Yes, that is mostly because your education happened in a 3rd world country, where education standards are quite low. People will be upset by me saying this, but that's how it is and everybody knows it.
However, you already have very good base knowledge and you know how to adapt to new technologies. You don't need more programming experience, but as you have already noticed, you need in-depth computer science knowledge.
A bootcamp is definitely an excellent choice and will teach you more than your degree. You should try to find a camp nearby, so that you are there physically and get to know other coders. Being able to solve problems with peers is invaluable. If you don't have a good offering nearby, definitely do online courses like on Khanacademy.
If you spend a year on CS principles it will be very, very helpful.
I get your point but I think what’s going on with OP would happen anywhere in the world. CS degrees are not hands-on and so if you are not already working on mastering a certain area of IT you will find yourself just as useful as a philosopher at the end of the program.
The advice on the thread is very good, keep at it, this career path, like many others is a lifetime learning experience.
> Yes, that is mostly because your education happened in a 3rd world country, where education standards are quite low.
I mean, based on the description this sounds like a pretty normal theoretical computer science degree, such as you might get in any university basically anywhere in the world. (There are CS courses which are deliberately practical, but they're very much the exception.)
> Yes, that is mostly because your education happened in a 3rd world country
I couldn't disagree more with this sentiment. I live in Canada and by way of both running a tech company and working with colleges/universities here I can tell you that none of them have curriculum that's adequately connected to industry skills.
The only exception, and it's a small one, is the University of Waterloo. By way of their reputation they've built a robust internship network for the engineering students. Although they still have gaps on the curriculum side, albeit smaller gaps than other schools, students complete up to 4 internships before graduating giving them a big advantage.
Since when has Canada ever been a "3rd world country"? The OP is talking about schools in poor emerging economy nations, not schools in industrialized economies.
No, OP is not talking about schools in "poor emerging economies." OP is talking about their experience doing a CS degree in Kenya. The COMMENTER (telomero22) is generalizing this to be a common experience in "3rd world countries."
I'm disagreeing with the commenter, telomero22, who believes OP's experience is due to studying CS in a "3rd world country." As others have confirmed in this thread, I'm suggesting that these sentiments are extremely common with CS grade in 1st world countries such as Canada.
Is it imperialistic to call developing countries 3rd world-countries? Then again, developing just means "more climate friendly then richer countries" I guess.
Your body craves carbohydrates, it's like an addiction. Overcoming that addition is all about training your willpower and delayed gratification.
It's the same as smoking. Strong willed people can stop smoking in a heartbeat. Weak minded people cannot, their minds are simply too weak to resist smoking and they need it every 2 hours. Same with eating.
Next time you feel that hunger feeling, out of spite just don't eat and the craving goes away within 1-2 hours and you'll get long term endorphins instead that make you feel good for your mind being stronger than that craving. It's not so hard, you just have to be a bit stronger than that desire.
You can also try fasting. Just don't eat for 24h and you'll feel a lot better than if you ate.
Some people simply cannot delay gratification, they need to be on their phone, watch tv constantly to get their dopamine hit. However, other people are able to delay gratification and get a much larger amount of endorphins and also the better ones.
It should become a habit to receive your dopamine hits from resisting the temptation and being stronger than this degenerate craving for unhealthy, processed food carefully designed to make the population addicted to their produce to buy more and more and eat more, so that they make more money.
There is a way to get out of this easily, don't eat any more sugar and carbohydrates, but plants and meat, which is the keto diet. It's very healthy and natural as well. You'll drop a lot of weight and you can still eat well.
I don't think this willpower explanation quite fits the facts.
I can delay gratification. I can quit coffee cold turkey no problem. I skip breakfast to increase my fasting period. I don't need TV or Internet, I'd rather work on my lifestyle property. I almost never take pain pills, I see myself as stoic, I can do long duration exercise.
I can count calories and force my weight down from 100kg to 74kg by sheer willpower and focus on the issue.
And yet I can't effectively keep the weight off. Because the hunger is 24x7, and my ability to focus on the issue isn't 24x7... I have other things to do in life.
