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1. Couldn't read the article, but get the gist.
2. Years ago I got a B.A. in business.
3. I can honestly say 90% of the courses were, pretty much
a waste if time. I literally had one instructor tell his
students, "I really don't want to be here, so I don't
exect you to even show up". Being young and naive, I went
to a few of his classes; He literally read, verbatim, from
a Accounting Book. 4. The Internet can teach a person much more than most
colleges, with the exception of a professional degree--medicine, or engineering. Even then, the degree will just
open the door. I've met engineers that couldn't build a house. 5. If you have the money, go for a degree. The women are
plentiful--that's about all I remember. Oh, yea--learn
what the placebo effect is, and don't let others take
advantage of you. Be careful with the student loans--
they are not bankruptable--at least for now. Hopefully,
that might change. 6. The most successful tech guys I have know dropped out
of school, and learned to program on their own. 7. I've met too any people who feel guilty not completing
the degree. I truely, feel they are better off--really.
I have seen too many Ivy League guys "skate" on projects, while the high school drop out works 2x as hard, and
in the end; most managers do take notice of the "Contributers" and eventually realize the guy with Stanford
sweatshirt doesn't do much, besides look cool in the
company pictures. |
To a large extent, given the values of US universities, that's mostly inevitable.
What are such values? In a university, the profs are expected to be doing 'research', not just teaching what's already on the shelves of the libraries or in commercial products. In computer science, the 'research' is supposed to be finding the 'fundamentals' of computing, e.g., the question P versus NP.
So, there can be some first courses in computer science that concentrate on teaching a programming language, maybe Java, and then some later courses in algorithms, data structures, compilers, database, etc., but, still, turning out people ready to 'hit the ground running' in a serious programming team is not really the goal.
Now, there are community colleges, but there is a 'quality' problem: First, the better students tend to go to universities. Second, where is a community college going to get someone who is a right up to date software team leader to teach and, also, do a really good job teaching with preparing the course materials and giving individual attention to the students?
Net, at least in the US, it's long been the case in computing that mostly or even entirely have to be self-taught. Heck, I've taught computing to undergraduates at Georgetown and to graduate students at Ohio State but I essentially never took a course in computing and, instead, was self-taught and before such teaching had a good career going in industry.
Self-taught's largely where it's at. Sorry 'bout that!
Solution? If you can think of a topic that needs some good teaching, then get smart on the topic, write a book, sell it in some form, maybe Kindle, develop some lectures and put them on YouTube, have a blog, etc.