Well, he didn't write Facebook, but Dan Abramov only took a semester of college and is now one of Facebook's most well known engineers, due to creating Redux.
Sorry, didn’t mean to sound bitter. No offense really, bad wording, please take excuse.
My point being that lack of profound/scientific knowledge cannot be just bypassed in any area.
And while trying to skip education many end in childish pursuit of difficult or impossible goals.
The author of the article states that physics can only be learned the hard way, and from my experience he’s right.
The same is true for informatics and its application in software def. and I know so many ppl that can right code, but are absolutely illiterate about asymptotic analysis, discreet math, and relational algebra. Missing these all they miss the real picture and very often try to invent half-baked solutions to already known problems.
Regarding the social benefit - it can be gained or not depending on how good one is with social work.
I doubt that Mark didn’t apply what he learned in the university. Even though I also used to think it’s bollocks since I already knew x86 assembly, C, basic graph theory and some Perl when I got into university. I nearly dropped out.
But in reality classes I had to take about Functional programming, Design of FSM, Logical Peogramming, data mining and software requirements analysis helped me form a much better understanding. Also some of the people I met there really helped me be on track with where things are going.
So you cannot just skip this with few videos and tutorial. It is childish to think so, as it is childish to think you can invent the next general theory of everything while you don’t even have a clue what the precious theory was about.
People like to tell the story of how Einstein was not good with math… we’ll, he had a PhD from Zurich, so he must’ve been good about something to gain it. Or the story of Apple’s Steve Jobs who dropped out of university. But then he actually attended classes and Wozniak took an university degree.
