Comment by soraminazuki
6 months ago
That says more about the industry than the quality of formal education. After all, it's the very same industry that's hailing mediocre robots as replacements of human software engineers. Even the article has this to say:
> As a mid-late career coder, I’ve come to appreciate mediocrity.
Then there's also the embracement of anti-intellectualism. "But I don't want to spend time learning X!" is a surprisingly common comment on, er, Hacker News.
So yeah, no surprise that formal education is looked down on. Doesn't make it right though.
I don't think two wrongs make a right, tho. Looking down at formal education is not the same as embracing anti-intellectualism. And while I admit the software industry is absolutely full of bullshit anti-intellectualism, I also don't believe formal education is or should be the standard for the education, formalism is not automatically better than alternative means of learning.
The problem of anti-intellectualism in SE is just the consequence of the field being more "democratized". Or, to put in other words, the mass is stupid and the mass-man is stupidier and primitive.