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Comment by benvanderbeek | Hacker News Reader

I was just talking to one of my coders about how nothing I have used in my career was learned from my computer science classes.

I guess I'm a "business programmer" - if I'm a programmer at all anymore - I'm not sure. I've definitely never delved into Scheme, Haskell, and OCaml.

I majored in CS, graduated from a California State University in 2002. I focused on getting A's, not learning or connecting w/ people or deciding what I wanted to do w/ my life. I figured I would graduate and a coding job would fall in my lap. Since graduating, I've worked at a real estate franchise, a hedge fund kind of investment place, and now ecommerce.

I don't know how a CS degree from a CSU looks vs UC or ivy league, definitely didn't think about it enough when graduating from high school. But I do know that my degree only directly served to let me pass through a filter to get my first job. And I probably could have had that with a vocational school degree.

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"nothing I have used in my career was learned from my computer science classes."

It must have still been useful, at least as exercise for the mind - I'm sure most people who go to the gym don't need to bench-press 200 pounds in real life too often.

At one time I kind of felt the same way - I had a degree from a good school, and really it seemed like all I got from it was (maybe) increasing the chances that my resume would make its way to someone who could potentially hire me. But the longer I've been in the software development world, the more I've seen its value to me.

The school I went to made it really easy to dive into projects, build weird things, talk to brilliant people about idea - in fact often it was hard not to (if you wanted to do well). I really took that for granted. What opened my eyes to that benefit were some of the amazing developers that I've been able to work with since - they did the same things in college, and often they had to really look for those opportunities rather than stumble in on them like I did.

I didn't go to school to learn how to not be afraid to play with (and throw out) ideas, but it's probably the best thing that came out of my degree.

How much did you know about CS before going to college?

Depends what you mean by "know about." I had taken a couple of programming classes. I knew you could write code, compile it, and make a thing that does a thing. I started college as a Computer Engineering major, then realized that really wasn't what I wanted. If I could go back, and if it existed at the time, I'd to informatics.

I ask because if knew nothing going in, you'd learn a fair bit in college.

With that said, I'd programmed since 3rd grade and still learned a fair bit in college that I use to this day. Of course, this was pre-internet, so I think it was generally hard to self-teach. But things I learned in college that I used professionally:

* Data structures. Before college I pretty much used primitives and arrays. In college I learned to make much better use of trees, graphs, sparse matrices.

* OOP. Although in fairness, OOP started to come to life when I was in college. There was no ANSI C at the time :-)

* Compilers. I've since built many compilers, but having taken the sequence certainly made it a lot easier.

* Databases. Never used a relational DB until college. I think it would be fair to say I've made millions off of them since. :-)

* Regular expressions and state machines. This is just ingrained now.

* Vi ... Used Vi exclusively for the first decade of my career.

* Unix ... Used various Unix variants in the first decade of my career as well. Learned most of it in college.

* Architecture and internals -- I've done a fair bit of work at the architectural level, and college is where I laid the foundation for understanding both the architecture (registers, cache, tlbs, pipelines, units, etc..) as well as basic EE. None of which I knew much about before college.

There are plenty more, but these are some examples. Probably my big weakness in going in to college is I did all game programming before college. I understood graphics really well and the game loop, But looking back at some of the code, and it was really horrible. You really shouldn't use arrays for everything :-)

I was exposed to all of that, but 1) haven't used much besides Unix/OOP/Databases since, and 2) feel like I only learned 1% of what I use even in those areas during college.

A lot of it comes back to not having specific goals in college, sliding by like I always did in school.

That, and the excessive my focus on the band I played in. Not that I regret it, but pretty impractical.

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