[athrowaway3z]

> I came to the formalisms of software engineering through painful experience rather than academic instruction. If anything, that made me take those principles more seriously once I understood them.

Not related to the article, but I've seen this thought before and I think its wrong.

This isn't what good academic instructions gets you. Instead, they provide a systematic approach to learning foundational/core formalisms which let you recognize other problems as being of the same kind.

An academic background should let the person reason from a place of pre-explored essential complexity, instead of first having to rediscover & deconstruct the accidental complexity.

Building scar tissue about why things are a certain way is practical experience for (non)academics alike.

[Schlagbohrer]

I worked for years at a manfuacturing facility where the engineers were men who only had a high school education and slowly (from the 80s through to the late 2010s) had been promoted up to doing engineering, but, with ZERO academic or theoretical background.

It was a massive disadvantage for them. They could carefully recreate the exact same thing over and over for new products that were similar to the previous version, but it was ALL cargo culted so they were terrified of any change, because they had no idea why a PCB was built in a certain way or what it meant to alter some aspect of a circuit board. So they were extremely, extremely resistant to any sort of change whatsoever.

And I as a young hardware engineer would get laughed at for saying things like "Do we have any fine copper wire? I need to make my own inductor for this test" because they didn't understand that an inductor is just coiled wire. Our board designer didn't understand why vias would be placed in a ground pad to link it thermally with the ground plane on a different layer, and laughed at me when I said we needed to "move heat around". He put a single via in the center of a huge ground pad. I asked him to put a grid of vias, so he humored me while having zero idea what the vias were for, or that having many vias linking two thermal planes would transfer more heat than just a single lonely via in a big pad.

Shit like that.

So I agree with you, the theory learned in academia plus the pedagogy is hugely useful and lets someone skip over decades of blind struggle.

[zelphirkalt]

If only we listened more to people who studied CS on the job. Many disasters could prevented entirely.