[ttoinou]

Interesting ! What is the name of the schools you attended, if that's not too private ?

In France at "prepa" (2 year intensive courses to prepare for exams for big eng uni) I learned the theory behind computer science (for example how to modelize a regex machine with graph / automata / matrices). That was useful theory to me, but that's just a drop in the ocean of uselessness

[jrowen]

One thing I think a lot of people don't internalize is that academia and industry have fundamentally different goals. When I went into industry, I had the thought, like many others, that "my degree didn't prepare me at all for working with a production database, and I'm never gonna implement a Turing machine, wtf?" I think it was a major disservice to academia when college became seen as the path to a good job, because it was never meant to be that.

Academia is about pure learning about the world in a very deep and philosophical sense. It's about underpinnings and history and giving you the abstract tools to reason about things. Academics are often aggressively against learning practical things to solve a specific business problem. Which is what industry is all about. I think it's easy to take a degree program for granted, but it's difficult to understand how your brain would be different had you not done it (assuming one did apply themself and attempt to get its value. If you just cursed it the whole time yeah it probably was a waste.)

[jrowen]

Another thought is that, I might be more likely to apply the term "ocean of uselessness" to a lot of what goes on in industry than to what academics are striving for.

People like having a job and a paycheck and accomplishing units of utility. But kludging together some libraries and maintaining another CRUD app isn't all that important or interesting in the grand scheme of things. The Von Neumann architecture and asymptotic analysis are, though.

[mettamage]

Vrije Universiteit Amserdam