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No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

nocsdegree.com

221–230 of 480 posts

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

#221

I work with a twenty-something year old right now. He graduated from high school. Had his own non-tech company for a while after high school. Decided he wanted to go into coding. One of the best damn coders I've worked with in 25 years. Gives the toughest, most consistent code reviews. He's the type of programmer you can build a startup around. In another comment a few days ago, I mentioned a 10x engineer I knew. Gra…

What languages do they use?

Does that matter? They probably use the right language to get the job done. Depends of the area of their work.

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

#222
post #138
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…

Another way of putting this: a primary function of a curriculum - university or otherwise - is to convert unknown unknowns (things you don't know exist) into known unknowns (things you are aware of but not fully versed in) and known knowns (things you fully grok). This is why we shouldn't replace college with nothing: this is an important function.

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

#223

I have worked with some people that are self-taught that ended up being incredibly good. However, I still bias myself a bit to people coming from a CS background because of other non-knowledge related reasons. Examples. They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs…

I don't buy into the argument that you need to have a degree because getting one is tedious. There are plenty of places in life that will teach you this lesson. I work at a coding school, we have lots of students that did things that make a university look like a joyride. Try doing a tech support job for years 10+ hours a day, now that is tedious.

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

#224
No CS degree is fine when you’re doing trivial programming work that doesn’t really matter, such as application frontends.

But could you imagine riding in a plane or using critical infrastructure services programmed by people with absolutely no computer science degree to their name? Not a chance. Like getting surgery from a butcher.

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

#225
post #188

I'm a 40ish FAANG Manager without a CS degree. I would point out that while I agree that it is possible to have a great development career without a CS degree, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way if you have a choice. So, if you are contemplating dropping out or skipping doing a CS degree and going right into the industry, you are going to face obstacles and bias throughout your career that having the CS degree wi…

What about a degree from a school that has a bit of a 'degree mill' reputation - https://www.wgu.edu/online-it-degrees/computer-science.html - pretend that's someone's only choice.

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

#226
40 years writing software for a living, dropped out of college after 3 years. I'd taken all the CS that I could, and took graduate level courses my last year because I had run out of other interesting classes. That final year of school just didn't look important compared to getting my dream job at the time (writing games for Atari).

No real regrets, though I had (and still have) a sense of inferiority that drives me to study. Last year I threw out many boxes full of papers that I've read over the years (they're mostly available online now). I have bookcases and bookcases of CS-related material. I've read Knuth, etc. (okay, still going through Vol 4...).

My only regrets are not getting a better math background (a decent calculus-based probability and statistics course would have helped). I took linear algebra in school, but didn't really get it until I started doing graphics and then I needed much more than my college course provided anyway.

Tried going back to school a couple of times. Work always got the better of me. Finally I realized that the degree just wasn't important to myself or my employers, and that I wouldn't learn anything anyway. Lack of a degree has never been a problem when finding a job (except once, and I actually felt pretty good about that one . . . maybe I'll tell the story some day).

I think the key to long-term success (whether you have a degree or not) is continuing self-education. I try to keep up by reading papers and digging into promising new tech. The industry is bigger and moving faster these days, so you have to pick and choose what to stay current on. It's a good idea to branch out anyway (if you read ten papers on storage, networking or graphics, read a couple on something unrelated, like AI or queuing theory or dig into biology or astrophysics -- stretch your head). Helps to do different types of projects, too.

I plan to work until I drop; I feel fantastically lucky to have found a career that I enjoy this much. My father-in-law retired from writing code at age 75, I think I can go longer.

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

#227
One of the top devs I ever worked with, I hired him, his previous job was a fitness instructor. He had left school at 16. Had done some programming on his home computer, and wanted to be a programmer for a living.

I was blown away by his methodical approach to a simple problem I gave him. Less than year later he was running his own team that had people in it that had been to some of the top universities in the UK, like Brunel, and they all respected him. He'd completely taken control of that project. That was all using VB6. 20 years on he's now a leading C++ expert.

Degrees don't mean anything imho.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does one find govt jobs using modern tech stacks?

https://www.usajobs.gov/

Here's one:

https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/539439100

>a custom build of the open-source search engine Solr, a highly responsive UI engineered on top of React, a high performance distributed brokerage system, and cloud-based hosted services with Kubernetes in Amazon Web Services. The primary programming languages are Python, Java, and JavaScript.

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

#229
I wrote a lot of software before I ever took a CS class in college. The only things you'll get from a CS degree are the ability to prove problems are NP-Complete, learn how to do Dynamic Programming, reductions from one problem to another, Linear Programming, Graph Theory, and a bunch of other math tricks (random hashing, fast modular exponentiation, The Gauss multiplication trick, etc.). You don't need any of that to write a Chrome Extension.

If you need software to scale to hundreds of millions of users, then you probably need people who have CS degrees to think about your hard problems and how best to optimize them and which ones have no polynomial time solutions for all inputs (problems to be avoided or worked around somehow).

I can do RSA by hand (on small messages), quickly tell (with only pencil and paper) what 2^1027 mod 3 is and do Euclid and Extended Euclid by hand to find multiplicative inverses (in one pass). But I can write code that runs pretty well, too, and I can do that with or without a CS degree. So can most people.

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

#230
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…

Formal bs/ms ee here as well. Started off wanting to do hardware and looked at programming as an afterthought. After a few years of working in embedded and realizing how many gaps there are in my knowledge, and how beautiful the field is, considering a doctorate in CS.
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