[Musical Intro]
Scott: When looking for a job as a developer it's common to see Computer Science degree required.
But, is it? Really?
Many people I know don't have a CS degree, including myself.
There are people who drop out of school and go on to found some of the biggest companies in the world, like Facebook and Microsoft itself.
How important is Education as a developer.
That is what we talk about this week on This Developer's Life.
[Musical Interlude]
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This episode was recorded live on July 5th in front of a Google+ audience.
Rob: So, I am sitting there the other day and I just downloaded Apple's developer tools.
The XCode, XCode 4.1. Because I'm trying to learn Cocoa, right, I'm trying to learn Objective-C and I'm reading all the primers on Objective-C and I see that Objective-C is based on C.
S: You see that? It took a book to figure that out?
R: Well, I mean I guess you know it but, you know, I think it hits you really hard between the eyes when you are look at this sample code right.
And I'm looking at this and I'm trying to recall the C language which was years ago and I'm thinking to myself why didn't i get a degree in computer science this would become so much easier to me.
But then i started thinking to myself, who am i kidding? I don’t know, would that really, do you think in your opinion, would that really have helped me to grasp Objective-C easier?
I mean from just what I learn in college?
S: Yea, absolutely. The older I get the more i realise that the basic how to think about x type skills that I got in 7th grade and learning cursive in kindergarten and all that stuff helped.
I'm not saying it is required, I'm not saying that you need it, but I am saying that it helps
For people who think like school thinks, school helps.
R: So, is it the, is it the act of learning that you think school enhances, or is it the subject matter itself.
I went to school for geology of all things and I, you know, I basically I guess you could call it I minored in computer science I learned Pascal and COBOL and all the things.
But that didn't, I don’t think any of that helped me later in life when I sat down to learn computer science, or maybe it did.
What is your degree? Your degree is in computer science right?
S: I have a degree in software engineering. And software engineering is the applied, it's like applied computer science.
R: Mm
S: It's the actual act of doing the work as opposed to the theory behind it
R: I see.
S: And, yea, so computer science is theoretical and people think about computers and how computers work and Turing machines and stuff like that, and in fact I think the first class I took in software engineering class was, you know, compiling Linux, so it was like let’s get right into doing something that is significant and is substantive and is engineering.
R: Awesome. I have a degree in geology, it’s all about banging rocks.
Well bringing it back to this week. Interesting thing for me is hearing the range of opinions and viewpoints on education from our story tellers this week.
The first one is fascinating, her name is Aqueelah Grant, and she worked her way through college, she had amazing support from her parents and she basically stressed herself out trying to get a job.
Listen to what it took, even with a CS degree. Listen to what it took for her to get her job.
Aqueelah: It took me about four years, it was four years of my life. I got an oracle certification after that and then I started applying to different IT companies and what do you know, CNNMoney.com called me, out of all the places that you can work for when you first start out in your tech career a company like CNNMoney.com it was, it was the most awesome experience.
And I just thought about all the nights I sat on the floor crying and, and saying that I hope for the best, I wish for the best and just hearing my mother and my father tell me that it was going to come, it was going to come and then after a while, when it doesn't come, you get lost, you get a little sad but, it's like, you got to keep trying. I mean I don’t know if there is going to be any parents listen to this podcast, but I have the most awesome parents, it's like they, maybe they weren’t technology professionals but they were professionals. My parents were always hardworking parents.
I used to get at, 7 years old I used to get up at 4:30 in the morning to go to work with my dad. And one thing that my father always told me is, no matter what you do in life, you will always be strong enough to do it. He said that you don't have to worry about if you ever be able to do it, if you really want it you can make it happen but they even today, I can call them up if I need anything they are there.
So it's like for yourself but we need that support, so if there are mums and dads listening, please support your children it's, they will never forget it.
S: Well, as a parent of two young children, I can tell you I spend a lot of time re-enforcing their self-esteem, yes you can do this. This is a problem that you can solve.
Because I know, that the passion for learning, well any industry, starts at a really young age.
Aqueelah: I can remember my 3rd grade teacher, Mr Bronsteen, and I can also refer back to, I went to vocational high school in New Jersey called Bloomfield Tech and I can remember learning about binary code in the 9th grade. We learnt Pascal, that was what was in at that time, binary Pascal.
