Poll of the Day > Ok, college is a joke.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Given I do have a lot of programming experience, I just learned CSS, HTML, and Javascript in about 8 hours watching YouTube tutorials on 2x speed.

I would have paid 6 months of my time and who knows how much stress and money had I gone to college, sitting through boring classes memorizing methods of learning things, taking bullshit filler classes on how to study where the teacher spends 4 hours threatening me, a grown ass adult, with her personalized system about what's going to happen if I dare be late past 15 minutes more than twice. Not to mention the fucking useless (for me) English classes, teaching me how to write a properly formatted scientific paper, or essay on a fucking horrible peice of literature, with some forced corny ass feminism message shoe-horned in. I am a software engineer. I am not a scientist or writer.

Then there was what I spent 1/6 my time on, my SQL class, I basically spent 6 months learning the difference between first/second/third normal form, when all I really needed to know was third normal form. I got a C in that class because I (ignorantly) didn't do 1/3 the homework. I literally could have learned it in less than a week on YouTube.

It's that kind of shit that's made incredibly apparent through actual usage, made overly complicated by being overly analytical and structured through arbitrary terms meant for the slowest of students to catch on and write some shitty code one day, code that will give someone competent a fucking hernia trying to fix.

Oh well. Time to find some apprenticeship jobs.
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It is and it isn't. There's classes people have to take that's irrelevant to their degree, and that makes no sense. Degrees should be streamlined to get the best experience, as well the best education possible for that degree

You were in an beginners course. They're going to force feed you slowly. Classes aren't individually tailored to you. Just because you know programming doesn't mean the people sitting around you do.
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I went to college for IT the place was flooded with h1-b1
no old person will hire someone off the street anymore, it's always HR people that have no clue and other h1b1's
it's not worth it
like you said you can learn it for free on the internet

they want you to have 3 years experiance to get a 15 dollar an hour job, my friend makes 50k a year with his business degree
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CTLM posted...

It is and it isn't. There's classes people have to take that's irrelevant to their degree, and that makes no sense. Degrees should be streamlined to get the best experience, as well the best education possible for that degree

You were in an beginners course. They're going to force feed you slowly. Classes aren't individually tailored to you. Just because you know programming doesn't mean the people sitting around you do.

and then you get to the high level classes and it's still the same stuff that can be downloaded off the internet for free

it's a 35k price tag for something you can learn for free
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Youre right. Its a long topic, but Ill never understand the pedestal that education gets put on. You can learn 99% of what you learn in school on the internet, in far less time. The only things you really learn in school is socializing and how to deal with boredom. Arguably important skills, but is the education system really the best place to learn them?

Lmao. If you go to college and the classes you take arent challenging, you have the A) The wrong college B) The wrong major C) The wrong classes.

If you already know all this stuff, why havent you just taken whatever certification it is to get whatever job it is that you want?
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Haven't you been programming for well over four years at this point? If you had spent those four years in college you probably would've come away with a nice software job instead.

Yeah there is a lot of filler in college, and from a purely pragmatic standpoint it's not that useful, but degrees still hold value. This topic comes off as pretty bitter. You realize that, if it's supposedly so easy to master software through these tutorials, there are millions of others out there thinking the same thing? Self-teaching is great if you can show off something really cool but good luck trying to get by just telling people you have no formal education and just watched a few videos.

Sulugnaz posted...

I learned 3 scripting languages in under 8 hours. I am a veritable software God and I thus declare college a waste of time! Proclaim!

I'm not, I still have roughly 30 more hours of video to go, and then I have to write a couple programs until I know it inside and out.

I did this with C#, I could write a C# interpreter at this point.

CSS isn't really a programming language, JavaScript is basically a slightly different C#, HTML is super easy itself.

If I want to be certified I can get a C certification, and if a lack of degree is hurting my resume I'll see if I can get something worked out.
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RoboXgp89 posted...

CTLM posted...