I never have a craving for something sweet. Not since I was like 5 years old. I will eat sweets from time to time, but usually only when pressured socially to do so. Sweets seem repulsive to me, make my tonsils cringe. I haven't binged on sweets ever since that halloween stomach ache in 1976.
Long term endorphins from not eating?! Maybe once, the first time you ever successfully don't eat, but surely it stops being a surprise after the first time.
It's because in poor and conservative countries women must choose a high paying job if they want to escape oppression and arranged marriage.
However, the more egalitarian and wealthy a country is, the more women are free to choose which job they like most and they are not so interested in Engineering it seems.
EDIT: Ha, looks like this is just a Jordan Peterson false claim. Women seem to be strongly represented in science and engineering in developed countries. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/women-in-science/
"It's interesting to me people make all sort of assertions about why men or women are dominant in an industry without anyway to falsify their hypothesis".
You proceed to answer with a random unsourced assertion that seems to go against current sociological studies.
So I'll answer you with another unsourced hypothesis: you're a man, and you just justified your position in the industry by waving your hand and saying "they don't want it anyway!".
They are not interested in engineering you say? Would you mind giving me an hypothesis off the top of your head as to why that is? I'm sure you'll have a very interesting assertion here aswell.
"Woman does not wish to turn aside from her higher work, which is itself the end of life, to devote herself to government, which exists only that this higher work may be done. Can she not do both? No!" -Lyman Abbott (1903)
or that society is pushing women against science in all countries but in developing countries this is countered by the need to get a high paying job. in wealthy countries you can live comfortably with a regular job so women are just expected to do that. no one is encouraging little girls to choose science; there is no need
This way, American universities have large amounts of funds available to provide the best education, best facilities, hire the best professors and that's why America simply has the best universities worldwide and it is paid by their students?
It also mostly only paid by students who can afford it. Students from weaker social backgrounds only have to pay a small fraction of the normal tuition fees.
As well, 77% of people with student loans have less than $40,000 in debt and 57% have below $20,000 in debt. $20,000 can be paid off within 2 years with a normal graduate job if one wants to pay them off early.
Maybe 90% by count, but not 90% by volume of transactions, prominence, etc. Bitcoin seems to be entirely resistant to moving away from PoW and Ethereum have been in the process of moving to PoS for years.
Pop quiz: What will happen first, Ethereum PoS or the year of linux on the desktop?
Yes, 90% by number transactions. Binance chain, Solana, Luna, AVAX, ADA, DOT are doing around 15 million transactions a day altogether while Bitcoin and Ethereum are only doing 1.5 million altogether.
You can start a science twitter, tweet every thought, every interesting fact you have found and you'll build a following and get your insights vetted, confirmed or refuted by the crowd. A very powerful way to increase your knowledge and accuracy.
Can you apply that to all kinds of medication, is this is a lot of more work or can you plug it in or let a student do the data entry?
It will take a while to gain traction, but if you go to conferences, add more kinds of medications, establish a brand and gain reputation, this could be very successful. The contribution to modern medicine is invaluable.
How many big kinds of medications are there? For the Top20 most common cancers, IBS, Neuropathy, acne, MS, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis and you've got most of the big ones covered. You can also add beauty treatments such as hair loss, skin rejuvenation and you are already in the beauty sector with much lower barriers to entry.
Might be a couple of months of data entry but then you would have this invaluable neural net no?
I wouldn't work on this full-time, but sending out emails here and there, developing it further here and there could be quite fruitful with a very good time spent/impact ratio.
i feel like it's something that, on its own isn't worth much, but could be sold to a group like goodrx or webmd or something like that for a decent payout.
2. Immutable, digital, accessible, secure ownership of music, video, real-estate, cars, gaming assets, health data
3. Instant access to nearly all possible financial products (loans, lending, startup investments etc.) without a middle man
There are many, many more use cases. Crypto drastically increases accountability, transparency, accessibility, trustworthiness for every kind of use case.
It seems like you are creating a lot of straw men to not see that, for example an impossible standard such as saying not all of crypto is 100% decentralized, so it's centralized, which just makes no sense and is a very strong logical fallacy.
1. Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.
2. Nope. It doesn't grant any ownership. It's a just a pointer to a file on third party server. Ownership is enforced by a central authority. Code is not law.
