Re:The Smears Against Edward Snowden Have Begun
by barrkel on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @01:01PM
(#5863105)
His lack of education is relevant because when you have at least some understanding of the depth of complex systems, it becomes very hard to imagine that a self-taught person has enough knowledge to speak competently about multiple such systems.
I think you have to admit, if you've dealt with enough such people, that they are the exception -- the mean and floor of that population's technical capacity is lower than of the educated population, in my experience.
This is not my experience, and let me tell you why I think it's so.
First up - I was self-taught up to the time I went to (a humble) college, and proceeded to learn little, and instead wrote compilers and won programming competitions in my spare time; college was just a means to a piece of paper. I ended up working on the Delphi compiler at Borland before the tools division got sold; and am currently working for a financial software startup. Why did I go to a humble college? Because I had difficulties in what you might call high school, because all I was interested in was CS, and that was not a subject available to study.
Second, my experience is that all the best developers I've worked with got started in programming outside an academic context.
Thirdly, a hypothesis about selection; all the developers I've worked with who didn't have a formal CS education were very good, and one in particular was outstanding. I believe that having succeeded despite the lack of a certificate from an authority, they must have been better than the average drone. And they often had soft skills that made them yet more effective that semi-autistic logicians.
Now, I don't know where you're coming from, but the gist I'm getting from what you write is that you have a lot of ego wrapped up in credentials, for some reason. Maybe you were a grad student, maybe you still are. My industry experience is in contradiction to your own.
I think you have to admit, if you've dealt with enough such people, that they are the exception -- the mean and floor of that population's technical capacity is lower than of the educated population, in my experience.
This is not my experience, and let me tell you why I think it's so.
First up - I was self-taught up to the time I went to (a humble) college, and proceeded to learn little, and instead wrote compilers and won programming competitions in my spare time; college was just a means to a piece of paper. I ended up working on the Delphi compiler at Borland before the tools division got sold; and am currently working for a financial software startup. Why did I go to a humble college? Because I had difficulties in what you might call high school, because all I was interested in was CS, and that was not a subject available to study.
Second, my experience is that all the best developers I've worked with got started in programming outside an academic context.
Thirdly, a hypothesis about selection; all the developers I've worked with who didn't have a formal CS education were very good, and one in particular was outstanding. I believe that having succeeded despite the lack of a certificate from an authority, they must have been better than the average drone. And they often had soft skills that made them yet more effective that semi-autistic logicians.
Now, I don't know where you're coming from, but the gist I'm getting from what you write is that you have a lot of ego wrapped up in credentials, for some reason. Maybe you were a grad student, maybe you still are. My industry experience is in contradiction to your own.