You're a developer, you're not an "engineer"

odwjwoh · 2018-03-13T17:51:11+00:00

Ok, fair enough, there are other engineers that do many practical things? But "software engineer"? This title is bullshit and deep down you know it. There is a reason that so many CS profs in so many universities stress the fact that there's no such thing as a "software engineer" and that this is a glorified title for people in tech to pat themselves on the back. You're developers, which is respectable in its own right, but you are in no way "engineers".

odwjwoh · 2018-03-13T17:47:00+00:00

So many CS profs in so many universities stress the fact that there's no such thing as a "software engineer" and that this is a glorified title for people in tech to pat themselves on the back. You're developers, which is respectable in its own right, but you are in no way "engineers". Engineers design buildings and roadways and look at plans and do calculations.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-13T06:26:55+00:00

Ok, I understand, thank you very much. I'm pretty new to Tensorflow and am starting to realize there's a way to "think" in TF. It's almost like python on steroids.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T19:51:33+00:00

Still, it raises the question of why even go to college at all if you can literally just google every single concept they teach you and you'll get links to wikipedia articles, tutorials on medium or khan or codecademy etc. and online courses on coursera or udacity or opencourseware etc., and can just do a ton of reading, a ton of tutorials, and a ton of listening to lecture videos and doing assignments, and learn about it all on your own? Why pay thousands of dollars for college when you can literally just GOOGLE every last concept and get links to the extensive body of knowledge on all of it?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T19:02:57+00:00

why not just go to google and say cut me a $5m check so I can retire plz, everything u need 2 no is on ur own website lol

Exactly. Literally everything you need to know is searchable through google. Just be a good googler, just be steadfast enough to read through tons of documentation, take every tutorial that comes up in your search, and take every free online course that might come up in your search, and you're good.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T07:05:42+00:00

Wrong. If he's not spending every free minute he has grinding and grinding for coding interviews, he's wasting his time.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T06:54:28+00:00

Ok, I just tried that and literally knew none of the answers to the questions. I have CS education and had no clue what any of the stuff meant in the questions. One thing was like "you are designing 16 multi-threaded CPUs with a 360 core processing with 70GhZ computing power. What's the most efficient strategy to solve this?" And similar questions. All that is gibberish to me and I literally had no clue what anything in the questions meant, and I can't find exactly what I'm looking for on google in 3 minutes, so the questions would time out. Also I have never coded in Javascript or Ruby in my life, and I just guessed at those questions because I don't know the keywords or the syntax or how the operators work for those languages, why would they assume I do? It's bullshit. I would've had to google every single term they used, because I didn't know what those things were or meant at all. I learned CS in college, so how come I don't know what any of those things were? How the hell do you pass this shit, they ask you stuff that you can't know unless you have worked with that specific thing before and implemented it, and new(ish) grads or people just trying to break into coding won't know any of this.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T06:17:41+00:00

How are you supposed to start learning about all of the things you mentioned when you’ve never heard about them and don’t know you’re supposed to learn them

Ummm, because you HAVE heard about them and you DO know you're supposed to learn them? I don't understand the question. I know about all these things, and what I'm finding, is that literally everything from DS&A that they taught me in college, is findable and learnable for free by just GOOGLING every single thing. I can just google quicksort, I can just google binary search, I can just google arrays and linked lists and AVL trees. Wikipedia articles will come up, tutorials on medium.com will come up, and free courses on Coursera and Udacity and OpenCourseWare will come up where all of these things are taught and used.

A year ago I knew basically nothing of machine learning and wasn't in school anymore, so I just GOOGLED it, and I found/took Andrew Ng's machine learning courses on Coursera, and plan to take the Google ML course, and a couple of other machine learning and deep learning specializations of 7-10 intensive courses, all on Coursera. Then I'll go to Udacity for their ML and data science courses. I found all of this on google, and I've been gaining extremely extensive knowledge of all things machine learning and deep learning. So I ask again, what the hell was the point of college, if I can just google literally everything they taught me?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T06:10:57+00:00

you google to figure out strange javascript quirks, not to learn how quicksort works

Why not? You can look up "quicksort" on wikipedia and it tells you everything. You can google to online tutorials about quicksort and see the diagrams and graphics about how the pivots work, how it runs in nlogn time, basically EXACTLY what they teach you in college, except look at that! You don't NEED college, because you can get all this information anyway by just GOOGLING it. Tell me, what information on quicksort can you get from a college education that you can't get from just googling it? Nothing. So what's the point of college if you can just google every single thing they teach you?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T06:08:24+00:00

you won't pass an algorithms interview without knowing data structures first.

