It's only elitist to the extent you believe people who teach themselves are somehow superior. Actual elitism is prioritizing the candidates who can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars at top schools. That's... I mean, it's classic elite. Access to education is a core part of an aristocracy or upper class.

Can't agree enough. I am a autodidact, and am still learning. And really every other week I wish I had a mentor/professor. Even though good books somehow covers up for no teacher. But, you can't just read thousand of books before solving a petty problem and there's where a Professor comes. They provide you with a distillation of years of work and experience. and not to mention the resources available for you at Uni

But your mentor can just be your coworker! That's how many professions have worked for a long time. I don't get where this idea that academia has a monopoly on difficult skills and knowledge comes from.

No CS professor I had ever helped me with a problem I had in CS. Now, as a Teaching Assistant I helped tens of other students diagnose bugs in their code, but that's a different game.

Pretty sure the kids paying 60k a year to learn CS at Swarthmore are more elite.

self-describing comment

Yup, honestly if I didn't have the structure of university I don't think I would have made it as a self-learned dev. Don't get me wrong I enjoy programming, however I very much needed the formal education process.

It's not elitism because learning how things work "under the hood" at the age of 20, when you've been using tech your whole life, it shows a lack of curiosity. Tech is inherently obfuscated, nail-biting debugging, and a crap ton of reverse engineering. CS is a subset of mathematics. Software development is a lifestyle and an ethos. No degree will provide that in full capacity like being a curious kid who wrote game mods or hacks, and looked into how the things he loves actually work. With something as accessible as software, you don't need privilege or thousand dollar lab equipment. If you don't know how things work under the hood because you waited for college...you're gonna have a bad time...

Software development is a skilled trade, like being a plumber. It's not a lifestyle.

@sibling maxxxxx

If you think that being a plumber or an electrician or a mechanic never requires creativity and deep knowledge, then I think you are looking down on those professions a bit too much. Much like programming, most of what those fields involve is routine grunt work. But from time to time, the usual ready-made solutions don't work and you'll have some tricky problem to solve.

I don't think that's true. If your job is checking off Jira tickets maybe it's the case. But there are plenty of areas where you need a lot of creativity and deep knowledge to make progress.

It takes just as much creativity and deep knowledge to achieve the Master Plumber rating (or for any other skilled trade).

Exactly. There are plumbers who just execute exactly what they learned in school but nothing else and there are others who can solve tricky problems. Same for programmers.

> But there are plenty of areas where you need a lot of creativity and deep knowledge to make progress.

This is also true for many other skilled trades.

You really do need privilege. Not everyone has regular access to a computer or internet even these days. And not every is in an environment where it's considered ok to sit and tinker with software all day.

More importantly we need people in our industry who have interests beyond just tinkering with things all days. We need balanced individuals who have skills beyond just code, who can look at problems from a wide array of viewpoints. If we only hire hackers who have been coding since they were young we're hiring an incredibly narrow set of people while trying to solve problems for billions of people around the world. That's not efficient! It's good for our ability to solve problems that we expand the tech community to include diverse individuals, including folk who didn't code as kids.

If you don't have regular access to a computer & the internet, then American CS college is miles away by cost comparison.

Like seriously, a $200 chromebook that you earn by working a local minimum wage job, a household that feeds and clothes you and your local public library wifi is what you would mostly need. The requirements for college far exceeds that by a mile.

The poster was walking widely about the industry as a whole not just college. And there are lots of scholarship students who had to work to help put food on the table, who couldn't afford a chromebook and the time to go tinker.

In many colleges, the cost of one or two textbooks outdoes the cost of a chromebook. If you have to work to put food on the table in college, you can work to put a chromebook on the table too and spend your college time on self study vs college itself

Isn't it...the opposite of elitism?