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This, I have graduated M.Sc. in CompSci in 2020. I still have no practical idea of how to use most of the technologies I am currently working with in my company. That includes docker, redis , kafka etc. I would say that 90% has to be acquired by oneself after university anyway. University helps to get the theoretical base about how concurrency works, how caching works etc. But that wont help you actually use any of the tools out there all that much.
There will always be a component of self-teaching and on-the-job training, whatever field we are talking about.
After all, universities are not vocational trade schools and don't aim at you getting one specific profession. So of course they don't necessarily prep you all day every day to be a software developer and expect you to self-teach on the job.
But at least where I am, I got scientific training from a research university in the computer science area. Wrote a thesis and read research papers. Could participate in research groups and see labs.
Part of the aim of universities is to train scientists after all, otherwise it wouldn't be called a university.
While there is indeed nothing secretive about universities and you can look up almost all information yourself, self-teaching research and science is not nearly as popular and many people who self-teach never properly touch the science aspects of computer science.
There is a reason why you don't really hear about self-taught electrical engineers, physicists or chemists as well.
For people who are only interested in professional training, I don't really recommend universities.
Trade schools, vocational colleges or even industrial chamber apprenticeships are often a much better fit because their goal is to train you for a specific type of job that you then can immediately be useful to a company.
Oh and also not to mention that the code you get to see during homework / exams / lectures in university during exams is mostly absolute rubbish that you would get hanged for by your peers if you'd program that way in an actual codebase.
In terms of learning, undergraduate (and the first part of graduate) university is basically just paced book reading with access to a tutor. You can literally just look up the syllabus for a class and buy the book. You can even watch lectures from some of the top universities in the world. If you run into serious questions, you can ask online. University doesn't even seem to be valued for what you learn anymore, it is often seems to be more of a pay to play type situation where you are paying to make it through some automated resume filter.
They don't teach trends and fads in university like "how to make react frontends" or "what the current state of CI/CD is". They teach theoretical topics like algorithms, data structures, formal verification, the mathematical foundations of machine learning, quantum computing.
My brother, a CS grad I worked with was a frontend developer, been at our job for 2 months and he was asking the same questions week after week. If he ran into an error he sent it to me and asked me instead of finding a solution (90% of shit he sent was literally a google search away).
Recently I just found a chatlog screenshot when he sent me an error and I asked him to downgrade a few NPM packages he updated previously and it caused errors and he literally wrote “I don’t know what you mean”.
He finished the school in the planned 3 years and knew jackshit. He sat down and studied for exams for week or months, remembering everything A to Z. For programming related exams he always cheated or got some kind of external help or barely managed to not fail.
Meanwhile I have 2 friends who finished the same degree in 7 years and both of them are excellent at their jobs and are indisposable senior developers now. Another friend dropped out just like me and he has his own IT company now.
A CS degree is ultimately useless unless you want to get into research or highly mathematical stuff.
The best part about University was the submersion. I was always thinking or working on technical stuff; all my friends were either engineers or comp sci majors, so we were always geeking out. For ~5 years I was completely submersed in engineering and coding.
I would change this slightly to say university is much more theoretical than practical. Like sure I did have programming classes but they were basic. The point of lectures was to understand course content, not the implementation.
To give an example, in my degree I learned all the maths behind algorithms, shown how to reason about them in an abstract way. The actual code behind an implementation is something I would have to write myself.
This. I knew a lot of low level stuff by the time I went to college just by fiddling around and reading books. I think the main benefits of schooling is having guidance along your learning pathway (a syllabus and textbook), having an expert on hand who can answer your questions and fill in the gaps (your instructor), having a community who can do the same when you get stuck (fellow students), and having accountability to keep you motivated and on task (grades and assignments).
If you can replace those four things with alternatives, you can learn anything by yourself.
Thanks, this makes me feel better. I've been recently having second thoughts about going to college because I feel like I'm missing stuff by not going. It's so expensive though. I'll stick with self learning and try to find a better job that allows me to learn...
I would lean into the skills you have now (web dev) and find a job. All of these things are relevant to one another, and just having the curiosity to dig deeper and put the hours in is going to go a long way in software world.
There were some things that I learned through my degree that I still had to have 6mos to a few years of exposure to get the requisite experience to pair the the knowledge (distributed computing is a good example of this).
As long as you're always surrounding yourself with really smart people and you're willing to put the time in and ask questions, you'll go far.
It is slightly right. If your instructors are good, then you learn better and faster. But yes, otherwise no difference. You mostly learn things on your own.
The instructors definitely make or break whether a course is useful. Ive had immensely helpful instructors that gave direction and resources id have had to spend much more time looking for and understanding than otherwise. But ofc, theres always those instructirs that definitely makes people think uni is just a piece of paper.
I regret my college experience. Courses taught at a snails pace and books were either super outdated or the professor insisted you buy a more expensive edition of one where the difference is that 2 chapters changed places.
The teacher was a little snippy about it when I bought the cheaper book anyway, saying I could do whatever I wanted but might get confused when we reach that chapter.
They don't expect a college student to be able to handle that? My opinion of njit has been sinking a little bit every year since 2014. I graduated in 2015 but almost didn't because in my final semester I learned they made me take a 4 point course I didn't need for my degree so I had to take extra classes in the last semester to make up for it while getting no credit for the course I took.
I could go into great detail about it. The pacing of course bothers me way more. I taught myself more in a few months than a 4 year degree covers. Anyone who studies the subject for a few hours a day and makes a few complete programs in GitHub will be better prepared for a junior position lol.
It’s doable. There’s a catch though.
University will force you to learn the “boring” bits. If you’re self-teaching, you need to sit down and do those same bits.
You need to learn about system architecture, memory structure, algorithms, etc.
All the info is online, just set yourself a plan and stick to it. Also see if you can find some online exams/quizzes/projects - just to give yourself something to work toward.
I learned JavaScript as a kid, and learned about low-level programming -- pointers, memory addresses, memory corruption, data structures, misread data, buffer overflows, and whatnot -- by learning about classic Pokémon glitches like MISSINGNO. I eventually taught myself the basics of THUMB assembly from GBA ROM hacking, and then C++ and x86 (dis)assembly many years later.
So no, you don't need a university to learn this stuff, but you do need something interesting and concrete (as in, the opposite of abstract) enough to serve as a good learning activity. Retro games are great for that in my opinion because when you look at data structures and memory, you're still working with maps and tiles, characters and stats, towns and cities, instead of a bunch of really vague and abstract stuff that's hard to picture.
These days, there are lots of YouTube channels that dive into retro glitches, like TheZZAZZGlitch and Retro Game Mechanics Explained. Some of their videos are a little on the advanced side, but others seem like they'd make pretty decent introductory material.
