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* Calls themselves "Software Engineer"
* Doesn't know what a thread is.

I swear these coding boot camps are churning out code monkeys whose real skill is building shitty React apps.

I believe a CS degree is necessary if you want to work on something more than CRUD applications.

Nothing against devs without degrees, but at least make an effort because my head will explode next time I have to explain to someone what a thread is and why it's a very bad idea to run blocking code on the main thread.

Comments
  • 7
    You don't need threads when everything runs synchronous and I have a lot of time to waste 🤷‍♂️
  • 21
    Next up: 🎓

    * Has a CS degree

    * Doesnt know what a thread is
  • 2
  • 16
    @hinst is right. Colleges aren’t much better than coding bootcamps — it just takes longer to graduate.

    In my experience, skill comes from passion, nothing else. All of the best devs I have worked with were self-taught, and very few of the devs with degrees were very skilled.
  • 3
    @Root agreed. Its all about passion but lets be real. Bootcamps can't come close to a degree with "proper" education. Top 10% bootcamps may be better than worst 30% collages but thats all. I sound like an idiot comparing 3-6 month bootcamp to 4 years of education. I am passionate about my profession but I am also a lazy person. So I propably wouldn't learn everything I know now without a degree. Collages kinda just pushes you to learn more and more.
  • 5
    I see people with CS degrees struggling with pointers. What does that mean? It means I help them understand how they work and move on. I have an electrical background and I help my CS colleagues understand the stuff they weren't exposed to in school.
  • 4
    @hack If the college is decent, you’re probably right. But if you’re passionate, you’ll learn just as much on your own, or more. (Though let’s be honest, probably not the super boring stuff.)
  • 3
    @Root Self teaching is way to go, with or without a college degree
  • 2
    I totally agree with @null-pointer-ex

    I am working with a few devs from bootcamps, and while some are passionate and really good, some others have very little idea of what they are doing and lack a lot notions regarding non-code stuff (DB basics, complexity, threads, memory, networking to name a few)

    For that thanks the "no need theory, just practice" trending speech from 5-6 years ago which was of course bullshit

    However, I must say that some unis are clearly a joke as well. I am French, yet working in the UK with some people from the Russell group and I wonder why they pay so much for their degrees because they know very little. My free French uni (as a modern country, education is free) had better teaching but yet will not be in the so-called bullshit ranking that are published every year

    In conclusion, world's scam.
  • 4
    At my current company devs are encouraged to make presentation for the sake of knowledge sharing. I once attended a presentation on Golang concurrency. In the first slide the presenter wrote "concurrency means doing multiple things in parallel". It's funny how some people failed to google some fundamental knowledge. It's ok not to have a degree, but at least do your fucking research before presenting something. Sharing false knowledge is damaging.
  • 2
    @ostream Don't bee too harsh, C has definitely issues, but a threat? That's C++. :D
  • 0
    I tell people that MIT offers free CS courses online, and they should try those before committing to a Boot Camp. No one has brought it up again after I started doing that. There are too many people that come out of boot camps that should not have done a Boot Camp
  • 1
    Last semester near the end of Parallel Computing the professor asked us what are the steps involved in incrementing a variable held in memory. The room finally agreed on the answer, in a maelstrom of stuoidity that left the professor speechless

    Create, Read, Update, Delete
  • 0
    I could write a book about the pointlessness of Academia, including a pretty long chapter about the various ways in which it restricts social mobility.
  • 0
    @Xamenyap Well uhm the first Google result for "concurrency programming" for me is an expandable result where the frist line is "Concurrency means multiple computations are happening at the same time" from https://web.mit.edu/6.005/www/...
  • 0
    @lbfalvy Why did they choose crud for that? I am very confused about that answer. Don't you just lock with mutex increment and unlock? I assume this was a variable in multiple threads?
  • 0
    agree, it's alarming when educations don't even touch on some basic concepts.

    I don't expect everyone to remember things how to implement concepts thry studied in college difference but there's a big difference between "Oh I forgot how shared memory is handled between threads" and never even having touched upon the topic.

    I do think there could be a middle ground where perhaps you don't need a full 3 year comp Sci degreex, you could skip one math class. but 6 months of practical education is still a bit too short.
  • 0
    @Demolishun Because they looked into the abyss between their ears and took the one thing they found in it; the only crumb of expertise that stuck after two years of academia.
  • 2
    @jiraTicket No amount of education fixes disinterest and all the interested require to learn is access to resources - something granted by default to most people in the world in computer science
  • 0
  • 1
    @lbfalvy their answer was CRUD? You’re joking! Come on stop making stuff up 😁! That prof should’ve flunked every student who answered that way lol
  • 2
    @TeachMeCode If they did, there'd be like 12 of us left of 150 admitted, and the uni needs the tuition fees to continue printing degrees for any sad soul willing to pay for them.
  • 0
    @lbfalvy yes sadly they’re very likely to still graduate without knowing how to code. Money down the toilet, only benefit is their resumes won’t get dumped due to lacking a degree. Besides they could’ve at least put a little thought in their crud answer. Why would you delete to increment a value?
  • 2
    @Xamenyap Sure that link is correct. parallelism is multiple processes can run simultaneously and concurrency is composition of such processes.

    Was just saying that if you ask "did you even Google this?" they might say yes truthfully as some search results mention insufficient definitions. Your criticism is perfectly valid though and anyone doing a presentation on the topic should study more carefully than taking a glance. Just saying it's possible they did Google it, sloppily.
  • 2
    I agree with @Root I don't have anything against those with college degree, but nowadays colleges are like bootcamps and maybe worse depending on the country, they just get bloated with so much unneeded information, teaching them with the same books from 20 years ago, regarding that area I think bootcamps are doing better job, but when it comes to bootcamps all of them have these ads "In 3 Months you can earn a salary of up to 100K" and that's probably why most of the bootcampers think they are Senior Engineers.
  • 0
    College never taught me:

    Git, github, ci/cd, docker, kubernetes, orchestration, streaming data tech.

    Name it.
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