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itamarbd1

If you want to create web apps go to online courses.

If you really want to understand how machines work, how strings work.

How distributed computing works

How databases work

How to program efficient string search

How regular expressions work

How to represent problems well for example in graph

How statistics works

How to analyze problems

How to read papers

How to be able to learn anything by your own

And the list goes on and on

It's all in real college University courses no online course would give that to you.

You have to focus on theory of math and cs for a couple of years and stretch and train your mind.

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I’m a senior engineer at one of the big tech companies. Sharing that because that’s all I have to back my opinion.

I don’t agree with you. I don’t think you need a four year degree for these concepts. I think many of the concepts you outline are very critical especially as you work on larger and more complex systems. However I’m not even convinced college does a good job at teaching these concepts. College introduce me to some of them but didn’t actually help me build any intuition at all. I regurgitated the things my professor said and that’s how I pass through my courses with straight A’s. I didn’t really understand distributed systems until I worked on them. I didn’t really understand them well until I read about distributed systems not from a textbook but by other people who had worked on them and this was mostly online papers or YouTube videos or conference videos where are companies presenting on their lessons learned.

I think the course of the classes you need for a computer science curriculum such as data structures, algorithms, operating systems, networks, languages and compilers, databases and distributed systems - These can all be self taught. I’m not convinced a four year degree that’s full of fluff with various elective courses adds any value.

You can literally read four books and get all those concepts. You won't be an expert in them, but taking a college course on them won't make you one either.

> It's all in real college University courses no online course would give that to you.

I learned all of what you enumerated online, usually practically applied too. This is not something you have to go to a university to learn.

Granted, I wasn't following a MOOC or a bootcamp - I just kept reading, and digging in deeper, and asking questions and practicing on my own.

Yeah, but you're not representative of most people. And the same applies to those who are in the top 10% and claim college education is useless - they're not representative of most people. Folks who now have a job because they have a college degree most likely wouldn't have one if they didn't go to college.

It's rare for someone to have so much self motivation. School environment forces you to learn those things without the burden of having to be so self motivated.

Yeah, I started off super into self-learning, even before the whole MOOC thing took off. I loved the MIT Open Courseware courses in high school, and I even really liked the central thesis of Illich's Deschooling Society.

Then I started tutoring and teaching. That's when I realized that I'm an extreme outlier. Most people are not particularly motivated and won't put in the hours upon hours of struggle.

The average experience of learning CS in university is just completely alien if you teach yourself how to program as a child. The biggest differences is the emotional labor. There are lots of things that my students would describe as "frustrating" that I have literally never thought of as frustrating (e.g., reading compiler errors). I think it's similar to learning a new language as an adult vs. as a small child.

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