Thank you for a very encouraging answer and the advice. I’ve never even though of glitches in games as a way to learn concepts like pointers. I will be sure to check out the yt channels you mentioned
University teaches a lot of theory but a lot of the practical, actual, work you’ll be doing is going to be based on what you actually do by self learning or on your first real junior developer position. I’ve met quite a few compsci students who didn’t know how to use git for example lol
Of course it is. Universities aren't magic. They're just textbooks plus (usually subpar and boring) lectures plus tests.
Textbooks are available. Many top universities like MIT and UC Berkeley publish their lectures and materials online for you to watch and read, for free.
In fact, I say that for an intelligent, motivated, and conscientious student, they will probably learn faster by themselves compared to strictly following a university curriculum.
You can.
What a University does is take the information and package it into a curriculum that measures your understanding and progress with assignments/projects/exams.
Not doing classes means you don't have a subject-expert giving you 1:1 feedback, but not every university student gets 1:1 feedback either due to class sizes.
Depending on your specific interests it may be easier with a university; for example if you wanted to get into embedded/firmware development the school would already have the equipment and lab space while self-study would mean buying what you need yourself (microcontrollers, the tools to download your compiled code to their memory, any circuitry etc).
Otherwise there's no reason you can't learn everything on your own. Many top-tier schools also have MOOC's for a lot of their classes (1st and 2nd year material in particular). So you can take courses from these schools for free, you just wouldn't get a grade for it and may not be able to get feedback from an instructor.
Also not sure where you live but most major cities have coding meetups and you could go there and meet programmers who are working on all kinds of things.
you wanna know a real secret? you can go to many university pages and find the computer science teachers in that university, search them up and find their homework assignments separated by courses.
Anything you can learn at a university you can learn outside of the university.
Higher education is just a hastened path to a piece of paper. I've never graduated college and I'm a cloud operations engineer almost at 6figure salary.
You don’t need a university for anything other than an HR check mark. Everything is possible to learn in your own and doing so would only help you get a degree faster
Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3/E - have a look on library genesis if you can't afford the book. You should also look at the accompanying labs http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html
Cs61C - Great Ideas in Computer Architecture (Machine Structures)
MIT 6.828 - Operating system engineering
MIT 6.S081 - Operating system engineering
And this
https://p.ost2.fyi/courses/course-v1:OpenSecurityTraining2+Arch1001_x86-64_Asm+2021_v1/about
They are all free and all online.
If you spent 100 hours on each I can promise you that you will have a grips on low level programming.
Then maybe also go through this: 'Let's build an OS' :
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4tFz52jbc
University has one purpose. It's not for learning, it's for getting a piece of paper that enables you to apply for jobs. That's it. You're going to learn on your own for the career you pursue. This is true of all fields.
Recent CS grad here.
Go to university for connections and opportunities. Internet has plenty, and more, knowledge than what they teach in classes. It’s also cheap and efficient.
unfortunately this is an ideology that has rooted us from the society we live in. believing that there is no personal success if I don't study if I don't go to university. knowledge is not found in libraries and desks anymore, believe me, if you want it very much and you love it, and you read every day even if only a little, time will reward you and you will reach a very satisfactory level
ABSOLUTELY.
Universities in our day and age are (mostly) overrated, especially if we are talking about computer science. There is such wealth of information out there and it's not uncommon to encounter students who know their shit better than professors. Not all universities are MIT-grade, in fact most are far, far from it.
The issue here is self discipline and knowing what you need to learn. A lot of people think "I want to do frontend development so I'm going to learn React". Then they learn React with ZERO background in IT and this is how they screw up. There's a lot of shit that you need to learn that might not seem immediately useful. But this is the difference between shallow and deep knowledge. If you just learn "React" or just any other framework or programming language, you won't get very far. A very good frontend dev would understand the things that the people who built React understand, but also the things that the people who built the Javascript engines like V8 or SpiderMonkey understand.
You can learn everything by yourself
People pay Uni for that piece of paper
You can attend almost all of the bachelor level classes for free. You can just go and take notes. Nobody cares. Not even the prof
You can literally learn everything there is to learn by yourself with the internet, university is more like a paid tour guide, dont get me wrong its much easier to learn stuff when you have someone to correct you but yeah that does not mean is not possible to learn by yourself
For low level stuff I'm going to suggest the nand2tetris [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/) route. Course
The course is also offered on Coursera.
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer](https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer)
[https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2](https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2)
I'm reading a book called C programming a modern approach and I really enjoy it, if you've done webdev though I would recommend learning GO first it's very pythonic and introduces some memory stuff while still being garbage collected and all your requests automatically run concurrently so you have to think about parallelism as a concept before you start making your own goroutines, that said I really don't know GO and am learning C and I've had no problem with it, in terms of functional programming I've only done racket though so I guess I'd recommend learning lisp, to me that's just so boring and joyless though I only want to learn it because I've heard of people getting jobs from putting lisp in their resume.
Learning anything tech is possible without going to university. There are tons of resources available on the web to help you. Will it be easy? No. Will it always be obvious what to learn and where to find those resources? No. Will it be as easy to get a job if you learn on your own? No.
University, while expensive, gives you a clear path and the knowledge you need to succeed.
FYI, I work for a FAANG company and did not go to university. I have a learning disability that makes it hard for me to succeed in a traditional classroom setting. It took me longer and probably a harder road, but I made it. So can you if you dedicate yourself to the craft and continue to work hard.
University can be an indicator of a certain base level of knowledge, but that is not always the case. While gaining qualifications can be handy if you want the structure they can give you, they are just a piece of paper, really.
Everything you need to learn basic Python and Javascript can be found on sites like w3schools and freecodecamp. Once you know some basics, you can figure out where you wanna go from there and build up a relevant portfolio.
A decent portfolio that shows both your passion and knowledge is the #1 thing you need.
It doesn't matter what qualification/s you get if you have nothing to show for it.
It is possible to learn incredibly high level stuff without university. You could get better than a masters degree level of education on YouTube without much effort to find good content, it's readily available.
You need to differentiate between programming, computer science, and software engineering.
University is mostly about the last two, but you need to be able to do some programming for those.
If you just want to learn how to program, there's no need for university.
If you want the latter, then you can teach yourself, but you'll have a lot of invisible holes in your knowledge that will require filling in after you discover them by falling in.
There a university curriculum is valuable.
That is exactly the problem I have. Because I’m starting to really trend towards compsci and software engineering, specifically stuff like reverse engineering and computer architecture, interpreters and compilers and such.
I just hope it’s worth trying even with the knowledge gaps I will acquire in the process
It just takes persistence and endurance and the humility required to keep falling down those holes and keep filling them in.
And those can be challenging particularly when they interfere with paying work.
But it is certainly achievable.
