> What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college?
> I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic commentary
Please edit this sort of name-calling and abrasiveness out of your comments to HN. It breaks the site rules, degrades the discussion, and provokes worse. Your comment would be much better without it.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11732185.
The question is "why do you move moderated comments from where they were to the top level?".
It's not that four years of study guarantees capability, but four years of study does mean far more exposure to far more technology and methodologies than a 12-week bootcamp can offer.
In my experience, boot-camp and self-taught developers have a different set of skills from a CS graduate. The former could well be very effective at lots of development tasks - but I have found that knowledge is often shallow, in that while they may practically know about, say, implementing a web application in Rails, they would struggle with a different toolset.
This is obviously not always the case, and there are many talented self-learners out there, in part because they aren't as lazy as the somewhat more entitled CS graduate. But contrary to the popular trope, I have rarely if ever encountered a CS graduate who can't code.
Even so, given the top 10% of their respective classes i'd easily take the CS grads over the bootcampers. Mid tier could go either way. Bottom tier i'd take the bootcampers.
That said, bootcamps (at least the ones with good reputations) are usually much more aggressive than colleges are about kicking out students who can't do the work or have serious attitude problems. So the floor is probably higher when it comes to bootcamp grads vs. CS grads.
Of course, it may well be that much of what you learn in all that extra time in a CS department is not that important to the typical working programmer. And many people pick up a knack for abstract thought somewhere other than a CS program.
I'm sure it's also true that a CS education often fails in instilling the deep knowledge of the topic that it is designed to. Lots of students are just not that bright, or don't do the work. And sure, selection bias surely has some effect. But it doesn't change the basic fact that you can learn more stuff in four years than you can in three months.
The fact that you consider yourself to be superior to most of the CS grads you've met is just the worst kind of anecdotal evidence. (Did you also do a lot better than the bootcamp grads you worked alongside? How do you know you aren't just more competent than the average student in either program? How do you know that the CS grads you've worked with are representative.) Meanwhile, the very post you're commenting on presents real data to suggest that, whole bootcamp students are just as good as CS students for most practical purposes, they typically lag far behind on knowledge/understanding of algorithms and data structures.
I really don't mean any of this as an insult. I have no doubt that you really are more talented than most CS grads. And in your case (and perhaps in many other cases!) perhaps it really was a smart move to save your money and skip college. But you've given the rest of us very little reason to think that your experience generalizes.
And by the way...
> Four years of school + the associated debt creates a big incentive to believe that you got a square deal out of college.
You could say the same thing about not going to college.
(I myself do not have a CS degree.)
> I've spent my career (no CS degree!) working alongside CS grads. I've gone further, faster, than most of them.
So we should replace selection bias for confirmation bias?
It's hard to read your reply as anything but reactionary and defensive, given that you paint the stance of the original comment as far more pro-college than it comes off as to me, only to knock it down with an anecdote about yourself. The original comment was about boot camps vs colleges, not colleges vs work experience and self-taught people. A twelve week course is not a substitute for four years, even if it is intensive. There's just not enough time to reflect on what you've done or be exposed to enough different concepts in depth to be equivalent.
That's not to say that experience doesn't trump both. You have experience. which accounts for your skill level. College and boot camps both try to impart experience at an accelerated pace, college just attempts to be broader and deeper over a longer period, while boot camps must necessarily by very narrow due to their length, any increase in the breadth of topics will necessarily reduce depth.
> CS grads are always surprised that I never got a degree
Then I imagine you are referring to fresh graduates. From my experience, there's quite a high percentage of non-CS people who do software engineering, you quickly learn to drop your preconceptions lest you be continually shown ignorant. I don't blame college graduates for this, they've yet to experience most of the world.
Will Hunting was right about a library card, but many -- I think most -- people require the discipline imposed on them by a university setting to actually do the work. Obviously -- obviously! -- you can learn this stuff on your own. But I doubt there are many self-taught programmers who've actually spent hours drawing out trees and solving recurrences and so on. To the extent that you've done that, then hooray for you!
