Confidence that I can learn a CS concept (or even a whole programming language) in a week or two, at least enough to get something done for a test or project deadline
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A deep and abiding distrust of documentation, timing, error messages, and hardware. “Should” and “just” became bright red flags. No class taught this, it’s just what happens when you’re forcibly exposed to computer guts for 4 years.
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A brutal repeated education in the costs of not sleeping. Even when I was 20, I realized that diminishing returns set in around hour 18 of being awake. I could still read and write, but not debug or code. (Had to learn that lesson too many times.)
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Debugging skills, especially printf (console.log for the kids today). All debugging is logging and log analysis; anyone who says otherwise is selling you something which you probably don’t need and won’t use.
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My most useful class was “data structures and algorithm analysis”, where the teacher facilitated the AH-HA moment of enlightenment that algorithms are crystallized in data structures and data structures imply algorithms. It was taught in Pascal, which I’ve never used since.
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I learned not to start with docs or books. Coding is physical. Start with examples, maybe skim the docs, then munge into shape, fix the bugs, and repeat. Read the spec and supporting docs once your hands know the shape of things.
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This is what I got from going to a crummy state school that looks like a high school and no one’s ever heard of. You don’t have to break the bank.
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Do you *need* a CS degree? Probably not. But you DO need these skills to be a competent programmer. And, there are a lot of other skills a college CS program won’t teach. My point is “no one uses pascal anymore anyway” or whatever isn’t a valid objection.
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Replying to @izs
I learned literally 100% of these skills inadvertently through the normal day-to-day work of programming. I think the big missing piece for a lot of people is a willingness and capacity to "get to the bottom of it" when tasked with someone outside of their comfort zone.
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CS education (at least anecdotally) seems to give people a respect for digging deep, while many (broken) work environments teach people to search for silver bullets and assume that if something's wrong it probably is a flaw in the ideas of the underlying tech.
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TLDR CS educations could instill more respect for what the real world looks like, and work environments (and boot camps) could give people more respect for "what's underneath" and less tendencies to search for silver bullets.
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I think this could be said about the entire American education system in general.
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