We had a Lotus Notes teacher, so I learned Lotus, in the 9th grade. My associate is in Computer Science and my Bachelor is in Information Science. And my Computer Science degree was just basically COBOL, HTML, SQL or anything, you can name it. So that’s kind of when I got the fill for and I had some awesome professors.
It was actually the interest in learning about technology and the intensity of being able to code, it's like, it’s a whole other world. You can create things, whether you want to go into web development, whether you want to go into testing, technology is it.
The first thing that I built, oh I am so excited about this. my project, my senior project, I built out a program that parse data in a, it was an access database, but I programmed it in C programming language for the State of Rhode Island, so that was my senior project which I actually got a B+ on but you know I had some tough professors so that's OK.
The assignment which is they, the data would be entered in the database and it's, it was cut and the code wouldn't really conform with what’s in the database so the program, the c program was basically just to cover all the aspects of the coding make sure that the information was aligned when you saw the output, basically.
So it was a pretty, it sound like a pretty simple program but the coding was really intense.
S: Ah the joys of school and school projects, there's nothing like the feeling of learning and then you get the cold splash of water of the real world during your first interviews, that's when you realize maybe this degree didn't mean a thing.
Aqueelah: I actually had a situation where i was on an interview and it was before I actually got in to hard-core technology and most of the people that interviewed me they loved me, they enjoyed my energy and my spirit but there was one guy who was known as the tough guy. He looked at my resume and he looked me in the face and said to me that it's nice that you have an oracle certification. It’s nice that you have an associates in computer science and a bachelor of information science, but you've never done this work. so in talking to you I can see why people like you, but I can't, I’m not really sure that you would be the best fit for this position, and it just, it shot me down, but because at that point I had already been through the wrangler, I mean, even though I had these things, I knew that I earned them, I knew that I deserved them that's why I was sitting being interviewed for that position. so, even though I was angry, I was enraged at what he had said to me the only thing I could really say it that, you know, I’m a hard worker, you know, I mean when I get in I do what I have to do and I said that I appreciated your feedback but I am still very much interested in this position. And then he just looked at me and said OK.
Sara: How, how was that, how did that end up?
Aqueelah: I actually landed the position.
Sara: Did you?
Aqueelah: Yea. It was a couple of jobs ago and I’m actually really great friends with the guy right now. But sometimes that's going to happen, and I have even had a situation where I was actually trying to get into it, this was in the very beginning when I first graduated from college. Someone actually told me that I should change my name because nobody will want to hire someone named Aqueelah. and that was, that was pretty hurtful but it's like what I have to tell people when you, when people try and discourage you from different things, is never lose yourself, I mean, and we can take criticisms and take advice, but know what advice works for you and what advice that doesn't work for you. the advice that I was given as far as getting an oracle certification even after I got my bachelor and associates that was good criticism, but listening to someone tell me to change my name on a resume, that wasn't good criticism. So it's like, just knowing what advice works for you, accept criticism because where would we be without critics. So men don't want, some men may not want us in this world but we can live and coexist in this world with them.
S: well, speaking of men, full disclosure, I happen to be one. It’s not easy for women in the tech industry, it's a male dominated industry and it is something they have to contend with and, of course, being men it's sort of difficult for us to see.
So, Sara asked Aqueelah, what have you had to deal with as far as dealing with men.
Aqueelah: I had a few female friends in my, well I female friends in general, but I had a few in technology, most of which dropped out after not even the second year was completed. They just thought technology was really tough and then most women were intimidated, they, I heard a lot of students say that they didn't think technology was a place for women. But I just didn’t think like that. It was what I wanted and it was what I needed.
I’ve been through a lot with people saying such things to me trying to move up into positions, I think it's definitely a place for women. I like to paint pink, I wear pink to work every day, and I want to paint the world pink. it's, it's like, I think that we should really bombard this male dominated technology, I mean it's setup in such a way where they, where you feel like you don't belong, but once you get in you really do belong, it's just the fact that you have to really work, have to want it and you have to appreciate it. there are times where you have, you do have to realize that it is the time to speak up and there's a time to humble yourself, but when you humble yourself you can't, you have to be sure that you don't lose yourself, because that happen.
