How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

Great story! It kind of makes me wonder about my own story to be honest, since I also do not have a CS degree yet I've learned to love coding. I am not really sure what my "dream job" would be though. I've thought about it on a few occasions and I always fall short of coming up with something that really "wow's" me enough to start down a new career path. Would be interested if anyone else has that same sort of existential crisis. I enjoy my job enough that I can't seem to come up with anything else that I'd love doing with my time, but I'm also not "in love" with my current job.

I have been teaching a free live code bootcamp on YouTube over the past couple of days (https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp). I've noticed a couple things:

1. People get stuck. A lot. Especially in the beginning.

Perhaps the biggest difficulty of learning on your own is the "I'm stuck" problem. I learned by hassling people in IRC, but man they were saints and I feel bad for constantly bothering them with my stupid questions. We use Slack to connect the students, and it's a constant flow of people getting stuck and getting help (about 4,000 people in there now).

2. Credentials and requirements have been drilled into students' mind far past a rational level.

I probably get asked 20x/day if we offer a certificate for graduates. I eventually started saying "yes" because so many people would be shaken up if I said "no." I can create a certificate and put your name on it, sure. It's not worth anything, but it's almost a compulsive need people have now.

Along those lines I probably get asked 20x a day if something is "required." I don't understand the mentality of joining a free code bootcamp and asking if something is required, but maybe that's just me.

3. Material isn't the hard part anymore.

I'm sure there are better teachers than us out there, but I'm convinced the number of people who can learn that way are a small fraction of the population. Most people aren't motivated and/or disciplined enough to go through that on their own.

I personally dropped out of college, but if I think back to my Shakespeare class, for example, would I have worked that hard if I were self-educating? Even though I think a lot of the assignments were relatively worthless, there is something about the forcing function of deadlines, social pressure, and working at the same time as peers that really does a lot for human psychology. I can't imagine the other students in any of my classes working that hard to learn anything on their own.

I look at the completion rates of MOOCs and other online programs, and it's tiny. Sure, you might say, some people are just sampling, but I would guess than this doesn't tell the whole story. There's something that's missing from the "here's a book teach yourself" method for most people.

My personal thesis for a high-quality, low-cost education for the masses includes material, but material isn't the point. The point is incentivizing people to do things they normally wouldn't do by "forcing" them to do so somehow.

A bit odd to put "dream job" in the title and start the article with a picture of him in the Googleplex...

But in the end find out he doesn't work at Google.

In any case, I meet people on the regular working at top tech companies without a STEM degree, some without any degree at all. The stories are all pretty similar:

1) Teach themselves programming

2) Make lots of actual software

I can think of a few reasons. First, because personalized instruction and discussion makes a big difference in actually gaining real understanding. Second, because most people won't push themselves as hard on their own. Third, because having someone with personal knowledge of you and your capabilities means something, especially with online things when cheating is trivial.

I spent 5 years teaching English as a foreign language in a Japanese high school. In Japan, the school system is keen to hire foreigners who are fluent in English because they recognise that their students lack fluency. They think the problem lies in the instructor.

However, the teachers at the school I taught in were almost all very accomplished English speakers. Yes, they had an accent. Yes, they made mistakes. But they were all fluent and proficient to a very high level.

One of the things I asked the teachers was, "How did you get to be fluent in English?" As I expected, not one replied that they became fluent at school. Then I asked, "Where did you learn most of your English?" Again, not one replied that they learned most of their English at school.

In reality, it is impossible to learn English in a classroom. The subject is too big. There are about 1500 common grammar rules in the language, so it is common to ask the students to memorise that grammar. It's achievable in 3-5 years. But you won't get fluency. Neither will you get proficiency with the 20,000 word families that you need to achieve adult level proficiency. In the end you get students who can tell you what a subjunctive clause is (well, they can tell you in Japanese, anyway), but who can't order a drink at MacDonald's.

This is not really a failure of the system because while we can teach fluency, you still won't get students who are proficient to any degree at the end of 3-5 years of classroom study. There just aren't enough hours. The students do not have enough desire or even need to learn the language. Only those who study independently will learn English.... and they would have learned English anyway.

Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc.

My hope was not that my students could speak English at the end of the class. That was impossible. My hope was that my students would feel, "I can learn English if I want to. I know how to do it." It's now about 5 years since I left teaching and many of my students can speak English very well. Several of them got jobs where speaking English was the key component of their job. I like to think that my classes helped them out, but of course the reality is that the thousands of hours they put in after my course is what taught them English. I hope I was able to nudge them into a place where those thousands of hours were possible for them.