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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

Talk to us again in 5 years when you've got some experience under your belt and you find out how woefully unprepared school has left you, despite your recent epiphany.

Then talk to us in 10 when you figure out that you could have learned all that same knowledge for free, in less time. Or that you could have been doing a job and someone would PAY you to learn it, and you'd learn even more in even less time.

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As someone who graduated from university while doing summer jobs, I am extremely happy with my education, and I find it useful on a regular basis. Even the physics that I won't be using as a software developer is a great framework that helps me pick up stuff that would have normally been beyond me, and the approach to problems that I picked up there makes many software tasks easier -- either to grasp, or to implement.

As for school itself - it both pointed me in the right direction, making me take classes that were related, useful, and built on each other in a meaningful way. It lead me down the right paths, and the access to professors that were willing to spend time to answer questions and point me in the right direction for further study were invaluable.

Of course school isn't a complete education, but it's a vital component of it.

I agree that university is useful in that it makes you take classes. I was becoming a reasonably competent programmer before I started university, and for every topic that I was interested in, I believe I could have learned it on my own.

I had no interest in database systems; it looked boring to me. My schedule and class requirements had a hole in it, and I took a database class. I'm glad I did.

I did want to learn Lisp, but I wasn't getting my head wrapped around it on my own, and was content to not push myself and just stayed with C. Then I took a language interpretation class and was forced to use Lisp. After a week or so the basic concepts clicked, and now I greatly enjoy Lisp. But I wasn't forcing myself to learn it.

I also ended up studying a bunch of other totally unrelated things that I wouldn't have on my own, at least not any time on the visible horizon: Russian history, economics, Spanish language, development of jazz music, public speaking... and I feel I'm overall better for it, partly because of what I learned in these classes, and partly because it made me realize there are interesting things to learn all over the place, not just in my favorite areas of study.

That said, if I've ever used any of this stuff that I didn't learn on my own in my actual work, I'm not aware of it. But that doesn't mean I'm not happy that I went through university.

Well, it's over 20 years since I graduated with a CS degree that had a strong maths/theory component and I'm pretty happy with what I did. It meant I could go on and do postgraduate work in an engineering department which pretty much directly led to me co-founding a startup with one of my colleagues - before we got VC funding we kept ourselves going for a couple of years largely by writing engineering simulations.

I'm fairly good at picking up new concepts by myself - but could I have taught myself what I learned by being taught and, more importantly, collaborating with some very smart people - I'm pretty sure, for me, the answer to that is no.

Did you have programming experience before your cs degree? I am thinking about gOing into cs now to help switch my career track and want to know if it's wOrth it. Thanks for your post.

A bit - some Apple II Basic and 6502 assembler at high school. Just enough to know that I really enjoyed developing software.

The CS course I did provided almost no "training" in the practicalities of software development - you had to do a lot of development to pass the courses but you were pretty much expected to pick up sensible development habits by yourself, we never had any classes in it.

Talk to us again in 5 years when you've got some experience under your belt and you find out how woefully unprepared school has left you...

Then talk to us in 10 when you figure out that you could have learned all that same knowledge for free, in less time...

I graduated from college 34 years ago and I will talk to you now...

College is not about getting prepared, learning facts, acquiring things, or being thrifty or efficient in doing so. College is about becoming a bigger and better you. It's not the only way, but it's a pretty good one.

I have never taken a CS or programming class. I have taught myself almost everything I've ever learned about about building software and businesses. None of the "stuff" I needed came from college, but I'd like to think that college played a fundamental role in helping become the person I needed to be.

On one hand, I have always been concerned about the giant chasm between academia and the real world. On the other hand, I would never discourage anyone from starting and finishing college. Take advantage of this great time to shape your future. You may never have such an opportunity again.

I'm of the school of thought that says there should be a giant (but not too giant, mind) chasm between academia and the real world. The whole bloody thing falls apart when universities make feeble attempts to offer vocational education.

Only speaking for myself... It's hard trying to learn stuff at a startup (in depth) and get sh*t done. A startup will consume most of your waking life. What you will learn will most likely be related to what you have to get done at the moment and it's a smattering of things. There are some very useful things you can learn in depth at school that you can't learn while at a job. Like cmpt theory/math theory. You can't efficiently learn that stuff while trying to crank out ruby code/javascript for something that must be done YESTERDAY. School is a less-stressful, structured environment for thinking deeply about stuff. Yes, you can learn stuff on your own but it's better to have access to mentors/coaches/peers available for guiding you in your studies. A school is the easiest way to get access to such a community. If you're learning Lisp at school you'll have 20 peers and a mentor to talk to.

Having been 10 years out of college I guess I can provide some insight. Just some background: I went to a top tier CS school in the Bay Area and graduated in 2000.

At 5 years out of school (2005),it was nearing the end of the dark times (bubble burst). I didn't feel unprepared for school. I felt overwhelmed by the economy (or lack of it) and the extent to which outsourcing had really threatened software development jobs in the US.

Finding good jobs wasn't about being or not being prepared. All recent grads had a hard time finding jobs in software and many decided to change directions (law school, MBA, grad school). In fact, I noticed my friends with Master degrees had much easier times getting jobs ... particularly at places like Google. So, in fact, education helped them more.

In 2010, looking back I can say that having a CS degree from a top school has opened many doors for me. I found out about a great job at a cool startup from a friend I went to _school_ with. Even when meeting new people (in a professional sense), alums from my school (and major) tend to be the most open to meeting because they recognize the value of the education we went through.

Just hold up right there. University is free in Slovenia. I'm not paying a thing for all of this :)

I'm also a doing a job on the side, so I can learn to instantly apply the experience.

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