CS degrees are useless

The elite self-taught startup coders and hackers over at Hacker News think CS degrees are useless:

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12351660

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352284

Do you agree?

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news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352032
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news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12352032

Still getting one because you're not a man without a college degree as I've been told.

I'm just in it for the pussy

My only problem with formal education is length. The first two years of university CS are incredible valuable on their own. Two year community or for-profit colleges simply don't compare.

I'm just in it for the money, it just so happens that the businesses in my area like seeing degrees from my college.

>2016
>knowledge
>mattering

preddy much dis.

I haven't used most of the stuff I learned in my degree, but it's not a waste of time because that piece of paper saying you graduated is the most important thing in getting a job with Mr Noseberg

For every successful programmer on Hacker News, there are dozens of failures or people stuck in mediocrity. The premise that you won't learn anything through your degree at a decent program is complete bullshit, but either way a CS degree is a way to mitigate risk in the job market.

The reality is that most people aren't prodigious, and even those who are, may well have missed some important details when self-teaching. MOST people who self-teach are going to learn the bare minimum to accomplish a task, with poor code quality and complete disregard for best practices.

Shouldn't you be an OBGYN?

>learn the bare minimum to accomplish a task, with poor code quality and complete disregard for best practices.
so the same as college?

>be straight
>fascinated with the pussy cause that's just how it works
>only porn I masturbate to is close-ups of vaginas
>start getting into speculum stretching porn
>hot at first
>slowly realizing that this shit's disgusting, probably smells like tomatoes or something
>wonder how an obgyn can even put up with this shit
It's not worth the constant projectile vomiting.

>What you've really missed is things like best practices, design patterns and concepts like SOLID, but a lot of people with CS degrees missed some of those as well.
I know people who graduated without even knowing how to write a for loop properly. Teachers never ever commented on SOLID/DRY/YAGNI and other stuff.

On the other hand I know people who did great on the theory/math/algorithmic side of things and just can't code """properly""" at all no matter how long they've been doing it. They always have some neat solution for things, they just aren't good at implementing them.

Survivor bias

Less so.

Most programmers are shit, but the average level out of college is better than the average level out of self teaching.

This.
I know great and shit programmers from all walks of life. Doesn't mean shit.

CS degree can be useless, but mostly it's very useful.

With the amount of materials that are out there internet, libraries etc... it's difficult to understand why anyone would want a (fucking expensive) college education anyways.

>inb4 poorfag.

I'm glad you get what I am saying. And a degree gives you a safety net so you don't need to be purely very competent. Elites will be elites, degree or not

>CS degrees are useless

Similar to what wrote.

"I have a degree in CS and I've never found myself in a situation where anyone would discuss bouble sort vs merge sort. Neither have I been in a situation where big-o was relevant beyond the basic concept of not doing obviously stupid shit.
What you've really missed is things like best practices, design patterns and concepts like SOLID, but a lot of people with CS degrees missed some of those as well.
If the book covers this, excellent, but why wouldn't it sell itself on valid points?"

The point isn't 'CS degree' == Software 'Engineering degree', a proper CS degree is suppose to give you solid grounding in discrete mathematics and mathematical thinking. This involves understanding proofs, logic, graph theory, combinatorics, number theory, algebra, probability theory and so on along with computational complexity, computability (logic) and algos/data structures.

Believe some of these people see CS degrees as "programming" degrees which is def. not the case at any good school. You can specialize but CS is like a sub-set of mathematics and should be taught that way.

...

>Interaction Engineer

I fucking hate how every soft field feels the need to label themselves "science" or "engineering" or "analysis". You're not fooling anyone, we know just as well as you do that you're not a real science.