Comment by awesome_dude
24 days ago
/me strokes my long grey beard and nods
People always think "theory is overrated" or "hacking is better than having a school education"
And then proceed to shoot themselves in the foot with "workarounds" that break well known, well documented, well traversed problem spaces
certainly a narrative that is popular among the grey beard crowd, yes. in pretty much every field i've worked on, the opposite problem has been much much more common.
What fields? Cargo culting is annoying and definitely leads to suboptimal solutions and sometimes total misses, but I’ve rarely found that simply reading literature on a thorny topic prevents you from thinking outside the box. Most people I’ve seen work who were actually innovating (as in novel solutions and/or execution) understood the current SOTA of what they were working on inside and out.
I suspect they were more referring to curmudgeons not patching.
I was engaged after one of the worlds biggest data leaks. The Security org was hyper worried about the cloud environment, which was in its infancy, despite the fact their data leak was from on-prem mainframe style system and they hadn't really improved their posture in any significant way despite spending £40m.
As an aside, I use NATs for some workloads where I've obviously spent low effort validating whether it's a great idea, and I'm pretty horrified with the report. (=
what's the opposite problem statement?
People overly beholden to tried and true 'known' way of addressing a problem space and not considering/belittling alternatives. Many of the things that have been most aggressively 'bitter lesson'ed in the last decade fall into this category.
11 replies →
The ivory tower standing in the way of delivering value I think.
4 replies →
I don't have a "school education" and I know plenty of theory, I certainly have read the papers cited in this test.
You might not have a school education, but you have educated yourself. It is unfortunately common to hear people complain that the theory one learns in school (or by determined self-study) is useless, which I think is what the geybeard comment you replied to intends to say.
OK, the real differences between self directed study, and school based study:
1. School based is supposed to cover all the basics, self directed you have to know what the basics are, or find out, and then cover them.
2. School based study the teachers/lecturers are supposed to have checked all the available text on the subject and then share the best with the students (the teachers are the ones that ensure nobody goes down unproductive rabbitholes)
3. People can see from the qualifications that a person has met a certain standard, understands the subject, has got the knowledge, and can communicate that to a proscribed level.
Personal note, I have done both in different careers, and being "self taught" I realised that whilst I definitely knew more about one topic in the field than qualified individuals, I never knew what the complete set of study for the field was (i never knew how much they really knew, so could never fill the gaps I had)
In CS I gained my qualification in 2010, when i went to find work a lot of places were placing emphasis on self taught people who were deemed to be more creative, or more motivated, etc. When I did work with these individuals, without fail they were missing basic understanding of fundamentals, like data structures, well known algorithms, and so on.