It is and it isn't. There's classes people have to take that's irrelevant to their degree, and that makes no sense. Degrees should be streamlined to get the best experience, as well the best education possible for that degree

You were in an beginners course. They're going to force feed you slowly. Classes aren't individually tailored to you. Just because you know programming doesn't mean the people sitting around you do.

and then you get to the high level classes and it's still the same stuff that can be downloaded off the internet for free

it's a 35k price tag for something you can learn for free

Bachelors level then? I'm not having that luxury at my level. Sure as hell would be nice. ASU isn't 35k, but if I could get the same info for free, I'd still be saving thousands
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CTLM posted...

It is and it isn't. There's classes people have to take that's irrelevant to their degree, and that makes no sense. Degrees should be streamlined to get the best experience, as well the best education possible for that degree

You were in an beginners course. They're going to force feed you slowly. Classes aren't individually tailored to you. Just because you know programming doesn't mean the people sitting around you do.

I disagree. A undergraduate education should be about getting a well rounded education across all major areas (art, history, science, language, math), and then a specialization.

But, I also believe my non STEM college courses were embarrassing and easier than my high school courses and taught mostly by people drunk on the idea of life of the mind when they didnt have a basic quantitative reasoning background and had a vendetta against math.

The time I spent interaction with my physics professors outside of class was a huge benefit to me as a person.

I do know the feeling of the absurdly slow pace of classes. part of it, I guess, is that it's not just about learning it, but proving you learn it. also, it's not about the specific things you're learning, but getting a broad education. you're learning to learn. if you think "I can teach myself this stuff way faster", that's it, that's exactly right. the class is a resource for you to use to help you teach yourself the content (and to prove that you did).

Yellow posted...

JavaScript is basically a slightly different C#

if I was a jerk I would say something like: this shows that you don't know either language very well at all. (I mean, if you said that in an interview, that would be a huge red flag to me.)

they are sort of superficially syntactically similar... sort of. but, I mean, they're not really the same at all. like, even a little. just about any code you could post would have all kinds of semantic differences and pitfalls depending which of the two languages it was from.

you could maybe say that "Java is basically a slightly different C#" (or vice-versa), and there'd be a little truth to that, but it would still be arguable. you could probably say that "VB.NET is basically a slightly different C#", but even then there'd be a long list of exceptions.

but javascript vs C#? there's not so much a long list of differences as there is an extremely short list of similarities.

Yellow posted...

I could write a C# interpreter at this point

well, it might not be that hard to *start* writing a C# interpreter (in C#). but like, good luck with type inference and generics and covariance, etc.etc. I have myself written an interpreter, but only by using an extremely constrained language and syntax. writing an interpreter for a general-purpose language is no small feat.
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*piece
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You sound kind of like you're too fixated on accumulating deep theoretical knowledge instead of just applying bits and pieces practically and having fun with it. What do you really gain by watching 40 hours of videos? If it's to tell prospective employers, trust me, they aren't impressed by stuff like "Yeah I've done some tutorials" or "I watched a few videos".

And sure, you expressed that you want to write programs to learn it inside out, but what do these programs look like? Like I'm having a hard time imagining that this would resemble a "realistic" functioning program, it's rare that some practical application demands all the techniques in the book. I'm picturing just a bunch of strange use cases kind of thrown together. An important part of the knowledge base for a software engineer is knowing when and why to use certain techniques; just throwing them into an example program shortly after you learned them doesn't really reinforce that all that well.

You say you could write a C# interpreter, but have you actually attempted to write one? Would it be the level of quality you'd want to show off? Maybe some people would find that impressive, but the more complicated your projects are, the higher you're setting your standard and opening them up for higher scrutiny. I'm of the mindset that a simple program made really well is better than a complicated one made haphazardly (obviously there's a certain minimum complexity that still needs to be met).

Yeah you really have to shop around to make sure you get an education nowadays. You have to see what it is youre learning and what kind of experiences a college can offer you, like study-abroad or project based learning.

That being said, I think a lot of bachelors degrees is more about getting a liberal education than showing you how to be a computer scientist or engineer, or whatever.
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Sahuagin posted...

well, it might not be that hard to *start* writing a C# interpreter (in C#). but like, good luck with type inference and generics and covariance, etc.etc. I have myself written an interpreter, but only by using an extremely constrained language and syntax. writing an interpreter for a general-purpose language is no small feat.

