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