21–30 of 480 posts
I'm 39 years into a coding career with no CS degree. But as a compulsive auto-didact (probably a common syndrome among HN readers) it hasn't been a barrier. Self-learning is a continual, daily requirement for coders. If you can continue your education as needed for this job you probably also have the skills and interest to learn from scratch. I studied the same books and did the same exercises as my brother the CS ma…
I really appreciate this as a self taught dev with a full time full stack job. I worked my ass off for 3 years, taking online courses, building product after product for people to actually use and ultimately landing a well paying and satisfying job. Things like this make imposter syndrome a little less nagging in my every day life.
I think its pretty well known that you can work as a successful developer without a CS degree. However , as someone who is currently working through a masters in CS (after working in software the last decade), I would say that CS courses (some, not all) provide invaluable foundation that would be difficult to obtain (of course you can self study CS). Sure — you don’t need to know how the OS works to write a web app t…
Your comment goes to the heart of the debate: does understanding what’s going on behind the scene of your tools help you become better at using them? I think for the vast majority of jobs it does not, but for a few it absolutely does.
It allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice.
This again gives me a good feeling of whether something will be easy/quick to learn.
I think its pretty well known that you can work as a successful developer without a CS degree. However , as someone who is currently working through a masters in CS (after working in software the last decade), I would say that CS courses (some, not all) provide invaluable foundation that would be difficult to obtain (of course you can self study CS). Sure — you don’t need to know how the OS works to write a web app t…
You can "peel back the layers of abstraction" without a CS degree, all it takes is time and (admittedly rare) dedication. Webservers, operating systems and books on theoretical CS are all out there, you just have to be interested.
When you have to learn all that stuff to get your degree, then you just have to learn it. Period. Also people who are full time students have more time to spend on these topics, but when you are actually working 8h+ per day and your career is mostly around JS frameworks it becomes much harder to invest time into these things.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd say it applies for most.
I've never taken a 'computer class' while in school, although I've taken some instruction while working.
Entirely self-taught. I do this because I like it. Back in the day, I never played video games, I taught myself, and wrote, code. To this day, I don't play video games.
It's been my experience that hiring degreed CS graduates may not be the best course. Theirs a big difference between being 'book-smart' and real world smart. I tend to give preference to guys who write code for fun over those who are in it for the money.
Case in point, we just brought on a high-school student who is about to start his comp-sci degree. He has written code for years for fun. He's just rocking it. I'm sure he'll be invited back each summer until his degree is complete and will likely be offered continued employment after.
I'm learning to code at the moment (Python this summer after learning the basics.) I kept talking to developers online to find out about their backgrounds as I don't have a CS degree. I figured as I was already asking people how they learned to code I might as well write up some proper interviews and share them with other people. This way I can scratch my own itch and stay motivated as well as sharing motivation with…
Thanks for this. I began programming when I was 8 on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K from books I liberated from my Mom back in 1983. I grew up as the internet was just becoming a thing, communicating with other would be developers and hackers on IRC channels. I still haven't lost the bug. I'd like to say my CS degree studies were useful, but they were hopelessly inadequate and so constrained and tedious as to kill any fu…
I don't know where the idea that a CS course is a good practical training for a career in development came from - I'm pretty glad the course I did included almost nothing that was attempting to "train" you and focused mostly on the absolute conceptual fundamentals (from the electrical engineering side through general engineering maths to specialised CS subjects) as well as letting us loose to actually build stuff with minimal supervision but careful evaluation.
[The thing that really got my attention was the lambda calculus course where the lecturer mentioned the S & K combinators, of course the same course covered the Y-combinator!]
I really appreciate this as a self taught dev with a full time full stack job. I worked my ass off for 3 years, taking online courses, building product after product for people to actually use and ultimately landing a well paying and satisfying job. Things like this make imposter syndrome a little less nagging in my every day life.
That's awesome! Honestly, I have interviewed tonnes of people already that are doing great with no degree. A friend of mine just got a job after taking a few months out to learn from scratch with Udemy, etc
Firstly, depends on the university - not all degrees are equal. I did most of a degree after working in the industry for seven years, and having programmed on and off since the zx81 - the degree was pointless. Only one course was interesting, AI, and the only time I've ever used that knowledge is tinkering at home.
I worked at a couple startups from 2012-2013. During that time, I became very proficient in Coffeescript and a couple popular frontend frameworks. I was very productive in terms of pumping out lines of code (that somehow resulted in a working product).
However, I didn't know how to write a for loop. If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about asking me how setTimeout has to do with the call stack.
The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.
In 2013, I began to realize my (glaring) deficiencies as a programmer. That was the point when I started spending all my free time doing online CS courses. They helped a lot with filling in the knowledge gaps that I didn't even know I had.
The main reason I'm posting this is to give a shoutout to Project Euler.
Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net/) is an amazing way to test yourself (and learn) CS concepts. If you've done a coding bootcamp and want to do a "gut check" to see how much you learned (or how much you have left to learn), I'd highly recommend Project Euler.
(I'm happy to say that in 2019, I can write for loops all day long...)
Recursion and Abstraction, like love and herpes, are a form of disease which once caught cannot be lost, but can be shed, and so spread. Your brain is wired to look for both opportunistically, in any problem. What a CS degree does, is teach you how to apply the infection. Some CS degrees are like innoculation against them and you come out with a degree, but no grasp of the fundamentals. Others, you learn so much you…