You make a lot of good points David.
Can we agree there are three types of degrees?
1) Non technical such as English.
2) Somewhat Technical such as MIS.
3) Engineering/Computer Science/Math or highly technical degrees.
At the UofA they did not offer a more technical/computer science degree
until I was about to graduate. I was in Management Information Systems
MIS. This was not a very technical degree.
I was required to take:
- FORTRAN which all business majors were required to take. It was
called intro to computers.
- Since I was an Accounting major at the time, I was required to take
COBOL.
- A class that was thought using Pascal. We had to do a project with
pointers. Do not recall much else.
- Analysis
- Design
- And some course on databases. I think this is where I learned about
normalization.
Not a very technical curriculum.
After taking COBOL I transferred to the local JC which had a very decent
curriculum. Not as good as Steve Litt's program.
The JC degree required 72 units and included lots of computer classes
such as assembly programming and added a 2nd COBOL class. I was told if
I did not get an A in COBOL I would not be able to find work in the
local community.
Given my education and experience I cannot create compilers,
interpreters, nor parsers. I see great value in having those types of
skills.
Keith
On 2022-12-23 15:08, David Schwartz via PLUG-discuss wrote:
The biggest difference I find between people who have been to college
and those who have not (ie, self-taught) is their breadth of
knowledge.
There are various required classes in a college program that are
designed to be “survey” classes that present an entire landscape
of approaches to different topics. And there are several such classes
required for the same reason.
Technically speaking, I was a Math major, and I was required to have a
bunch of core math courses. Then there was a core of computer-related
courses. Then there were a lot of electives I could take based on my
interets. When I was applying for graduation (BS), my advisor looked
over my studies and remarked at how broad my interests were. He
counted nine (9) different computer-related fields, and said most
students only got exposure to 4 or 5. I just followed my interests,
while a lot of others followed what their advisors told them to take.
I can’t say one is better than the other, but I’ve certainly met
lots of devs who have what I considered to be extremely deep and
narrow understanding of various programming topics at just the BS
level.
As a programmer, math has been a constant thread in most of my work,
but it has all been fairly simple math (if you want to call it that).
One quite innocuous (and required) class that I took was MAT243
Discrete Math Structures. It was all about counting problems. There
was only one guy who taught it and he had the personality of a wet
dish rag. Nobody really liked it. The material itself was quite
boring, to say the least. However, it turns out that this one class
probably has played the most central role of all math classes I took
in school. Most of the rest of the core math classes (like calculus
and linear algebra) have had zero impact on anything.
One class i wish I would have taken is Set Theory, because SQL is
based on that, but back in the 70’s, SQL was barely even a thing
yet.
Now, things could have been different, because the jobs I got were a
result of searching for work that interested me. I actively avoided
anything dealing with heavy-duty math topics that got into the realm
of calculus, numerical analysis, and hard-core linear algebra. I loved
trig for some reason, and I used some basic linear algebra once when I
did some stuff involving image analysis and manipulation, although
that involved understading and applying a lot of existing material
rather than having to write code from scratch.
As it happens, I’ve done a lot of work in areas that leveraged my
studies in the world of Compiler Construction, building lexers and
parsers and similar stuff, although most folks may never run into
that. I’ve always enjoyed working with lingusitic and
language-related problems.
The point is, I’ve worked with many self-taught devs who had a lot
of very detailed knowledge of the subject. But what they lacked was
breadth.
When your knowledge foundation is built on narrow topics picked up
over time based on choices you’ve made yourself or what your
employer has made for you, it’s not common to “survey the
landscape” in the same way that you get in a typical college
curriculum. And that has often been important to me in being able to
find alternate approaches to solving a problem.
I’m not about to say that having classes in humanities and social
sciences is helpful to programmers overall, but someone who wants to
get into Management might find them quite helpful at some point. I was
a Math major, and yet I’ve never used Calculus and things built on
that, although from time to time I’ve wished I had a little more so
i can play around in the arena of things that let you analyze and
alter sound profiles. But so much of that has been covered by others
that you can just search around and grab a library to do what you
need, so it’s not a great loss. But reading the theory behind a lot
of thee algorithms is hard for me to follow.
One of the biggest areas where I've observed this to be relevant, and
will probably never be addressed, is in the web world involving
certain types of web design. User-facing stuff lives in the world of
Graphic Arts, while back-end support (ie, database stuff) is more
classic programming stuff. There are lots of schools that teach UX/UI
design from an “art history” perspective that’s targeted at
artists. These people often must deal with some kind of back-end DB,
and frequently need a middle-tier to apply a lot of security and
filtering as well.
These folks are NOT “programmers” although more and more
javascript is being employed on UIs today. So we end up with people
who have virtually no classic traiing in “programming” or
“math” being asked to solve classic back-end and middle-tier
programming tasks, and companies wonder why their systems run so
poorly. But, boy, do the “look great”. :)
In situations like this, a project really needs to have TWO people
working on the project: one of whom is more of a visual artist
(graphic design) and one of whom is more of a programmer.
Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to happen very often in my
experience. The term “full-stack” has come to imply someone
skilled in the entire gamut of skills — jack of all trades, master
of none. When people programmed in VB or FoxBase or things like that,
the whole magilla was built into that one tool. It wasn’t a
“stack”, it was just one big dev tool or another, Today it’s
like someone threw thse tools at a brick wall and they shattered into
component parts.
Back before we had IDEs, we had all of these tools, and you used
“make” to help you build things and you just used whatever
“commands” you could find to help. Today, they’re all taught as
separate subjects in some schools. Back then, everybody was dealing
with the same pot of stew filled with most of the same ingredients.
Today, your likelihood of being hired is how many of the different
ingredients you have hands-on experience working with.
Companies don’t want to waste time and money with people having to
learn stuff — they want people who can hit the ground running. So
even saying “full stack” isn’t meaningful unless you say what
each of the components of that stack are. Never mind that a lot of
them at each layer are fairly equivalent. The people laying out these
requirements often don’t have a very broad base of understanding
themselves, so they rely on advice from whomever they can find to
advise them. And sometimes it’s just left to someone in HR.
Anyway, my point is that self-taught people tend to have an excellent
understanding of things they’ve encountered over time. Left to their
own devices, most people do not “survey the landscape” from time
to time to see what else is out there, in the way a typical 4-year
college degree affords students. Yes, a lot of what you’re exposed
to is ultimately going to be irrelevant, but a lot of it comes into
play in unexpected ways throughout your career.
I’ve worked with self-taught devs who don’t know anything about
regular expressions, or what lexers and parsers are, so when we’re
facing a situation where we need something like that, they don’t
even know what to look for. If you have no exposure at all to some
topic, you don’t know any relevant terminology, or how to research
it, or anything. You’re just groping around in the dark. I’ve seen
this a lot, and it exists frequently because people don’t like to
ask for help.
I ran into that recently myself and posted an explanation of what I
wanted in a group, and several people came back and explained
there’s a whole “body of knowledge” with its own terminology and
whatnot, stuff for me to search for on Google and dig into.
As it happens, there are lots of little niches like this we’ll all
encounter over time. However, most college curricula are designed to
present a lot of stuff that most people in the field will enounter
repeatedly over time.
I think it would be possible to teach an entire CS program without the
humanities and social-science aspects in half the time they take today
(2 years) and that would be quite sufficient for most developers in
their career, without much loss of value. But again, if you want to
get into any kind of Management role, you’d be at a loss relative to
others who did get this broader background in college.
-David Schwartz
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