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by nift 2370 days ago
While I do tend to agree with you and I'm a firm believer in "learning by doing", which I can especially see in my (young) kids but I never got the "learned more in 4 months working than 4 years of school" premise/idea.

Sorry in advance of this a tangent and maybe I'm just lucky that I'm the product of a good education or perhaps I have always had the wrong jobs, but while I of course learned tons by working I have never been able to compare what I learned at university and on the job, not because they are fundamentally different, just different.

I never learned or more importantly had time to deep dive into an issue for months of time on the job compared to university. Things have to be solved fast, go go style a client is waiting. Perhaps this is a product of the jobs I have had, don’t have enough data to say otherwise.

But I have never at university learned how to for instance lead a team or communicate effectively to non-academics. This is not something I expected of my university of course as these are very different skills.

But what I did learn was to understand the computer at a deeper level, which helps me every day and I find to be crucial to my day job.

I value my university degree/time dearly, but it is of course not the real world and of course not everything is applicable, but you never really know what is before you need it I guess.

By this not saying that teaching shouldn’t evolve, innovate and/or change for the better, I think I’m just saying it is doing some stuff right, and I believe (no data backing here) that our industry wouldn’t get or continue to get the innovations we have achieved without at least some university foundations sprinkled in there :)

What would you change? :)

1 comments

I can back up your experience. My university studies were focused on maths and theoretical computer science, and I've learned a lot of things there that are unlikely to be learned on a regular job. That said, at least my PhD did feel a bit like an apprenticeship in how it was structured. It was an apprenticeship for becoming an academic - and while I don't work in academia anymore, that has given me some useful skills that most of my peers don't have. (Of course, there are also skills that I don't have but some of my peers do. In many teams it's useful to have a mix of academically and not academically inclined folks, and the ideal mixture obviously depends on the kind of work the team does.)