That's the one thing I want to come out of this podcast, do not be afraid of people, to not be afraid of yourself, a lot of people in my career, though most of them didn't appreciate me at first they respect me, I get a lot of respect. if something happens, if I need something, there are so many people that I can call, some of the guys make joke at the fact that I do MMA, you know, when they see me coming with my bag they say I'm not going to mess with you today. So it's the thing about, you know, even though you're in a male dominated trade, you can also make them love the person who you are. And I’m hoping that what I’m doing is going to be historic and maybe more women will be appreciated in technology because it's like, we have to, the women in technology now, we have to be representatives. We can't sit around and complain about what's not happening because I did that, i lived that life, it made me angry and it made me bitter until I realized that sometimes you just have to stick your hand up.
S: Stand up indeed.
Many thanks to Aqueelah grant for her story today. You can catch her on Twitter, on twitter.com/aqueelahgrant, she works at Trimmer Media as a QA Specialist.
Many thanks to Sara Chipps for bringing us this story today.
[Music Interlude]
S: People who enjoy education, who wallow in it, who can swim in the education of it all, who get excited about waking up in the morning and learning something new are going to succeed more at school, I mean I recognize that when you make big bold statements, big definitive statements about school, like school is important. There is always someone out there who is a billionaire who didn't go to school and is doing just fine, I totally get that but the idea is that the knowledge of the collective will save you time. I think that is what it comes down to.
Yesterday we were at the fireworks, and the 5 year old had this little transformer that he got at burger king that was covered in phosphorous so it would glow in the dark. and he was really disappointed that it wouldn't glow, and he was crying and crying, because we were all in the dark and the little transformer is not glowing and mummy is like I don't know, I don't know how to turn it on. So I said I have a flashlight, I had my Maglite, so then I pointed the Maglite at full blast at the phosphorous and held it there for 5 minutes and then it made the transformers phosphorous glow. so then the rest of the next half an hour while we waited for the fireworks to come up are a lesson to the 3 year old and the 5 year old about how phosphorous works and how luminescent materials absorb light and then how long do you have to hold the flash light there to make it glow and all that kind of stuff. And then the fireworks started, and one of the things the 5 year old noticed is that you see the fireworks explode and then a few seconds later you HEAR the fireworks explode.
What's going on there?
So then the whole of the rest of the discussion on the way home becomes the speed of light versus the speed of sound.
R: I have definitely seen that with my children, and yeah there is a joy of discovery, and joy of learning. There is also a joy of creation.
The reason I bring this up is Miguel de Icaza said something to me a MIX once, a couple of years back, he said I don't consider myself a developer, I consider myself a code artist. What he was talking about at the time was the act of creation, how it is intoxicating and how just the act of creating something will drive you to create even more.
I think for a lot of developers, myself included, that act of creation sometimes you just don't care how things are done, you more or less just care that you can do them.
Listening back to what Aqueelah had to say, i mean yea she enjoyed learning but she also enjoyed being able to do these things.
Aqueelah: The intensity of being able to code it's like, it's a whole other world and you can create things whether you want to go into web development, whether you want to go onto testing, technology is it.
R: A lot of educators will argue about this that, when someone learns something, i mean of course it depends on the person, but when they learn how something works a little bit of magic is removed and correspondingly that feeling that you get when you are able to be the magician, the one who's creating, sort of goes away.
S: See, and that's the difference, I don't know what's better, but it's not beautiful to me until I know how it works.
R: interesting, I would say the same for me as well. but I think guys like you and me, we, we like to know how things work so we can turn around and teach it to somebody else as opposed to actually use the thing.
S: yea, exactly, exactly. I mean for me, it's less about the thing I’m teaching and more about the journey while teaching.
I think I could easily teach physics or math and, well I’m not very good at math, if I knew math I could easily teach math. I’m just saying it's the passing on of the information more than it is the information itself. But just like I gave the example with the fireworks, how can you not want to know why you hear the fireworks last and you see them blow up first. How can you not want to know that?
R: I don't know man, I think that for some people the exploding of lights and loud boom is probably good enough, but let's bring it back to this week, the next person we are going to talk to is Seth Juarez, I got to talking to him at a conference recently about his career, what he is doing now and about what he learned in school. It was quite an amazing story.
S: right, here is a guy who went and got a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s degree, and then almost got a PhD. but still doesn't think that school is the end all be all. for some reason I assumed that when someone got a PhD in something that they would insist that you call them doctor
R: [Laughs]
S: And that they put doctor at the end of their email signature and things like that. But he has such a realistic perspective, he continued in school because he wanted to learn more.
