I'm 100% self-employed and build websites where I earn money from advertising/affiliate/sales-revenue. Been doing it fulltime for 7 years now, before that I was a student for a couple of years (where I learned that me and academics wasnt a match made in heaven..).
I used to have a site that carried 5m uniques/month, but I've also run sites that had has worse performance problems with much less users. I know of several instances where I got stuck and had help from academic books (to refresh my memory) or friends that paid more attention in class than I did :-)
My point, and as others point out, you just dont learn these things yourself unless you are forced todo it. Learning to solve a problem and learning to learn are two very different things and the later makes your view of a issue much more complete. Many subjects is completely useless stuff that is only in the courses to make them hard, but when I look back I tend to see that many courses were very valuable.
Sounds like you dropped out of academics, were successful in website development, are arguing for a hands on learning approach where it "makes your view of an issue much more complete", and even successfully used compsci books, you write "many subjects is completely useless stuff" and yet in your first post you give advice of doing the opposite of what you found success doing.
I'm saying that academics helped me understand some subjects that have been very valuable for me in my "career" as a website developer.
Perhaps I would have done fine without them, but I'm sure my projects are better as a result of me spending a couple of years learning stuff.
If you want to become a "better" programmer in the context of writing more efficient code, more bugfree code and become more efficient (learning to use the concepts that comes with the language instead of reinventing the wheel). Then yes, school helps.
You can learn it outside school aswell but I bet it will take more time in the long run. I think we'll have to accept that we disagree on this topic.
Comments
I'm 100% self-employed and build websites where I earn money from advertising/affiliate/sales-revenue. Been doing it fulltime for 7 years now, before that I was a student for a couple of years (where I learned that me and academics wasnt a match made in heaven..).
I used to have a site that carried 5m uniques/month, but I've also run sites that had has worse performance problems with much less users. I know of several instances where I got stuck and had help from academic books (to refresh my memory) or friends that paid more attention in class than I did :-)
My point, and as others point out, you just dont learn these things yourself unless you are forced todo it. Learning to solve a problem and learning to learn are two very different things and the later makes your view of a issue much more complete. Many subjects is completely useless stuff that is only in the courses to make them hard, but when I look back I tend to see that many courses were very valuable.
Sounds like you dropped out of academics, were successful in website development, are arguing for a hands on learning approach where it "makes your view of an issue much more complete", and even successfully used compsci books, you write "many subjects is completely useless stuff" and yet in your first post you give advice of doing the opposite of what you found success doing.
I'm saying that academics helped me understand some subjects that have been very valuable for me in my "career" as a website developer.
Perhaps I would have done fine without them, but I'm sure my projects are better as a result of me spending a couple of years learning stuff.
If you want to become a "better" programmer in the context of writing more efficient code, more bugfree code and become more efficient (learning to use the concepts that comes with the language instead of reinventing the wheel). Then yes, school helps.
You can learn it outside school aswell but I bet it will take more time in the long run. I think we'll have to accept that we disagree on this topic.