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No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

nocsdegree.com

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

#191

Post by fucknuggetz »

I'm a CS major at the moment.

I learn some of the most interesting shit that I would never have thought to teach my self. Data structures, discrete math, and theory of computation come to mind.

Learning about how grammar and linguistics are so heavily tied into CS has been eye opening and has helped me understand so much more about what's going on in a computer. I never would've learned that on my own.

Sure, probably don't need that to get a job as a developer. But, having a CS degree != being a developer in the first place. I get that they can go hand in hand but it's just not the same.

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

#192

Post by hutzlibu »

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 doubt there are many Haskell developers (or one at all) without a academic background ..

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

#193

Post by hutzlibu »

jerf wrote: post #153
Nevermindmyview wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"for" is not that complicated, it's just mapM with its arguments pre-flipped: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.12.0.0/docs/Contro... I don't know why you want to call that a "loop", but, sure, you do you, you crazy imperative programmers.

Because it is a loop in any sane language ... you overheaded functional programmers ..

edit: Sigh. I was jockingly mocking.

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

#194

Post by legohead »

No degree here. Started programming when I was 14 on MUDs. I actually went to college for CS, quit, went back 6 years later, and quit just shy of my BS. I need 9 or so hours. I moved to another state and didn't want to go through the transfer process and probably end up taking repeat classes...

I'm at the ceiling pay-grade wise now, and burnt out, but that's another issue :) The moral of the story is, you can progress really well in this field if you can prove yourself. Experience > Education

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

#195

Post by 0xDEFC0DE »

cabaalis wrote: post #131
saagarjha wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any self-respecting computer science degree education should cover at least one language that has iterators or enhanced enumeration.

My CS degree (2002-2006) did not explicitly cover "for x in y" iterators. But it did cover an understanding of algorithms and data structures well enough that I could implement one. Which is better? YMMV.

That was probably before they were really in style e.g. C# didn't add foreach / iterators until ~2005 with v2.0 and your curriculum probably lags a bit behind the industry state-of-the-art unless it was Ivy league

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

#197

Post by hutzlibu »

legohead wrote: post #194

No degree here. Started programming when I was 14 on MUDs. I actually went to college for CS, quit, went back 6 years later, and quit just shy of my BS. I need 9 or so hours. I moved to another state and didn't want to go through the transfer process and probably end up taking repeat classes... I'm at the ceiling pay-grade wise now, and burnt out, but that's another issue :) The moral of the story is, you can progres…

It is luckily easy to prove what you can in IT, as you can just show own succesful projects. But at least in germany here, you will still have a hard time getting the same pay, no matter the actual skills, as they are very often bound to formal education.

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

#198

Post by fishmm22 »

dcole2929 wrote: post #189
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…

I've been really involved in teaching people with non-traditional backgrounds (e.g. no cs degree) to program lately, and this has been my biggest struggle. There are people who are working in the field as a web dev and have been for years and can't do simple stuff like iterate. They have no understanding of what the stuff they're actually doing means or does. It's just copy and pasting snippets they see online and fi…

It is funny that people constantly mention these supposed developers who have jobs but cant program. Where are these jobs? I have a recent cs degree, did resume coaching, and worked through a couple coding interview exercise books. Still having trouble finding work. Show me one of these mythical jobs poorly trained programmers get, I will blow them out of the water. In reality I think most of those jobs have been outsourced and no longer exist.

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

#199

Post by eloff »

UncleMeat wrote: post #109
eloff wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gene…

It's not really that hard. For example I made a queue that outperforms the lynx queue. My fundamental instinct after reading that paper was that there's no way faults out perform bounds checks in a modern, speculating out of order CPU. I ran some tests and yes my instinct is correct. Maybe the result wouldn't hold under peer review for some reason, I just tested a few more ideas / criticisms with a colleague and moved on. I don't personally benefit from trying to publish the result and I have enough demands on my time.

I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those. It's true I'm well above average though, so perhaps my experiences don't generalize. I don't believe that though. I still think it's motivation and goals that count.

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