There are those who say you don’t need to go to university.
One such person is James Altucher:
Did James just write another post about college education? Is this, I don’t know, the eighth one he’s written?
Here’s the problem: Everyone is lying to you. And maybe three people are telling you the truth. DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY.
While I tend to agree with some of his points, I do believe that university gives a better understanding of computes for developers – it brings a breadth and depth of the theoretical knowledge that I haven’t seen in developers who have skipped the university part of their lives.
A thing I learned best at university was to draw my hand so I won’t fall asleep in complex math courses.
My hand from one of the lessons
Here are other 18 things that I have learnt at the university and couldn’t have learnt elsewhere:
- o(1) and o(n) rocks. o(n^c) and o(x^n) sucks. Everything in-between (=o(n*log(n))) is debatable
- Fourier transforms are for mathematicians. The only thing worth understanding is that changing the problem’s definition can help you reach the solution you seek
- Computers speak in binary. Real developers write in assembly. Hackers in C or C++. The rest think of them as programmers but they are just writing scripts
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There are several techniques that keep me awake in lectures and meetings. Here are the best 3:
- Write what is being said
- Draw the back of my hand
- Surrender and fall asleep
- Sleep is the best way for me to absorb computer science information. Drawing works best for humanities. Writing down is good for math
- Lambda calculus is for computers and mathematicians. Programmers should stay away from it
- Inter Process Communication comes in different shapes and sizes. So do Inter Person Communication
- N=NP might be the most important problem of computing. It is a waste of time dealing with it as a programmer
- Text search is tricky. Use a ready-made module instead of trying to write your own crap algorithms
- Tail recursion is awesome. No recursion is even better
- There are very few new discoveries. Most of the research today was done by someone a decade ago already – he just had less computing power at his disposal to make use of it
- Nobody really understands critical sections
- There’s a lot of solid math behind security, but at the end of the day, the way you design your security protocol will bring your undoing
- You will never be the smartest. There’s always a 15 year old who goes with you to the math and physics courses, but has an easier time getting his homework done
- How to say all those mathematical terms in Hebrew. English is how you find it in Wikipedia. Hebrew is how they teach it at the universities in Israel
- Statistics is a deterministic science. You start by determining the result and then find the numbers to prove it
- If statistics and practicality made sense in this world, there needs to be only a single male. Or maybe a handful
- Whatever it is you learnt in university will not help you in real life
What things did you learn at the university that aren’t easy to come by elsewhere?
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James also has a new book about alternatives to college.
It is pretty know that the universities are containers of data. You come with data, leave without, and that’s how data is contained…..