[nickpsecurity]

"Finally, I have a bone to pick with the "it's the older generations' responsibility to educate the younger generation" idea that I hear so often. At the end of the day, it's everyone's own responsibility to educate themselves, and we all know there's plenty of materials available for that."

I'm on your side of the discussion overall but that's unrealistic. It took me a decade to get so much of this knowledge and wisdom out of papers on programming, OS design, networking, security, etc. I just found some more foundational work in past months that should've been in every classroom for its relevance but nobody's heard of it.

The problem is that the stuff is scattered all over the place and not in pure form at all. There's books, papers, brochures, lectures, etc. These might have good details, fluff, or a varying mixture of each. Many great works can only be found behind paywalls (IEEE, ACM). Others are on academic sites, specific blogs, or places like CiteseerX where you have to know what you're looking for ahead of time.

Our field is anything but a clean, integrated presentation of what really mattered, matters, and might matter. It's a huge, scattered mess that we expect new crowd to just automagically sort through and discover necessary stuff. Prior generations certainly have some responsibility to make that easier rather than harder. I do my part with posts here and elsewhere directing people to specific techs that solved (or nearly so) the problems they are talking about. Need a more thorough solution, though, for the various sub-fields of I.T. before I'll blame the newcomers for prior generation's mess.

[brianmwaters_hn]

Hm, I agree that there's a lot scattered out there, but I hope that there's some room for exploration (and maybe specialization) somewhere in the noise.

I actually have an interesting perspective on this, being completely self-taught, before returning to university as an adult to get a computer science degree.

There are pros and cons to both sides of the self-taught vs. teacher-taught thing, though I'll make my bias clear up front: I spent a lot of years reading books and messing around with stuff; now, when I hear college students complain that a teacher "isn't a clear lecturer" or "didn't answer my question well," my tendency is to say "there's a book and an Internet out there, suck it up and get to studying, buddy," though I realize that attitude isn't perfect for everyone.

[nickpsecurity]

" when I hear college students complain that a teacher "isn't a clear lecturer" or "didn't answer my question well," my tendency is to say "there's a book and an Internet out there, suck it up and get to studying, buddy,""

I get that and mostly agree with it. Exception being the people who learn best with the help of others (esp face-to-face). They don't learn the hard stuff well with text but they're valuable once they learn it. The other exception would be the topics where having a pro at hand can greatly simplify the learning process mostly due to nature of topic itself.

In most situations, you're totally right. People just aren't putting in effort. I think the stuff with lots of historical baggage of unknown usefulness seems like unjustifiable effort to many in IT. So, I don't throw them into that category if it's such a thing rather than their own skill set. Now, if they didn't know essential networking skills and griped that nobody told them, I might link to your comment followed by a back hand.

[cbd1984]

> when I hear college students complain that a teacher "isn't a clear lecturer" or "didn't answer my question well," my tendency is to say "there's a book and an Internet out there, suck it up and get to studying, buddy,"

Which raises the question of what the lecturer is even standing around talking for. Isn't it just a waste of their own and everyone else's time if they aren't good at doing what they attempt to do? If someone is a good researcher and lousy in the classroom, why make them teach classes and waste everyone's time?

[nickpsecurity]

I agree with you there. I think Brian probably would, too. His point was that many people let their pursuit of knowledge end there rather than use other resources available to learn what they needed to know. The lecturer becomes an excuse rather than an obstacle on the path to understanding.