<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>nostrademons</author><text>I have a CS degree, but I learned basically all of the above on my own.  In some cases I &lt;i&gt;also&lt;/i&gt; had a class later that taught it, but for most of the networking stuff it wasn&amp;#x27;t even taught in school.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re self-taught and worried about your CS fundamentals, there&amp;#x27;s a really simple algorithm to get an education better than any CS student at roughly 1&amp;#x2F;100th of the price:&lt;p&gt;1. Look up some famous university like Stanford or MIT.&lt;p&gt;2. Download the course syllabus for the course you&amp;#x27;re interested in off their website.  (Nowadays you can often get the full &lt;i&gt;course&lt;/i&gt;, including all the lectures and handouts.)&lt;p&gt;3. Buy the textbook.  When I was in school you could pull shenanigans like buying the European version of the textbook for 1&amp;#x2F;4 the price or (if you live in a college town) buying the textbook, reading it, and returning it before courses are finalized, but these loopholes have probably been mostly closed.  There&amp;#x27;s now a thriving used-textbook market online that didn&amp;#x27;t exist when I went to school, though.&lt;p&gt;4. Read the textbook.  Do some of the exercises.  Implement the algorithms.&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this is largely what CS students do for homework.   Most of them kinda gloss over it because it&amp;#x27;s required, though, while if you&amp;#x27;re doing this because you really love the material, you&amp;#x27;ve got a big advantage.</text><parent_chain><item><author>madeuptempacct</author><text>I can provide some examples for him as a self-educated dev:&lt;p&gt;* What is big O&lt;p&gt;* What is value type vs pointer&amp;#x2F;reference&lt;p&gt;* How does the internet work&lt;p&gt;* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 
(Thankfully, there&amp;#x27;s this: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;basecs&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;basecs&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc&lt;p&gt;* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc&lt;p&gt;* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don&amp;#x27;t know these)&lt;p&gt;* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)&lt;p&gt;* How modern computers work&lt;p&gt;* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math&lt;p&gt;* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)&lt;p&gt;* Linux&lt;p&gt;I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don&amp;#x27;t pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.&lt;p&gt;Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.&lt;p&gt;A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn&amp;#x27;t figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.&lt;p&gt;This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.</text></item><item><author>pc86</author><text>Could you provide some examples?</text></item><item><author>mental1896</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have a degree and I&amp;#x27;m 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don&amp;#x27;t have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there&amp;#x27;s a tradeoff. But the problem with these education &amp;quot;holes&amp;quot; is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.</text></item><item><author>orev</author><text>The main reasons to get a degree are:&lt;p&gt;-. To show you can complete a big, multi year project that’s full of doing stuff you don’t like&lt;p&gt;-. To get past HR screenings&lt;p&gt;-. If you ever want a chance to reach Executive level jobs, you need to have a degree, for the perception of nothing else.&lt;p&gt;This debate has been going on for a long time, despite this being presented as a recent thing, and it always comes down to those things. While the tech-minded here might want to see it from a strictly educational standpoint, these are human&amp;#x2F;societal reasons that are quite important.</text></item><item><author>bradenb</author><text>I was discussing student loans and value of a college education with friends the other day. We were discussing whether or not I would recommend college to someone today. My conclusion is that TODAY I would still as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans.&lt;p&gt;But, then we started discussing whether I would push my children to go. My answer is that I hope I don&amp;#x27;t need to. Even though I have some amount of college savings for my kids, I don&amp;#x27;t think it will be enough to let them choose their school freely and I would much rather that money go towards starting them out in their career or family or whatever they choose.&lt;p&gt;My hope is that when it is time for them to start their adult life that there will either be enough cheap or free alternative forms of education or that the stigma of not having a degree will have lessened. Realistically, I don&amp;#x27;t think the situation will have changed in that time.&lt;p&gt;My own experience is complicated because I took out loans--which I greatly regret--but also likely have my career to thank for it. I had a full-tuition scholarship to the school of my choice, but opted to go to another school my parents wanted me at; when I eventually transferred back to my original choice I had lost the scholarship. If I had to do it again today I would definitely start with a 2 year local college education and then work hard through the remaining years to finish debt-free.