I'd probably just use a lot of reflection to replicate the code running on the actual framework running underneath. For storing data, I'd probably do a hashtable[Type] of hashtable[index]. It wouldn't be perfect, but I'd be able to get an XNA game playing at full speed. It would be kind of cool, but ultimately completely useless and a waste of time.

Getting an interpreter on another OS/Architecture? That would be hard. That would be Wine levels of work, or at least, it would have to use Wine.

I've written a very crappy C++ interpreter and enough of an NES emulator to get the gist of how emulators/interpreters really work.

I've already done a ton of work generating C# code out of objects and generics and things like that with my object to child class converter. That's something I'm actually proud of.

And no, I really don't understand JavaScript, but my definition of "basically the same thing" is more, "relative to SQL and HTML, JavaScript is basically C#, and should be very easy to learn"
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JSebastianBach posted...

You say you could write a C# interpreter, but have you actually attempted to write one? Would it be the level of quality you'd want to show off? Maybe some people would find that impressive, but the more complicated your projects are, the higher you're setting your standard and opening them up for higher scrutiny. I'm of the mindset that a simple program made really well is better than a complicated one made haphazardly (obviously there's a certain minimum complexity that still needs to be met).

As much as I really want to now, I really should not spend my time writing a Windows exclusive C# interpreter.
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For specialized skills, college is kind of an inefficient learning method especially since you get saddled with irrelevant other activities.

Yellow posted...

Given I do have a lot of programming experience, I just learned CSS, HTML, and Javascript in about 8 hours watching YouTube tutorials on 2x speed.

I still need to learn Javascript and CSS. Which videos did you use?

Yellow posted...

I am not a scientist or writer.

Writing tends to be pretty important in most careers, excluding some purely physical labor roles.
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This is kind of the argument I've always had for a lot of things. Experience to me is more important than a ticket. I'd go to a mechanic with years of verifiable experience in his backyard before I went to a kid fresh out of school with none.
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Broken_Zeus posted...

I still need to learn Javascript and CSS. Which videos did you use?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYsuU86-DQ&list=PL0eyrZgxdwhwNC5ppZo_dYGVjerQY3xYU&index=1
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Yellow posted...

I'd probably...

everything I'd say would sum up to "I really think it's more complicated than you realize". I don't like how this kind of thing tends to turn into a pissing contest.

Broken_Zeus posted...

I still need to learn Javascript and CSS. Which videos did you use?

the best resource for learning JavaScript that I'm aware of are the Douglas Crockford lectures. (will be ECMAScript 5, not 6. new ECMAScript 6 features can be seen here: http://es6-features.org/ )

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL62E185BB8577B63D
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miki_sauvester posted...

Youre right. Its a long topic, but Ill never understand the pedestal that education gets put on. You can learn 99% of what you learn in school on the internet, in far less time. The only things you really learn in school is socializing and how to deal with boredom. Arguably important skills, but is the education system really the best place to learn them?

Only 3 things need to be learned from college.

Medicine, law, and science. Everything else can be self taught or learned at a trade school.

Those 3 things were the primary purpose of colleges and they have become bloated beasts in the 90s for some reason during the bubble economy.

Things wont change for the better until 10-15 years from now when people from the previous generation are no longer in power over educational infrastructure and student loan fatigue has destroyed the majority of current college graduates.
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ima class of 2001(high school), that said i left home at 16 and moved to a college town with 3 chicks, worked overnight at the local uni-mart and ate atleast a 10strip a night. that said, i put 30k down on my 180k house that i drew and got a 750 a month payment.

Strive, drive and push youself to get what you want, do whatever it takes. cos bitching about it on POTD will never ever get you anywhere, thats not a moderation/timeout....
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It's not 2001

Sahuagin posted...

everything I'd say would sum up to "I really think it's more complicated than you realize". I don't like how this kind of thing tends to turn into a pissing contest.

What is, the library linking? That might be a pain. Most things to general syntax I've already done.

Just out of curiosity I'm starting one for fun. It's been a while since I've made an interpreter, and none of them have been really well written. It's been bothering me, the things I could have done better. I doubt I'll finish it.

I'm sorry if I'm coming off as arrogant, so I'll just say yes, it's probably much harder than I think.
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You are wrong and right.

