I would like to meet the person who knows everything! I have met some 20 years olds who think they know everything! But as the old saying goes, "The more I learn the less I know"

Having two kids getting their CS degrees right now at top 50 colleges.

I am not impressed.

A friend of my son goes to UNFS (North Carolina State Film School). For four years he makes films. After the first year he has to choose between photography, directing, writing, etc. Then he spends 3 year fine tuning his craft. Great program!

CS Programs seem to be a little of this and a little of that, none of it coordinated. Quality is teaching is varied, occasional a great teacher or TA, much more frequently poor teachers or TAs.

I remember seeing at 14/15 some of my older cousins course notes form his computing course at UMIST (one of the 4 good places to do computing then) - and thought this isn't much different to what I am doing in my CSE class (and CSE's where the vocational track for those expected to leave high school at 16

I'm also self-taught, but I don't see a degree as valueless. There's a lot of concentrated knowledge to be had in a hurry from a good (probably even a decent) program, and while I've yet to run into a case where I could not pick up what I needed on the fly, I certainly have many times felt it would be an enormous timesaver, and thus make me more efficiently able to do things I enjoy doing and that get me paid, to have had that knowledge preloaded.

On the other hand, I didn't start my adult life a few dozen grand into the red with student loan debt, which, from what I gather through long acquaintance with many who did, has very considerable advantages of its own. So I'd have to call it a tradeoff - but, then, that's my whole point: it's not accurate to say that either option is strictly preferable to the other.

I'm self taught (as in, I've taught myself a lot outside of school, in fact I left school early and only finished my degree after several years in the industry), and I still learned quite a bit from my computer science degree.

It forced me to study a wide variety of things I probably wouldn't have spent much time on if on my own (i.e. OS programming, making my own compiler, prolog, finite automata, assembly programming, etc).

Also did A.I., 3d graphics, network programming, and various other things, but I probably would have learned that on my own to a certain point (I developed video games for awhile).

I enjoyed enough of those topics to know what I'm bad at. Video games are culmination of all those things, yet terrible at risk/reward.

> yet terrible at risk/reward

Pretty much. Managed to work on about eight games in a row that didn't make back their investment for three separate companies while I was in the game industry. They failed for various reasons, and a few of them really should have been successful, in my opinion, but oh well. Bad timing (releasing at the same time as heavy hitters), bad marketing, bad luck with reviewers, getting screwed by platform holders, aiming at the wrong audience, bad choice of difficulty, bad choice of which idea to pursue, technical issues that weren't in the testing environment and not discovered until release, overly restrictive and expensive update patching policies with platform holders, all sorts of fun reasons.

I assume you are talking about US undergraduate degree (if not, can you clarify). If so, most good colleges give you ample opportunities for additional learning -- go to grad classes, do research -- those avenues are usually very easy to open.

I probably agree that for each student at least one of those 4 years is usually wasted; but this is different than whole program being a waste for a person.

Yes the US undergraduate degree. I have gotten into some research and got picked up for an exceptional internship which have been good. It doesn't change that I could have passed out of all the actual curriculum on day one though.

I guess "community taught" would be better than "self taught" since I learned from so many people online. But I had been programming for 10 years before school, and while I was in the military (over 6 years) I took advantage of many MOOCs from MIT, Stanford, UNSW, etc. and many books from Knuth to most of the No Starch Press library which I understand is not the case for traditional students. It is frustrating though, especially not being just out of high school.

If you're taking MOOCs from MIT, Stanford, UNSW and others can you really say that university CS curricula taught you nothing? They probably taught you quite a bit since, well, you took their courses.

You were just overprepared for an undergraduate degree by the time you got around to trying for it. For anyone else taking a similar path, specifically the military part, you can often knock out an associates degree with that amount of military experience. Do it, you can skip most of the core curriculum and focus on the CS part and be done in 2-3 years (less if summer courses are available) and be in grad school in your 3rd or 4th your of full-time college education.

I'm sure you don't know everything. Looking at your profile, I see the words "technician" so I am thinking you were trained at some point.