What better reason to stay in school then, I wasn't done yet.
[Music Interlude]
S: Where did you go to school?
Seth: I went to school actually, for my bachelor’s degree I went to UNLV, University of Never Leave Vegas, that is what it is affectionately called by those who live in Nevada. And it was alright, it was pretty good. And then I went and got a master’s degree at University of Utah, in Salt Lake City. And then I studied in a PhD program for about 2 years after that.
S: Why didn't you finish?
Seth: Well, the problem was my advisor, I was studying machine learning, my advisor decided to go to the University of Maryland, he invited me to go but it just was not something I could do at the time and, so, I was kind of left orphaned and I had to decide what to do and it was, maybe just wait it out.
S: You're in high school and you're doing well and you say I’m going to go to college.
Seth: That's right.
S: And you fill out applications and...
Seth: actually it was, it was a little bit different than that, I was walking down the hall in high school, there's a high school, I kind of went to 2 different high schools, one was in New York, one called Astenno technical high school, the my dad got a job in Henderson, Nevada, and the name of the high school was called Basic High school. and so I was walking down the halls in Basic high school with a friend, his name was John, and I just realized that high school was just a complete waste of time, I mean, remember your last year of high school you were, like, doing three classes of pottery and work release. So as a junior I thought this is, this is ridiculous and so I decided to get out of high school.
And so what I did was I went to my, you know the person that helps you out, what's her name, the counsellor, that's right. and I said, hey I want to get out of high school and she said, well you got to have English and government, and so I go to take these test and obviously these tests are for people who are, like rejects, for people who can't pass high school, and I get there and I remember sitting with a bunch of people that were just like, hey if I don't pass this test I am kind of screwed, and I was just taking them to get out of high school and they were seriously easy tests, I read like two entire text books and it was far too much work so then I decide to take the tests and got out of high school when I was 16, almost 17, and then I started college that summer.
S: Wow, and was this Basic high school like, was everyone smart or blessed, or however you want to phrase it, or were you just
Seth: no, honestly, if you think about it everyone’s senior year was literally let's party and take pottery or basket weaving or something or work release. So I just did not want to do that. I don't know as developers were not super social, but I was kind of a social guy but I just decided why don't I just go right to college and skip the wastefulness.
S: And was it always in your mind that college was the next step, there was never really I’ll go and I’ll, I don't need to go to college, did you grow up in a house where it was always understood that you would go to college.
Seth: yea, I mean, it was kind of understood, but I think the most important thing was that I decided that I am going to go college when I got my first job and I, the guy’s name was Derryl, and Derryl, his job was to help clean, this is not like a cliché you know, I’m Hispanic and so I need to do yard work, but literally it was yard work. And what we would do was to go to this large field in the desert and pick weeds, and we would pick weeds for like 8 hours and I decided this is not the kind of work I’m ever going to want to do ever, I might as well go to college. So that's when I decided that I needed to go to college and that's what it was.
S: [Laughs]
Seth: Yea, I’m not going to pick weeds for the rest of my life.
S: And after, you did computer science?
Seth: that's right, that's right.
S: you glossed over when you said were in a master’s degree program, you said machine learning really fast.
Seth: yea, so I'm really interested in cognition and how you, how people think. and the idea is hopefully computers can pseudo think right, I don't think computers will ever have the sort of, this weird nature that humans have where we can make decisions without any, without any knowledge we can totally make decisions. Computers have a hard time doing that, and so I remember sitting for the first time when I started my master’s program with one of the advisors and I said, hey I’m really interested in knowledge. and he said you should look at machine learning, specifically he was telling me to look at NLP, which is natural language processing and how humans sort of thing and how to get computers to also think. It’s just a tremendously interesting thing, I really like looking at it actually.
S: When...this is...remember I went to a community college and I am a little, and then I went to a state school, so I’m a little bit...from an education perspective, i personally have a, a bit of an inferiority complex.
Seth: Uh, you shouldn't, at all actually
S: No, but I'm just saying that, when I came out of high school I didn't have any money, and we didn't have the ability to pay for me to go anywhere. And when I went to my advisor, they said oh, you have a 3.4 and you know that's like you've been hanging out for 4 years, and...
Seth: Yea.
