Re: Great interview

Great interview (Score: 4, Interesting)

by marqueeblink@pipedot.org on 2014-04-01 23:19 (#XS)

I can't speak for science, but one certainly doesn't need an advanced university degree, or even an undergraduate degree (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, etc), to do fantastic work in software. People with a masters or Ph.D in CS from a well-regarded university tend to have a certain polish, though, with a practical understanding of the peer-reviewed research and fewer gaping holes in their base of fundamental knowledge. That would be important for professors, as even Dyson grudgingly acknowledges in the interview, I think.

It's almost a truism that many or most of the best teachers on a given college campus are those who don't have tenure. Youthful energy, ambition, receptiveness to new ideas, lack of complacency and habits of political infighting, rapport with students, are some of the reasons commonly given.

Re: Great interview (Score: 4, Informative)

by bryan@pipedot.org on 2014-04-02 03:27 (#XW)

You can defiantly excel at computer science without a formal degree. With a lot of self-taught "street smarts" from working in the practical word, you can do some neat stuff. But, some of the more academic upper level courses are amazingly insightful.

Although I opted for "just the B.S." credential, I took over a dozen upper level classes that had zero effect on my chosen degree. And wow those classes where neat. You are unlikely to develop a large Prolog application in the real world. Or build a fully functional MIPS CPU using only NAND gates. Or understand the differences between Third normal form and Boyce Codd normal form. Or apply the math behind transformation matrices and construct your own 3D rendering library. Or calculate the bandwidth of digital communication channels with the Nyquist theorem. Etc, etc...

My point being, those that skip the formal classes are skipping a significant amount of background knowledge behind the degree. You can still get this knowledge on your own self-study schedule, but the University has it all wrapped up in a neat little package for you.