Ask HN: How many of you are employed, self-taught SWEs?

To build the future.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

No. I need to get back to my principles

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

By presenting myself as a low cost low risk gamble

- What were you doing before this?

See below

- Any tips for the rest of us?

I leave my education off my resume. I've been at this over 20 years and have a hard 10 year cliff when it comes to talking about things.

I consider the knowledge I left the University with as rather useless unless someone continues the practice.

If the employer cares about prestige and pedigree then leave the room, rudely if you want.

Engaging with the now is the crucial determinant of empowering the future. If the competence signalling is past laurels than you're going to get stagnating structure. I've seen it. Just leave. Aspirational stricture through institutional structure is a waste of human effort.

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What do you care about? That's the main question. There's no easy answer. But once you can get to it let that drive and centralize your decisions.

Really that's all I can give you.

It was an accident. I needed to accomplish an admin task which required modifying a SQL query someone else wrote. I just fully dove into SQL mainly for reporting purposes after that.

>What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

I am a data engineer for a unicorn startup. It is really awesome! The pay is ridiculous, especially considering I live in a low cost of living area but have a standard tech SF salary. Also the talent is insane. I get to interact with some really smart folks.

> How did you break that first-job barrier?

I saw the opportunity to automate an admin problem with a SQL query. I asked a developer to pretty much be my senpai, and he gave me an SQL crash course. After that, I did SQL tutorial after SQL tutorial and eventually got promoted from call center agent to data analyst.

>What were you doing before this?

I was a call center agent and working at a car wash right before that. That was like 5 years ago :D

>Any tips for the rest of us?

Get in touch with your companies IT/engineering department if you can. Lots of software people love curiosity. Try to find someone like that where you currently work. Also, do a lot of projects and be prepared to feel really confused about how things work. I think I would not be where I am today if I didn't have some really good mentors. Secondly, programming tutorials will have you believe that the world is just a bunch of for loops and if statements. But then you look at a real life production system and it's wayyyyy more complicated than that. Just know that the minimum amount of knowledge you need to have a software job is probably a lot lower than it would seem. Don't be discouraged when you feel like you have no idea how something works because it will happen a lot.

I was a gamer - I started by making websites for my team (we were competing on clanbase.com) and then eventually I branched out into various MMOs and made bots/cheats/etc. I then began selling those and realized it was a better source of income than my job at McDonalds (I was ~17 then) and ended up sticking with it.

- What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Currently doing a stint as a solutions architect but have been a CTO at a startup and Tech Lead at Twilio launching some pretty cool products since then (still at Twilio). I expect to return to the product side after honing my sales knowledge/skillset/improving soft skills.

- How did you break that first-job barrier?

I did a little contracting via some freelancer website, but I won my first real software job by finding a security vulnerability in sendspace.com. I let them know via their support e-mail and shortly after they asked if I'd want to join to fix it, and more. Then, to break into the US I took a job as a CTO massively below market rate at a YC startup with non-technical founders that were paying huge sums for outsourced development and surprised at the value I could bring quickly.

My offer at Twilio was in part from constantly hounding the team for improvements / changes / suggestions to which they suggested I come and help do it. I was also encouraged to apply at Shopify in 2013 after writing this post https://ma.rtin.so/posts/reverse-engineering-shopify-private...

- What were you doing before this?

Studying / part-time McDonalds

- Any tips for the rest of us?

Side projects. Building tangible software will give you a much softer transition into the professional world and a more practical skillset. Be curious. Don't give up, don't be intimidated, and be willing to take risks to get your foot in the door.

I came in by photojournalism -> photoshop -> graphic design -> web design through the 90's.

I was never really good as a designer. I was capable, but I didn't have that "real talent" that I could see in others. Instead, I was always interested in the technical aspects of design. I enjoyed color separation and complex printing jobs.

At around the same time, I realized I was getting tired of handing my designs over to the engineers who would slop them together. So I started dabbling with Macromedia Director (predecessor to Flash for making CD-ROMS [when that was a thing]), then flash, and then HTML and kept going farther and farther back in the stack. This was in the time of PERL and ASP, and I'd devour O'Riley books trying to learn as much as I possibly could. A book on regex. A book on data structors. Learning SQL.

I then had the fantastic opportunity to work with a group of people that stuck together through a series of companies (myself as the designer). At the last company, I was incredibly fortunate to have the architect take me under his wing and have daily master/apprentice style problems and reviews with me. Today you're writing a binary logger. Tomorrow a reader. Now an HTML parser. The architect was brutal, and I'd go home sometimes in tears... until I realized it wasn't about _me_. I had to check my ego at the door, and that this could be a dialogue if I was willing to participate and not to get defensive, and be OK unlearning some bad practices (To this day, I still think he's one of the most incredible humans on the planet).

Twenty years later, it's been an excellent career. I've built a lot of cool shit, and finally even had a decent exit. I'm in management now, but I can still find some "fingers on the keyboard" time here and there.

If I can give any advice:

- Never stop learning. Never stop asking questions.

- Don't get hung up on being a particular language specialist—it's fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals... everything else is just syntax.

- Interviews are going to suck sometimes, because there's some asshole in the loop that biases towards academia and thinks you're not worth their time... but don't let it get you down (pro-tip: you probably don't want to work there anyway).

- Celebrate your journey, don't shy from it, and be proud that you're doing this on your own; because it's a damned hard road sometimes.

I was 11, my dad used FORTRAN at work to build economic simulations, and walked me through some basic programming. This was during the ~5 years that I was taking amphetamine or methylphenidate daily for ADHD, which I mention because I'm pretty confident that it's a big part of the explanation for why I spent then next 4 years completely obsessed with programming. When I was 15 or so I stopped taking the drugs and switched from actually programming to mostly reading about the craft. At first I focused on full stack web development, and gradually acquired an interest in systems programming and Linux sysadmin stuff.

What are you doing at your job? Is it everything you dreamed of and more?

Work for FAANG developing and operating backend microservices which do little more than shuttle data around. This is my first job out of college, been doing it for a year, don't like it much at all. Looking to transition to a role which involves developing more interesting applications and has less operational burden. I'm cautious about switching roles amid this pandemic though.

How did you break that first-job barrier?

I got a math BA in college, though that wasn't my primary academic focus. That degree is enough to get employers who require a relevant degree to not immediately discard your resume. Beyond that, luck. Sent my resume to a FAANG new grad hiring pipeline, and got an offer. I got some relevant work experience in college, first working quarter-time for a startup writing node js libraries, then working for my university's CS department as a sysadmin. These jobs were not hard to get, probably because of how woefully uncompetitive they were on compensation, which I was OK with while I was a student.

What were you doing before this?

College, studying math and philosophy. My parents didn't believe that I could get a good SWE job without a degree and were willing to pay for my education, so I accepted their generosity, and I'm glad I did despite the opportunity cost. I'm regularly tempted to pursue a career in academic philosophy despite the myriad drawbacks.

Any tips for the rest of us?

If you're free of financial obligations and self taught, you have the option of jumping straight into your professional career and getting a head-start on building wealth, which might well be the right option for you. But you're also in a position where you have skills that you can rely on as a backup while you experiment with other options for your future. Working on other people's projects is not nearly as fun as working on your own, and if you managed to acquire SWE skills on your own, you can probably learn other skills as well and broaden your horizons.