Recently, a guy named Haseeb made some news for scoring a job worth $250K at Airbnb even though he was an English major who was not even a year removed from his bootcamp entry date. People were pissed but if you read the guy's story, you'd see that he's not your regular bootcamper...he was a millionaire as a teenager after teaching himself how to play poker...and this is how he describes his bootcamp experience:
http://haseebq.com/farewell-app-academy-hello-airbnb-part-ii...
> Entering into App Academy, barely knowing the basics of Ruby, I came into the office and grinded every day, spending 80+ hour weeks just coding and studying. I’d come in at 9AM in the morning and leave around midnight, 7 days a week, sleeping in a bunk bed in SOMA in a 200 square feet shared room.
How many students at even the best colleges can describe themselves as working that hard on anything (well, other than athletes)?
I am a self-taught programmer that has done exactly this. What good is reading the material if you don't pound some of that stuff into your brain? I never did homework in school, but I have done tons of it for myself.
I'd like to believe there's a trend where CS grads think that because they got their degree, they're done learning. I have a handful of friends — with their CS degree — who did exactly this.
But when you're self-taught, it's often out of a mix of passion and curiosity, and sometimes desperation ("man if I could just automate this, I'd have a killer startup!").
While I've spent only a few minutes in a post-secondary classroom, I think it'd be hard to find those qualities in the minds of students.
I consider myself self-taught, I just happened to do a lot of it during a 4-year period. I'm pretty grateful to my school, whose premise is basically: "we're just going to set you up on some smart teams in some difficult situations. Learn your way out of it."
There's nothing inherently wrong with CS degrees, since you can basically learn whatever you want while getting one, but they don't mean anything either.
Not that spending four years at college is a guarantee you understand it, plenty of people don't. But all else being equal, it's a higher probability.
I studied history and philosophy in college/grad school.
my first job in computers was 13 at a local college and I got so much crap from the it team there for being too young and not having enough experience even though I was hired because nobody there could write code well enough to parse dirty data from spreadsheets to pass into spss.
most of my family has a degree and some even teach, but I found it tedious and uninformative and always ended up the teachers pet, helping fellow students, which was fun, but I wanted answers to My questions.
I found the best way for me to learn is complete immersion in a subject, 24/7, read about it, write about it, if it's a language write in it, if it's a technology use it for everything possible and potentially possible. at the outset if you can get answers to the starting questions then that is useful (like training), but once you move out of the basics, in my experience, you will only progress to higher levels by answering your own hard to answer questions, and if it's easy to find answers to your questions, you're not there yet.
break things all day long and then fix them has been my learning mantra for many many years and like the parent poster, I've surpassed pretty much everyone who I've known with a degree in CS.
// The ELK stack is pretty sweet.
Parent made the point that "All those concepts that they teach in CS isn't about knowing the name of an algorithm, it's about thinking abstractly."
The point is that making that sort of sweeping generalization is harmful to everyone. Parent is implying that there's a secret skill set that can exclusively be unlocked by getting a CS degree. I think we can all agree that as a categorical statement is plainly false.
These statements encourage people to not look at the individual but instead rely on a set of biased and unquantified assumptions.
// P.S. glad you like the ELK stack :)
Honestly, getting all three: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, all wired up is really straight forward. It's even easier if you use AWS's built in elasticsearch service.
I used ELK to analyze my nginx logs, and it worked really well, and now that logstash-forwarder is replaced by Beats, its even more reliable.
What, they bred the capacity for abstract thought into you in college?
College attracts a generally higher quality applicant pool. You're mistaking selection bias for an effect.
Let me tell you, I've interviewed programmers from all over. There are boatloads of people with CS degrees with close to zero capacity for creative thinking. There are also boatloads of CS grads who can barely code their way out of a while loop (true story!).
I've spent my career (no CS degree!) working alongside CS grads. I've gone further, faster, than most of them. I've had to deal with this kind of idiotic commentary over and over again.
CS grads are always surprised that I never got a degree (oh, I never would have guessed! you're different, its those OTHER people without degrees who are idiots). Four years of school + the associated debt creates a big incentive to believe that you got a square deal out of college.