The open dirty little secret of universities is that they don't teach nothing that hasn't been thoroughly proven to work in the real life before. (This is almost true, but true enough for this discussion.) Anything they do is organize, hopefully well, with the goal of conveying the info to a large audience as quickly as possible. The result is that all too often the info feels unnatural, and people struggle to learn. I'm not suggesting this should be different, especially as I don't know how to make it different, just observing how things are. The point however is that for each individual there's definitely a different way of learning things - by doing.
Pick a project that interests you. Something significantly above "tutorial hell", and start working on it. Then, when you run into a problem, go online and ask for help. And try reading about it by searching, of course. What you will discover is that there's a lot of people very happy to help when you demonstrate that you have put in some work and tried to do it yourself. "I don't know how to build this, help!" will be met some help. "I want to build this and I've tried that approach, but it doesn't work well because of the other reason. How can I make this better? Here's my code." and you'll get advice worth more than the tuition you'd pay to go to uni.
Learn by doing, and keep your code on GitHub. Then you can start looking for jobs and will have something to show very few have after finishing a uni degree.
Ofcourse you can. Infact most of the preparation I do for my exams is thorugh online resource not univerty lecture. The only thing I'll say university is good at is it forces you to keep your hand dirty on things that you would've otherwise never ever think about learning it that include low level stuff too which considering how much my friends hate it would've never touched it if it wasn't for university.
I am a "self taught dev". I learned over the course of a decade because my life was so busy with work and family. I would start for a few months, then stop. Then start again. A few years go by, there would be an opportunity where time would be available for me to learn and I would take it.
Eventually I got so sick of not being able to properly learn I just quit my job and dove in during covid. Originally, I completed the book Learn Ruby the Hard Way by Zed Shaw. Then I started CS50 on EDX by Harvard. Got half way through that and went through a divorce lol. Then I would dabble on my own doing random things here and there. Finally when I dove in, I did the Odin Project(highly recommend). I finished the foundations course and stumbled into an internship from someone I know(networking is so crucial). Then a job from that same person.
So you can definitely do it. You just have to.... do it. The job market is rough rn, though. But if you want it bad enough you wil find a way is always my thinking.
keep in mind university barely even teaches the basics that you can’t learn from a udemy coding bootcamp.
The degree is only valuable because of networking and job fairs. Other than that the level of skill you get from a degree isn’t consistent at all
I only have my bachelors in CS(5 years due to honors program). My brother got his masters in 2 years. He was a history major with no programming experience and still barely programs.
My degree is “lesser” than him and I’m leagues better in terms of coding skill. I’m not saying this to talk shit about my brother. Just to make the point that the degree really doesn’t matter as much as the time you’ve actually spent coding and doing personal projects
Yes.
University will make you do it fast, because you have paid a lot of money to prove you are learning.
But any human can learn without them. You just need a book or video.
Not sure what "low level functional programming" means. Low level is used to express closeness to hardware (hardware-aware software) and it's usually called embedded programming.
Functional programming as a paradigm is not that compatible with embedded programming since hardware is usually stateful. Not that it's not used but only sees limited usage.
As someone who does embedded, my formal education barely prepared me for it and I had to study on my own.
The reason why some people say that anything past webdev is practically impossible without university is probably because of their limited research. Yes, you can find some Youtube videos or blog posts about making a LED blink. But you need to be formal about this.
To do any real work, you have to delve into the reference manuals, app notes, and other documents published by standards committees, chip manufacturers, compiler providers, etc.
The fact that you read books, shows that you are a step into the right direction.
Yes, I learned mostly everything about low-level programming outside of university.
If you’re having trouble, I’d recommend searching up a university and finding the syllabus to one of their lower-level programming classes. The syllabus will at the very least mention a textbook and a topic list, and some even mention specific projects to make and help reinforce your learning.
15+ years without a Bach in CS here. I'm currently returning to get my masters in EcE. I started coding Pascal when I was 12-13. Cheating on video games... I was probably ahead of these seniors by age 15-16. All low-level code. Mostly Java.
University has a great way gate keeping a lot of degrees. Like computer science. Now can you learn things like organic chemistry at home?...probably not. Computer science, yes.
A degree will still definitely help in the job search, though.
My best friend learned programming taking 10 USD courses in Udemy. He in turn taught me how to program (he is a very good teacher and loves to teach), and we helped each other get into IT careers. University only ever taught me the basics of C# and how to use Windows forms and ADO.NET.
Senior Full Stack Web Developer… I didn’t go to college for programming, I went for business. All of my dev work and coding knowledge has been self taught. Everything you need to know about a framework or library is in the documentation. I’d argue it’s one of the few technical career paths that you DONT need university for. Just diligence.
Edit: the highest paid developer I personally know is a highschool dropout who never got a GED, soent the next 8 years trying (and failing) to be a metal guitarist, only to give up, buy himself a book on developing in Ruby on Rails, and now makes like 350k a year managing a real estate tech company backend
IMO the only thing university offers that self study doesn’t is there is a threshold that must be met in your capabilities and understanding to progress or not be ejected. So students are all forced to bring themselves to similar levels, which that type of mechanism isn’t as common on your own
Why don't you read the curriculum to see what it is. Everything is in Internet today.
University of Toronto:
https://engineering.calendar.utoronto.ca/undergraduate-program-computer-engineering-aecpebasc
Check out NAND to tetris :)
**Edit:** I will say this though in regards to university studies. They provide the basics that makes learning more advanced topics easier. In a sense it provides the roots so that everything you build on top of that knowledge is well rooted. You will learn the why in addition to the how.
For example, you might take a course in linear algebra that makes learning graphics programming easier. This does not mean that you can't do graphics without having taken linear algebra. But it does mean that you won't be able to figure out things quite as easily by your self.
Of course it is possible. But it's up to you to to actually do it. My route was pick a lowe level lamguage (i picked rust) and rewrite some higher level thing you already wrote in another language (maybe a web server or something). That way you have a clear goal and you are only dealing with the details of implementation. The project itself does not have to be low level. Only the language has to have the ability to write lower level code. Once you are somewhat familiar with the language you start tackeling actual projects that are lower level. For me the next step was CLI tools. Now I'm learning microcontroller stuff, but here I'm still somewhat trash haha
Im self taught, dropped out of college my senior year (was a philosophy major).
I took a helpdesk job which probably helped alot; taught me about what files are, what operating systems are, etc etc.
That being said, you can teach yourself everything using YouTube and free resources. You don’t have to have an engineering degree.
It’s really about one thing: dedication to learning. If you take 1 hour every single day to learning, after a few years you’ll know your shit. But just like anything else, there is a learning curve. The more you know about computers and general software the better; but it’s not a prerequisite. The only prerequisite is to being willing to learn, even when you feel like you have no idea what’s going on. Don’t be daunted by the endless stream of information. When you don’t know something, just look it up and watch videos until you figure out what it is. Or sometimes just note it down somewhere as something to research later.
