[crimsonalucard]

I've met these hacker school/self taught types. One of them worked as a programmer for 20 years and didn't know what was recursion until about a year ago. He gets away with it because in programming there are many ways to solve a problem. Usually you only need to solve the problem rather then find the best way to do it.

A CS graduate will know about a 50 ways to solve a problem and will have the ability to find the most optimal way to do it. He'd probably take twice as long as the hacker school graduate who'd solve the problem using the one canned method he was taught in hacker school.

[toomuchtodo]

> He gets away with it because in programming there are many ways to solve a problem. Usually you only need to solve the problem rather then find the best way to do it.

"Getting away with it" == using another solution.

> A CS graduate will know about a 50 ways to solve a problem and will have the ability to find the most optimal way to do it. He'd probably take twice as long as the hacker school graduate who'd solve the problem using the one canned method he was taught in hacker school.

Disagree. I rarely find someone with a degree to be substantially better than someone self-taught on the job. I've even seen developers with degrees do far worse.

[crimsonalucard]

"Getting away with it" == using another solution.

Not knowing recursion for 20 years is more "getting away with it" then just simply "using another solution"

>Disagree. I rarely find someone with a degree to be substantially better than someone self-taught on the job. I've even seen developers with degrees do far worse.

Sure in jobs where the most optimal solution doesn't matter there is no correlation with performance and degrees. This is probably the case for many jobs. However for a job where it does matter, say the programmers behind the V8 engine or people implementing Ruby and the python features, a degree or knowledge about theory makes a huge difference.

[toomuchtodo]

> Sure in jobs where the most optimal solution doesn't matter there is no correlation with performance and degrees. This is probably the case for many jobs. However for a job where it does matter, say the programmers behind the V8 engine or people implementing Ruby and the python features, a degree or knowledge about theory makes a huge difference.

Its disingenuous to think everyone needs to obtain that level of knowledge, at substantial cost, when only a few are going to use that knowledge in the scenarios you described. Not everyone needs to know how to create programming language or write a complier.

We should not look down on those who are bootstrapping themselves in the industry without the exorbitant costs of a CS degree lest we retreat to the mindset of ancient guilds.

[crimsonalucard]

>Its disingenuous to think everyone needs to obtain that level of knowledge, at substantial cost, when only a few are going to use that knowledge in the scenarios you described. Not everyone needs to know how to create programming language or write a complier.

This knowledge is usually what separates someone with a degree and someone without one.

I don't look down on someone without a degree, but I have no doubt in my mind that such a person will have a higher chance of being less capable of implementing high concept applications like a ray tracer, a 3D engine, search algorithm, operating system, or a machine learning system, ... etc. These jobs are not so obscure that only a 'few' people need to know it, as you seem to indicate.

In fact there's a popular new buzz word in CS called "Big Data" where those involved need a huge amount of theoretical knowledge that cannot be gained from simply attending a hacker school.

[robotkilla]

> Not knowing recursion for 20 years is more "getting away with it" then just simply "using another solution"

Someone define recursion here... are we saying this guy didn't know what a recursive loop was for 20 years, or are you using "recursion" in some other way?

edit what i mean is this: did the guy have a hard time defining recursion in terms of CS, or could he flat out not demonstrate it with some pseudo code?

[crimsonalucard]

He admitted to me he didn't learn about it until about a year ago. Meaning he never used it in his code and he never understood the concept.

He was a python programmer. Typically in python, you shouldn't use recursion anyway.

[robotkilla]

Recursion isn't very good in Python this is true. I'm not going to judge the guy's skills since I don't know him, but that seems to be a common pitfall that a lot of developers I know find themselves in - they learn a single language or framework and never break out of it.