Yes the Navy "trained" me by saying "here are 20,000 pages of documentation on the E-2 Airborne Early Warning aircraft avionics, now go fix it".

That has nothing to do with my CS studies, of which I have learned nothing from college and could have CLEPed a BS degree on day one if it was possible and moved on to a masters where I should have been initially placed.

> I'm sure you don't know everything.

I never claimed I knew everything.

At least they didn't treat you to a two-week-long PowerPoint presentation.

...on the previous version of the system.

...the month before the training was updated to the most recently fielded version.

...taught by a retired Army guy.

...from Texas.

...who won't stop telling stories about his Army days.

Hey, what's wrong with Texas?

You ever notice how most people never tell you what state they're from unless you ask them? It's almost like they don't believe their state of origin to be all that important to their personal identity. Some of those people might even be from Texas.

But the hombre from Texas is not one of those people. He will drive for 30 minutes, past dozens of ordinary, mundane restaurants, to reach the nearest Texas-style barbecue restaurant, run by a fellow expatriate Texan, who shoulders the burden of living outside of Texas for the sake of fellow Texans who tragically cannot be in the best state all the time, yet need to regularly consume bits of Texas in order to survive.

Ironically, Texas has so many people in it, all constantly surrounded on all sides by Texas, that you cannot easily identify that guy until he actually leaves the state.

Also, the thing that's wrong with Texas is football. That is easily 120% of my problem with Texas.

Well, if it's any consolation, right now all their college football programs suck, and suck hard.

It was in fact possible to go straight to a Master’s in Software Engineering.

Oxford’s distance Master’s will take experience in place of a degree.

https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/softeng/

Is it still possible somewhere, somehow?

Yes, the programme is still open, and will be for tyhe foreseeable future.

How many classes did you take in college? Because my first few CS classes I didn't learn a whole lot from either. It wasn't really until the 200 and 300 level classes that I started learning anything substantial that I hadn't picked up on my own beforehand.

I only have a couple classes left. I had already studied it all before starting, materials up to graduate level are mostly available openly online now. I did expect more from the 300-400 level classes and lost a lot of motivation when I realized they were not as advanced as I expected.

I did take some 400 level electives completely outside what I am interested in and had not studied which were great though. One professor for those asked in the beginning what each person expected from and I mentioned what I am actually specializing in and he consistently gave examples of applying it to what I do which was excellent.

If waiting for 2-3 years before you're able to learn anything substantial is considered normal - and we're not talking about monasteries and such - then I think there is something seriously wrong with the system.

I was already writing various types of software, taken a class in high school, gone to summer camps, etc, before I reached freshman year of college. There was plenty of students who had never even touched a programming language before and it was all brand new to them.

And I still learned things my first year (especially in ancillary classes, I only took three computer classes my freshman year), I just didn't get much out of CS classes until sophomore year. One of those classes was a gimme class I really should have tested out of ahead of time in hindsight, though (basically computers 101, I had quizzes on identifying what was the desktop, mouse and monitor).

You should read all the context before stating that this comment thread means the system is broken. Just because extremely self-motivated individuals now have readily available resources to learn almost anything on their own does not mean the system is broken for everyone else.

Less snark about technicians after all someone has to correct the engineers maths or remind them how Ohms law works :-)

I have no college degree, or college classes at all, and have been doing systems engineering/software engineering for about 13 years now. All self taught/learning on the job. While it is nice not to have had college loan debt, I know there are things I may have a better grasp on if I spent months learning a particular topic. In fact, I am jealous of people who actually got to spend time being taught computer science and learning interesting things. I am sure there are topics/approaches/patterns that would be very helpful. Not that I am complaining, things certainly have worked out for me very well, it is just something else that I know would "boost" what I already know. On the flip side, I know of one job that was a very short interview, as they said they could only offer X (which was laughably less than what I was making currently) because I had no degree. What I knew meant very little (to the place, not the interviewers), having the piece of paper meant more. You could say "their loss" but on the flip side, I have no idea what opportunities I have missed because of it.