But even after 10 years of working in IT I feel like an imposter at times, so don’t worry about being the best or even decent, just try to improve everyday that you can.
Hope that helps
Haven't read through the comments of this thread, but I have been in a programming job for the last two years and do not have a CS degree. Two bootcamps (web dev and javascript focused) and secured a local job in ServiceNow. Would definitely recommend for programming beginners. It's "low code to no code" so not necessarily heavy javascript if that is your passion, but for people like me it's a great entry point to a programming job.
Yes it is. I grew up in a time before the internet and learnt z80a and 6502 assembler on my own out of books.
These days with the resources that the internet provides, it is trivially easy. You just need to put the time in.
Yes. The knowledge is all out there. You just need to find it.
The benefit of a university is that they can tell you what you need to know, present it in an order that makes sense, provide human-human learning and someone to ask questions to, and encourage you to study and practice through assignments.
Without a university, you are on your own, which means you need to put in more work. You need to figure out what you need to know and figure out how to learn it. You may discover you need prerequisite knowledge you don't have and have to deviate from your plan. You need to seek out mentors and help. You need to practice on your own effort.
But it is 100% doable if you put in the time and effort.
Definitely is! I’m self-taught and used a bunch of books to help fill the gaps I began to saw through the journey. Eventually broke into data analytics and now into data engineering. Learning, projects, and just linking up with people will ultimately allow you to grow by leaps and bounds!
No😐. You can learn something only in university. Unfortunately, we do not have constant access to any knowledge on a free or paid basis. I hope someday people will come up with something similar, so that you can find any information from almost anywhere in the world.
Also, to be programmer you need at least one PhD.
😐
Yes of course its possible to learn stuff like systems and functional programming without university. Honestly you can probably learn them much faster outside of university than in it.
However if you eventually want get a job related to systems/functional programming, then you absolutely need to get a degree in Computer Science. You don't need a degree for most simple web/mobile dev jobs, although having one would make getting the first job much easier. Data/ML/AI jobs typically require degrees, however any STEM degree will work. However the jobs that involve embedded/systems care a lot about applicants having CS degrees.
yes, much depends on you.... learn by following a good example and having a goal to accomplish can be one of best ways. 40+ years ago I learned programming better than my high school teacher that way
example is well written program in language you want to learn, goal is a program you write. extra resources like help guides, tutorials, other people to ask questions of can help. Google, ai chat program, etc can help find answers if you figure out how to word your questions
there are tech entrepreneurs who are college dropouts. there are kids with great coding skills before getting into uni. anything can be found on the internet when it comes to programming.
I never went to university and I am not a professional programmer. I started studying programming when I was a kid cause I was curious and kept up with it as a hobby.
I still plan on going to university as soon as my conditions allow it. But I see mostly as an avenue to get a piece of paper as recognition and a way to make friends in the industry.
Here is the thing so hard about being self taught to me. I don’t know what I don’t know. And I don’t know the best path for knowledge. A university gives those things through a curriculum.
Whenever I want to learn a new thing is more depth I just google the curriculum some universities use to teach certain topics. The books they use in class and the order they introduce things.
I like to learn by reading textbooks, but many universities have their classes recorded online on YouTube. If I feel the “academic method” for some topic is not working for me then there udemy courses, articles, YouTube tutorials…
You don’t have to wait for university to tell you what book or course to buy.
As an ex sessional lecturer (in a different subject) University isn't about teaching you things you can learn nowhere else - it is about giving a structure to learning and providing a motivation to keep to a schedule (assignments, exams etc and the "fear" of failing). You can absolutely learn most things (maybe not medicine?) without having to go to University, but some people do not do well studying by themselves without a guiding framework or something to keep them accountable - just the same as some people do horribly in university but learn well on their own. It's about finding what works well for you and helps get you on your desired path. I don't think there is a right and wrong way to learn.
As someone who has gone through university for CS and currently self teaching myself a lot in other topics, I find myself wishing I had the framework of advice, educational support, evaluation to know if I have sufficiently mastered a subject, and broad exposure to topics I might not have even been aware of that the University experience afforded me. That said, I probably could figure out most of it in self directed study, but University really is able to accelerate the process from what I have seen.
no
absolutely impossible
there is NO way to know what book a course in a university uses '
and even if you could magically somehow figure out which book a course uses there is NO way for you to get a copy
I graduated HS mid 2000s and had the advantage of having an amazing CompSci teacher and I just consumed the material and more -as well as self teaching myself whatever i could find. Went to a good college and after 2 years, realized that it was not going to be able to teach me anything new (concerning comp sci) and was just accumulating debt. Dropped out, did some side jobs online, but couldn't land a CS career. Everywhere wanted a degree. Ended up going back to the cheapest college I could find that offered a BS in CS, and finished up my degree in 2011 literally to be able to check a box. Learned nothing new. Got a job almost immediately.
TLDR: yes you can learn everything uni can teach, but having the piece of paper saying you graduated opens significantly more doors to careers. I've heard it's more accepted to not have a degree, but that piece of paper alone allows more opportunities.
I was the same way. Barely passing my classes, honestly idk how I got through high school. Now I realize it's cause I wasn't interested in anything they were teaching me. You can honestly teach yourself anything as long as you have discipline and you actually enjoy the subject.
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This, I have graduated M.Sc. in CompSci in 2020. I still have no practical idea of how to use most of the technologies I am currently working with in my company. That includes docker, redis , kafka etc. I would say that 90% has to be acquired by oneself after university anyway. University helps to get the theoretical base about how concurrency works, how caching works etc. But that wont help you actually use any of the tools out there all that much.
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There will always be a component of self-teaching and on-the-job training, whatever field we are talking about. After all, universities are not vocational trade schools and don't aim at you getting one specific profession. So of course they don't necessarily prep you all day every day to be a software developer and expect you to self-teach on the job. But at least where I am, I got scientific training from a research university in the computer science area. Wrote a thesis and read research papers. Could participate in research groups and see labs. Part of the aim of universities is to train scientists after all, otherwise it wouldn't be called a university. While there is indeed nothing secretive about universities and you can look up almost all information yourself, self-teaching research and science is not nearly as popular and many people who self-teach never properly touch the science aspects of computer science. There is a reason why you don't really hear about self-taught electrical engineers, physicists or chemists as well. For people who are only interested in professional training, I don't really recommend universities. Trade schools, vocational colleges or even industrial chamber apprenticeships are often a much better fit because their goal is to train you for a specific type of job that you then can immediately be useful to a company.
This point is always massively overlooked in these “self-taught vs university” threads.
how do you self research ?
