No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers • Hacker News Board

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#51

Post by convolvatron » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

balabaster wrote: post #28

rezeroed wrote: post #20

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 think for anyone that started programming in the early days of home computers like the ZX81, C64 and BBC Micro, except for the fundamentals, most CS courses seemed to be completely useless. I cannot honestly say anything I learned in my course was useful compared to pursuing my own interests.

I missed undergrad, and managed to weasel my way into graduate school after 15 years as a programmer. ultimately research isn't for me, but I found basic CS theory both interesting and useful in my later life.

certainly agree that the systems and programming coursework wasn't particularly useful.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#52

Post by derekp7 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

I sometimes feel like I have a leg up based on when I learned computers (self taught mid 80's to early 90's). At that time, everything was more low level, and there were fewer, yet higher quality books on the market. So I started off with W. Richard Stephens, K&R, Pike, Sedgewick, and others that you either had to really get it, or you wouldn't get anything. Not that this was the best way to learn, but you knew coming out of it what you learned.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#53

Post by MichaelApproved » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

craigsmansion wrote: post #38

"This 22 year old self-taught PHP developer earns $15k a month and lives in an Austrian farmhouse" I mean, f*cking seriously? Yeah, that's harsh, but such a headline's an insult to those with a CS degree and serious self-taught developers alike. To those who made this stay on the front page: given you're competent, you already make the same or more money as those with a CS degree, even if you might know less about th…

1) You're allowed to curse on the internet. HN doesn't have a content filter. Saying "f*cking" reduces the impact the curse is supposed to have. If you feel it's appropriate to curse then just fucking do it.

2) Not everyone does well in a formal school environment. This site shows people that self-taught can still earn good money.

3) Even if a CS degree would increase the Austrian's earnings, how much would it increase it by? Would it offset the cost of the education? Would it offset the wages earned during the years he was in school?

4) People don't always upvote something to the front page because they agree with it. Sometimes people do it to encourage discussion around a topic.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#54

Post by arethuza » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

Nevermindmyview wrote: post #35

cj wrote: post #29

I'm an engineer. No CS degree. I coded for fun on various side projects from 2006-2012. I didn't consider myself very good. 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 l…

What kind of coding did you do for 6 years if after that time you couldn't identify a for-loop?

A Haskell developer?

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#55

Post by II2II » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:15 PM UTC

harianus wrote: post #15

itsmemattchung wrote: post #5

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…

It seems like you’re saying it’s nice to know the layers of abstraction but it sounds like you don’t use it in real life. As a non CS degree developer I can’t really see anything that I’m missing because of not having the degree. I have a successful business, get hired for freelance jobs for a good salary, can build anything I want, ... Would love to know what one would get out of having the degree versus self study.

Self-study verses earning a degree is a red herring. While there are some advantages to studying in an institution, the degree is simply there to tell others that you have studied a particular curriculum. My only concern with self-study is that a lot of resources are the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes, but that says more about the people who create those resources than the learners themselves.

As for knowing the theoretical basis of computer science, that will have value in some parts of industry and very little value in other parts of industry. While someone in your position may have a high degree of success working in the upper layers of abstraction, someone has to develop, advance, and maintain the lower levels of abstraction that you depend upon. None of that is meant to say that you need that theoretical knowledge to be successful, rather it is important for some people to have that theoretical knowledge to ensure the success of the industry.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#56

Post by C4stor » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

blymphony wrote: post #13

hirundo wrote: post #9

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…

Not even government jobs are out of reach for you. I work as a federal employee without any college degree doing web development with React/Node/AWS.

That would heavily depend on the (unspecified) country.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#57

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #29

I'm an engineer. No CS degree. I coded for fun on various side projects from 2006-2012. I didn't consider myself very good. 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 l…

Self taught, I remember loops were the last thing I learnt as a kid when I was working on my own Tibia servers using Lua. I remember the day it finally clicked. It helped having a forum where you could ask more experienced people to explain it plainly.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#58

Post by commandlinefan » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:16 PM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #52

I sometimes feel like I have a leg up based on when I learned computers (self taught mid 80's to early 90's). At that time, everything was more low level, and there were fewer, yet higher quality books on the market. So I started off with W. Richard Stephens, K&R, Pike, Sedgewick, and others that you either had to really get it, or you wouldn't get anything. Not that this was the best way to learn, but you knew comin…

I have a CS degree (in fact, I have both a BS and a Master's degree in CS) - I'm still "self taught" in the sense that I learned to program the same way you did, by reading Stevens, K&R, Knuth, etc. outside of my coursework. Don't get me wrong - I learned a lot of interesting stuff: I never would have learned calculus if it hadn't been a degree requirement, and it helps to understand a lot of AI, but learning to program is sort of a "side effect" of academic computer science.

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#59

Post by dx87 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:17 PM UTC

patorjk wrote: post #41

hirundo wrote: post #9

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…

> The main thing I lack is access to government jobs I guess my question would be which government? I do government contracting (US), and degrees are not required. The labor categories are typically written so that if you don't have a degree, you just need an additional 4 years of experience. On almost every contract I've worked on I've met a developer without a degree.

It depends on the position. It's a lot harder to get work as a government employee without a degree in the US, but contractors seem to have more flexibility. I worked for a government agency while I was in the military, and I can't even get an interview for the exact position I was doing for a couple of years because I don't have a degree. I know a few people who've missed out on jobs because the government position has a hard requirement for a degree, even if it's not relevant to the position (like computer science for a security position).

Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

#60

Post by tibbon » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 3:18 PM UTC

I grew up surrounded by computers, but took relatively few classes. I took AP Computer Science in high school, but had to teach myself the “B” part of the class because the other students couldn’t keep up and our AB class just reverted to just the A portion but that was too easy for me. I also took an “honor programming in C” class from the same teacher, but it was essentially just two hours a day for me to program silly games using some Borland graphics library. I spent a lot more time being familiar with networking at the time really, and despite the CS parts seeming easy, anything web related outside of HTML was a mystery to me.

I did music for college and the only programming I did was in csound and max/msp.

Long story short, music doesn’t pay much. I just started reading and doing programming. I got gigs almost immediately for solving simple data problems for people (extract these CSV files into this format and pull down web data, etc). Fortunately I had companies where they were happy for me to take on whatever programming I felt comfortable with, despite being in a non-dev role originally there.

12 years later, I’m damn good at this. It helps that I can generally just read a book and absorb it. I’ve read books on CS, but haven’t taken any more CS classes outside watching some MIT course 6 videos. I did take some machine learning classes at MIT over IAP and those were fun. One weird thing, I’ve never taken beyond pre-calculus, but the linear algebra stuff in most ML things isn’t that hard for me. Maybe I’m just lucky? I’m a total hack at math, but can understand concepts quickly still and apply them in code.

One weird quirk was that I had to learn that not everyone can learn like I can. I taught for a few years at General Assembly and learned immediately that most people don’t like being throw in the deep end, or being told to read something and apply it the next day. They need smaller and better defined problems to build confidence. Only 5% of student actually enjoy things on hard mode. That’s ok- it’s just different than me.

Like, at work right now I’m probably going to need to do some Go work. I’ve never used Go outside the first 10 project ruler problems. But- I don’t mind telling them that sure, I can do some work in Go. It’s just code, and if I sit down for 8 hours I can get decent with the language.

The only things I’ve encountered so far that felt were “hard” were Haskell, and anything with shaders and modern 3D programming. I’ll figure them out eventually. TouchDesigner has also been tricky, but it’s mostly that their documentation is scattered (so much in videos) and the ui/workflow is non-obvious. I should write a book on it.