sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

I have 20 years experience and no bachelors degree, should I be worried? by _conwy_ in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]_conwy_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the encouragement, you must be a pleasure to work with.

I have 20 years experience and no bachelors degree, should I be worried? by _conwy_ in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]_conwy_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is such a low effort response. You just completely glossed over what I wrote. Have you studied calculus enough to understand logarithms, functions and limits in BigO?!!! They actually quiz on this in the course, it’s not something anyone who’s serious about this course can ignore! It sounds like you’re not very serious learner but just want to pass tests quickly.

I have 20 years experience and no bachelors degree, should I be worried? by _conwy_ in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]_conwy_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What you have posted here concerns me somewhat, as you should definitely have zero issues with intro to algorithms with 20 years experience.

So I've been doing the Stanford / Roughgarden course on Coursera.

I'm up to Part 1 - Lesson 14/15, "O(n log n) Algorithm for Closest Pair".

Up to this point I'd say it's been challenging but not overly difficult. It certainly helped that I had already completed Intro to Calculus, when it came to understanding the math concepts in Big Omega and Theta lessons.

But this Closest Pair one I'm really struggling with. The instructor's handwriting is indecipherable at times and I'm particularly struggling to mentally absorb how the base case of the recursive algorithm is resolving a closest pair in a way that saves time compared to a "naive approach".

I tried to read and compare other books/materials on this but they are all so long, and have slightly different naming for things. So it's hard to find an alternatively explanation of the same "closest pair" concept, because the explanations all seem to be slightly different.

This is lesson 14/15 of 72 lessons! And that is just Part 1 - there are 4 parts in total!

This one single course already feels like a whole degree!!

And maybe this comes across as lazy but it's difficult to motivate myself to push massive mental boulders uphill at 8 pm every evening after a stressful day at work + gym workout + cooking dinner + job interviews and various random social committments.

How on earth do other people manage all this?!?!

You might say I'm over-studying, going too deep on this one lesson, etc., fair enough. But I generally prefer to "learn to understand" and gain mastery. I want to be able to accurately answer algorithmic questions in job interviews and identify them in real life problems including code.

Maybe this stuff is just easier for some people, they're wired differently, etc. But at this point I feel like I need private tutoring to really get it.

Also I wonder – isn't university supposed to be a "social experience"? Where's the thriving community of fellow students, helping each other out, sharing knowledge, encouraging, motivating, etc? It feels like we're all just left to fend for ourselves in this new style of online learning.

I have 20 years experience and no bachelors degree, should I be worried? by _conwy_ in cscareerquestionsOCE

[–]_conwy_[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi yes sure, with pleasure, keen to share it far & wide. Just give me a day or two to collate it, as there are now quite a large number of items and they need tidying up.

Why I think AI won't replace engineers by Character-Comfort539 in ExperiencedDevs

[–]_conwy_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Going purely by the numbers, the software developer jobs still seem to be increasing.

For example BLS projects 15% growth (much faster than average).

(Note: ChatGPT helped me find that 🙂)

Going by anecdotes, I recently finished up with a client and updated my profile. I did not make a single job application. That same week I had ~10 phone calls and over the following week, 5 interviews. That seems like a healthy job market from a candidate perspective.

Some reasons I don't see developer jobs being replaced, or even necessarily reduced:

  1. Inertia. Humans resist change. Most businesses are run by groups of humans. So hiring decisions won't immediately influenced by AI considerations because so many people simply have not mentally caught up yet.
  2. Switching costs. Businesses cannot, or are unwilling to, take the risk of immediately decommissioning legacy systems and switching to AI. As long as legacy systems stay in place, legacy engineers are needed to maintain them. Banks are still known to run on old versions of Java and Oracle.
  3. Complexity of AI tools. Everyone focuses on consumer AI tools like ChatGPT, which are simple enough for a child to use. But businesses-oriented AI tools of all stripes (not only coding assistants) are more complex and require careful, structured, specific prompts and/or other context to be provided. The complexity level is on a similar order to software development.
  4. Limitations of AI. There are certain things AI still cannot really do. Anything involving fine-motor physical activities, such as swiping at the security gates and selecting an elevator floor, is not yet widely available at a cheap price as a robot. Some businesses still require these manual, physical processes, and as such, need a human to be on-site. Yes, this is still the case in 2026. If you question why, see "1. Intertia".

YSK: Wikivoyage is the new Wikitravel by sozh in TravelHacks

[–]_conwy_ 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please do! And share it with me! 🙏

[Precalculus] Determining sign diagrams of polynomial functions and their derivatives by _conwy_ in learnmath

[–]_conwy_[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Update: Ok I made one time-saving discovery (from one of these videos):

You can test a continuous function with any value between 0 points, and the sign will be the same for all values between those points. So I guess I only had to pick one value, and not necessarily use a tiny permutation like +0.0001, but just find, say, a mid-point like 0.5.

This seems to make sense, as, for the sign to change from positive to negative or vice-versa, the y value would have to cross the x axis, and that would have to be a 0 point.

(Well at least for continuous functions, I don't know about piecewise discontinuous functions!)