[sheetjs]

> Treehouse CEO Ryan Carson declares “A computer science degree is a rip off…I know because I have one.” Perhaps his CS degree was from a college which didn’t have a very good program or maybe his focus has been web development where you rarely need computer science.

According to wikipedia:

> In 2000, he graduated from Colorado State University with a Computer Science degree

I suspect, like with most fields, that the school definitely matters (and that he may not have arrived at the same conclusion had he attended a school with a better CS program)

[rayiner]

Colorado State is a major research university and has a pretty good CS program. I certainly wouldn't chalk his opinion up to a CS program that wasn't strong enough. I'd attribute it to the nature of web development versus more theoretically intensive problems.

[analog31]

I've noticed that the "degree is a rip off" comment crops up among graduates of practically every field from every school, equally from successful people and failures. So I'm not sure that I'd read much into it.

[cjf4]

The key piece of context about this quote is that Ryan Carson has a vested interest in people deciding they do not need a computer science degree to code.

[berrypicker]

"... how much you learn in college depends a lot more on you than the college. A determined party animal can get through the best school without learning anything. And someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all." - PG

Have to agree with this. How good you are at coding is more related to the number of hours you put in than grades or school. People who enjoy coding have the advantage of being able to spend more hours before getting tired/bored, and thus become better coders than top CS graduates who are just trying to pass college.

[walid]

Well if you think of it, a CEO like Steve Jobs will call the PC a truck... to sell the iPad.

• Computer Science = Truck

• Treehouse = iPad

But how do you make iPad dev tools?

[lstamour]

> But how do you make iPad dev tools?

The same way you make a real-world video editing suite work on an iPhone and have the guts to make that your seasonal and campaign: in a careful and considerate fashion without trying to be all things to all people.

That said, if I had an editable Chrome dev tools on a tablet I'd be 50% of the way there some days. :)

And ... Don't read too much in the car/truck comment. Eventually even smart phones will behave like supercomputers. It's just a matter of time.

[walid]

You missed the point on what I was inferring.

> The same way you make a real-world video editing suite work on an iPhone and have the guts to make that your seasonal and campaign: in a careful and considerate fashion without trying to be all things to all people.

It isn't about being all things. It is about a level of control you need while working. This is actually a mathematics problem namely Godel's second theorem of incompleteness which states and this is a brief description that "a system cannot contain itself" meaning that you can build a system of components but those components can't be built from inside the system. This equally applies to software.

> That said, if I had an editable Chrome dev tools on a tablet I'd be 50% of the way there some days. :)

Again you're conflating two issues. Not all dev tools can exist is a browser. If they do then by definition they don't exist in the browser anymore. A paradox. If your dev tools can exist in the browser alone then you definitely are using only a subset of necessary dev tools for other domains. It is obvious that you are a web dev but then I'm not and the browser doesn't cut it for me.

> And ... Don't read too much in the car/truck comment. Eventually even smart phones will behave like supercomputers. It's just a matter of time.

Then again you missed it. I wasn't reading into it. I was comparing how the CEO of Treehouse was dissing CS degrees because he wanted to sell his tutorials like Jobs was dissing the PC because he wanted to sell iPads.

[girvo]

> Eventually even smart phones will behave like supercomputers.

I just had a vision of a Paralella board as the main CPU for a mobile phone... wow, that would be neat.

[alayne]

Well, for starters, he is a CEO not a CTO.