S: And then they said, your SATs like 1480, so you snored your way through the SATs and got a great score but you got a 3.4 and then she was very disappointed and she looked at me with this like, OK, you've literally had 4 years to get a decent grade point average and you didn't, but you obviously have some ability because you have an SAT score that is very good, you know, I think it was, at the time, the max was 1600 so it was a pretty good SAT score. And she said, I think you are screwed. And I was like, wow that's...
Seth: Really?
S: That's really supportive that's the kind of positivity a high school student needs to take it to the next level.
So then I went over to the east coast because I had a girlfriend who was going to Boden, and I visited all the different schools in that area, and I went around Boston, Boston College, Boston University and then I visited MIT and I was like, so overwhelmed, I was so inferior, I was like I have no, I had not been prepping, I did not know how to study.
Seth: Yea
S: I literally coasted through high school on charm and raw MIPS.
Seth: Interesting
S: You see what I’m saying
Seth: Yea
S: And had I put, I am only now, pushing 40, starting to learn how to focus and study, I’m sure I would have been on Ridland, but thank goodness my parents didn't think that was a good idea.
Seth: Yea, me neither
S: I lettered in drama,
Seth: [Laughs]
You know, I did too actually, I didn't letter drama but I took drama, I love that stuff
S: the idea of going to an amazing school, like an MIT, is, I just can't deal with that. But then the idea of going to get a master’s degree is amazing to me. Was that just the next obvious step, yea I’m going to get a masters?
Seth: Well, no, I wanted to get a PhD just because I wanted to know a lot about a specific thing.
Now let me, let's backtrack a little bit, I don't, I don't profess to be like this super genius, smart guy at all, I don't think I’m smart at all, in fact when you go to school or when you meet other people that are in our field for example you get this sense that, holy cow there are some really, really smart people and school doesn't necessarily make you smarter. I don't think it does at all, I think school helps you focus on one thing and it allows you to sort of bare through the process of actually becoming an expert in one specific field, so for example if you have someone with a PhD, they might be really, really, really knowledgeable in one specific thing but in other things might not be very smart at all and so there never need to be an inferiority complex, in fact all school is, is like this focus group to help you study better. That’s all it is, it's not, if you can find a group of your peers at a code camp or at a user group, or whatever, that's as much an education as anything else, it's not the hey I doled out thousands of dollars and gone to MIT and now I'm smarter, I don’t think that’s it all actually. I don’t feel any smarter at all, i just know a little bit more about one specific topic actually.
[Music Interlude]
Seth: I've seen on twitter many people, sort of have this argument of Yea I don’t need to go to school or college to learn how to program and other saying yea you do. I think it's kind of a hybrid of both, I actually started with community college, I went to only but supplemented my education with stuff in community college and I found people at the community college to have more knowledge and experience in real life stuff than the folks did over at the university. And so, you kind of have to temper your education with, you know, real smarts which is, how you use this stuff that you've actually learnt.
S: When you're at that the master’s degree level, do you feel like you're six years away from high school, or is it just taller high school?
Seth: No, in fact, I felt like a complete idiot and when I started the PhD programme, because I actually went to PhD and they just sort of gave me a masters along the way which was kind of interesting. So, I, here fill this paper out and we will give you a masters. Oh ok, because I had already been there for a couple of years and I had two more years after my masters that I went there. but I just remember getting there and feeling completely inept, I would go to seminars, because after a while there are no more classes to take, it's more like a oh hey, we're going to talk about this topic, everyone was going to show up and we were going to read these papers and I felt completely inept, in the sense that I, I had no idea what was going on it seemed like. And as I went obviously I got a better idea but I still felt like I did not know anything.
And, so really the master’s / PhD programme is not like high school, it's not like your bachelor’s degree where, literally, they placed a series of hoops that you need to jump through and the higher you get through the hoop the better it seems like to everyone else. in a master’s / PhD programme, it's really all about the knowledge that you want to understand, it really changed the way i thought about programming in fact, the functional concepts, and so when you get to that level, i think that is the level that it should have always been at, you know.
What are you interested in, study it and find out as much as you can about it and the peers around you would help supplement sort of that, that information that you're trying to learn. I really felt like an idiot actually, I still do, I don’t think I am a world expert in anything, I know a couple of things about a couple of things, but I think schooling at that level really helped me, sort of, cement this knowledge in my head that yea, you’re not really all that Seth and that is an important thing to realize.
