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greyenlightenment  investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...  2yr ago (greyenlightenment.com)   3109 thread views

Why the college bubble won’t pop

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Yeah. If you're gwern and you drop out of college, good choice. If you're something like 115 IQ, or maybe the median professional programmer in the US, does dropping out materially help you? Probably not.

college alternatives ... coding bootcamps

College is not, if you're smart and capable, a useful way to learn to code in any sense. Much better to just learn yourself playing around and then making things. But coding bootcamps aren't really either, I guess.

College is not, if you're smart and capable, a useful way to learn to code in any sense.

It's possible that a useful conception of "learn to code" is narrower than I'm contemplating here, but for much of the work I'm used to in the tech industry learning to code is a fairly small part of what's taught and what's needed skillwise from a college education. There is absolutely an employment niche for people whose skill is only coding doing fairly deterministic work; web pages still (arguably?) need to be built, UI widgets plugged into backend widgets plugged into backend databases and so forth, but the people I see out of boot camps and the like have basically zero background in even the theory of building large-scale robust software systems that use CPU and memory efficiently. It's that latter group, usually with at least a bachelor's and often advanced degree, who are the ones making a serious career of it.

That probably sounds elitist AF, but as somebody who was arguably the best programmer in my high school I'd still have been a hot mess at any software engineering job without even the unevenly rigorous computer science classes I got at my (otherwise very good) liberal arts school.

That said, and despite that I endorse the value of college coursework for software engineering jobs, I'm still suspicious of the general case of a college education causing better outcomes vs being correlated with better outcomes.

forth, but the people I see out of boot camps and the like have basically zero background in even the theory of building large-scale robust software systems that use CPU and memory efficiently

Bootcamps are much worse than college, certainly, but if the goal is to learn "the theory of building large-scale robust software systems that use CPU and memory efficiently", college really is not an efficient or particularly useful way to do so versus experimenting and reading - if you're very capable in any case. And the most impressive "large-scale robust software systems that use CPU and memory efficiently" that I know personally come from people who were self-taught and then learned by reading, talking to people, and doing.

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