineers. The only common threads I've seen is that you must have the talent for it, and that you have to love it enough to work your tail off.
In my view, most CS departments are set up to train people to be CS grad assistants instead of software engineers in industry. In my opinion, schools should offer degrees in software engineering in addition to those in computer science. It's important to face another fact as well; 5 yrs after you get your degree, if you expect to continue to glide along on your knowledge that you gained in school without continuous self education, you're going to be dead meat in the field. A degree is a START, not an end unto itself.
Also, for the previous poster that said his degree would be important when he was 45. It's a lot more important at the start of your career than when you have experience. I haven't been seriously quizzed about my educational status in at least 7 or 8 yrs.
Also, in keeping with my comment about talent, I'd also love to eventually see apprenticeship programs for coders. I'm sure there are people out there with the talent to do coding or other computer tech tasks. There are certainly opportunities for people, and I don't think a 35 yr old should be expected to quit his present job and go to school full time for 4 yrs to check them out, if they display the talent.
Just my
The usefulness of college/university (Score:3)
Oh, I had to take non-DC circuit analysis too; transient signals are very important in integrated circuits, and integrated circuit design is a part of Comp. Eng.. However, I didn't have to take some of the hairier Elec courses, from Fields and Waves on up.
We have the good fortune of using C under Solaris on Sun workstations for most of our programming work.
What I really want to do is design an OS that will blow Microsoft out of the water. Of course learning how the CPU decodes a machine-language instruction through a microprogram has little to do with this (too low level). Neither does anything having to do with Java (too high level). Methinks I should have been a Computer Scientist, but there probably isn't a scholarship for those.
Actually, both of those are at least tangentially significant for OS design. Comp. Eng. should cover OS design, as it falls right in its area of influence (the layer where hardware and software meet). Comp. Sci. would teach you OS design, but there would be a vast amount of high-level and theoretical stuff thrown at you as well. Comp. Eng. focuses more on practical application, as opposed to the high reaches of theory (though we still get a bit of it).
For OS design, I strongly recommend the excellent textbook that we had in our OS course. Assuming it hasn't changed over the past year or so, it is:
William Stallings
Operating Systems: Internals and Design Principles, 3rd Edition
Of course, that only coveres half of the OS (the kernel). For driver programming, I'd suggest finding semi-decent documentation on Linux drivers and picking apart drivers in your own copy of Linux. BeOS is another good platform on which to learn driver development; there are a few good reference sites that cover its driver architecture.
There are a lot of aspects of OS design that I would have taken quite a while to find out about on my own. I know what a page table is now, and how several process scheduling algorithms work, and the merits and drawbacks of each. As well as a large amount of low-level detail about what's involved in implementing a microkernel, c/o the labs we had to do. I could have picked up all of this by spending a year taking apart the Linux kernel, but out in the working world, it's hard to find the time for major undertakings like that (I know, as I'm working now).
In summary, I was given useful information about this in my CE courses. My sympathies re. NT and Java
The usefulness of college/university (Score:4)
Type number one is a place where people go to drink and have sex. The professors range from mediocre to truly incompetent, and nobody really learns a whole lot even if they do pay attention in class and do all of the coursework. People who have been through one of these colleges generally say that college is a waste of time. In a college like this, I agree - it is.
Type number two is different. The professors actually know what they're talking about, and many are quite bright indeed. The coursework is actually challenging. No matter how smart you are, you'll be picking up new concepts and then working your butt off to prove that you understand them. The courses that you are taking are relevant to your chosen career and teach you things that you will use after you graduate. You also learn how to learn, as many others have pointed out. I have the good fortune to be at a university like this, and it has proven invaluable for my work in the software industry.
A complaint that I sometimes hear from people who don't like college is that none of the courses are interesting. IMO, this isn't necessarily a problem with the college (though it can be for the first type of college). I was very lucky, and chose exactly the right course stream; my courses match my interests almost perfectly. But, if I'd chosen Electrical Engineering instead of Computer Engineering, I'd be stuck doing analog circuit analysis when what I really want to do is design ICs. This would not only have presented problems after graduation, but would have made my coursework alternately difficult and boring.
