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No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

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

#61

Post by eloff »

sarchertech wrote: post #17
whatshisface wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's possible to learn most things through self-study. But the vast majority of people will only learn the parts that they find fun and interesting. They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program. For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by get…

No, you don't need a degree. All you need is a resolution to learn the things that you're missing. I covered C++ in all its hairy glory, assembly, SIMD, data structures and algorithms (implementing them, not just using them) and concurrent and lock free algorithms and data structures. Some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers. I might do them as an in depth blog post one day.

I went way beyond what any CS grad does, and it cost me nothing in money and less time than a CS degree. If you're motivated you can beat a university CS education - it's actually really not that high a bar.

I agree with you that most people won't do that. I was home schooled so I have a different attitude about learning than most people - and that's made all the difference. But is fundamentally a problem of motivation and goals, you don't need university for either.

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

#63

Post by arethuza »

commandlinefan wrote: post #58
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 prog…

That was similar to my experience on a CS course - you were expected to do a lot of development, but nobody really specifically taught you about it and you were expected to pick that up by yourself as you went along.

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

#64

Post by non-entity »

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…

I'm at a point where I don't want to do (web) app development anymore and want to switch to something more interesting (to me)so I'm not stuck doing something I hate for the next x decades. Unfortunately, it seems that what I want to get into (low level embedded stuff, firmware development, etc) seem almost neccessary to have a degree (or even a Masters or PhD). I assume this isn't mostly because of the level of EE knowledge required. Unfortunately going back to school is out of reach now

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

#65

Post by illuminati1911 »

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.

The original comment is about engineering competence and having the comprehensive understanding of subject, which is not just limited to running business and getting monthly paycheck to pay the bills.

Some benefits that it will give you:

- It will actually let you move into different positions within tech/it industry when you have wider/deeper understanding of how things works.

- As someone said already in this thread: "allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice."

- You'll be better at your job. Maybe not every day you need to know what's happening under the hood, but there are and there will be days when you need to. Even if you only developed JS frontend apps whole your career.

When you actually say "I can build anything I want", then (although I don't know you) I'm pretty sure that you can't. People who get that deeper understanding of things also understand how complex some things are and how complex some things can get.

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

#66

Post by hirundo »

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.

A decade ago when I was on the job market I saw lots of ads for government IT jobs, seemingly all listing CS degree requirements. So I didn't bother applying. Maybe it wasn't a hard a requirement then, maybe it has changed, or both. I have an ethical preference for market transactions, so didn't push on that door as hard as I might have if other opportunities weren't readily available.

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

#67

Post by Nevermindmyview »

arethuza wrote: post #54
Nevermindmyview wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A Haskell developer?

I'll bet a choklate bar that 100% of all developers who spent 6 year using Haskell knows what a for-loop is.

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

#68

Post by sergiotapia »

Make peace with this fact: you can most definitely build businesses and add value to any organization. But you won't be able to optimize Twitch's video codec or any other very low level, uber-specific, high impact code.

Business need both types in this world. No shame in that, but don't lie to yourself into thinking that you can do _both_ with no CS degree. You can't.

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

#69

Post by notus »

I'm confused how you accomplished anything without some type of looping abstraction. If you understand one of them most of the rest are fairly intuitive except looping with recursion. It just seems bizarre that you were working somewhere and being productive without knowing what a for loop was.

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

#70

Post by saagarjha »

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…

Those books are still quite useful today: I learned C from The C Programming Language, for example, and I’d still recommend it as the best book to read to learn the language (though a nice supplement that covers how modern compilers work would be useful to accompany it).
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