1.) RTFM + STFW
2.) I've been doing it for 3 or 4 years.
3.) I got a consulting gig a couple weeks ago, but there isn't much programming involved :(
Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
121–128 of 128 posts
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#122If you are serious about programming and have any possibility of doing this at all, by all means get a CS degree at the best university you can access. I have worked with or interviewed a few programmers without any university degree and time and time again their confidence in how getting a degree is a total waste of time was directly proportional to their ignorance of basic facts from various areas of CS and inabili…
Both links to Amazon go to the same book. What was the other book that you were suggesting?
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#123Self taught. No choice about that in 1967. No computers in schools, no such thing as a CS degree, and anyway for family reasons I had to drop out. By pure chance I got a job as a computer commissioning tech at a local computer manufacturer - Elliott Brothers Automation; my job was to take room sized discrete component mainframes from their hand-wired manufacturing stage and make them work so they could be shipped to their new owners (typically universities or research labs). First day on the job, 19 years old, they lead me to a work station, point at the 'scope, the Crown sized blueprints, and the machine, and say "make it work. See you at lunch". I did. Both. No idea how, pure babe in the woods, but turned out my mind just works that way. So after a few months, I had noticed they turned the reference machine off outside 9-5 work hours, and got permission to turn it back on for my own purposes. The rest is history.
I have been at this for over 45 years as a cross-disciplinary hardware and software designer ever since. Still techie, at 66 years old, still nicely gainfully employed, still young at heart (if with a few creaky bits now:). Still mostly self taught, still inventing stuff that did not exist before. Yes, along the way for my own satisfaction I got the B. Sc and most of an M. Sc, but neither were required by my employers. Also, as somebody already mentioned, I have been recruited to every change in my career, or founded start-ups (with funding based on my design abilities), by people who knew me. Other than that first chance, I have never got a job by submitting a resume. And even that first job was by referral from an interviewer for a different job, after we had chatted for a while. Every change always started with my phone ringing.
I do not attribute this career to inborn talent, although I certainly turned out to have some. I attribute it to wide eyed curiosity and a perpetual feeling of "what? you want to actually _pay_ me to do this?", and its concomitant continuous learning and inventing. And to nobody telling me what I wanted to do was impossible.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both links to Amazon go to the same book. What was the other book that you were suggesting?
Oops! http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...
Thanks. I'm still in the phase where I can't build anything non-trivial, except for simple web applications.
When I'm ready, I plan to start studying these resources.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oops! http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...
Thanks. I'm still in the phase where I can't build anything non-trivial, except for simple web applications. When I'm ready, I plan to start studying these resources.
6.00 from MIT and the Udacity courses about CS/programming might help bring you up to speed, and 6.00 is periodically offered at edx as a full online course. Wish you luck!
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#126If you are serious about programming and have any possibility of doing this at all, by all means get a CS degree at the best university you can access. I have worked with or interviewed a few programmers without any university degree and time and time again their confidence in how getting a degree is a total waste of time was directly proportional to their ignorance of basic facts from various areas of CS and inabili…
On the other hand, I have come into contact with hundreds of programmers with CS degrees who were simply inept. It goes both ways.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#127I learned by having problems I needed to solve, and I knew that a computer could solve those problems. For me the most important thing is not having a rule book. If you believe deeply that you need a CS degree or to follow a popular route into the industry then I believe that you will fail to learn as everything will seem to be an obstacle that you are not privileged enough to overcome. Without a rule book, and with…
you said "I knew that a computer could solve those problems." Where did that knowledge come from? It's not an obvious fact to most people. I have tried to convince students of this, but they tend to be skeptical.
Re: Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?
#128self-taught. I was a Physics student in college when a friend showed me how you could simply combine a few commands in a linux shell to make more complicated commands. I think he probably showed me grep something | wc -l. And that piqued my curiosity. I went from playing with bash to learning Perl and eventually a job as a webdev guy.