First of all, college is just as much about the education as the networking. I didn't realize/know that the first time through, I just put my head down and did the work and didn't care at all about the professors.

The second time through, I made sure to know the professors, ask questions, put effort into my assignments, and ensure I had someone who I could use as a reference in the future. It has paid off more than once.

After some time, you'll find some professors are actually passionate about their work and keep in touch with the industry they are involved in - and you can get job leads through them. Some professors don't care and are just professional instructors with no involvement in the industry.

I just hope you understand that everyone has their own learning style and pace. Just because you watched a bunch of YouTube videos at 2x speed doesnt mean everyone can do this.

Also there are a million things to learn in college, you know. You cant learn how to be a lawyer or a journalist or veteranian by watching YouTube videos. What a silly thing to imagine
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watching some youtube videos does not speak anything to your skills in project management, communication, organization, networking, working with others (especially that one), etc... all skills you learn as a necessity in college/uni

a degree really isn't just a piece of paper as much as people say it is
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Yellow posted...

I am a software engineer. I am not a scientist or writer.

you're not a scientist, but chances are you would need to be able to talk to a scientist. you're not a writer, but chances are you will need to write documentation if you're coding programs, and be able to write emails and communications if you're working on a team. it really doesn't benefit you to look down on these things.

this quote honestly just speaks to your lack of character and i don't think you would actually excel in your desired field with this attitude.
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Yellow posted...

What is, the library linking?

languages are recursive for one thing. maybe you know that and can already parse complex expressions, but otherwise I would start with a simple arithmetic expression parser.

other than that, there's all kinds of complex things that are not so easy. type inference, scopes, closures, lambdas. or even, what about something simple like a class?
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You do come off as pretty arrogant. You might want to try at least finding a job in software first so you can have something to brag about, otherwise it's all just theoretical skill... in more than one sense of the word. Both that you're focused a little heavy on theory, and that you "theoretically" know things but probably aren't applying them as rigorously in practice as you think you are.

I just hope that when you are talking to people for jobs you don't act like you do in this topic, you sound neither all that skilled in nuances nor like an enjoyable person to work with. The stuff you like to get into might be nice for their coding tests and "trick" interview questions but those are honestly a pretty small component of the process in my experience. You still have to get through all the behavioral interview stuff, if you can even get an interview in the first place.

I teach high school English. I keep trying to push for classes to be either shorter or accelerated. There is really no reason students have to sit in my classroom for 50 minutes a day. Most of my material is online and I spend a majority of the period just building relationships and answering any questions that come up while they move through the work.

Really, they need to know:
- read fiction/non-fiction and look for text evidence to answer questions
- use the internet to find reliable sources for research
- ability to properly cite sources (MLA, APA, whatever)
- be able to discuss their evidence-based ideas with others

No real reason why they take 4 years of "English" when they could just combine the class with History and do everything as one subject since it's pretty much the same thing
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Sahuagin posted...

Yellow posted...

What is, the library linking?

languages are recursive for one thing. maybe you know that and can already parse complex expressions, but otherwise I would start with a simple arithmetic expression parser.

other than that, there's all kinds of complex things that are not so easy. type inference, scopes, closures, lambdas. or even, what about something simple like a class?

I wrote a math string solver at one point that used pemdas. My interpreter did subroutines, so recursion worked. I had multiple hashtables (planned) for scopes that were disposed at the respective at the end of methods. It was slow, as it worked with the string the whole time, so I'd probably compile it into objects representing values and object references before running.

For classes I'd probably define a class with object representing all methods objects properties and such, but I never did get around to working with that. I guess you'd just have to follow the logic of a compiler.

It would basically be Java at that point. :P
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Yellow posted...

I wrote a math string solver at one point that used pemdas.

k depending how it was implemented, that's more like it. a C# expression is a lot more complicated though.

Yellow posted...

I had multiple hashtables (planned) for scopes

thinking about it, I guess maybe you would need a tree of hashtables, and it would be similar to namespaces; they can be nested and inner scopes can see outer scopes, but outer can't see inner.

so, that's a start at least, but there's a lot more to go than that.
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