I recently went through (the recordings of) MIT’s intro course for electrical engineers, in which somewhere the professor says students may wonder why they have to do all this calculus and learn FET models and so on — in real life don’t you just wire chips together? And he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.
he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.
You never know when background knowledge and first principles might come in handy. One of my favorite YouTuber practical engineers has this story about going on a boat trip. The new coffee maker on board was freaked out by the noise from the inverter and kept shutting itself off. A total disaster! There would be no coffee the whole trip. So he turned on the blender while making the coffee, and the coffee maker started working. How did he know? He knew what kind of motor was in the blender, and knew its windings would increase the inductance of the circuit the kitchen appliances, filtering out the higher frequencies put out by the cheap inverter.
This guy isn't an electrician. ("Elekchicken") His day job is just to put pieces of "industrial lego" together -- just like how so many programmer jobs now are mainly about gluing libraries together. But he never shies away from knowledge of first principles, and he demonstrates all the time why such knowledge is valuable.
As discussed in the original PR https://github.com/facebook/react/pull/4400 the original checksum used a naive adler-32 algorithm, but with some basic math you can find a much more efficient implementation that eliminates most of the mod operations without risking a hidden deoptimizing overflow.
It's not everyday that you get to use your background knowledge, but when you do it feels great!
Jeff Bezos went to Princeton, Zuckerberg and Gates to Harvard, Sergey Brin and Evan Spiegel to Stanford. The bestest degrees seem like a decent option for the xB/year category too.
With the exception of Bezos, everyone on your list dropped out of their degree before finishing it - although to be fair to Brin, he already had a degree from Maryland before dropping out of his PhD.
Going to schools like that is more about having the right pedigree and connections. It’s much easier to get VC funding or get hired into a tech company as a stanford dropout than as a tripple doctorate from croatia.
Dropping out doesn't mean they didn't already get a lot of benefit from their schooling. Just that they realized they didn't need the piece of paper and could do the rest on their own.
But especially the fundamentals is where I think most of the value of a uni degree is.
Yeah, there's a huge difference between "so-and-so left a PhD program to start a company based on his research" and "so-and-so read a web framework tutorial instead of going to college."
I recently went through (the recordings of) MIT’s intro course for electrical engineers, in which somewhere the professor says students may wonder why they have to do all this calculus and learn FET models and so on — in real life don’t you just wire chips together? And he points out that MIT degrees are for the people who make the chips.