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Comment by alpha_squared | Hacker News Reader

As someone with a CS degree, most of the people I know with CS degrees are not very good developers. This is regardless of schools, as my anecdotal experience includes people from ivy leagues. The strongest developers I've met and worked with often come from other STEM fields or, interestingly enough, philosophy backgrounds.

Again, purely anecdotal, but it is 20 years of anecdotal experience across a very broad range of industries.

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Becoming a good developer was nowhere in the curriculum at the CS program I attended, unfortunately. It still had some interesting topics. I think the profession evolved too quickly for an academic curriculum to cover anything relevant.

Nowadays I hope the CS curriculum explicitly disregards whatever the standard industry code factory meta is, since from the outside it appears to be soulless and dehumanizing. Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?

> Who wants to take 101: Hit Approve all day on your 20 claude terminals?

Obviously put all 20 in tmux sessions and have a monitor agent do the approvals.

The meta has changed in 6 months so the university is investing millions of dollars to design a new 101 course: Hit approve all day on the agent which should be taking your job any time soon.

Classical developers IME can’t properly abstract their way out of a paper bag. They’ll draw semantic boundaries everywhere but where they belong usually following tech and tradition instead of properly reasoning about it. They are generally unable to see beyond an inch of their nose and think the business comprises 75-90% software dev and don’t see how their activity is actually the tiniest insignificant wiggle in the grand scheme of things (“the suits are just there to act important”). “Don’t see further than your nose is long” they say in Dutch.

I think philosophy is an excellent match for development, certainly now with AI.

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