3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.
Trust me when I say this, I did a lot of research and reading in earnest. I really hoped there was something of substance in it. I really wanted to embrace web3 and its promise of an open distributed web. I am a programmer. I am always open to learning about and adopting new technologies. I tried hard. I started by reading the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi. I looked at the web3.js framework. I read as many whitepapers as I could. I looked at many of the projects. Things just don't add up.
>3. Nope. Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme. There is no finance in DeFi. Just scammers running pump and dump schemes and rugpulling starry eyed idiots who think centuries old financial principals are useless and want to make a quick buck without doing anything.
There's plenty of projcts ran by people who are clearly not trying to scam anyone. Time will tell whether they will actually be successful but you are clearly biased again and not even attempting to be objective.
There is a lack of balance here. Yashg is not wrong in his assertions, and nor are you, that time will tell if the non-scammers are successful or not. I was laughing at the concept of bitcoin when it was mere cents to the coin and some pizza was bought. I'm not laughing now, but I'm also well aware that if you need to explain why something is NOT a Ponzi scheme, it's a Ponzi scheme. I've done a fair bit of work in the NFT space, and saw myself how riddled with fraud it is - not the operation itself, but the punters trying to scam the platform for a free token. I also saw how brittle the concept really is. In many cases, the smart contract is simply saying address X owns the number 4. That later gets translated to some URL which is not guaranteed to be there in 10 years time. Storing the actual asset on the chain would have been preferable but is not practical. So where does that leave us? How does one's ownership of the number 4 translates to them owning a deed to a building or a picture of a monkey, in the sense that you could explain it to your grandma?
I'm on the fence here. I want this to work, but I also understand how it works and know that it's not a simple task.
If it helps you understand, there's blockchains being built with close to none tokenomic concept to it. Meaning, there's no value on investing on their token but on using the platform. In some cases it's posible, in others it's not since you need to leverage costs/incentives in some way (but they still manage for it to remain low price through inflation, etc).
> Nope. Still need to convert it to real money for buying something. Gas fees > transfer fees.
Sure, if you choose an expensive (congested) blockchain to make the transaction. Otherwise the fees are about comparable or in some cases even less (below 1% for a round-trip from "real money" to crypto and back).
> Without an underlying economic activity it's all a ponzi scheme.
What do you mean by "underlying economic activity", and what kind of such activity does for example a bank or fintech possess that distributed ledger tech does not?
1. Transfers of what? The recipient has to convert to fiat to do anything useful.
Cheaper and faster don't seem to be happening either, at the moment.
2. You can never digitally own a physical object. Your ownership is centralized in the real-world legal system.
You say "secure" as though people are going around stealing houses from each other by snatching their deeds. Ownership of all of those things is already secure enough.
3. In the US at least, none of this is true. Users still have to go through KYC and there is almost always a middleman involved. Crypto has escaped neither institutionalization nor regulations in developed countries.
1) would be just as expensive if taxed properly, so not cheaper just illegal
2) immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets, also its a pretty negative turn of society to go and try and make fungible products like music listening into private non fungible ownable assets
3) The middle man is usually there for a number of reasons. Same way exchanges showed up almost immidietly after crypto, you would also have crypto banks to handle loans etc. Add the financial constraints the goverment needs, for lawful contracts to be enforceable and now you just have a more expensive, volatile and environmentally destructive banking system.
Like it seems most of the ideas of things "crypto works for" is just what banks used to do before regulation was added. And the regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered. For every notary you pay to get a deed in a house or doctor to check your health data, some will or some medical anomaly gets corrected. For every fee you pay in a loan someone elses gets secured and has no extortionate shark loan fees.
With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end. Its an extremely silly proposition and I am not surprised it is being peddled by the likes of Jordan Belfort because he seems to like to do old medieval scams on new targets.
> immutable is a pretty shitty property for some of those assets
Because smart contract chains allow for turing complete code, mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.
> regulation is there for a reason, for every extra fee you pay to do cross border money transfer, some money is not being laundered.
It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.
> With crypto right now you lose all that protection in exchange for a slow, expensive gas fees, environmentally destructive proofs of work and absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end.
I'm breaking this down.