My advice for those pondering college is to think carefully about what they want to learn about, and to pick a good school at which to learn. This might mean a hideously expensive school, or it might not. However, if you pick a bad college or university, your time there will be a dead loss.
Likewise, picking your field is important. If you choose incorrectly, you will be forced to work your butt off learning things that just don't interest you. Don't be afraid to change fields once you have already enrolled; it's better to lose a year than to stick with something you don't like and lose four years. It will still be worth it.
If you do find a good college or university and manage to get into a field that truly interests you, then IMO you will almost certainly find post-secondary education to be worthwhile.
That piece of paper... (Score:4)
I have a little metal ring in my pocket. On it are flat little piece of metal, with teeth. Worthless and useless, right? Too thin to cut food, too thick to pick your nails. Oddly, they fit locks. I can easily get into rooms and cars that are otherwise inaccessible to me.
I can secure my house against thieves, get into my car and drive myself to my job. I can get into my office, in which lay confidential and propriatary materials. I can check my PO box for mail.
I wouldn't have any of these things without my keys. And, I wouldn't have any of them without my degree.
A college education opens doors.
It teaches structured thinking, but most geeks already have that skill. We've argued the value of a college education and the experience of University ad nauseum here on
It turns out that it's a unary argument. One can not make an informed decision about it, since you either do or do not have the experience. A comparison can not be made, since it would be like men trying to compare their experience of manhood with the experience of being a woman. We do not have the means to be objective here.
But, without a doubt, that little piece of paper opens doors. Some people without it get quite lucky, but they are a significant exception to an otherwise unnoticed majority. Most people who do not have the degree, do not get as far as those with the degree. It's not flame-bait, it's fact.
Without a degree, you start as a tech, and you need to prove yourselv constantly, to advance. With the degree, you start at a higher level, and if you continue to prove yourself to advance, you advance faster and higher.
Bill Gates' success not withstanding, a significant majority of executives, CEOs, CIOs, managers and others who make lots of money, is college educated, (sadly) with business degrees that exceed the Bachelor level.
Get your keys. You don't have to use them, you can still use a crowbar or a credit card to open those doors, but keys make it a) easier, and b) socially acceptable.
College can be an excellent experience. (Score:3)
'I don't need college, I can learn anything I want to about programming in the real world'
That's true, if programming, by analogy, is a skill no higher than a technician; someone tells you what they need and when, and you do it.
There are absolutely lots of things that cannot be learned except by college, unless you are a genius along the ranks of Feynman, Newton, or Einstein. If you were that smart though, you'd probably in college with 2 or 3 degrees, right?
I'm not trying to insult people who haven't gone to college(yet), I'm making a point to those people who are considering and wavering. As mentioned in other posts, there are plenty of things you learn in college that isn't taught, ethics among them, but there are just as many things you won't be able to figure out in the real world. Predicate calculus, program correctness, and big O complexity. Or semiconductor physics, and why transistors act the way they do, and how an entrepreneurial physicist/engineer can take advantage of their quirks and unleash the next big(say a thin flat light cheap LCD) thing on the world. Or even math, and alternatives to 2d linear algebra; 3d or 4d math...
The best things one learns are from classes not related to your main interests, but from which if one makes the effort, can be applied to your main interests in new and uniquely satisfying ways...
AS
My College Experience (Score:3)
Many of the things I learned in college were invaluable, besides just that piece of paper. Other things were not very valuable. There were a number of classes that were basically a waste of time, but that was just preparing me for the real world.
Perhapse it depends on the college. I just interviewed a new college grad for an entry-level embedded programming job, yet the grad couldn't perform simple things. I asked about the difference between a linked list and a binary tree and how they relate to Big-O notation when searching. No answer. I asked the grad to write a C function to convert an integer to an ASCII string. Again, the grad was at a total loss.
For those who say they got nothing out of college, either you didn't want anything out of college or you were some super genious before entering. Either that or you went to some brain-damaged college.
Prior to college I had done a fair amount of programming and exploration. I knew 80x86 assembly cold and all the main data types used. In college I was able to greatly build on my experiences. Also, that piece of paper has been useful since it allows me to get a lower insurance rate.