[Merrill]

Motivation is key. The successful apprentice is one who is motivated to learn from the master. The only problem with the classroom method is that it is often demotivating for the students.

With all the online information available, autodidacts have a great opportunity.

[gmueckl]

Autodidactic learning is not always ideal: you may miss some fundamentals of the trade that may be important when you're are setting the curriculum yourself. In some trades, this can potentially endanger people. The other thing autodidacts usually don't get is the unwritten oral part of apprentice training that is passed on informally and often even implicitly.

[AmericanChopper]

You could make similar vague criticisms about academically trained people though. They may enter the work force with little practical skills, their academic sensibilities may interfere with pragmatic decision making... That’s no more of a strawman than your comment.

Personally every time I’ve taught myself something, I’ve started with the fundamentals. I taught myself databases from the ground up. I started with learning query optimizers, data normalization and MVCC.

I think your criticism is much more dependent on the individual than it is how they were trained.

[gmueckl]

I don't see how my argument is a strawman. I have learned a great deal of stuff in an autodidactic fashion myself. A big portion of my Ph.D. work is based on things I learned autodidactically. I know that I missed existing knowledge, didn't always look into the right places etc... I have been extremely lucky that none of the work I have published so far hasn't been covered in previous work that I missed.

Research, as much as trades, has its own oral history, informal institutional knowledge and so on. It's being told by the supervisor that it's not worth pursuing a certain course of action because there's a non-obvious roadblock that leads to unpublishable negative results. Or it's being told that you should try procedure X in this specific step in your experiment because $obscure_reason or "it just works better when you do it this way" and a shrug. There is tons of experience passed down from one generation to the next everyhere that is never put in proper writing. Getting access to that knowledge is just an enormous advantage.

[AmericanChopper]

Well both of us are really just putting forward our own anecdata relating to each method of learning. If we generalise that to apply criticism to larger groups of people, then I’d say that’s when we cross the line into creating a strawman. Each method certainly does have its pitfalls, but also it’s own ways of overcoming them. If we wanted to discuss the likelihood of falling into those traps (or more generally, the effectiveness of autodidactic learning vs formal education), then we’d need some data (I’m not aware if this has been studied, maybe it has?). We’d also need to put a fair amount of thought into defining the criteria for measuring that effectiveness. For example, I taught myself to change the oil in my car, if you assess my abilities as an oil changer, I think I’d be quite competent. If you assessed my abilities as a general mechanic, I’d be woefully incompetent.

> I have been extremely lucky that none of the work I have published so far hasn't been covered in previous work that I missed.

This reminds me of how Ramanujan is said to have independently remade numerous previously made discoveries in mathematics. Certainly a risk of autodidactic learning.

> There is tons of experience passed down from one generation to the next everyhere that is never put in proper writing.

Perhaps this depends on the field. For software development, huge amounts of this knowledge is available online. I set out to learn GraphQL recently, and after reading the spec, I gained most of my knowledge on the topic from a mixture of experimentation and reading online writing. But I guess that raises the question, did I teach myself these skills, or was I taught them by dozens of random stack overflow users and blog writers?

[ken]

Those don’t sound like the “fundamentals” of databases at all. They sound like pretty high level concepts.

When I studied databases in college, we started with how pages are stored on disk. That is fundamental to both data and indexes, and everything that uses them. Query optimizers depend on almost every other part of the database. In the databases we wrote, I don’t think we got to that.

[barbecue_sauce]

Well you're talking about the fundamentals of building databases. He's talking about the fundamentals of using databases.

[adamsea]

And if you wanted to learn to play violin, would you teach yourself?