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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

#101

Post by setpatchaddress »

sergiotapia wrote: post #68

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.

Nonsense. You can absolutely teach yourself to optimize low-level code if that's what you want to do. The amazing thing about today's world is that all of the incredible resources available for learning just about anything in science and engineering to anyone who has the time to consume them. And you can work on open source projects to build your native skills.

The difficult part for you will be obtaining an interview. Because all of the other candidates will have CS degrees, and increasing numbers of them will have graduate degrees. You are at a disadvantage.

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

#103

Post by oneplane »

non-entity wrote: post #64
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 k…

It actually is because of the theory required. If you go low enough, more happens in your head and less in your tooling. It's why there are low-level and high-level languages.

The lower you go, the more you need to know (and do) yourself. That is where CS degrees do help, because without the benefit of layered architectures of shared libraries, systems and code in general you need to know what those layers did in order to know how to do the work without them. That said, low-level doesn't always mean the same thing. Some people think writing software in C is low-level, but when I think low-level I mostly think of assembly on bare metal with no OS or anything like that.

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

#104

Post by hi41 »

I am trying to transition from C programming on Tandem(also called HP/Nonstop) to Java and web technologies. The main reason I want to move out of Tandem is that there are only few companies having that system and jobs are few. I have basic Java knowledge but don't have any experience developing for web. The new jobs posting all talk about lot of skill set - Struts, Spring. When I got a job interview I got unrelated things like Solr. Each of these frameworks seems to be massive. How do I proceed to level up to the current technologies? Your help is much appreciated.

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

#105

Post by tempsy »

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…

Is Project Euler better than LeetCode for "gut checking"?

I've probably done 300 or so LC, and do some every week, mostly as an insurance policy for technical interviews if I ever opportunistically interviewed in a short time frame.

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

#106

Post by sergiotapia »

sus_007 wrote: post #97
sergiotapia wrote: post #68

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.

So you're saying a highly motivated individual with an access to World Wide Web and physical textbooks can't teach him/herself to optimize "Twitch's video codec" or any low-level problems on their own ?

Everything is against you. You probably won't.

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

#107

Post by jshowa3 »

zcrackerz wrote: post #87
jshowa3 wrote: post #76

I just find these odd. Does anyone struggle with this stuff? They just make it all look so easy. I for one struggle quite a bit with coding, design, theory, and other aspects. I just don't get how so many people think coding is as easy as "reading a book" or "doing a tutorial".

Well, you're literally writing step-by-step instructions that a computer will faithfully perform without deviation. Once you understand how a computer works and how to talk to it, it should be as easy as having a conversation. I don't think this is easy, but when you've been doing it for years and years, it feels that way.

Computers don't even operate solely step by step anymore. They often operate asynchronously, through interrupts, or compute things in parallel across multiple threads.

Maybe if you're programming something simple, it will be "step by step". But most programs are not this simple.

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

#109

Post by UncleMeat »

eloff wrote: post #61
sarchertech wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

> some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers.

You can probably imagine why many people wouldn't believe you. "My work is amazing but I am too lazy to publish it" is a peak stereotype for self-educated people. My prior on this being ignorance rather than genius is super high. And if it is true that you are a once in a generation genius who could outpace the research community then your experience is completely useless for others, given that you'd be so much smarter than a typical person who is doing self-education and trying to get a job.

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

#110

Post by rhacker »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #57
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.

Self taught from ages 9-18, Qbasic -> C -> C++ -> PHP

I did go to college and learned Java and UML and a few other esoteric things - until I got into my data structures classes. If a self-taught software engineer feels like something is missing, take a few data structures classes. That helps a lot.

But yeah, self taught can take you pretty much anywhere unless the job reqs prevent it.

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