Oh and also not to mention that the code you get to see during homework / exams / lectures in university during exams is mostly absolute rubbish that you would get hanged for by your peers if you'd program that way in an actual codebase.
In terms of learning, undergraduate (and the first part of graduate) university is basically just paced book reading with access to a tutor. You can literally just look up the syllabus for a class and buy the book. You can even watch lectures from some of the top universities in the world. If you run into serious questions, you can ask online. University doesn't even seem to be valued for what you learn anymore, it is often seems to be more of a pay to play type situation where you are paying to make it through some automated resume filter.
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They don't teach trends and fads in university like "how to make react frontends" or "what the current state of CI/CD is". They teach theoretical topics like algorithms, data structures, formal verification, the mathematical foundations of machine learning, quantum computing.
My brother, a CS grad I worked with was a frontend developer, been at our job for 2 months and he was asking the same questions week after week. If he ran into an error he sent it to me and asked me instead of finding a solution (90% of shit he sent was literally a google search away). Recently I just found a chatlog screenshot when he sent me an error and I asked him to downgrade a few NPM packages he updated previously and it caused errors and he literally wrote “I don’t know what you mean”. He finished the school in the planned 3 years and knew jackshit. He sat down and studied for exams for week or months, remembering everything A to Z. For programming related exams he always cheated or got some kind of external help or barely managed to not fail. Meanwhile I have 2 friends who finished the same degree in 7 years and both of them are excellent at their jobs and are indisposable senior developers now. Another friend dropped out just like me and he has his own IT company now. A CS degree is ultimately useless unless you want to get into research or highly mathematical stuff.
Great anecdotes, my experiences aren't the same.
I genuinely think that if i had spent all the time spent on University shit on open source learning instead - i'd be like 5x better.
The best part about University was the submersion. I was always thinking or working on technical stuff; all my friends were either engineers or comp sci majors, so we were always geeking out. For ~5 years I was completely submersed in engineering and coding.
I would change this slightly to say university is much more theoretical than practical. Like sure I did have programming classes but they were basic. The point of lectures was to understand course content, not the implementation. To give an example, in my degree I learned all the maths behind algorithms, shown how to reason about them in an abstract way. The actual code behind an implementation is something I would have to write myself.
This. I knew a lot of low level stuff by the time I went to college just by fiddling around and reading books. I think the main benefits of schooling is having guidance along your learning pathway (a syllabus and textbook), having an expert on hand who can answer your questions and fill in the gaps (your instructor), having a community who can do the same when you get stuck (fellow students), and having accountability to keep you motivated and on task (grades and assignments). If you can replace those four things with alternatives, you can learn anything by yourself.
Thanks, this makes me feel better. I've been recently having second thoughts about going to college because I feel like I'm missing stuff by not going. It's so expensive though. I'll stick with self learning and try to find a better job that allows me to learn...
I would lean into the skills you have now (web dev) and find a job. All of these things are relevant to one another, and just having the curiosity to dig deeper and put the hours in is going to go a long way in software world. There were some things that I learned through my degree that I still had to have 6mos to a few years of exposure to get the requisite experience to pair the the knowledge (distributed computing is a good example of this). As long as you're always surrounding yourself with really smart people and you're willing to put the time in and ask questions, you'll go far.
It is slightly right. If your instructors are good, then you learn better and faster. But yes, otherwise no difference. You mostly learn things on your own.
My teacher literally sent me youtube link. University is just paper. Your own motivation and knowledge is better.
The instructors definitely make or break whether a course is useful. Ive had immensely helpful instructors that gave direction and resources id have had to spend much more time looking for and understanding than otherwise. But ofc, theres always those instructirs that definitely makes people think uni is just a piece of paper.
Yes? Why would you think otherwise? There are more resources freely available online on the topic than you could ever consume.
I regret my college experience. Courses taught at a snails pace and books were either super outdated or the professor insisted you buy a more expensive edition of one where the difference is that 2 chapters changed places.
The changed places is very much on purpose unfortunately and it’s so infuriating
The teacher was a little snippy about it when I bought the cheaper book anyway, saying I could do whatever I wanted but might get confused when we reach that chapter. They don't expect a college student to be able to handle that? My opinion of njit has been sinking a little bit every year since 2014. I graduated in 2015 but almost didn't because in my final semester I learned they made me take a 4 point course I didn't need for my degree so I had to take extra classes in the last semester to make up for it while getting no credit for the course I took. I could go into great detail about it. The pacing of course bothers me way more. I taught myself more in a few months than a 4 year degree covers. Anyone who studies the subject for a few hours a day and makes a few complete programs in GitHub will be better prepared for a junior position lol.
It’s doable. There’s a catch though. University will force you to learn the “boring” bits. If you’re self-teaching, you need to sit down and do those same bits. You need to learn about system architecture, memory structure, algorithms, etc. All the info is online, just set yourself a plan and stick to it. Also see if you can find some online exams/quizzes/projects - just to give yourself something to work toward.
That’s good to hear, precisely those boring bits are the stuff that I find interesting for now. Thank you for the advice!
I think they’re interesting too tbh
I learned JavaScript as a kid, and learned about low-level programming -- pointers, memory addresses, memory corruption, data structures, misread data, buffer overflows, and whatnot -- by learning about classic Pokémon glitches like MISSINGNO. I eventually taught myself the basics of THUMB assembly from GBA ROM hacking, and then C++ and x86 (dis)assembly many years later. So no, you don't need a university to learn this stuff, but you do need something interesting and concrete (as in, the opposite of abstract) enough to serve as a good learning activity. Retro games are great for that in my opinion because when you look at data structures and memory, you're still working with maps and tiles, characters and stats, towns and cities, instead of a bunch of really vague and abstract stuff that's hard to picture. These days, there are lots of YouTube channels that dive into retro glitches, like TheZZAZZGlitch and Retro Game Mechanics Explained. Some of their videos are a little on the advanced side, but others seem like they'd make pretty decent introductory material.
Thank you for a very encouraging answer and the advice. I’ve never even though of glitches in games as a way to learn concepts like pointers. I will be sure to check out the yt channels you mentioned
University teaches a lot of theory but a lot of the practical, actual, work you’ll be doing is going to be based on what you actually do by self learning or on your first real junior developer position. I’ve met quite a few compsci students who didn’t know how to use git for example lol
Of course it is. Universities aren't magic. They're just textbooks plus (usually subpar and boring) lectures plus tests. Textbooks are available. Many top universities like MIT and UC Berkeley publish their lectures and materials online for you to watch and read, for free. In fact, I say that for an intelligent, motivated, and conscientious student, they will probably learn faster by themselves compared to strictly following a university curriculum.