> slow
Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.
> expensive gas fees
Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it. Ethereum processes over a million transactions daily, not including Layer 2 and side chains which have increased that capacity and lowered gas fees in practice.
> environmentally destructive proofs of work
Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%, and most blockchains currently use it.
> absolutely no legal protection if you get scammed in the end
The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.
> mutability can be programmed in to particular tokens at the smart contract level.
Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.
> It shouldn't be my personal financial responsibility to pay for a corporation to double check my own assertion that I am not breaking any law.
Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country. If you do not want to pay it directly in your transfer, then whatever alternative you propose would mean either tax payers or other bank users end up paying more than their fair share if they do not do as many transactions as you.
> Taking Ethereum as an example, payments generally go through within 15 seconds, compared to several hours for a same-day wire transfer or several days for an ACH payment.
This is a false equivalence. The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.
Secondly, the money in an ACH payment goes through in miliseconds, the 2 day wait is a legal escrow for legal purposes not technological ones. One that crypto should also abide if it had any real use.
> Gas fees are expensive because too many people are using it.
Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.
> Proof of Stake reduces energy consumption by over 99%,
It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.
> The standard way to send money abroad, international wire transfer, also gives you next to no legal protection if you get scammed.
The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.
What it doesn't protect is against Nigerian Prince scams but thats not a failure of the wire transfer, and it certainly is even worse thanks to crypto...
> Yeah but contingencies not predicted in the original contract cannot be added, hence they are immutable from the original design. Something legally not really enforceable as laws change making previously written contracts or clauses void.
This could be a feature or a bug, depending on use case.
> Someone has to double check the financial and legal frameworks are being abided by in transactions of money, specially cross country.
Not really. I think money transfer, especially in the United States, is way over-regulated. But our opinions don't really matter, because crypto is a cat out of the bag.
Maybe you would want to make it illegal to make a peer to peer crypto transaction without a middleman checking it for legality first. I believe that's impossible without outlawing crypto altogether, which is a political nonstarter (though they might be successful at outlawing proof of work only).
> The transaction in ethereum takes however long you wanna pay a gas fee for, the 15 second thing is an average not a median, and certainly not a general use case for smaller transactions.
Since the EIP-1559 fee market change in August 2021 introducing flexible block sizes, the 15 second transaction time is very much a median. Not sure what you mean by "not a general use case for smaller transactions."
> Gas fees are expensive because you can pay to jump the queue, and considering the number of fraudulent transactions, scams etc people are incentivized to over pay to make their quick buck after a rug pull.
No more overpaying in the general case since EIP-1559, since block sizes are flexible now. Blocks can double in size, so as long as the network demand doesn't double within a 15-second period, you can include a fee at the market rate and your transaction will be processed in a timely manner.
Ethereum fees are an open auction market where anyone can bid. If scams can afford to outprice legitimate transactions, then that says something about society, not about the network. The network is impartial, providing service to whoever bids high enough.
> It also reduces security, increses centralisation and increases fees. Certainly a cure-all for a problem created by crypto in the first place.
Proof of Stake increases security, decreases centralization, and reduces fees. It would take a long comment to describe why this is the case with sources, so tell me if you want me to write it up.
> The 2 day to send allows plenty of time to report a transaction, for the goverment to intervene if flags are raised etc. It certainly offers tons of legal protection.
From my understanding, international wire transfers can only typically be cancelled within the first 30 minutes or so, if you're lucky. The payment method offers exactly zero legal protection - it's as if you've handed the recipient cash and they walked away with it. If you send money to the wrong account, or if the recipient does not provide you with the services you purchased, your only recourse is to hire an international lawyer and sue the recipient in whatever country they are in. You can look on your wire transfer form and see disclaimers to this effect.
However, you already have very good base knowledge and you know how to adapt to new technologies. You don't need more programming experience, but as you have already noticed, you need in-depth computer science knowledge.
A bootcamp is definitely an excellent choice and will teach you more than your degree. You should try to find a camp nearby, so that you are there physically and get to know other coders. Being able to solve problems with peers is invaluable. If you don't have a good offering nearby, definitely do online courses like on Khanacademy.
If you spend a year on CS principles it will be very, very helpful.