Do I need to study at a university?

Recently, such discussions on near-resource resources are not uncommon. The opinions of IT people more and more boil down to the fact that studying at a university is a waste of time, because they - [IT specialists without a diploma, left the university, bought a diploma] - emphasize what is needed. This point of view is understandable and has a right to exist. But I want to talk about this issue from a different angle. Of course, in each case, everything is individual, but some general conclusions can be made.

He graduated from the university and defended his thesis (by the way, it was very closely related to the topics of work in an IT company), so it may seem that I will justify our educational system. This is not so, but, in any case, I will try to be objective.



While universities are thinking about how to pay for utilities, there will be no normal education in this country.

I will not touch stories about how the founders of Microsoft and Apple without higher education achieved global success, because this does not apply to the main topic. Many current politicians and businessmen also did not always study at the university.



The first thing I would like to draw attention to. You fly on a plane, knowing that the main pilot did not study at a flight school, but flew a thousand hours on a game simulator? Do you entrust the operation to a person who has not read the anatomy, but condemns, but is 100% sure that you need to cut somewhere here? Do you trust to defend yourself in court to a person who has not studied at the law academy but has read 3 books on jurisprudence at home?

Probably not. But, if you have a runny nose, then probably the advice of a pharmacist will be enough for you, and for understanding the general principle of the simplified taxation system, the advice of an "advanced" layman or a trainee lawyer will be enough for you.

The topic of presence / necessity of a diploma is very well revealed in the series “Force Majeure” (Suites).

If you draw analogies with IT, then if you need to do a simple job, for example, write a press release, make a prototype in php or pull a topic on wordpress, then you do not need a professional specialist and, indeed, to master this or that IT craft, a de facto university is not needed. Fortunately for our IT people, 90% of all outsourced work is just that.

But as soon as the level of complexity of the task increases (and, accordingly, the level of responsibility), then everything is not as glamorous as it seems at first glance. In addition to knowledge of the platform, language, tool, you also need to understand the domain domain and have a historical baggage of knowledge that a person will be ready to apply in critical situations. In the case of lawyers, this is an acquaintance with the base of past affairs and the ability to find precedents, for the manager - knowledge of business cases and fail stories, for the developer - knowledge of mathematics, algorithms, etc.

Open any vacancy, for example, from health care. It is unlikely that you will see many vacancies where there will be no requirement to be bachelor or master. Or ask anyone who has been interviewed by high-tech companies - they are unlikely to be asked questions about C # or Java.

In fact, everyone can answer the answer to the question “is it worth studying at a university” rather simply. To do this, it is necessary to slightly reformulate the question into the following:

• did you go to college because you wanted to go there or because you didn't take anywhere else?
• did you enter a university because you need it for a career?
• did you enter a university for a diploma?
• Are you planning your career for the next 5 years or 20?

But this is not the main idea that I would like to convey.

The main value of any country is its intellectual potential (well, also oil and gas) . It is measured in the quantity and quality of patents (remember all patent wars?), The presence of advanced technologies and scientific staff. Every large IT company spends millions of dollars researching and conducting experiments. Due to this, they are protected for ten to twenty years in advance from default and serious problems.

Our situation is a little different. Research institutes have practically lost their strategic importance; those who remain at the university are mainly those who have not been hired. The bureaucracy nipped any initiatives and successes. Therefore, speaking from the point of view of geopolitics, the presence of XXX thousand outsourcers for the country is a rather useless indicator. In multimillion-dollar countries, we have a scanty number of offices of world companies with R&D. The CIS in terms of penetration of large companies, I think, loses to Tel Aviv alone. But in Israel, the 27-year-old junior developer is the norm.

Well, in conclusion, I will say that many of my colleagues quite successfully combined both studies at the university and work in IT companies. Moreover, the ability to plan their time and the ability to set priorities very much now help them.

In addition, the university is a great time to experiment and find what you are really interested in. Often people who decide to study everything on their own take, as a rule, “what’s easier”, “what a friend advised” or “where to take”, and after a few years are not ready to quit their favorite job, because you need to learn everything anew.

By the way, when they ask me what to learn and what programming language to use, I answer this way: take your hobby and make for it, for example, a website - first in C #, then in Java and compare your feelings, which you liked more. If neither one nor the other - look further. After several experiments, you will realize that you really get turned on and like.

Thanks for attention!