
For Silicon Valley Hopefuls, Is College Irrelevant? - sarika008
https://medium.com/bright/for-silicon-valley-hopefuls-is-college-irrelevant-89ffb15dbe82
======
imh
I think I can give pretty good insight into this, as someone with a weird
background coming to programming. I'm a data scientist with a physics
background, but I'm still even atypical in that role, having just a bachelors
degree.

My experience has been that without some of the real meaty knowledge that only
comes from studying CS, you don't realize what you're missing until you work
with other people who have the background. Pairing up, seeing them use
abstractions that fit the problem perfectly is an eye opener. The theory
helps. I've been shoveling my way through CLRS and learning haskell in my
spare time, and both of these things, while not directly relevant to the
problems I solve day to day, definitely improve my code.

And of course, when looking for new jobs, the right degree never hurts as far
as where you go on the resume pile.

~~~
soham
Very well said.

Same experience here, running
[http://InterviewKickstart.com](http://InterviewKickstart.com). Having a
background in CS is very helpful and often the differentiator in how palatable
you find Google/FB interviews vs not. Without CS background (degree or not,
but something similar), candidates find it very challenging to even get
through the course, much less appear for core CS interviews.

Degree is not just a certificate; it's a proxy to 2-4 years of working through
interesting stuff under guidance (professors) and with a group of like-minded
people. It ain't a panacea, but it's a great opportunity for those who
recognize the importance of that controlled setting of learning.

------
david_shaw
This sounds like the age-old conflict that computer science students have long
bemoaned: computer science is not software engineering.

If you're interested in algorithmic development and the actual _theory_ of
computer science, you'll probably enjoy most four-year degree programs in that
area. If, however, you're studying computer science because you want to write
software -- and that's what matters to you -- you're probably going to be
frustrated that the coursework veers more strongly towards the theoretical.

I think that most college degrees are more about showing some sort of
credential for inexperienced people than providing solid value in and of
themselves, but I also don't think they're completely useless. It really
depends what you're trying to do.

~~~
WalterSear
It's worse. I know someone who came out of a 4 year CS degree, knowing only
php, because that's as new-fangled a technology as their professors were
willing to bother to learn. They ended up going to a boot camp in order to
learn how to get anything done.

~~~
michaelchisari
Knowing PHP extremely well would be a great place to start a career.

~~~
michaelbuddy
agreed. some people still think that you should get out of college and be
ready to make 90k in the exact area you studied. That's just not the case with
so many areas of study. You can make your way into some sort of company or
agency or partner up with a fellow student and start to consult. You might
only make 35k for a while but that's how it works. If people know that going
in, they probably would budget how they will spend on college in the first
place a little better. Maybe they woulnd't accumulate 100k of debt if they
knew they'd only be making 32k for the first couple years and have to buy a
vechicle on top of that.

~~~
WalterSear
In other words, it's a terrible place to start a career in software
engineering.

------
twblalock
I think that stuff like this and code boot camps, rather than online distance
learning, is the real threat to traditional higher education.

In my time in academia, I was always struck by how uncomfortable academics
were with the idea of university educations being vocational training, rather
than education "for its own sake." It's a nice ideal, but almost all students,
especially those in STEM fields, are in college to improve their career
prospects. But academics are mainly focused on replicating themselves, i.e.
focusing on teaching things that are useful to students who plan to attend
graduate school in the field, but not useful to the majority of students who
do not. This is how we end up with CS grads who can implement obscure data
structures they will never use in industry but cannot do practical things like
use version control or continuous integration, or write good unit tests.

For someone who wants to work in a technical field, I think new programs like
this one, or like code boot camps, are becoming increasingly attractive as
college tuition becomes more expensive and student loans become more
burdensome. If employers are willing to hire graduates of these programs,
traditional universities will have trouble attracting students. And they
should.

