[tbabb]

Who are all these people who "didn't learn anything" from university? What were they spending their time doing? I learned a ton about a wide variety of fields from experts in those fields; it was extremely valuable. Did this guy just goof off the whole time?

[erikpukinskis]

Ya, and when they say they never ask candidates about their education... OK, so you've never needed to hire a statistician, or a mathematician, or a lawyer, or a materials scientist... There aren't a ton of people walking around who picked that stuff up on YouTube.

A lot of people pay programmers a lot of money to brute force problems someone with a masters degree could solve in a week, and give you a correct O(n) algorithm instead of the coder's buggy O(n^3) solution.

[rayalez]

I mean yeah, if you spend 5 years of your life and tens of thousands of dollars, you will learn more than in a one coding bootcamp. Like duh doi, no argument here(even though there's plenty self taught programmers who are better than the most college students).

People who say "don't go to the university" are mostly talking about the opportunity cost. Is university the best way you could spend 5 years of your young life and $30-120k? Fuck no.

If you are curious and driven - spend your money on books and video courses, and spend your time learning things that interest you. Create stuff, build portfolio, get a job or launch businesses.

You will get SO much more out of it than out of college.

More importantly - learn to think and to learn by yourself. 95% of learning will be done after the college anyways, so might as well figure out how to do this on your own, not by following teacher's instructions, preparing for quizzes, and following the inane and obviously horribly inefficient system.

[drawnwren]

Older student chiming in - it's very frequent that my friends who did graduate from university discount what they learned there. I think it's hard for people to understand that University taught them lots of things besides coursework, like how to deliver software on timelines, or how to socialize, they also discount the importance of patterns I.e. they don't remember their physics courses but they do have some ideas about how physics roughly works.

[JBlue42]

You can still goof off and get a lot from it if by goof off you mean partying, going to sports events, etc. I went to a large public school, learned a lot, met lifelong friends (some of whom have gotten me jobs), worked part-time throughout school, and also had a damn good time. This was 2001-2005 so I'm sure things have changed. Costs surely have.

[RikNieu]

He got an MBA at a well-known European university... hardly gooding off