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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

> College will not prepare you for the job

I'm on the fence. Not initially, sure. But there are embedded lessons that click later.

I was ten years into my career before I needed to write a b-tree or a double ended linked list, but when the need arose I was very grateful for having the ability to recognize it, and the familiarity to act on it.

Some things I learned such as the wonderful value of pure functions just didn't click for about as long. I'd done a ton of Scheme in College and at the time it was nothing but a frustration "Just let me mutate state, this is dumb" it wasn't until I had years of tracking down what the heck was mutating state in a giant old code base that I learned to appreciate functional programming.

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Do you need college for that, though? I don't have one and still know how to implement a double-linked list, trees, tries, hash maps and what to test for when implementing binary search[^1]. Just keep your eyes open.

[^1]: https://blog.research.google/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-ab...

If anything, I miss the linear algebra drills the most.

I was a self taught programmer for close to a decade before going back for a degree and I’ve been working for almost a decade since finishing.

Unlike self teaching, a degree forces you to learn the boring bits as well as the interesting stuff. When I was self taught, I’d flitter around and pick up fun pieces here and there, but with no real focus.

Some people are disciplined enough to teach themselves the equivalent of a 4 year CS degree. Most are not.

And there are people I’ve worked with, without degrees who are far better programmers than I am. But they still tended to have some gaps. I’m fairly certain they’d be even better with a degree.

if you learn the same material, then obviously no. there are open source cs degrees and by nature everything is accessible online.

but you're almost guaranteed to encounter DS&A courses in college which gives you a base level of understanding.

someone self-taught might not.

It's also very valuable to have a shared frame of reference with colleagues so you can communicate more efficiently. Saying things like "this is like backpressure" instead of having to explain the entire concept is very valuable.

I'm not degreed, been working with and for PhD's, people with and without degrees for 3 decades including several stints at valley startups and never heard anyone use the term backpressure outside of a mechanical engineering context.

It's a term in queuing theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpressure_routing

The best college courses taught me more than my jobs ever did. Creating my own iPhone app and reimplementing rowhammer stand out. The app I sold and reimplementing rowhammer required me to learn about C, assembly and CPU architecture fast. It gave me a mindset that still serves me. And sometimes it allows me to pentest my employer because I smell a vulnerability.

The average college course, yea not great…

>I'm on the fence. Not initially, sure. But there are embedded lessons that click later.

College can give you a great baseline to build upon. I can't tell you the number of developers with 10 years experience and a degree that I've interviewed who could't explain what database normalization was.

Having said that, the vast, vast, vast majority of stuff I know I learned "on the streets."

I can't remember what I did in CS in college. College was fun and there was a ton of interesting stuff in general, but that's just 1 or 2 years worth of learning compared to working full time for a decade or more after that.

Even on the purely theoretical side I think I learned BNF or design patterns on the job. Same for algorithms, you'll see a lot more going through react's inner workings than sitting in CS courses.

OTOH you don't need 5 years and $50K debt to learn these basics.

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