<story><title>Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?</title><text>What things (books, activities, courses - anything really) have richly rewarded the time you invested in mastering them?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodablah</author><text>While I have no doubt this paid dividends for you, I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that the cost&amp;#x2F;benefit is greater on the whole than alternatively spending those 4 years doing real-world development. Subjective, sure, but from my perspective there are too many amazing self-taught developers and too many subpar ones with degrees to automatically justify the 4 year time and money cost for the average person (concerning skill, career prospects have their own reasoning w&amp;#x2F; degrees of course).&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest things one learns is the ability to self-teach. Unfortunately college charges a lot of time and money to learn via their chosen methodology which doesn&amp;#x27;t fit many people. At worst it can build a dependence on teacher-pupil classroom settings to learn new approaches, hence so many training sessions and stagnation in their absence. 
As a tautology, it&amp;#x27;s not that one approach is necessarily better than another, but we must remember that one approach is not necessarily better than another.</text></item><item><author>mattlondon</author><text>Computer Science degree.&lt;p&gt;Sure, lots of us &amp;quot;learnt&amp;quot; programming in our bedrooms or whatever by doing our own thing and messing about in whatever language.  I went into my compsci degree arrogantly thinking that I pretty much knew how to code already so please just give me the bit of paper saying I have the degree and I&amp;#x27;ll be on my way thanks very much.&lt;p&gt;I was very wrong.&lt;p&gt;Although I was pretty good at the coding (or at least I like to think so), I learnt so much more of the theory that is as relevant today as it was then, and as it was decades before that too.  It stretched me in ways I did not even know I could be stretched - I dont think I would never have learnt the &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot; theory that transcends specific programming languages if I was just tinkering around on my own or reading a &amp;quot;How to program Python&amp;#x2F;Visual Basic 6&amp;#x2F;PHP&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;quot; books etc (aged myself there with VB6!).&lt;p&gt;More or less every day I still use those skills&amp;#x2F;knowledge I learnt on my degree, but not only that I came out beaming with confidence and the knowledge that I &lt;i&gt;knew my stuff&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;As a direct result of my degree I enjoy a pretty cushy, well-paid, well-perked, and secure job at a company that many people dream of working at, and have done for years.  Sure it was 4 years and a few thousand GBP (at the time in the UK - more expensive now) but totally 100% worth it - I genuinely dont think I&amp;#x27;d be where I am now if I had not done the degree.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>niklasd</author><text>I agree that self-teaching is a very important skill, but it is a skill that I learned in my university time. It itself is a self taught skill, of course. At least in Germany, lectures are not compulsory, and if I find I don&amp;#x27;t learn enough, I go home and try to understand it on my own.&lt;p&gt;Second, I dispute that spending those 4 years doing real-world development would have yielded greater benefit. The thing is, he&amp;#x27;ll be doing his whole life real-world development, so the longer he is in the profession, the smaller the benefit of the additional amount of experience will be. On the other hand, in the four years of college, he has the chance to learn some other stuff deep in a way that he won&amp;#x27;t have the chance while he&amp;#x27;s working.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?</title><text>What things (books, activities, courses - anything really) have richly rewarded the time you invested in mastering them?</text></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodablah</author><text>While I have no doubt this paid dividends for you, I&amp;#x27;m not convinced that the cost&amp;#x2F;benefit is greater on the whole than alternatively spending those 4 years doing real-world development. Subjective, sure, but from my perspective there are too many amazing self-taught developers and too many subpar ones with degrees to automatically justify the 4 year time and money cost for the average person (concerning skill, career prospects have their own reasoning w&amp;#x2F; degrees of course).&lt;p&gt;One of the biggest things one learns is the ability to self-teach. Unfortunately college charges a lot of time and money to learn via their chosen methodology which doesn&amp;#x27;t fit many people. At worst it can build a dependence on teacher-pupil classroom settings to learn new approaches, hence so many training sessions and stagnation in their absence. 
As a tautology, it&amp;#x27;s not that one approach is necessarily better than another, but we must remember that one approach is not necessarily better than another.</text></item><item><author>mattlondon</author><text>Computer Science degree.&lt;p&gt;Sure, lots of us &amp;quot;learnt&amp;quot; programming in our bedrooms or whatever by doing our own thing and messing about in whatever language.  I went into my compsci degree arrogantly thinking that I pretty much knew how to code already so please just give me the bit of paper saying I have the degree and I&amp;#x27;ll be on my way thanks very much.&lt;p&gt;I was very wrong.&lt;p&gt;Although I was pretty good at the coding (or at least I like to think so), I learnt so much more of the theory that is as relevant today as it was then, and as it was decades before that too.  It stretched me in ways I did not even know I could be stretched - I dont think I would never have learnt the &amp;quot;hard&amp;quot; theory that transcends specific programming languages if I was just tinkering around on my own or reading a &amp;quot;How to program Python&amp;#x2F;Visual Basic 6&amp;#x2F;PHP&amp;#x2F;C#&amp;quot; books etc (aged myself there with VB6!).&lt;p&gt;More or less every day I still use those skills&amp;#x2F;knowledge I learnt on my degree, but not only that I came out beaming with confidence and the knowledge that I &lt;i&gt;knew my stuff&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;As a direct result of my degree I enjoy a pretty cushy, well-paid, well-perked, and secure job at a company that many people dream of working at, and have done for years.  Sure it was 4 years and a few thousand GBP (at the time in the UK - more expensive now) but totally 100% worth it - I genuinely dont think I&amp;#x27;d be where I am now if I had not done the degree.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sam0x17</author><text>It also depends on whether your indicator for success is writing CRUD endpoints in the latest web framework vs inventing new data structures, algorithms, and AI systems.</text></comment>