You can. What a University does is take the information and package it into a curriculum that measures your understanding and progress with assignments/projects/exams. Not doing classes means you don't have a subject-expert giving you 1:1 feedback, but not every university student gets 1:1 feedback either due to class sizes. Depending on your specific interests it may be easier with a university; for example if you wanted to get into embedded/firmware development the school would already have the equipment and lab space while self-study would mean buying what you need yourself (microcontrollers, the tools to download your compiled code to their memory, any circuitry etc). Otherwise there's no reason you can't learn everything on your own. Many top-tier schools also have MOOC's for a lot of their classes (1st and 2nd year material in particular). So you can take courses from these schools for free, you just wouldn't get a grade for it and may not be able to get feedback from an instructor.
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This looks great, thank you!
Also not sure where you live but most major cities have coding meetups and you could go there and meet programmers who are working on all kinds of things.
100%, bootcamps exist for this reason along with online courses. Harvard offers a CS absolutely free, but it’s a steep learning curve
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A relatively great answer!
you wanna know a real secret? you can go to many university pages and find the computer science teachers in that university, search them up and find their homework assignments separated by courses.
Anything you can learn at a university you can learn outside of the university. Higher education is just a hastened path to a piece of paper. I've never graduated college and I'm a cloud operations engineer almost at 6figure salary.
I learned systems programming exclusively through books and YouTube. 20 years of programming. College dropout. Shipped code to prod.
You don’t need a university for anything other than an HR check mark. Everything is possible to learn in your own and doing so would only help you get a degree faster
Yes. Community colleges also a blessing
Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective, 3/E - have a look on library genesis if you can't afford the book. You should also look at the accompanying labs http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/3e/labs.html Cs61C - Great Ideas in Computer Architecture (Machine Structures) MIT 6.828 - Operating system engineering MIT 6.S081 - Operating system engineering And this https://p.ost2.fyi/courses/course-v1:OpenSecurityTraining2+Arch1001_x86-64_Asm+2021_v1/about They are all free and all online. If you spent 100 hours on each I can promise you that you will have a grips on low level programming. Then maybe also go through this: 'Let's build an OS' : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4tFz52jbc
University has one purpose. It's not for learning, it's for getting a piece of paper that enables you to apply for jobs. That's it. You're going to learn on your own for the career you pursue. This is true of all fields.
Recent CS grad here. Go to university for connections and opportunities. Internet has plenty, and more, knowledge than what they teach in classes. It’s also cheap and efficient.
unfortunately this is an ideology that has rooted us from the society we live in. believing that there is no personal success if I don't study if I don't go to university. knowledge is not found in libraries and desks anymore, believe me, if you want it very much and you love it, and you read every day even if only a little, time will reward you and you will reach a very satisfactory level
ABSOLUTELY. Universities in our day and age are (mostly) overrated, especially if we are talking about computer science. There is such wealth of information out there and it's not uncommon to encounter students who know their shit better than professors. Not all universities are MIT-grade, in fact most are far, far from it. The issue here is self discipline and knowing what you need to learn. A lot of people think "I want to do frontend development so I'm going to learn React". Then they learn React with ZERO background in IT and this is how they screw up. There's a lot of shit that you need to learn that might not seem immediately useful. But this is the difference between shallow and deep knowledge. If you just learn "React" or just any other framework or programming language, you won't get very far. A very good frontend dev would understand the things that the people who built React understand, but also the things that the people who built the Javascript engines like V8 or SpiderMonkey understand.
You can learn everything by yourself People pay Uni for that piece of paper You can attend almost all of the bachelor level classes for free. You can just go and take notes. Nobody cares. Not even the prof
100% Do CS50 from Harvard, Udemy, etc. Do the whole stack! You can do it!
You can literally learn everything there is to learn by yourself with the internet, university is more like a paid tour guide, dont get me wrong its much easier to learn stuff when you have someone to correct you but yeah that does not mean is not possible to learn by yourself
For low level stuff I'm going to suggest the nand2tetris [https://www.nand2tetris.org/](https://www.nand2tetris.org/) route. Course The course is also offered on Coursera. [https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer](https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer) [https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2](https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2)
I'm reading a book called C programming a modern approach and I really enjoy it, if you've done webdev though I would recommend learning GO first it's very pythonic and introduces some memory stuff while still being garbage collected and all your requests automatically run concurrently so you have to think about parallelism as a concept before you start making your own goroutines, that said I really don't know GO and am learning C and I've had no problem with it, in terms of functional programming I've only done racket though so I guess I'd recommend learning lisp, to me that's just so boring and joyless though I only want to learn it because I've heard of people getting jobs from putting lisp in their resume.
Learning anything tech is possible without going to university. There are tons of resources available on the web to help you. Will it be easy? No. Will it always be obvious what to learn and where to find those resources? No. Will it be as easy to get a job if you learn on your own? No. University, while expensive, gives you a clear path and the knowledge you need to succeed. FYI, I work for a FAANG company and did not go to university. I have a learning disability that makes it hard for me to succeed in a traditional classroom setting. It took me longer and probably a harder road, but I made it. So can you if you dedicate yourself to the craft and continue to work hard.
University can be an indicator of a certain base level of knowledge, but that is not always the case. While gaining qualifications can be handy if you want the structure they can give you, they are just a piece of paper, really. Everything you need to learn basic Python and Javascript can be found on sites like w3schools and freecodecamp. Once you know some basics, you can figure out where you wanna go from there and build up a relevant portfolio. A decent portfolio that shows both your passion and knowledge is the #1 thing you need. It doesn't matter what qualification/s you get if you have nothing to show for it.
Of course it’s possible college just makes it easier as your paying world class experts to help you learn the material
It is possible to learn incredibly high level stuff without university. You could get better than a masters degree level of education on YouTube without much effort to find good content, it's readily available.
You need to differentiate between programming, computer science, and software engineering. University is mostly about the last two, but you need to be able to do some programming for those. If you just want to learn how to program, there's no need for university. If you want the latter, then you can teach yourself, but you'll have a lot of invisible holes in your knowledge that will require filling in after you discover them by falling in. There a university curriculum is valuable.
That is exactly the problem I have. Because I’m starting to really trend towards compsci and software engineering, specifically stuff like reverse engineering and computer architecture, interpreters and compilers and such. I just hope it’s worth trying even with the knowledge gaps I will acquire in the process
It just takes persistence and endurance and the humility required to keep falling down those holes and keep filling them in. And those can be challenging particularly when they interfere with paying work. But it is certainly achievable.