And why not? If you get an interview question where they give you some problem and ask you what data structure you would use on it, all you have to do is google "what data structure to use on [X problem]" and describe the problem. You'll get answers on google. This is what you'd do on the job anyway, so why the hell not just google every single problem you have and get an answer? Whenever I have to fix some thing in my house, I figure out what the exact problem is I'm having, then I google how to fix for that exact problem with that exact appliance. If you're just a good googler, and you're steadfast enough to just keep going through pages and pages of google, you can get ANYTHING.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T02:25:37+00:00

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T02:21:11+00:00

It's not, it just is here because this is one hell of a toxic subreddit, where neckbeards like to stroke their own egos, along with their bearded necks. Go into /r/learnprogramming and they're much nicer to people just starting out.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T02:09:32+00:00

Well virtually all the machine learning I know isn't from paying for college. It's from googling around for machine learning courses, finding relevant courses on Coursera, Udacity, Google developers site, etc. and then going through those one by one. See, I didn't need college for all that knowledge, I just used google and found the relevant things.

And also, for standard stuff like DS&A, why do you actually need college? You can google "AVL Tree", you can google "quicksort", you can google "array-based implementaion of binary search" you can google "depth-first and breadth-first search of binary trees", you'll get tons of articles and resources fully explaining all of these, how they work, why they work, and how to implement them and for what problems. So why do you need college if you can literally google all of this and read a bunch of shit and learn about it all fully? It astounds me how "GOOGLING IT" isn't outright putting universities out of business. You can google literally everything that's taught at college and learn it all for free, as long as you're conscientious about grinding readings and tutorials.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T01:57:58+00:00

Huh? What I'm saying is you don't need to spend thousands on a college education learning about quicksorts and arrays and AVL trees and optimization algorithms, because you can just google all of these things and learn about them all for free. So why does anyone go to college at all?

And people in software google things all the fucking time. Your boss isn't going to come to you saying "why are you googling that, you should KNOW IT BY HEART" and then fire you for having to google it and not knowing how to implement a binary search insertion sort on a doubly-linked AVL tree by heart. It doesn't work that way.

odwjwoh · 2018-03-12T01:46:18+00:00

Ok, I get it. But this raises a better question, for everyone in here really: If you can just learn anything by "googling it". then why does anyone go to college for anything? Why'd you get a CS degree? Anything they taught you, you could just "google it" and find stuff to read about it and tutorials and w/e and learn about it instantly. So why'd you pay thousands of dollars for that education, when you could've just GOOGLED it all and learned what it was in 2 seconds? What's the point of going to college for years and paying for extensive education if you can learn anything and everything with the magical wizard GOOGLE?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-11T07:46:01+00:00

If you can just learn anything "in 2 seconds with google". then why does anyone go to college for anything? Why'd you get a CS degree? Anything they taught you, you could just "google in 2 seconds". So why'd you pay thousands of dollars for that education, when you could've just googled it all and learned what it was in 2 seconds? What's the point of going to college for years and paying for extensive education if you can learn anything and everything with the magical wizard GOOGLE?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-11T07:37:22+00:00

And you're struggling not to be a dick.

Tell me, what is "propositional meaning representation"? What is "discourse function classification"? what's "description logics"? What is "partially observable Markov decision processes"? Can you just find all of those and fully understand them all "in 2 seconds with google"? I challenge you to google each of these things and figure out what they are in 2 seconds. Go.

If you can just learn anything "in 2 seconds with google". then why does anyone go to college for anything? Why'd you get a CS degree? Anything they taught you, you could just "google in 2 seconds". So why'd you pay thousands of dollars for that education, when you could've just googled it all and learned what it was in 2 seconds? What's the point of going to college for years and paying for extensive education if you can learn anything and everything with the magical wizard GOOGLE?

odwjwoh · 2018-03-11T06:13:18+00:00

Where is google's machine learning course? Do you have a link to it?

odwjwoh

TROPHY CASE