Computer science as a lost art (2015)
Ugh.<p>I think what people writing articles like this tend to miss, is that it&#x27;s much easier to be super deep in a field when the field is limited and low-entry but you&#x27;re already in it. Because there&#x27;s not really as much going on and there&#x27;s not much else to do but learn C or some text editor on a super deep level or what not. What else are you going to do? Look at the stuff &quot;deep&quot; people are generally into, it mostly revolves around POSIX some way or another. And databases, but nobody wants to talk about that.<p>But today, there are hundreds of languages, a whole bunch of frameworks per language, various tools, constantly changing standards, etc. The available landscape is absolutely staggering. If you want to deeply focus, you need to pick what to deeply focus on, which is a rather tough choice and a questionable one, because the thing you focused on might become obsolete.<p>&gt; if you want to make a tiny little difference in the industry and change the world just a little bit, then you do need that degree<p>And what sense does THIS make? Among the people who I know who _do_ deeply get into some specific CS topic, many are those who do not have degrees, because they&#x27;re often people who are not fans of structure and ended up doing what they want, as opposed to what might be beneficial for career purposes.<p>This just seems to be heavily misguided elitism.<p>If you really want to know why the quality of software, and basically everything else, has gone down, just look at market incentives and you&#x27;ll find that to be an utterly boring question.