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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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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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