There's another angle here too...and that is whether the people who are having loans forgiven even received X number of dollars in value from their college experience. A LOT of these students did not, which is why students that got swindled into scam "universities" are top of the list for forgiveness.
This is an entirely different topic, but one where I'm sure we have a lot of agreement. I suspect a most people on HN could have gotten to where they are in their careers by starting at a computer trade school (with the exception of jobs where 'the piece of paper' is a requirement for some reason).
Your comment struck because superciliously I agree, but when thinking about it, it's quite true. Both are strongly related but quite different, just as a marathon runner (though better than average) will not set world records on a 100m sprint.
A software engineer can easily use a XGB model and get some outputs, but is a long way from having a deep understanding of statistical distributions.
A ML engineer can easily put together a Django website, but is far from designing a maintainable software application.
Maybe on average it's true, but it's also a weird tone to strike in marketing materials. Where I work the MLE's are expected to write production level code and deploy their own services. We explicitly hire 1 level down on the SDE ladder when hiring MLEs, so a senior MLE should basically be almost a senior SDE.
I was the other way. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but my university had extremely competitive programs, so getting into the CS program was nearly impossible, even if you were already admitted to the university.
> Very few people answer to no one and the rest get told what to do, all too often, throughout their lives.
I don't know about this. I run a team of ML engineers, and the ones who require being told what to do in order to be productive are simply worth less to the team. Sure, the scope of work is very specific (often limited to the teams purpose/mission), but autonomy is very much sought after and rewarded where I work. I simply don't want to work on a team where I, as the boss, am the sole person responsible for finding high leverage problems to solve, and have to then package the work then assign it.
I think there is a large gap between "go solve this large engineering problem, how is up to you" and "here are pre-groomed tickets, do not deviate from them". Do you disagree?
While we're on Python and private methods - what's with everyone just _underscoring every method and variable by default? Does anyone teach people to do this or have I just ran into a few people with this habit by chance?
I know what _underscoring does in Python and what PEP8 recommends but doing it all the time for everything is so ugly and unnecessary.
> Making variables and methods private means making them inaccessible outside the class and I gave the typical reasons/best practices for that.
The point they are making is in python there's no private method, everything is public. There's only a convention of "avoid using anything starting with "_"
