Excellence is what matters. It can be found in universities (and is in theory what universities are for), but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement. In fact, I usually react to the new hires with C.S. degrees with some degree of frustration at what schools are teaching these days.

Excellence can also be found in independent reading, and it can be learned with professional mentors as well.

You can learn it from AI, too, actually. I'm skeptical about the central use of AI in writing code directly, but find it incredible as a teaching tool. It is especially impressive when I use it as something between a tutor and a search engine, talking to it a lot about the best way to do things and asking it about standard methods and resources. It's not infallible, to be sure, but it's this incredible combination of tutor and textbook, with a better connection to the zeitgeist than all but the very best of tutors and textbooks.

In this way, AI is not dissimilar from school, independent reading, or work experience: you can use these tools in different ways, to serve different goals. If you focus on credential, skill, productivity, and money, you may entirely miss out on excellence in your craft. On the other hand, you can pursue excellence in any of these contexts.

> but in my professional experience, a C.S. degree is no guarantee that one has been trained with excellent taste and judgement

The range of degrees is very wide. Even within some universities you will find graduates with completely different levels of ability despite achieving the same degree. Some universities are set up to pass everyone through to graduation and the professors try to give opportunities for the really motivated ones to actually learn.

The range of degrees you will see is also dependent on where you’re hiring. Graduates from the programs with the strongest degrees aren’t applying to average jobs. They’re being recruited before they leave campus and they have a deep network of people in top companies to get referrals from.

This creates a strong selection effect where the type of C.S. graduates you encounter is dictated by the strength and compensation level of your company. Top school CS grads can go straight into jobs that pay higher than Senior SWE compensation in many markets. They’re not interested in applying to average junior SWE comp jobs at companies that nobody will recognize on their resume.

I went back to school recently to get a degree after 20yrs in the industry. It's hard to overstate how helpful it is to able to open ChatGPT and ask "ok but why?" ad infinitum like children do.

I've spun up an AI-assisted RoR app. Having the AI "explain this to me like I'm a human" has been the quickest way for me to learn a new environment, language, and system that I've ever encountered.

The golden days are now: We can amplify our mind's ability to get stuff done before our AI overlords supplant us.

Kind of not kidding. My opinion: Get shit done, make stacks because it's going to get interesting even if AI never advances much further. The perception that it will be chaos enough.

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