[ale] CS Degree necessary?

[Thompson Freeman]

With my limited collection of degrees, I hope I'm never accused of finding
a particular degree useless. I will, however, encourage people to study
LOTS of stuff and not focus exclusively on the practical limits of what
they think they will do for years and years. Partly because they may well
not be doing that in a few years, partly I've never been able to tell
where the next useful idea will come from.

On 18 Jan 2002, Vernard Martin wrote:

> On Thu, 2002-01-17 at 03:33, Matt Shade wrote:
> I have tried to keep my mouth shut on this particular topic but I guess
> my better judgement has finally lost the battle.
> 
> There seems to be a general consensuse that computer science degrees are
> mostly useless in the technical field. While it may be true that many
> folks without computer science degrees are great programmers, blah blah
> blah, do not fool yourself into thinking that folks without CS degrees
> know the same things as folks with CS degrees.
> 
> I'm speaking from the stance of someone that has a couple of degrees in
> computer science and trying desparately to finish off a third. Simply
> put, a CS degree means is that you have supposedly been exposed to the
> various theory and rationals behind much of what physical computers are
> based on. And you ahve supposedly been given time to properly learn
> these theories and think about them and ponder them in an environment
> that isn't as harsh as the real world. While it is often true that the
> academic environment is the least useful place to learn these skills, it
> is sometimes the ONLY place some of these skills will be learned.
> 
> I'm willing to bet that most of the folks doing the really innovative
> design work on motherboards, cpus, video cards and operating systems are
> not the folks that dropped out of engineering school or just learned it
> all in the basement. Don't fool yourself just because some folks can do
> without a formal education does not mean that is useless.
> 
> V
> 
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-- 
===========================================
The harder I work, the luckier I get.
                    Lee Iacocca
===========================================
Thompson Freeman          tfreeman at intel.digichem.net


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