Learning on your own or formal training?
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Ok, maybe it does a bit more but i have seen some amazing guys in the last few years who dropped out of college and are doing awesome
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
Mathlab wrote:
my degree just gets me through the door
I use the door handle for that.
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
My formal education has been a significant asset in my professional career. However, considering the varying level of quality at many universities and the quality of many "programming" candidates I can safely say, YMMV. But, if you have a solid foundation and understanding in computer science it will only serve to help you.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
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Formal training doesn't allow you to screw stuff up, because they guide you to color between the lines without experiencing failure. Failure is crucial to learning. I've learned that after watching all the Rocky movies in a row.
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I like that
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
The advantage of learning on your own is that there are no boundaries, so you can get really creative with your code. The disadvantage of other people learning on their own is that there are no boundaries, so they get too damned creative with their code.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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1% inspiration?
AspDotNetDev wrote:
1% inspiration?
1% Perspiration?
People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
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While I'll agree that 90% of my knowledge has come from years of coding, my other 90% has come about due to how I was taught to think and analyse. That came formally from various schools, colleges and universities. :)
Chris Meech I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar] In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra] posting about Crystal Reports here is like discussing gay marriage on a catholic church’s website.[Nishant Sivakumar]
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
Formal learning gives you the techniques and foundation of knowledge that you need in order to learn efficiently on your own. And yeah, it also gets you a box ticked on the CV which gives you a chance to prove yourself. But I think the value of formal education is significantly more than that piece of paper; it teaches you how learning works, so when you are investigating things on your own, you have some structure to tie it to. And if you've done a course in something that's directly relevant, it also gives you the base layer which is really hard to pick up from nothing.
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i don't think school teaches me how to learn, think and analyze, that's just bullshit they say when they have nothing real to justify tuition fee (now depending on your field of specialty, some math/algo can be valuable) sorry i sound pragmatic
dev
Absolutely true...
Piyush K Singh
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The advantage of learning on your own is that there are no boundaries, so you can get really creative with your code. The disadvantage of other people learning on their own is that there are no boundaries, so they get too damned creative with their code.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I laughed, then it hit me, I might also get a bit creative sometimes
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I laughed, then it hit me, I might also get a bit creative sometimes
Creative + documented understandably = good code It's when the second operand is missing that there are problems.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I find that 90% of the useful knowledge I have came from hours of coding on my own and the community. The other 10% aka my degree just gets me through the door in some cases and allows me to punctuate my documentation. Why go to school, teach the next generation to code? :thumbsup: or :thumbsdown:
Formal training is an absolute must. It will teach you things you cannot discover on your own just because you have no idea they exist. It is a shortcut to grow by twenty years in six months. I received good training on topics like algorithmics, formal proofs, numerical analysis, mathematical programming, concurrent systems, language parsing... I had no idea I needed to know about that. If you stick to standard programmer experience, all you'll get is the "culture" embedded in User's Manuals and other Cookbooks.
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Formal training is an absolute must. It will teach you things you cannot discover on your own just because you have no idea they exist. It is a shortcut to grow by twenty years in six months. I received good training on topics like algorithmics, formal proofs, numerical analysis, mathematical programming, concurrent systems, language parsing... I had no idea I needed to know about that. If you stick to standard programmer experience, all you'll get is the "culture" embedded in User's Manuals and other Cookbooks.
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Formal learning gives you the techniques and foundation of knowledge that you need in order to learn efficiently on your own. And yeah, it also gets you a box ticked on the CV which gives you a chance to prove yourself. But I think the value of formal education is significantly more than that piece of paper; it teaches you how learning works, so when you are investigating things on your own, you have some structure to tie it to. And if you've done a course in something that's directly relevant, it also gives you the base layer which is really hard to pick up from nothing.
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that's bullshit. only in specialized fields you'd need the math/algo and most other shit they teaches you in *academia* is waste of time ...and yea I learn how to learn and think *myself*, school didn't teach me that
dev
We obviously had different experiences
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i don't think school teaches me how to learn, think and analyze, that's just bullshit they say when they have nothing real to justify tuition fee (now depending on your field of specialty, some math/algo can be valuable) sorry i sound pragmatic
dev
IMO it all depends on the teacher. Putting all teachers in the same pot based on the few examples you got to know is IMO not pragmatic. Sort of catch-all exception handling ...
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Ok, maybe it does a bit more but i have seen some amazing guys in the last few years who dropped out of college and are doing awesome
Mathlab wrote:
... i have seen some amazing guys in the last few years who dropped out of college and are doing awesome
... but then again, maybe for them the proportion is different, and maybe they invested time in learning formally on their own.
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Creative + documented understandably = good code It's when the second operand is missing that there are problems.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Idunno ... there's a saying: "boring code is good code" (not sure if it didn't originate with Joel Spolsky). Thing is, nobody has problems understanding boring code, and since you mostly read code (or javadoc - I prefer code), "creative" code, even if understandable, may be difficult to comprehend, increasing its TCO. Now, with architecture, it's an entirely different story. To be creative when architecting a new app means (for me) finding a basic structure for the application which should allow developing all parts in a highly decoupled way, communicating via a few, well defined and narrow interfaces, so that each part does just one thing and is therefore easily comprehensible - find a project setup which works well for every feature of the application but also makes reading and understanding code easy. While it doesn't sound too creative, it must be something difficult, since I've seen so many applications which lack this basic, central, spinal bone like abstraction, and are just a heap of heterogeneous parts which communicate via ad-hoc interfaces. That's not creative and not useful, that's just bureaucracy applied to software design. And, to get back to the original subject, that's where IMO it makes most sense investing in self-training - IME very few people in academia are really concerned with this issue, so while your formal training might give you strong basic knowledge about algorithms and data structures, IME most CS graduates don't even know who Christopher Alexander was, and using design patterns in a sensible way is something they haven't grasped yet, even if it was thaught to them. OTOH, training yourself in algorithms and data structures, while possible, isn't something I've seen many people do.
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that's bullshit. only in specialized fields you'd need the math/algo and most other shit they teaches you in *academia* is waste of time ...and yea I learn how to learn and think *myself*, school didn't teach me that
dev
devvvy wrote:
only in specialized fields you'd need the math/algo
That's BS. You probably don't feel like you could use it because it wasn't taught to you the proper way. The difference between knowing your formal stuff or not knowing it is a difference in app speed, code size, development speed and maintenance cost of maybe one order of magnitude, over the lifetime of an application. If you're not developing one-off, 200 lines of code apps. As for your self-taught thinking skills, I think there's a flaw there: you obviously didn't teach yourself that other people might actually know what they're talking about, and also that there's always some more to learn.