Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?

#41

Post by MrDom » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 2:06 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #20

freework wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats what I've been doing. My resume lists the dozens of projects I've completed. Out of every 50 resume's I send out, I get maybe one interview. I don't think anyone even looks at my github. As soon as they see I don't have a degree, they throw my resume out.

You should not primarily be attempting to get interviews by sending in 50+ resumes. Instead, try to get 5 coffee dates with people with the authority to hire engineers. Resumes are an institution created to allow people to throw out resumes.

I'm curious, how does this sort of thing work when you're in japan? Or remote in general. Send them a coffee voucher and get them on the phone?

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?

#42

Post by patio11 » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 3:17 PM UTC

MrDom wrote: post #41

patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not primarily be attempting to get interviews by sending in 50+ resumes. Instead, try to get 5 coffee dates with people with the authority to hire engineers. Resumes are an institution created to allow people to throw out resumes.

I'm curious, how does this sort of thing work when you're in japan? Or remote in general. Send them a coffee voucher and get them on the phone?

Meeting people on the phone is totally doable, especially if you have an introduction to them or have pre-demonstrated credibility somehow. It doesn't 100% play to my strengths, so I did a lot of flying around back when I was doing active consulting. My engagements were worth ~$50k apiece so taking a $10k trip to a conference (or just a target-rich area like, say, SF) was totally doable if it got me four later stage conversations with a 25% chance of closing apiece.

Typically it would look something like "4 week prospecting trip, fill up 2~3 quarters worth of consulting engagements, fill up last quarter while delivering." This was a hard schedule to sustain after getting married, which is one reason I'm not actively consulting anymore.

But there are many, many ways to do this. A more successful consultant in Ogaki does 90% of his prospecting over Skype.

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?

#43

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 3:42 PM UTC

I have a degree, but it's in math and physics, not in programming. I had one programming class in high school (Fortran) and one in college (Basic - but by that time, I already knew Basic).

I've known at least two other self-taught programmers, at least one of whom didn't even have a college degree. They were good engineers. There wasn't any "you're lower in status because you're self-taught" stuff (at least not among the programmers - management may have rated them lower, I don't know).

I wouldn't downplay it, and I wouldn't display it prominently. In this world, pretty much you are what you can do. If you can do it, who cares how you got there?

Re: Ask HN: What has been your experience with self-taught engineers?

#44

Post by frituredeluxe » Fri, Sep 19, 2014, 4:14 PM UTC

To be honest, there are no real different experiences with self-taught engineers compared to university grads-

It's difficult to say what makes a good engineer, but in my opinion it's more the tinkering and curiosity kind of stuff that really matters. Some may call that soft skills, so odds are it's equally likely to find those characteristics in both autodidacts and grads.

Maybe that's the reason why Facebook is on PHP: They they: We need a personality kind of guy as developer no matter what he has learnt or not, so we take PHP as we can teach him that very quickly.

One thing which is more common in self-taught people is humbleness and modesty.

So, what you should do is display it prominently: Being a self-taught guy highlights the curiosity you need for being an engineer at most, in my believs

hth