No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by GordonS » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

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…

I'm in a similar situation. Dropped out of uni because it bored me, easily got a dev job (I was really lucky), worked for years as a developer, and then an architect.

I eventually did study part time for a degree, mainly out of belief that it might help with future career opportunities, but also because I might enjoy it.

I got a 1st, with honours. TBH, the only part I truely enjoyed was the final project. The rest was mildly interesting at best, and a bore at worst. I found 80% of it easy, 10% difficult (maths), and 10% challenging (the final project, but only because I made it challenging).

In retrospect, I don't think it's really made any difference to my career, as I'd proved myself long before getting the degree. I don't necessarily regret it either though - maybe the most useful thing was getting me into the groove of reading academic papers, which had benefited me greatly, both work-wise and in my personal life (health issues).

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

#242

Post by jshowa3 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #202

jshowa3 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it odd that you did all this extra work, yet couldn't even be bothered to write a paper about it and still haven't.

I'm not an academic. How do I gain by putting in all that effort?

Because you've claimed that you made substantial strides in algorithms that nobody else has supposedly done. Why not get a free PhD out of the deal? If anything, you can show it to a professor and they should be able to recognize it. After all, you could be advancing the field directly.

Honestly, if you think writing a two to three page paper is "a lot of effort", I doubt you've done what you've claimed.

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

#243

Post by dentemple » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

khendron wrote: post #145

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #42

I have no CS degree, and I've been in the industry in various forms since the mid-90s, software developer full time since about 2001 or so. I have no CS degree because I just did not have the math grades to get entrance to university. I've been working at Google as software engineer for 7.5 years now. I guess you could say this is success, but I would not recommend this path; even after 20 years, there's hiring manag…

> there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out. I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared w…

I've had a similar experience to other poster, but relative to tech stack.

I learned .NET and Javascript early in my career. Every single job interview I had at a .NET shop brought up my lack of a college degree as a possible barrier to "handling" or being "good enough" for the position (their words). Not a single one of these companies invited me back for another interview.

Never had the same problem with JS, and now I happily work as senior-level engineer (using Python and Javascript) while encouraging other more junior engineers to take up and pursue the JS ecosystem.

U.S. East Coast.

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

#244

Post by Consultant32452 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #184

docker_up wrote: post #150

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?

PHP

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

#245

Post by ska » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:24 PM UTC

faissaloo wrote: post #212

ska wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In this context we are talking precisely about the things that you cannot learn that way (at least, not efficiently).

It's obviously true that you don't need to know these things to perform your current job, but that's not what the OP was talking about.

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

#246

Post by hutzlibu » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:26 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #236

hutzlibu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There definitely are! Eg Jezen Thomas. Hopefully in the future also myself :)

You are sure he was never at a university? And why are you drawn to Haskell? For me I only had to deal with it a bit at university and I found the concept interesting, but could not imagine non math people to use it for anything as a language of choice

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

#247

Post by jdcro » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

ricardo_ramirez wrote: post #208

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…

Is this something that necessarily needs to come from a university? All of the things you mentioned seem like skills one would pick up in an entry-level job. Is there something about a job that makes it easier to never develop these habits?

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

#248

Post by rsuelzer » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

I have no CS degree. I see a lot of these comments poo-pooing the skills of people who taught themselves to program. From my experience, some of the best developers I have worked with do not have CS degrees. I have given many interviews where candidates could explain what an abstract class is, but then when it came time to actually write code they could not even build something that compiled, or their code was really messy and unorganized because they had no concept of maintainable code since they have never had to do anything other than academic exercises where style apparently is unimportant.

It's like they memorized some books and definitions but never actually had to build anything.

The developers that didn't have a formal background in CS almost always did poorly on the technical questions, but I found about half the time it was simply a lack of knowing the terminology. She might not know what a monad is, even though she implemented in her own code.

I have always been into computers, but didn't really consider it as a career until I got a job that required me to do a lot of data entry, so I started teaching myself how to automate things. I turned a 40 hour per week data entry job into a single button click on Monday. This meant I had a bunch of free to time to develop my skills and work on additional programs that would help our organization. I fell in love with programming. I eventually interviewed for a position but failed the technical questions miserably, I didn't understand a lot of the terminology like "linked list", "adapter patern" or what "bubble sort" was. So, after that I got a book just about programming interviews, and realized I had actually implemented most of the practical things in that book, I just didn't know the technical name for it.

After I read that book I interviewed at another location and was immediately hired. The only difference was that I took maybe a week to learn some terms.

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

#249

Post by eloff » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

jshowa3 wrote: post #242

eloff wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an academic. How do I gain by putting in all that effort?

Because you've claimed that you made substantial strides in algorithms that nobody else has supposedly done. Why not get a free PhD out of the deal? If anything, you can show it to a professor and they should be able to recognize it. After all, you could be advancing the field directly. Honestly, if you think writing a two to three page paper is "a lot of effort", I doubt you've done what you've claimed.

You overestimate the value of a paper. It's worth approximately $0. But would cost maybe a week of time or about $6000 if you only count what I can sell my time for. Terrible deal.

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

#250

Post by inflatableDodo » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #192

arethuza wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Haskell developer?

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

Hi. Not an academic. Currently fiddling around with OpenGL on Haskell, for reasons.