alt Hacker NewsTo each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.
Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)