In response to a post about raising smart kids on Slashdot a long time ago, someone posted this:
"Uh-oh, the ground is trembling, (Score:4, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29, @08:06AM
Small mammals are scurrying for cover,
All the birds have taken wing.
The hordes of self-proclaimed geniuses who wander the halls of Slashdot approach."
This is possibly the Hacker News equivalent of that topic. It appears impossible to have these discussions without the whole thing degenerating into thinly-concealed self-praise.
'Self-taught' vs 'CS-educated' covers such a wide range as to make the question almost meaningless, in any case. Even among CS-educated people, most of us have progressively forgotten and relearned so much as to have way more in common with 'self-taught' than we'd care to admit. For example, I took computer architecture courses in both undergrad and grad school, but pretty much forgot it all and relearned almost everything that I know about it now in a very different context (high-end x86 that didn't exist back when I took comp arch). Much of what I 'knew' then isn't even true anymore...
And 'self-taught' could mean "ploughed though Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest + TAOCP + SICP + Hennesy&Patterson" while CS-educated can equally mean "took a bunch of Java courses and dodged all the hard stuff I could".
"Uh-oh, the ground is trembling, (Score:4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 29, @08:06AM Small mammals are scurrying for cover, All the birds have taken wing.
The hordes of self-proclaimed geniuses who wander the halls of Slashdot approach."
This is possibly the Hacker News equivalent of that topic. It appears impossible to have these discussions without the whole thing degenerating into thinly-concealed self-praise.
'Self-taught' vs 'CS-educated' covers such a wide range as to make the question almost meaningless, in any case. Even among CS-educated people, most of us have progressively forgotten and relearned so much as to have way more in common with 'self-taught' than we'd care to admit. For example, I took computer architecture courses in both undergrad and grad school, but pretty much forgot it all and relearned almost everything that I know about it now in a very different context (high-end x86 that didn't exist back when I took comp arch). Much of what I 'knew' then isn't even true anymore...
And 'self-taught' could mean "ploughed though Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest + TAOCP + SICP + Hennesy&Patterson" while CS-educated can equally mean "took a bunch of Java courses and dodged all the hard stuff I could".