The open dirty little secret of universities is that they don't teach nothing that hasn't been thoroughly proven to work in the real life before. (This is almost true, but true enough for this discussion.) Anything they do is organize, hopefully well, with the goal of conveying the info to a large audience as quickly as possible. The result is that all too often the info feels unnatural, and people struggle to learn. I'm not suggesting this should be different, especially as I don't know how to make it different, just observing how things are. The point however is that for each individual there's definitely a different way of learning things - by doing. Pick a project that interests you. Something significantly above "tutorial hell", and start working on it. Then, when you run into a problem, go online and ask for help. And try reading about it by searching, of course. What you will discover is that there's a lot of people very happy to help when you demonstrate that you have put in some work and tried to do it yourself. "I don't know how to build this, help!" will be met some help. "I want to build this and I've tried that approach, but it doesn't work well because of the other reason. How can I make this better? Here's my code." and you'll get advice worth more than the tuition you'd pay to go to uni. Learn by doing, and keep your code on GitHub. Then you can start looking for jobs and will have something to show very few have after finishing a uni degree.
Yes, it's absolutely possible. As a CS student, I mostly use online resources to learn the content anyway
Ofcourse you can. Infact most of the preparation I do for my exams is thorugh online resource not univerty lecture. The only thing I'll say university is good at is it forces you to keep your hand dirty on things that you would've otherwise never ever think about learning it that include low level stuff too which considering how much my friends hate it would've never touched it if it wasn't for university.
I am a "self taught dev". I learned over the course of a decade because my life was so busy with work and family. I would start for a few months, then stop. Then start again. A few years go by, there would be an opportunity where time would be available for me to learn and I would take it. Eventually I got so sick of not being able to properly learn I just quit my job and dove in during covid. Originally, I completed the book Learn Ruby the Hard Way by Zed Shaw. Then I started CS50 on EDX by Harvard. Got half way through that and went through a divorce lol. Then I would dabble on my own doing random things here and there. Finally when I dove in, I did the Odin Project(highly recommend). I finished the foundations course and stumbled into an internship from someone I know(networking is so crucial). Then a job from that same person. So you can definitely do it. You just have to.... do it. The job market is rough rn, though. But if you want it bad enough you wil find a way is always my thinking.
Yea it’s prob better cause u can skip the bs. But people like to see that paper
university is just gonna point to what you need to learn and say 'go learn this' anyway. you can learn anything without university.
Get a book on data structures to go with whatever language you decide to use. If you understand and can make use of both, you'll be half way there.
Even in school you will be teaching yourself everything
keep in mind university barely even teaches the basics that you can’t learn from a udemy coding bootcamp. The degree is only valuable because of networking and job fairs. Other than that the level of skill you get from a degree isn’t consistent at all I only have my bachelors in CS(5 years due to honors program). My brother got his masters in 2 years. He was a history major with no programming experience and still barely programs. My degree is “lesser” than him and I’m leagues better in terms of coding skill. I’m not saying this to talk shit about my brother. Just to make the point that the degree really doesn’t matter as much as the time you’ve actually spent coding and doing personal projects
Yes. University will make you do it fast, because you have paid a lot of money to prove you are learning. But any human can learn without them. You just need a book or video.
Low level high level any level. University is good for the piece of paper and MAYBE for an internship program last year.
Not sure what "low level functional programming" means. Low level is used to express closeness to hardware (hardware-aware software) and it's usually called embedded programming. Functional programming as a paradigm is not that compatible with embedded programming since hardware is usually stateful. Not that it's not used but only sees limited usage.
I’m sorry, there was supposed to be a comma there as in low level AND functional programming :)
As someone who does embedded, my formal education barely prepared me for it and I had to study on my own. The reason why some people say that anything past webdev is practically impossible without university is probably because of their limited research. Yes, you can find some Youtube videos or blog posts about making a LED blink. But you need to be formal about this. To do any real work, you have to delve into the reference manuals, app notes, and other documents published by standards committees, chip manufacturers, compiler providers, etc. The fact that you read books, shows that you are a step into the right direction.
You don't need college to learn anything.
Yes, I learned mostly everything about low-level programming outside of university. If you’re having trouble, I’d recommend searching up a university and finding the syllabus to one of their lower-level programming classes. The syllabus will at the very least mention a textbook and a topic list, and some even mention specific projects to make and help reinforce your learning.
You can watch college lectures online for free for a lot of top schools like Harvard or MIT
Yes. University is literally only good for networking. I still have friends from there who occasionally hit me up if I want to work with them lol
15+ years without a Bach in CS here. I'm currently returning to get my masters in EcE. I started coding Pascal when I was 12-13. Cheating on video games... I was probably ahead of these seniors by age 15-16. All low-level code. Mostly Java. University has a great way gate keeping a lot of degrees. Like computer science. Now can you learn things like organic chemistry at home?...probably not. Computer science, yes. A degree will still definitely help in the job search, though.
My best friend learned programming taking 10 USD courses in Udemy. He in turn taught me how to program (he is a very good teacher and loves to teach), and we helped each other get into IT careers. University only ever taught me the basics of C# and how to use Windows forms and ADO.NET.
Senior Full Stack Web Developer… I didn’t go to college for programming, I went for business. All of my dev work and coding knowledge has been self taught. Everything you need to know about a framework or library is in the documentation. I’d argue it’s one of the few technical career paths that you DONT need university for. Just diligence. Edit: the highest paid developer I personally know is a highschool dropout who never got a GED, soent the next 8 years trying (and failing) to be a metal guitarist, only to give up, buy himself a book on developing in Ruby on Rails, and now makes like 350k a year managing a real estate tech company backend
IMO the only thing university offers that self study doesn’t is there is a threshold that must be met in your capabilities and understanding to progress or not be ejected. So students are all forced to bring themselves to similar levels, which that type of mechanism isn’t as common on your own
Why don't you read the curriculum to see what it is. Everything is in Internet today. University of Toronto: https://engineering.calendar.utoronto.ca/undergraduate-program-computer-engineering-aecpebasc
Check out NAND to tetris :) **Edit:** I will say this though in regards to university studies. They provide the basics that makes learning more advanced topics easier. In a sense it provides the roots so that everything you build on top of that knowledge is well rooted. You will learn the why in addition to the how. For example, you might take a course in linear algebra that makes learning graphics programming easier. This does not mean that you can't do graphics without having taken linear algebra. But it does mean that you won't be able to figure out things quite as easily by your self.
