- The student has questions that it wouldn't have occurred to the teacher to answer.
- The student gets confused and asks for things to be rephrased or reframed.
- The student has questions that don't currently have static answers, but get computed by the teacher in real time, according to an intuition and assimilation of the facts that the student is only beginning to develop.
- The teacher's answers are up to date, whether or not he has actually exercised the diligence to maintain the textbook.
- The teacher fields the questions that the specific students ramping on the project actually have, rather than trying to anticipate all possible questions of all hypothetical students (and still failing).
There is a reason we have college and not just reading lists. And those are subjects where the economics support massive investments in discovering the best / most broadly useful ways to present the ideas. The average software project isn't that.
The commoditized software factory is an MBA fantasy. The expertise held by "key persons" is a software team's greatest asset.
Then you had poor teachers or a poor structure that didn't give you access to teachers in the right way.
While documentation has both advantages and disadvantages compared to in-person training, video tutorials are strictly worse than an interactive lecture.
I’m an autodidact. No teacher can provide the density and velocity of information and knowledge the Internet, science papers and books can provide. I can’t watch a lecture at 2x speed if its live. I can’t cherry pick. I have to be at a certain place at a certain time when I might not be in the right headspace. Then add on top that’s it’s basically a crapshoot whether or not you get along with your teacher or not. I don’t regret going to college but I didn’t gain much academic knowledge there either.
100%. As an undergrad in the 90s I came to this conclusion as well. Then when YouTube, Khan Academy, and MOOCs hit critical mass in the 2010s, I could see the beginning of the end. COVID-19 has greatly accelerated the demise of in-person learning, and the fact that colleges continue to charge the same tuition is clear evidence that what they're selling isn't education, it's credentialling.
> I can’t watch a lecture at 2x speed if its live. I can’t cherry pick.
If you have a 1:1 teacher you can just tell them what you already know and they can jump to the parts you don't. Much more efficient than skipping through a video for interesting snippets.
- The student has questions that it wouldn't have occurred to the teacher to answer.
- The student gets confused and asks for things to be rephrased or reframed.
- The student has questions that don't currently have static answers, but get computed by the teacher in real time, according to an intuition and assimilation of the facts that the student is only beginning to develop.
- The teacher's answers are up to date, whether or not he has actually exercised the diligence to maintain the textbook.
- The teacher fields the questions that the specific students ramping on the project actually have, rather than trying to anticipate all possible questions of all hypothetical students (and still failing).
There is a reason we have college and not just reading lists. And those are subjects where the economics support massive investments in discovering the best / most broadly useful ways to present the ideas. The average software project isn't that.
The commoditized software factory is an MBA fantasy. The expertise held by "key persons" is a software team's greatest asset.