~~~
eachro
I have yet to meet a CS graduate from a decent school who hasn't been able to
learn version control or write good unit test cases in less than a week.

~~~
strathmeyer
I haven't met a company hiring CS graduates that thinks they can easily learn
things; they expect their future employees to have experience with all of
their technologies already.

What's scary is that nobody has any clue how to get programming jobs with a CS
degree except to get really lucky like they did.

~~~
fredkbloggs
A CS degree from where? I am sure there are colleges out there that teach CS
as mathematics, but in my experience that's very uncommon. Most graduates I've
met have done at least some programming using real hardware and software and
have been taught how to connect the abstract math to real applications. Not
all are qualified to work as engineers, but I don't believe a different course
of study would have been them any moreso.

~~~
strathmeyer
I went to CMU. We built operating systems in C on SunOS machines. Never seen
anything but Microsoft, Java, and Oracle in the real world.

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jasonwilk
Getting tired of these posts. It is so easy to say college is irrelevant. At a
high level, it is a mostly generalized education that of course can no longer
guarantee success due to the sheer amount of people who now obtain a degree.

However, college is still relevant. A smart man once told me that college is a
place to learn how to learn. Managing a schedule, living on your own,
succeeding in courses that you are not passionate about, showing up on time
and just overall having your shit together are things you will need to be
successful in real life.

Unless you have ambitions of being a sys admin for life straight out of high
school, then maybe you should save your $$. Even then, I'd still probably go
to college. It's 4 years that you'll never forget for better or worse.

~~~
xiaoma
> A smart man once told me that college is a place to learn how to learn.

Good point. People such as Steve Jobs, Michael Faraday, John Carmack, Ernest
Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday,
Srinivasa Ramanujan and others like them should have just ponied up the money
and _learned how to learn_! One can only imagine how much better the world
would have been.

~~~
sjg007
These are outliers by definition.

------
codingdave
College did give me valuable analytic skills that I do see lacking in some
coders who did not continue on to higher education. I'm sure some people can
gain those same skills without college, but not all do.

So college is certainly not required. But I think writing off as irrelevant is
being overly dismissive of what it does offer.

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spitfire
This is a disaster in the making.

In first year economics you learn about opportunity cost. The classic example
is a student straight out of HS taking a job at McDonalds because it pays now,
vs going to university and delaying earning money for a better future
potential.

But most of all, these are vocational training which won't be of value 15
years through your career. A CS degree will teach you how to think and
fundamental skills that will still be of value 30 years from now.

~~~
IndianAstronaut
> CS degree will teach you how to think and fundamental skills that will still
> be of value 30 years from now.

Work experience can teach you how to think. Imho, my work and hands on
experience, as well as mentoring, have taught me much better how to think than
a degree.

------
rbanffy
I was once turned down because I am an engineer (EE) and not a CS grad. Your
mileage varies wildly. It all depends on what kind of product you want to work
on. If you're going to write web front ends, CS may be overkill. If you are
going to write an OS or a search engine, it won't be. If you are planning on
writing guidance software for rockets, CS may not be enough.

~~~
Kalium
The catch being that it's very difficult to anticipate multiple decades of
career from the very start. You might not plan to do something, but that
doesn't mean you won't change your mind later.

I've known people who cannot advance their careers in the ways they want
because their lack of education stands in their way. It's very frustrating for
them.

~~~
rbanffy
I should probably have added a "and right now you have no idea which one it'll
be for you" to the end. Because I'd never image I'd be once more writing data
center automation tools just 2 years ago. And, when I started, there was no
such thing as a data center.

------
justinlardinois
Saying college is "irrelevant" in tech is a bit of an exaggeration. There are
certainly plenty of people who have done well without college, and a lot of
companies have picked up a reputation for not caring about college (Google is
the first that comes to mind).

If you can learn to develop software on your own and put together a portfolio
that shows your skills, good for you. But a lot of people aren't self-
starters, and even if they are, a college degree does carry an air of
certification with it that's hard for a programmer with no professional
experience to attain.

There's also the issue that plenty of companies still _do_ think you're
useless if you didn't go to college; just go browse any job board.

I agree that it's possible to get into the industry without a CS degree, but
when in doubt, go to college.