For everyone.
S: But when you got to the point where you said I’m going to go get a PhD, what's the thinking process there? Is it the, I don’t want to go to work, so I will stay in school longer? or is it still more of the I still want to know more about this particular subject, so I will keep going forward.
Because I find a PhD to be very...
Seth: Time consuming?
S: [Laughs]
Seth: [Laughs]
S: Imposing.
Seth: Yea. well, I actually had a job during my time as a PhD, it wasn't about, it really wasn't about hey, you know, look at me I’ve got a doctorate, it was more of about I want to know everything there is to know about this one thing and it seemed like the doctoral programme was the vehicle that could sort of impel us towards that end goal.
I really wanted to know everything there is, was, to know about machine learning. Because it is a passion of mine, obviously I’m never going to be able to know everything about machine learning but maybe I can know or expand knowledge in one particular pin point issue with machine learning. and that is what I want to do, I want to contribute somehow and that is what I still try to do obviously I’m not in a PhD programme right now because my advisor left and I moved to a different state. But I think, I think I still try to do that.
S: what do you do now that you have two years of a PhD, is that a failure?
Seth: Some people tell me hey Seth, like my wife she's like, Seth you need to go back to school and finish your PhD and I think about this, every once in a while I’d like to go back, obviously I live in the state of California now and there's really great schools just around here, like USC, UCLA, Caltech. But I don’t know if I am smart enough to go to those schools first of all, and second of all, what does a PhD really do for you? I mean other than the fact that my wife gets to say hey my husband has got a doctorate, you know, I think that'd be kind of cool. But let me sort of tell you one story that happened.
I was, it was my turn to present a paper on something, it was, I think it was on some advanced topic of probability distributions and how to, you know, upper and lower limits of some algorithm.
And I remember sitting there, no actually standing up presenting this topic and the advisor, he says, he asked me a question like Seth, what do you mean by this? How does this work? and I remember standing there thinking, I have no idea how to answer this question in front of a group of peers.
Those in computer science, those of you in programming know about graph theory, graphs for computer people are like these little nodes and edges that connect to each other, and what we were trying to do was, we were trying to find a new upper bound for something. and it turns out that if you take a graph, convert it into a matrix called a laplasian, and then take a spectral analysis, and this is going to sound really weird, you take the spectral analysis of a laplasian, which is a matrix of a graph, it turns out that the second Eigen value tells you how connected a graph is, and that kind of blew me away. and I remember talking about it not believing it, and I remember showing that it worked, and I was so proud of myself because I showed how this thing works, and then the professor says Seth, what about this? and I can't remember that particular topic. You didn't explain this and you didn't explain this. You don't know why this works, you haven’t proved anything. And I remember standing there feeling like a complete idiot. Thinking, gosh I really thought I’d nailed this presentation, and he in fact said Seth, next week you are going to have to finish this. Because you really didn't explain anything and I remember going to his office afterward and explaining this proof to part of this particular theory. And I was just like, wow, I’m not very smart, I have like 8 years of school, 8 years of college and I still feel like a complete moron.
It turns out that the more that I’ve learnt about computer science, just this one topic, the more I realise how much I don't know. and it's kind of a humbling experience, if anything, you think you know everything, I mean, you should really either go to school or sit with a group of your peers and sort of glean knowledge off of them, I don’t think education necessarily is a go to school kind of thing, I think we need to go to school every day but it was in that environment that I realised how much I don’t know. And how much I really want to know. I remember standing there thinking I want to know this, I want to be able to answer this question but I simply cannot. And it took me another week just to sit down and figure out what the heck the guy was talking about, and really get back and say here I know this now. Here is how it works.
