Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kalium | Hacker News Reader

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The difference between having a job in programming and having a career in programming is your grasp of the fundamentals of computing. This is because the ability of a person to learn new technologies and techniques is largely a function of their grasp of fundamentals. Fundamentals that bootcamps uniformly skip over in the interests of getting to experience faster.

In the abstract, it is of course fully, completely, and totally possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing. Jobs where relational calculus is taught in the office are, I suspect, similarly rare.

Bootcamp skills are only useful so long as the person never needs to learn a different paradigm, learn significantly different technologies that require thinking differently, move into a different type of programming, or desires significant technical career advancement. Those things require a mix of fundamental knowledge and experience.

Does that make sense?

I feel like you're taking an elitist position... I've heard this applied to professionals at every level of education. A quick find-and-replace applied to your comment follows.

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The difference between having a job in programming and having a career in programming is your grasp of the fundamentals of computing. This is because the ability of a person to learn new technologies and techniques is largely a function of their grasp of fundamentals.

Fundamentals that Undergraduate Computer Science Programs uniformly skip over in the interests of getting to experience faster.

In the abstract, it is of course fully, completely, and totally possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing. Jobs where Recent Developments in Deep Learning at Stanford are taught in the office are, I suspect, similarly rare.

Undergraduate Computer Science skills are only useful so long as the person never needs to learn a different paradigm, learn significantly different technologies that require thinking differently, move into a different type of programming, or desires significant technical career advancement. Those things require a mix of fundamental knowledge and experience.

Does that make sense?

I've been accused of elitism before on this subject.

Let me tell you about a person who did so. This person wanted to help the team design database schemas. This person did not have a background with strong computer science fundamentals and did not understand relational calculus. The person struggled to contribute, ultimately becoming a drag on the schema design process. When offered educational materials on the subject of relational calculus that would have addressed this lack of knowledge, using them was quickly given up as too difficult. This person was thus sharply limited, and extremely frustrated, by their lack of Undergraduate Computer Science fundamentals.

Your find-and-replace is only meaningful if you treat "Undergraduate Computer Science" as a string literal with no semantic meaning.

Elitist is not the same as wrong. Medical education is pretty elitist too. That doesn't mean I want to designate everyone who owns a knife as a surgeon. Should I find-and-replace your comment to the tune of s/elitist/populist/, on the assumption that elitism == bad and populism == good?

And before you say that we're just programmers and thus not dealing with life-critical things like doctors are, I refer you to the case of Therac-25.

>> possible for a person to learn this independently or on the job. In practice, that is sufficiently rare as to not be worth discussing.

Is this because people don't really feel a strong need to learn this, because they manage to find their next job ? or because it's impossible to learn alone(even with the help of mooc's and the like) ?

I suspect both, as well as time constraints and lack of an educational environment, are at work.

It's not impossible to learn, say, discrete math on your own. But it is sufficiently difficult that many who attempt will either fail or quit in frustration.

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