

Hackathons Taking Center Stage, The Transformation Of The Computer Scientist - gailees
http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/15/with-hackathons-taking-center-stage-the-coming-transformation-of-the-computer-scientist/#

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angersock
So, part of the annoying thing about this is that "computer science" as billed
at any university is a product so diluted in quality and standards that it's a
crapshoot to see if somebody with a CS degree is good at anything you need.

Assuming a competent student and good curriculum, CS at a school could mean
either theoretical computer science (computability, graphics), computer
engineering (OS design, networking, HPC), security, software engineering (how
to structure large projects, design and documentation in depth), or even
applied math (crypto, numerical methods).

It _usually_ means some blend of the above.

And for all of that, the things that are most financially lucrative these days
don't require anything other than the ability to read the fucking manual and
bolt together your favorite ruby gems or node packages and then apply a pretty
design to it.

Hackathons are a really good way of getting students exposed to the state-of-
the-art in our industry and getting them out of their comfort zones in a
controlled environment where they can fail freely.

All that said, it's still a bummer to see a full panel of toy mobile apps.
Then again, we all had to start somewhere.

~~~
delluminatus

      And for all of that, the things that are most financially 
      lucrative these days don't require anything other than the 
      ability to read the fucking manual and bolt together your 
      favorite ruby gems or node packages and then apply a pretty 
      design to it.
    

This is simply untrue... financially lucrative things almost always have to be
highly scalable, very robust, and implement functionality that is not "in the
manual". Making a trivial webapp is easy; making one that implements useful
functionality and scales to millions of users is not so easy.

~~~
angersock
Scaling is a problem that happens once you get users, and by that point you
can pay real engineers to solve your scaling problems. Scaling is a phantom
bugaboo used by engineers to help massage their egos that some punk-nosed kid
is kicking their ass at capitalism using Ruby or PHP or Node or Perl with a
shitty, inferior product...that happens to have more users and mindshare and
potential then that engineer's pet project, oh-so-carefully engineered and
constructed.

If you set out to build Twitter or Faceobook or Snapchat or whatever at scale,
from the start, you're doomed.

But, cranking out a stupid little Rails app with enough hook and flair to get
your initial userbase and attract investors is pretty much just bolting
together gems and bootstrap.

Worse is better, the crowds have spoken.