It was a humbling experience. It’s something everybody should go through, really. and there are people that will go through it in a work environment, there will be people that will through it in a social environment, but I think you need to go through the you know what, you're not as smart as you think, you need to dedicate more time, and that was the impetus for me to really sit down and look at things. And I’ve looked at papers to try and understand them for long periods of time and it's stressful because you know you have to talk about it, and you know don’t want to look like a fool in front of you peers. If you have the spirit of I want to know what this is, I think that's the key motivation for any kind of educational pursuit. Whether it'd be at school, or whether it'd be, you know, at your home, or whether it'd be your amazon account, amazon prime account where you get books every day and you salivate every time the UPS guy comes, because you know there's a book. And I think of all professions, developers are the ones that have that I want to know what this is, and I want to know how to do it and that's real education, it's not necessarily earned at MIT or at some fancy university. it's earned by your desire to know how is this done, how does this work, I want to do it to and I think that is the coolest part of education, so those who argue about hey, you don't need to go to school or whatever right, I think it depends on the person. Some people need that sort of environment where there is like this focus group kind of feel where everyone is doing the same thing so you are too. Or you can do it on your own, you know, with your love affair of the UPS guy and the books that he brings with your amazon prime account.
S: If you have two developers that each have 10 or 20 years’ experience, except one has a PhD and one never graduated high school. Where do they come together and where do they, where are they never going to see eye to eye on because one has 8 years of school the other ones doesn’t have.
Seth: That’s an interesting question, it depends on how the guys studied, and it’s all dependant on people. There are certain things that I wouldn't have learned without school. At the same time I don’t know if those things are really useful. for example, those who have taken computer science undergrad degree and taken complexity theory, that's probably one of the toughest topics in computer science, what it does is give you a sense of how doable is this particular algorithm that I am being asked to do.
So someone that's never thought about that might get a problem and might say yea I can do this. Whereas the PhD guy is like, yea you're going to be able to get close but you can’t. And so, it's all a question of, you know, you have this kind of sense what's going on in your field in a different way. And I’m not saying that the guy that barely graduated high school isn't going to be able to write a program but what i am saying is that, it's better to know more. It’s better to have a good solid understanding of your field. And that's an important thing I think. And whether you get it from the amazon UPS guy or whether you get it from school, I don't think it matters. But if both of them have the spirit of I want to know how this is done I think the perspective of both would enhance the team, if they know how to work with each other. Because I know some PhD students that were kind of like yea I’m really smart, they don’t get it yet, they don't get it. It’s not how smart you think you are it's how driven you are to know more, and that's the important thing, and anyone can have that.
S: One of the things that, one of the piffy sayings that a manager of mine loves to say, and I say it all the time, if you're going to put together a basketball team you can't teach height. When are you supposed to learn height?
[Laughs]
Seth: There’s certain things that you need to know as a computer person, right, as a computer programmer. You need to have a solid understanding of the tools you are working with. For example, if you are writing code in Haskell, right, you need to know about the functional paradigm, you need to know that you can't do things with side effects unless you have a monad, right. and those things are important to understand, right, there is no way you are going to be able to do things correctly if you're trying to do object oriented programming in Haskell. And so, does that mean that you have to have a master’s degree to know Haskell? No, it just means you need to know your tool. You need to know what you are doing. So for example, if you, height is not necessarily, I don’t even know how to correspond height to computer folks but it all depends on the tool you use.
If you are a C# programmer, then there are certain skills that you need to know about, but if you're a ruby programmer, you know about a dynamic programming language and what that really means, you know about duck typing, you need to know why ruby behaves differently than C#. You need to know for example, in python, if you use python that you can really, you can do whatever you want, if you're a JavaScript dev using nodejs to do server programming you know about an event driven programming model. There are certain things you need to know, but I think that in our particular field there is no limitation to what you can do if you have the desire to understand it. Now my personal opinion is everyone should know at least a couple of programming languages, they need to be able to interact with a couple of programming languages, and they need to be from the following categories, a strongly typed programming language, a dynamic language, and also a functional language. When you have languages from those three areas you sort of can play around with and interact, I think you're going to be this, really good programmer and I personally would not have been able to understand the functional paradigm without a master’s class. Others certainly can, I know tons of smart people from the F# community that have magically just figured this out because they had a desire to learn. I needed a professor and a group of peers to sit there and explain it to me. And maybe that says something about me, I think it does, but I don’t think there’s the height limitation.
There are some devs out there that are like the 9 to 5 programmers that just want to get the thing done. That is not going to necessarily make you the best programmer. And you can’t teach desire, just like you can’t teach height. It’s something that innate, and something that you create. and so I guess the height paradigm would be desired and know and understand you can’t teach that it’s something that either exist or doesn’t, you know how we are, I mean, we see this new shiny thing that comes out, and everyone goes bonkers over, hey I want to know how to do that, that looks really, really cool and you see these people on twitter, that literally, their desire to know and understand impelled them to do research, to do all sorts of things, and they do it in their spare time, right, and this is the motivation behind really good open source projects, right, they want to know and understand how to do this, and so they make it. for example, I’m doing a machine learning library in .net, not because of some all truistic sort of desire to give back to society, although maybe that might be a good side effect, but because I want to know machine learning better, and you know as well as anybody else that we only understand things once we have to write code for it. And that is the impetus for me I think.
