

Want to be a software engineer? Go to university - abrimo
http://blog.mijura.com/post/12761772819

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JakeOnRails
"Anyone can learn to write code but they will never be a Software Engineer or
a Computer Scientist. They won’t be able to design large scale financial
systems, search engines or contribute to the next powerful programming
language."

I wonder what the author thinks about all of the computer scientists who
pioneered the industry before there were universities teaching computer
science?

~~~
ChuckMcM
Well if you've ever taken a university class where they 'take you through' the
topic, which is to say along the path that discoveries were made and then
updated, you realize that they learned stuff originally that was wrong, and
really smart people went off on really wild tangents that were a waste of time
(sometimes provably). So going through a solid college program on engineering
should 'move you through' the mistakes to get you close to state of the art,
with an understanding of _why_ those were mistakes, and why things are done
the way they are now, and how to evaluate your progress with some tools like
complexity analysis and to figure out how to break what seems like an
impossible problem into achievable segments.

Good college students learn to ask a lot of questions and to learn from the
answers.

That being said, people who don't 'go to school' but have a 'learning
lifestyle' (which is to say always curious, always reading, always tinkering
with a variety of ideas) can get just as good as any university student can.
The challenge for them is to convince an employer that they are in fact well
educated on the topics and tools they will be expected to use to do their job.
If they start their own company, well they don't really have to convince
anyone since the results speak for themselves.

