[Haskell-cafe] education or experience?

[Jerzy Karczmarczuk]

Roman Cheplyaka comments a post by Christopher Howard:
>> I'm trying to decide, however; should I go back to
>> school, finish my B.S. and pursue a Masters in CompSci? Or would the
>> time (and money) be better spent aggressively pursuing volunteer work
>> for companies, hoping to eventually get the experience and contacts that
>> lead to a paying job?
>>
>> To be honest, I don't really want to go back to school, because I learn
>> a lot faster (and more economically) on my own. However, I'm not sure
>> which path is the fastest, and safest, approach to an actual paycheck.
> If you have some money to cover your expenses, consider learning by
> contributing to open source software.
>
> Compared to an academic career, you'll have a more "real" goal of making
> good software (instead of publishing papers). Also, this experience will
> be much more relevant for your future job.
>
> Compared to work for companies, you can choose more challenging,
> interesting and innovative tasks that most companies can offer.
> And the code quality will often be higher in open source than in
> companies.
>
> Roman
For me, opposing experience and education is simply silly.

Probably more than 70% of all people would learn much faster on their 
own than at school. But, learn WHAT? :

1. Probably less than 1% would guess correctly what they SHOULD learn, and
2. in general they will not be able to assess their own knowledge...

Learning, for most people, is a social process.

If Mr. Howard thinks that he is a kind of Srinivâsa Râmânujan, good 
luck, but the statistics is against him. With a chance, he will master 
very well one or two tools, but without a more structured background, 
the creativity in the domain of software might be severely limited. If a 
necessity of refactoring his fabulous product means more learning ab 
ovo, the loss of time might be considerable.

Roman: - Christopher Howard seems to be very far from publishing papers; 
he asks us whether he should complete his B.S. In this context, 
recommending Open Source seems a bit premature.

Jerzy Karczmarczuk