I got an Electronics Engineering Degree almost 30 years ago (and, funnilly enough, I then made my career as a software engineer and I barelly used the EE stuff professionally except when I was working in high-performance computing, but that’s a side note) and back then one of my software development teachers told us “Every 5 years half of what you know becomes worthless”.
All these years later, from my experience he was maybe being a little optimist.
Programming is something you can learn by yourself (by the time I went to Uni I was already coding stuff in Assembly purelly for fun and whilst EE did have programming classes they added to maybe 5% of the whole thing, though nowadays with embedded systems its probably more), but the most important things that Uni taught me were the foundational knowledge (maths, principles of engineering, principles of design) and how to learn, and those have served me well to keep up with the whole loss of relevance of half I know every 5 years, sometimes in unexpect ways like how obscure details of microprocessor design I learned there being usefull when designing high performance systems, the rationalle for past designs speeding up my learning of new things purelly because why stuff is designed the way it is, is still the same, and even Trignometry turning out to be essential decades later for doing game development.
So even in a fast changing field like Software Engineering a Degree does make a huge difference, not from memorizing bleeding edge knowledge but from the foundational knowledge you get, the understanding of the tought processes behind designing things and the learning to learn.
Also a software engineer… I look back on my undergrad fondly but was it really that helpful? … nah.
I also put no stock in learning how to learn. If people want to learn something they do, if they don’t, they don’t. Nobody has to go to school to fish, play video games, or be a car guy, but all of those things have crazy high ceilings of knowledge and know how.
If you go into an industry you’re not interested in, it doesn’t matter how well you learned to learn, you’re not going to learn anything more than required. For me, I’m constantly learning things from blogs, debates, and questions I find myself asking both for personal projects and professional projects.
Really all a university is, is a guided study of what’s believed to be the foundational material in a field + study of a number of things that are aimed at increasing awareness across the board; that’s going to be more helpful to some than others.
If you graduate and work in a bunch of Python web code … those fundamentals aren’t really that important. You’re not going to write quick sort of bubble sort, very few people do, you’re going to just call .sort().
You’re also probably not going to care about Big-O, you’re probably just going to notice organically “hey this is really bad and I can rearrange it to cache the results.” A bunch of stuff like that will probably come up that you’ll never even pay any mind to because the size of N is never large enough for it to matter in your application.
… personally I think our education system needs to be redone from the ground up. It creates way more stress than it justifies. The focus should be on teaching people important lessons that they can actually remember into adulthood, not cramming brains with an impossible amount of very specific information under the threat of otherwise living a “subpar” life.
Older societies I think had it right with their story form lessons, songs, etc. They made the important lessons cultural pieces and latched on to techniques that actually help people remember instead of just giving them the information with a technique to remember it and then being surprised when a huge portion of the class can’t remember.
Edit: To make a software metaphor, we’ve in effect decided as a society to use inefficient software learn functions driven by the prefrontal cortex vs making use of much more efficient intrinsics built into the body by millions of years of evolution to facilitate learning. We’re running bubble sort to power our education system.
I got an Electronics Engineering Degree almost 30 years ago (and, funnilly enough, I then made my career as a software engineer and I barelly used the EE stuff professionally except when I was working in high-performance computing, but that’s a side note) and back then one of my software development teachers told us “Every 5 years half of what you know becomes worthless”.
All these years later, from my experience he was maybe being a little optimist.
Programming is something you can learn by yourself (by the time I went to Uni I was already coding stuff in Assembly purelly for fun and whilst EE did have programming classes they added to maybe 5% of the whole thing, though nowadays with embedded systems its probably more), but the most important things that Uni taught me were the foundational knowledge (maths, principles of engineering, principles of design) and how to learn, and those have served me well to keep up with the whole loss of relevance of half I know every 5 years, sometimes in unexpect ways like how obscure details of microprocessor design I learned there being usefull when designing high performance systems, the rationalle for past designs speeding up my learning of new things purelly because why stuff is designed the way it is, is still the same, and even Trignometry turning out to be essential decades later for doing game development.
So even in a fast changing field like Software Engineering a Degree does make a huge difference, not from memorizing bleeding edge knowledge but from the foundational knowledge you get, the understanding of the tought processes behind designing things and the learning to learn.
Also a software engineer… I look back on my undergrad fondly but was it really that helpful? … nah.
I also put no stock in learning how to learn. If people want to learn something they do, if they don’t, they don’t. Nobody has to go to school to fish, play video games, or be a car guy, but all of those things have crazy high ceilings of knowledge and know how.
If you go into an industry you’re not interested in, it doesn’t matter how well you learned to learn, you’re not going to learn anything more than required. For me, I’m constantly learning things from blogs, debates, and questions I find myself asking both for personal projects and professional projects.
Really all a university is, is a guided study of what’s believed to be the foundational material in a field + study of a number of things that are aimed at increasing awareness across the board; that’s going to be more helpful to some than others.
If you graduate and work in a bunch of Python web code … those fundamentals aren’t really that important. You’re not going to write quick sort of bubble sort, very few people do, you’re going to just call
.sort().You’re also probably not going to care about Big-O, you’re probably just going to notice organically “hey this is really bad and I can rearrange it to cache the results.” A bunch of stuff like that will probably come up that you’ll never even pay any mind to because the size of N is never large enough for it to matter in your application.
… personally I think our education system needs to be redone from the ground up. It creates way more stress than it justifies. The focus should be on teaching people important lessons that they can actually remember into adulthood, not cramming brains with an impossible amount of very specific information under the threat of otherwise living a “subpar” life.
Older societies I think had it right with their story form lessons, songs, etc. They made the important lessons cultural pieces and latched on to techniques that actually help people remember instead of just giving them the information with a technique to remember it and then being surprised when a huge portion of the class can’t remember.
Edit: To make a software metaphor, we’ve in effect decided as a society to use inefficient software learn functions driven by the prefrontal cortex vs making use of much more efficient intrinsics built into the body by millions of years of evolution to facilitate learning. We’re running bubble sort to power our education system.