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grandalf
The main benefit is meeting smart people (assuming you go to such a college).
The next benefit is that you can get structured coursework to teach you things
that you might have trouble self-teaching.

The costs are high: Not everyone who is there should be, many courses are
needlessly competitive and one must waste time over-preparing just to be
competitive. Student loans.

I'd actually recommend doing a startup first for about 2 years and then going
to college after so that you can make proper use of it (and of course drop out
if necessary).

~~~
forgetsusername
> _I 'd actually recommend doing a startup first for about 2 years_

You really recommend that someone fresh out of high school should start a
business? With essentially zero real-world experience? What "problem" is it
that they're going to solve with a startup?

If college isn't right for them out of high school, how about they get a job?
That way they can earn some money and learn some social skills that are vital
to functioning in our society.

~~~
grandalf
Consider the reasons why people attend college:

\- to get into professional school

\- to get hired by a large firm

\- to get into a PhD program

If you are entrepreneurial, none of those apply and may actually be
distractions.

A few years in the trenches of a startup (yours or someone else's) will help
clarify what the goal of the education will be, and also what kinds of
activities and groups to join.

If the startup is successful, defer college a bit, if not (as is most often
the case) start school with a keen appreciation of what you plan to get out of
the experience, or if you are hoping to explore ideas, do so with a bit more
realistic an idea of what execution will be like.

------
sandworm101
College is needed. College is needed because US highschools are horrible.

I see too many people in the tech community with zero useful communication
skills. They don't know how to speak properly let alone write properly. The
documents they produce are gibberish. Sure, they can spin up a cloud server
and get it doing something useful, but they are totally unable to explain what
they are doing to others. They then claim this lack of communication is rooted
in those other people lacking tech knowledge.

College, university, provides bedrock standards through which educated people
communicate effectively. Reading Shakespeare in english 101 isn't going to
help you compile a new app, but it will help you communicate with someone on
the other side of the planet who also studied Shakespeare in some other
classroom. The ability to articulate not general feelings but specifics
communicable to others without mistranslation is a skill very much lacking in
the tech world.

~~~
TheCowboy
I think there are a lot of different problems mixed into this.

Part of this is social skills. This seems to break down starting in junior
high, where a civil and comfortable environment for children to interact can
be seen as an exception, or only available to a segment of the kids.

Then you have the challenge of explaining highly technical topics, where the
knowledge is changing, to people where you simply do not know their starting
point and ability to understand new concepts as they are introduced. It's
probably closer to the challenge a teacher has when explaining a foreign topic
to students.

Social skills and social maturity are just as important for talking to people
about technology as they are for thriving in a college environment. Especially
at elite colleges, if kids don't know the rules of the game, they will not
enjoy the full benefits of education.

I think college also fails to be a great melting pot and social fuser as it
could be when you look at retention and dropout rates, and the social
backgrounds of who primarily benefits. I can appreciate Shakespeare, but I
think trying to teach that (or another topic in the same spirit) as the
solution is just doing more of the same, and it doesn't work. Or at least it's
not as effective as other approaches might be.

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sjg007
Well yes and no. Data science jobs are gated by newly minted PhDs. Software
Engineering jobs are gated by CS grads who quiz entirely on Algorithms and
data structures. You can get a job outside of this but it is becoming more
difficult because of self selection.

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sarika008
I feel like this is just on the line of being a scheme, or being totally
relevant to today's workforce. Which is what makes it fascinating.

------
hockeybias
I received a Fine Art major with a business minor decades ago. After college I
attended a six month program at a school in San Francisco called the 'Computer
Learning Center' and learned COBOL and Assembly. I have learned a number of
other languages since and write code today for a living.

I loved attending a liberal arts college (The University of Puget Sound). The
education I received there enriches my work life and non-work life a great
deal.

If you are interested in CS today, I think that getting a CS degree at a
liberal arts college would represent a wonderful combo platter of useful
skills and broad-based knowledge of the humanities and other non '1s and 0s'
subjects.