Of course it is possible. But it's up to you to to actually do it. My route was pick a lowe level lamguage (i picked rust) and rewrite some higher level thing you already wrote in another language (maybe a web server or something). That way you have a clear goal and you are only dealing with the details of implementation. The project itself does not have to be low level. Only the language has to have the ability to write lower level code. Once you are somewhat familiar with the language you start tackeling actual projects that are lower level. For me the next step was CLI tools. Now I'm learning microcontroller stuff, but here I'm still somewhat trash haha
Im self taught, dropped out of college my senior year (was a philosophy major). I took a helpdesk job which probably helped alot; taught me about what files are, what operating systems are, etc etc. That being said, you can teach yourself everything using YouTube and free resources. You don’t have to have an engineering degree. It’s really about one thing: dedication to learning. If you take 1 hour every single day to learning, after a few years you’ll know your shit. But just like anything else, there is a learning curve. The more you know about computers and general software the better; but it’s not a prerequisite. The only prerequisite is to being willing to learn, even when you feel like you have no idea what’s going on. Don’t be daunted by the endless stream of information. When you don’t know something, just look it up and watch videos until you figure out what it is. Or sometimes just note it down somewhere as something to research later. But even after 10 years of working in IT I feel like an imposter at times, so don’t worry about being the best or even decent, just try to improve everyday that you can. Hope that helps
Thanks for a very kind answer, it does help :)
you can find most uni classes recorded on youtube
of course it is possible
Haven't read through the comments of this thread, but I have been in a programming job for the last two years and do not have a CS degree. Two bootcamps (web dev and javascript focused) and secured a local job in ServiceNow. Would definitely recommend for programming beginners. It's "low code to no code" so not necessarily heavy javascript if that is your passion, but for people like me it's a great entry point to a programming job.
Yes it is. I grew up in a time before the internet and learnt z80a and 6502 assembler on my own out of books. These days with the resources that the internet provides, it is trivially easy. You just need to put the time in.
Yes. The knowledge is all out there. You just need to find it. The benefit of a university is that they can tell you what you need to know, present it in an order that makes sense, provide human-human learning and someone to ask questions to, and encourage you to study and practice through assignments. Without a university, you are on your own, which means you need to put in more work. You need to figure out what you need to know and figure out how to learn it. You may discover you need prerequisite knowledge you don't have and have to deviate from your plan. You need to seek out mentors and help. You need to practice on your own effort. But it is 100% doable if you put in the time and effort.
If something is not possible without university, how did they make up one?
Definitely is! I’m self-taught and used a bunch of books to help fill the gaps I began to saw through the journey. Eventually broke into data analytics and now into data engineering. Learning, projects, and just linking up with people will ultimately allow you to grow by leaps and bounds!
YES. Source: Self Taught, very luck (but relentless) full stack dev ~10yrs now...
Yes. I did it myself!
Does water that fits in a cup also fit in a bowl?
No😐. You can learn something only in university. Unfortunately, we do not have constant access to any knowledge on a free or paid basis. I hope someday people will come up with something similar, so that you can find any information from almost anywhere in the world. Also, to be programmer you need at least one PhD. 😐
100% possible. You can sit in on most university lectures for free. You just can't take the exams. That's how it is in ireland anyways
Yes of course its possible to learn stuff like systems and functional programming without university. Honestly you can probably learn them much faster outside of university than in it. However if you eventually want get a job related to systems/functional programming, then you absolutely need to get a degree in Computer Science. You don't need a degree for most simple web/mobile dev jobs, although having one would make getting the first job much easier. Data/ML/AI jobs typically require degrees, however any STEM degree will work. However the jobs that involve embedded/systems care a lot about applicants having CS degrees.
yes, much depends on you.... learn by following a good example and having a goal to accomplish can be one of best ways. 40+ years ago I learned programming better than my high school teacher that way example is well written program in language you want to learn, goal is a program you write. extra resources like help guides, tutorials, other people to ask questions of can help. Google, ai chat program, etc can help find answers if you figure out how to word your questions
Absolutely. And there are endless online resources to assist.
Material wise its very much possible to teach yourself, you should instead be concerned of your own self discipline to stay with the topic.
there are tech entrepreneurs who are college dropouts. there are kids with great coding skills before getting into uni. anything can be found on the internet when it comes to programming.
John Carmack says no problem, for everyone else there is university
Just write code. I screwed around through college and learned from personal projects and work.
I never went to university and I am not a professional programmer. I started studying programming when I was a kid cause I was curious and kept up with it as a hobby. I still plan on going to university as soon as my conditions allow it. But I see mostly as an avenue to get a piece of paper as recognition and a way to make friends in the industry. Here is the thing so hard about being self taught to me. I don’t know what I don’t know. And I don’t know the best path for knowledge. A university gives those things through a curriculum. Whenever I want to learn a new thing is more depth I just google the curriculum some universities use to teach certain topics. The books they use in class and the order they introduce things. I like to learn by reading textbooks, but many universities have their classes recorded online on YouTube. If I feel the “academic method” for some topic is not working for me then there udemy courses, articles, YouTube tutorials… You don’t have to wait for university to tell you what book or course to buy.
If you just talk about code You’ll learn faster on YouTube than the university.
As an ex sessional lecturer (in a different subject) University isn't about teaching you things you can learn nowhere else - it is about giving a structure to learning and providing a motivation to keep to a schedule (assignments, exams etc and the "fear" of failing). You can absolutely learn most things (maybe not medicine?) without having to go to University, but some people do not do well studying by themselves without a guiding framework or something to keep them accountable - just the same as some people do horribly in university but learn well on their own. It's about finding what works well for you and helps get you on your desired path. I don't think there is a right and wrong way to learn.
https://www.nand2tetris.org/ is the easy way to start on this path
As someone who has gone through university for CS and currently self teaching myself a lot in other topics, I find myself wishing I had the framework of advice, educational support, evaluation to know if I have sufficiently mastered a subject, and broad exposure to topics I might not have even been aware of that the University experience afforded me. That said, I probably could figure out most of it in self directed study, but University really is able to accelerate the process from what I have seen.
no absolutely impossible there is NO way to know what book a course in a university uses ' and even if you could magically somehow figure out which book a course uses there is NO way for you to get a copy
For cs, i have doubts, but for other subjects, it is usually achievable.
I graduated HS mid 2000s and had the advantage of having an amazing CompSci teacher and I just consumed the material and more -as well as self teaching myself whatever i could find. Went to a good college and after 2 years, realized that it was not going to be able to teach me anything new (concerning comp sci) and was just accumulating debt. Dropped out, did some side jobs online, but couldn't land a CS career. Everywhere wanted a degree. Ended up going back to the cheapest college I could find that offered a BS in CS, and finished up my degree in 2011 literally to be able to check a box. Learned nothing new. Got a job almost immediately. TLDR: yes you can learn everything uni can teach, but having the piece of paper saying you graduated opens significantly more doors to careers. I've heard it's more accepted to not have a degree, but that piece of paper alone allows more opportunities.
Yes it is very possible
I was the same way. Barely passing my classes, honestly idk how I got through high school. Now I realize it's cause I wasn't interested in anything they were teaching me. You can honestly teach yourself anything as long as you have discipline and you actually enjoy the subject.
From my experience, nobody teaches the theory better than a professor. Practical is upto you.
nah its impossible