Theory matters after all...

Comments

# Jason Haley said on August 8, 2007 9:07 AM:

# Tobin said on August 8, 2007 4:36 PM:

I am one of those "uneducated" people you wrote about. In many ways, I wish that I had received a CS degree at some point (or any degree for that matter).  There are things that I didn't learn in college and wish that I had.  Instead, I forced myself to just read the books that I would have read in college (Patterson/Hennessy, Kernighan/Ritchie, etc, etc). Despite that, I lack knowledge of some aspects of programming that I fear I will never learn now.

College should be, in theory, more than just teaching someone to regurgitate what a book told them.  I don’t feel that everyone needs college to teach them how to think outside the book bindings. Some, however, need a great deal of instruction and that’s where the degree helps.

# Tobin said on August 8, 2007 4:37 PM:

I am one of those "uneducated" people you wrote about. In many ways, I wish that I had received a CS degree at some point (or any degree for that matter).  There are things that I didn't learn in college and wish that I had.  Instead, I forced myself to just read the books that I would have read in college (Patterson/Hennessy, Kernighan/Ritchie, etc, etc). Despite that, I lack knowledge of some aspects of programming that I fear I will never learn now.

College should be, in theory, more than just teaching someone to regurgitate what a book told them.  I don’t feel that everyone needs college to teach them how to think outside the book bindings. Some, however, need a great deal of instruction and that’s where the degree helps.

# William said on August 8, 2007 11:05 PM:

Wuzzzuppp My Brotha.  

Actually, when I hear this argument come up and someone making the case that a CS Degree is a *must* to being a real developer, you are one of the people that immediately comes to mind. Not having a CS degree myself, it's a cheap technique if I say "well what about me" b/c few people would really be putting people on the spot.  But having worked with you, you are as much da man as anyone I've worked with and you certainly don't shy away from Theory.

What I was speaking to though, and I think you know where I'm coming from, is that there are many folks that like stroking their own egos by making things complex.  Typically, if you question them on it, they reply with condescension or hostility.  Other folks will typically know the design may be hosed, but don't want to get into a theoretical battle which they feel they'll lose. This in turn causes them often to criticize the design, not with "he doesn't know what the f~ck he's talking about" as much as "Well, that stuff works great in  a textbook but in the real world, it doesn't work"  The real problem isn't too much theory in the cases I've seen, it's usually either too much ego or not enough knowledge, and in some cases a heaping helping of both.  I mean, have you ever worked on something that really sucked b /c the designer(s) knew OOP, Networking, artchitecture, hardware etc "too well"?  Some stuff is inherently complex like the subject the guy in the article presented on.

It's just that I've seen way too many ego driven nuts who think that people can't be good developers unless ______________ (fill in some sort of criteria like 4 year degree, master's degree, 10 year experience etc).  Generally,  these guidelines have some value but when adhered to blindly, cause people to make dumb decisions.  I've also run into a lot of chip on their shoulders type who either haven't kept up with technology, or are pissed off the world isn't still using VB6 and variant datatypes.  So they trash designs that mean they'll actually have to learn something new as 'too textbook' all the while it's more a matter of 'too much learning I don't want to do.'

There are just too many examples of superb developers who don't have CS degrees.  In our whole crew in greenville and atlanta, other than Burton I don't think any of us had a 4 year cs degree.  On the other hand, we've all had to clean up Access/VB disasters by pure pragmatist types who hated everything that seemed like it came out of a university.  

If you don't have a degree, I think you really need to have a real passion for programming and a good bit of experience to make up for it.  If you do have a degree, you do need to keep in mind that the business world has issues that are impossible to simulate back in school and consequences that will last a lot longer than a report card.  There are too many examples of people on both sides of the equation who are damn good at what they do though for me to ever be able to take a side one way or the tohtter on the argument, it's totally a matter of 'It depends"

# Andy said on August 9, 2007 12:13 AM:

I bet you could use this to pin point the location of any stego in a pic with a little tweaking.

# Henson Benson said on August 12, 2007 10:19 PM:

Few things do add..

There are CS degrees and CS degrees...School one went thru matters.

Also a CS degree, a serious one, teaches you how data structures work, the big O thing, how pointers (yeah, who remembers pointers now:)) work and one understands that todays languages provide lots of layers and wrappers on top of those basic data structures and one should be able to understand how things work under the hood of a language.

But for brainless web development stuff (reading and displaying stuff)...a degreee is not needed.