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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

#171

Post by rvz »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #101
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 intervie…

The main difference is that more resources are now publicly available to everyone to look up on the internet which was a different story 40 years ago. This is why companies at the time hired grads that can re-implement closed-source software from scratch from a reference spec or by reverse-engineering from another company to stay ahead. This has happened with device drivers and closed-source compilers.

To some extent open-source has removed the cost for reinventing libraries, reverse engineering and there is little need to study specific elements in a subject to solve such a problem when you can grab lib_whatever or a free compiler for a language.

You are right that in interviews at famous companies (FAANG, asset management companies, aerospace / embedded systems companies) being self-taught here isn't enough. Instead, they require specific certifications and they look for the graduate with a strong engineering degree rather than someone who is self-taught.*

Right now in 2019, I would do both.

*Having a serious open-source project or significant contributions is actually a huge advantage over recent graduates.

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

#172

Post by mywittyname »

jtdev wrote: post #113

I’m a programmer who studied information technology (with a number of programming courses, but zero true CS coursework) first at community college and then at a budget brand state college. I’m now a senior developer/engineer and frequently work on projects alongside CS graduates from prestigious schools who seem incapable of completing even the most simple coding tasks - this is the case nearly 100% of the time in my…

> equently work on projects alongside CS graduates from prestigious schools who seem incapable of completing even the most simple coding tasks

It's possible there's selection bias going on. The wheat end up at the Apples and Googles of the world and the chaff end up working with you.

This isn't intended to be an insult. People who attend ivy leagues are given such a huge leg up that even an average graduate probably make it further than most of us plebeians.

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

#173

Post by jhall1468 »

reallydude wrote: post #167
jhall1468 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree 100%. I used to code all the time, prior to my CS degree, in High School, etc. But now I'm a professional programmer. I don't code outside of work, because coding is what I already do 4-6 hours a day. Now that it's my job, I've taken to other hobbies (and raising a family). I love what I do, but I don't live for it.

I've written code for fun since I first taught myself how to do it. After decades of work, I still do it for fun.

Which is fine. But that doesn't mean you should be favored in an interview and it certainly doesn't mean you're a better programmer than I am. My point was: favoring people that code for fun is just as bad as favoring people who only received formal degrees.

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

#174

Post by s_dev »

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?

Haskell just enforces iteration through recursion.

How did he solve the iteration problem? A for loop is just syntactic sugar for a while loop.

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

#175

Post by pryelluw »

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…

Same here. The added benefit of there being a handful of really good resources to learn. The manual if my C64 pretty much taught me all the basics in a very approachable manner (I was 7 when I started).

Nowadays, there are so many resources (mostly low quality) that people waste too much time trying to decide or lesrning things wrong.

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

#176

Post by another-dave »

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…

I think that's one thing that's making me think twice about doing a CS degree now e.g. by night — a lot of what you learn at university isn't in lectures, it's in the ample free time that you have between lectures.

With limited free time, it's hard to know whether it's better to self study or do a degree (or even just follow along a curriculum online)

I go between trying to work through things systematically to get a good grounding where I have knowledge gaps, and jumping to what I think will help me best on my job at this point in time.

It would probably be better to stick to one approach or the other to make more focused use of time, but I'm not sure which way is best! :)

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

#177

Post by jeffdavis »

ska wrote: post #138
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…

> 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 This is absolutely key. One of the main advantages of a solid undergraduate curriculum is that it forces you to work your way through things that are important, but don't interest you as much. And this path is designed and supported by people with a much better broad view of…

I think it depends on the person and the experience. It's easy to say that a particular course was helpful, because it often is. But what's the opportunity cost? What other things didn't you learn because of all that time learning about, say, OS schedulers?

Also, it assumes that you have access to a very high quality education. In lots of cases, the teaching might be mediocre (perhaps even at elite universities that care more about research grants than education).

There's a lot of value in having a standardized base of knowledge, where you learn all the things that a practicing engineer should know. But in reality, the sum of things you "should" do takes more than a lifetime. And you have to find some ways to differentiate your knowledge and expertise if you want to innovate.

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

#178

Post by kitchenkarma »

Typically CS degree means that you can finish something regardless if it makes sense or not. That skill is in demand in large corporations that require people to follow stupid processes and complete tasks that don't reflect on what are the actual needs. Of course there are good CS degrees, but these are not as common as one thinks. The purpose of universities was to gather knowledge and pass it on where it was not possible otherwise to do so. These days people have open access to all kind of knowledge and universities are not as much important as they were. If company lists CS degree as a job requirement, that for me is a good indication of a place I don't want to work in.

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

#179

Post by pmarreck »

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?

Any functional language, pretty much.

They use enumeration (list/array traversal) to process a list/array of inputs.

And it entirely makes impossible the off-by-one error.

I am happy if I never have to see a for-loop again. (Even in JS, I use iteration/enumeration constructs as much as possible.)

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

#180

Post by nobleach »

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.

You're lucky. When I worked for the federal government(USDA/USFS), there was no way I was going to get access to non-windows servers for deploying my projects. When we brought up the idea of using AWS, they told is that it was impossible as they had no way to handle reoccurring monthly billing. (obviously, this is a lazy excuse). The only node project I managed to get deployed ran behind Apache on Windows Server 2003... and it performed as horribly as one might expect an event-loop to perform behind a threaded proxy.
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