S: See, that's interesting, I actually only understand things if I teach it.
Seth: Yea, I mean, I do to. but there are certain things that, when you're talking about programming, I love teaching concepts, but when you sit down and you literally have to tell the computer do this there is no fudge factor right, it's you told it right or you didn't. and so I like to do both, obviously one of my favourite passions was teaching, most people don’t know this, but I taught at a high school level and at a collegiate level for over 8 years, once you know something, you really don't know it until you actually share it and you have written some code for it at least in the programming I think.
R: thanks to Seth Juarez for sharing his story with us today.
You can check him out on Twitter, at twitter.com/sethjuarez.
[Musical Interlude]
R: So I get that you can learn how to think, I mean I understand that, you know, I understand the notion that when you're like a computer science person or developer you need to break a problem down, dive in, see how it works, dissect it, throw code at it and solve it, I understand that but I also think there's a process that goes on in a different part of your brains more or less a creative part or maybe even I’ll call it a coping part.
Because for me, to take this back to me my favourite place, school was basically a rite of passage, you know, I mean, I looked at a degree and I thought I just need a degree. I don't know what's going to come after that.
So, what came after that was an opportunity for me, and my friend said hey, you want to be a computer science guy, you know, you can come and write these web pages and get paid a lot of money, you know it's funny, and it reminds me of a story you told me about your dad becoming a fireman, you know, because you told me, what did you tell me, you told me once that, because I said that must be so cool to have a dad who is so committed to public safety and helping and you said...
S: No, I love my dad, he's awesome but, he was bagging groceries I think at the local pick and save, and his buddy said hey, their testing down at the local fire department, so why don't you come down? and then 35 years later he retired from the fire department.
I visited schools on the east coast and went to, visited Boston University and MIT and realised that these were not places I was going to be able to function. I wasn't sophisticated enough to pull off an MIT degree so I came home and I basically procrastinated, I didn't fill out, I went to a community college because frankly I did not fill out the applications. I had them, to all sorts of top schools, but I didn't fill them out, I let them sit and I went to community college because a friend of mine called me and said Hey, there's a new software engineering degree, brand new degree for first year at Portland Community College, let's go, I'll meet you there and i showed up on the first day to meet my friend there, he never showed, well, then ironically do you know what he does now, he's actually a SharePoint salesman at Microsoft.
R: Oh my god.
S: [Laughs]
R: That’s demeaning.
S: I went to school by myself, and I actually went to school with a guy named Steven frank who now runs Panic, who, he's a mac guy, we sat next to each other in class and once i did that I was afraid, I’m like, I need to get a degree or I’m not going to be able to get a job so after I got my 2 year degree I went and I did my 4 year degree, and that took 11 years though, I only graduated with my 4 year degree in 2003.
R: Alright, so let’s wrap this up.
One of the things I really wanted to do with this episode, was to answer the question does a degree matter?.
S: If it matters to you, then absolutely.
R: Right, because in a lot of ways it doesn't matter that much to other people, like Aqueelah's first interview where the guy said ok, you have a degree, you have some certifications but unfortunately you don't have any practical knowledge, I don't think you're going to fit here, or in my case, I should be out pounding rocks, I have a degree in geology, I don’t really have any formal computer training aside from amounts to a minor at my school.
You, you're a software engineer, but thing about is that we made it through school, you know, we made this rite of passage and we have this passion for learning and in a way school is kind of like a gateway
S: I think I like that, I think that a degree is a gateway drug for learning. if you don't have that passion already, whether you're a home schooled 17 year old or wether you’re an old evangelist at DevExpress, who never finished his PhD, you can either, you get that passion for learning growing up or maybe you learn it at school but the point is to get it where ever you can and try and keep it alive for as long as you are alive.
I think a degree is important, I think a lust for learning is more important.
R: Life time advice from Scott Hanselman
S: Stay in school, don't do drugs.
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