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/the-student-loan-debt-crisis-is-about-to-get-worse?srnd=premium</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>gregmac</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve interviewed people with degrees that don&amp;#x27;t know about many of these questions. In fact I make it a point that if someone puts something like &amp;quot;TCP&amp;#x2F;IP&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;networking&amp;quot; in the laundry-list of skills&amp;#x2F;knowledge they have, I ask them a basic question about it -- and a depressingly large amount of time people can&amp;#x27;t even explain the difference between TCP and UDP.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve also worked with people who can explain what big-O is and yet they&amp;#x27;ll write completely inefficient nested loops and N+1 SELECT queries, and then wonder why everything is slow in production even though it works great in dev.&lt;p&gt;Comp Sci can teach you theory and concepts, but as they say: there&amp;#x27;s no substitute for experience.</text><parent_chain><item><author>madeuptempacct</author><text>I can provide some examples for him as a self-educated dev:&lt;p&gt;* What is big O&lt;p&gt;* What is value type vs pointer&amp;#x2F;reference&lt;p&gt;* How does the internet work&lt;p&gt;* Binary search trees, tries, graphs - u wut m8 
(Thankfully, there&amp;#x27;s this: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;basecs&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;medium.com&amp;#x2F;basecs&amp;#x2F;archive&amp;#x2F;2017&amp;#x2F;01&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;p&gt;* Basic cryptography, hashing, etc&lt;p&gt;* DNS, IPs, HTTP, etc&lt;p&gt;* TCP, UDP, etc (I still don&amp;#x27;t know these)&lt;p&gt;* Stack, heap, queue, malloc (Again, very little exposure to this without learning a low level language.)&lt;p&gt;* How modern computers work&lt;p&gt;* Logic gates, clocks, memory, (actual) binary math&lt;p&gt;* Wifi basics (actual physical data transmission)&lt;p&gt;* Linux&lt;p&gt;I can go on and on and on, but these are things you don&amp;#x27;t pick up at work unless you go out of your way to learn how they work.&lt;p&gt;Regarding the parent post - I have a very generous training budget. And guess where I will never spend it? At the best University in my state. I got a degree in something other than Comp Sci, and 95% of the classes were useless and way-too-drawn-out. So, you might not be as behind as you think.&lt;p&gt;A pretty-smart co-worker of mine with a Comp Sci degree said he didn&amp;#x27;t figure out the point of object oriented programming until he got his first Java job.&lt;p&gt;This is only related to other comments in this thread, but I do feel that formal education is oversold, and particularly to people who are from poor families with no guidance trying to have a shot at life.</text></item><item><author>pc86</author><text>Could you provide some examples?</text></item><item><author>mental1896</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t have a degree and I&amp;#x27;m 10+ years deep into my career. What has started to stand out for me in recent years is that there are holes in my experience that my college-educated peers don&amp;#x27;t have to deal with. Granted I never had to deal with student loans so I guess there&amp;#x27;s a tradeoff. But the problem with these education &amp;quot;holes&amp;quot; is that they hit you right out of left field when you least expect it.</text></item><item><author>orev</author><text>The main reasons to get a degree are:&lt;p&gt;-. To show you can complete a big, multi year project that’s full of doing stuff you don’t like&lt;p&gt;-. To get past HR screenings&lt;p&gt;-. If you ever want a chance to reach Executive level jobs, you need to have a degree, for the perception of nothing else.&lt;p&gt;This debate has been going on for a long time, despite this being presented as a recent thing, and it always comes down to those things. While the tech-minded here might want to see it from a strictly educational standpoint, these are human&amp;#x2F;societal reasons that are quite important.</text></item><item><author>bradenb</author><text>I was discussing student loans and value of a college education with friends the other day. We were discussing whether or not I would recommend college to someone today. My conclusion is that TODAY I would still as long as that person has the means to do so without any loans.&lt;p&gt;But, then we started discussing whether I would push my children to go. My answer is that I hope I don&amp;#x27;t need to. Even though I have some amount of college savings for my kids, I don&amp;#x27;t think it will be enough to let them choose their school freely and I would much rather that money go towards starting them out in their career or family or whatever they choose.&lt;p&gt;My hope is that when it is time for them to start their adult life that there will either be enough cheap or free alternative forms of education or that the stigma of not having a degree will have lessened. Realistically, I don&amp;#x27;t think the situation will have changed in that time.&lt;p&gt;My own experience is complicated because I took out loans--which I greatly regret--but also likely have my career to thank for it. I had a full-tuition scholarship to the school of my choice, but opted to go to another school my parents wanted me at; when I eventually transferred back to my original choice I had lost the scholarship. If I had to do it again today I would definitely start with a 2 year local college education and then work hard through the remaining years to finish debt-free.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Student Loan Debt Crisis Is About to Get Worse</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/the-student-loan-debt-crisis-is-about-to-get-worse?srnd=premium</url></story>