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by steveklabnik 3736 days ago
There are lots of people from both kinds of backgrounds in all kinds of communities; how much of classic hacker lore is about high school dropouts, let alone college dropouts?

A CS degree doesn't mean you'll be a good programmer in industry.

1 comments

No, but it helps.

I have a technical school specialization in computing and a CS degree.

Many of the things we learned at technical school only made sense afterwards when I got into CS.

Also some of the design problems we had, which were solved by the usual"try something until it works", became basic programming exercises with the right CS information.

Yeah, it isn't a magic solution, but it helps in what concerns designing software in the large.

Most other backgrounds aren't exposed to such issues.