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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

#211

Post by astura »

fishmm22 wrote: post #198
dcole2929 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 out…

Oh, they exist, I've worked with a few. Luckily, no more than that.

We all know hiring and interviewing are basically a crapshoot. Good people sometimes don't get hired and bad people sometimes do.

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

#212

Post by faissaloo »

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 disagree greatly, I find that the things you need to know you can often just learn on the job.

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

#213

Post by hutzlibu »

boblebricoleur wrote: post #90

Since these articles seem to be putting a cash value on the word "success" (or at the very least an instagram buzz value), I would point that IMHO, most of this success comes from people skill. You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does…

"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. "

What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university?

(lack of formal education, money, time ...)

And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success stories, so thats why you see such success stories much more ..

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

#214

Post by rbongers »

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 learned in the early decade using K&R, Pike, and Petzold. It has been a great base for me, despite the age of the books.

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

#215

Post by arendtio »

vegiraghav wrote: post #34
ggm wrote: post #11

Recursion and Abstraction, like love and herpes, are a form of disease which once caught cannot be lost, but can be shed, and so spread. Your brain is wired to look for both opportunistically, in any problem. What a CS degree does, is teach you how to apply the infection. Some CS degrees are like innoculation against them and you come out with a degree, but no grasp of the fundamentals. Others, you learn so much you…

recursion overrated imo.

I disagree. To consider something overrated, its value has to be little in comparison to the effort to learn it.

For some problems, recursion is vastly superior e.g. for recursive data structure like trees. And coincidentally, often those structures are much better at delivering high-performance solutions than their naive loop-based counterparts.

Granted, it isn't easy to learn, but also not that hard. Overall, I think the gains easily outweigh the effort. And it is not like I am writing recursions all day long. Most of the time I write loops, but you should know when using recursions is the better way to go and for those times you should know how to handle them.

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

#216

Post by ozim »

In my opinion CS degree gets bonus when hiring because it weeds out people that are not interested. With 160 people in same year as me starting it ended up with 90 people getting bachelors, and maybe 60 masters. Then out off all that graduated maybe 30 went into software dev, others went into testing and support roles, maybe even into other stuff not CS related.

If you are starting career, how are you going to convince someone that it is not passing fad for you, that after 6 months you would say "ok I am done, I am bored with it". There is no way to show people how much time you invested in your self study. It is not about what you know, it is about other people getting to know so they can hire you.

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

#218

Post by d0paware »

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, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.

I think this is the case even if you receive a formal CS education. I picked the most difficult or interesting classes and got As in them, and barely passed everything else in order to graduate in 4 years. Many students avoided the hard professors to protect their GPA, so it was really easy to register for them since 25% of students might drop the class.

Probably the most important thing a formal CS education does is expose you to CS fundamentals, but in my experience you end up having to be self-taught in a university setting anyway. Most of the professors I had were more interested in research than in lecturing - many lectures were completely incomprehensible. And even with amazing lecturers, I would still have to spend hundreds of hours reading and practicing on my own.

One of those classes I barely passed was algorithms, since my other workload was too great. I eventually had to self-study this subject years later to pass the tech interview torture chamber.

College was mostly an exercise in self-learning or learning how to learn for me - something I am still reaping the benefits of today.

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

#219

Post by GrinningFool »

pryelluw wrote: post #175
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.

I had a similar experience with C64 and its User and Reference manuals at that age. I was thinking about that a couple of months back, and found that they're still out there as PDFs of the originals:

https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/

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

#220

Post by decebalus1 »

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'm a doctor. No medical degree.
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