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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

#251

Post by justaguyhere »

jshowa3 wrote: post #114
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…

Agree 100%. Not to mention, having a degree opens up a lot of opportunities in case you ever want to leave the field. Many people get sick of coding after doing it a while due to its highly repetitive nature. Having a degree essentially gives you a pass to enter a myriad of fields that still require one.

It also helps in immigration. And if you want to do a PhD etc. In most cases, it is better to have a degree (even a crappy one) than not have one

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

#252

Post by kemiller2002 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #204
kemiller2002 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you, but I don't completely agree with your implications either. From my experience, most people with a CS degree will not attain that level as well. Even at the masters level, a number of people will not understand. It's sad. I really feel this is a failure of universities not forcing students to learn, but I know there are a number of politics etc that factor into how hard they can make course…

There's a difference between learning specifics, and learning habits of thought. The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research. Both of those are excellent training for at least some aspects of being developer. But that doesn't mean the details are inh…

>The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research.

I agree that should be the case, and sadly enough, I've seen a number of people graduate college with degrees in CS and not have that. There have been a number of times when I'd mention some non-esoteric concept that should have been covered and the response is something like "huh"? I'm not talking about things like "Oh you don't understand how to implement Redux?", it's more things like "Ok, you need to compute the intersection of these two arrays." You are right, they probably have been exposed to these concepts, but they have no idea how to actually do it. More importantly, they grasp so little, they didn't even know where to start. The saddest one I saw was a student that was wicked smart, and the school didn't challenge him enough to struggle through any projects. When he came to intern, he was lost, because he'd never been actually challenged. (He was from a major public university too.)

Don't get me wrong, I disagree, there are a number of great CS programs from both public and private universities, and actually the good ones are exactly like you mention (both theoretical and practical application), but there are a lot that aren't.

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

#253

Post by sounds »

mywittyname wrote: post #151
mattmar96 wrote: post #134

There's clearly strong feelings in this thread. Whether or not a degree is necessary, I think we can say there's two groups: - People who went to university, going through significant effort for their degree, and want to defend that choice - People who _didnt_ go to school, perhaps suffering from a touch of imposter syndrome, who want to hide their insecurity I'm a 20yr old "self-taught" dev. I'm considering going ba…

I went to school for CS after 10 years as a self-taught profession dev. The main value I derived from it was the experience. Specifically, learning how to meet new people. Being a shy person by nature, I forced myself to make two new friends in every class, and it worked really, really well and it's something that I probably could not replicate outside of a similar environment. Additionally, I legitimately enjoyed th…

The parent is exactly how I feel about my degree also. I didn't go back to school, I went to uni right on the "normal" schedule.

The discussion today seems to be all about the logic of it (how will you know what's in a uni degree unless you go?) That was the logic that convinced me to go. It wasn't until I graduated that I could say, with confidence, none of the classes contained anything I didn't already know.

(Yes, yes, including the theory classes.)

But the parent is exactly right: going to uni is a complex decision with multiple independent axes to evaluate: will you make more money over your lifetime (probably not)? Will you get that job you want (probably not, it's more down to people skills)? What will you do with your spare time while in uni (you will have some spare time)? What will you do with the opportunities to meet people?

Then there's what uni you want to attend. How you plan to pay for it. Whether you want to live in a dorm, live with your parents, or go online.

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

#254

Post by mls-pl »

xwdv wrote: post #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.

People with CS degree have more theoretical knowledge, for sure. But people without it, self taught, have more practical knowledge, cause they simply done things instead of learning about them. Decide yourself, which is better.

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

#255

Post by nevi-me »

I'm turning 30 this year, a professional accountant and started out as a hobbyist, but work in data engineering consultancy as middle management, leading efforts into getting our team to adopt Rust of all languages.

I've found being willing to learn more to help me out, my breadth of knowledge is good enough that in many languages and concepts, I can hold my own against CS graduates.

I think knowing what you don't know is important, because you get incentivized to expand your knowledge. I'm currently studying Maths and Stats, because they're a good base for data science, and where I want to go in my life out of corporate.

The value that I bring to the table is no longer fluency in about 7 languages and a skill to learn more quickly (I've done obscure things like reverse engineering 'complex' accounting rules written in COBOL). What I bring to the table is the ability to solve problems using my financial expertise and technology.

So if anyone's reading this, don't be intimidated by "coding". I see writing software as a natural extension of what's on my mind, using what I understand technology to enable me. So, stretch your mind, it's a very powerful thing. Have faith in yourself, and do great like the people on No CS Degree

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

#256

Post by jhall1468 »

trustyhank wrote: post #205
jhall1468 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't advocating that people don't. There are absolutely vastly better compiler programmers than I am that have never taken a formal class. My point was that I wouldn't have learned it because I don't enjoy it. And sometimes, professionally, we get to do stuff that isn't fun. The nature of being self-taught is heavily biasing the things that interest you. College forces you outside of the box. Outside of the box h…

As a self taught developer I can say your point assumes self teaching is all about following your interests. This is simply not true. Self teaching is a combination of following your interests and figuring out your areas of weakness and attacking them. Part of my self learning involves browsing college degree requirements or graduate programs to identify must know topics, I learn them regardless if I have a particula…

My point assumes people bias their learning towards their interests. That isn't an opinion, that's just human nature. That's not to say you can't learn things that don't interest you, but if you aren't going to do it formally you certainly have to be driven by filling those gaps and most people aren't.

Learning to think outside the box and learning about specific specialties that you don't find interesting aren't even remotely the same thing. If you read what I wrote, you'll notice the example areas I gave. None of them were "thinking outside of the box", they were fields that didn't interest me.

The value they bring is that I learned a common language. I can talk to ML engineers or Compiler Engineers in a common language because I have experience in those fields that I wouldn't had I taken a different route. That isn't even remotely a requirement for my field. It's just useful for discussions with other people.

Maybe you'll spend hours and hours learning compiler design and implementation so you can have a friendly conversation with a colleague at lunch, but I'm not going to. Formal education forced that on me. That's been healthy for my professional networking, but that's about it. I still consider it useful, but had I skipped the CS degree I wouldn't do it. Nor would most people.

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

#258

Post by rifung »

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…

> Show me one of these mythical jobs poorly trained programmers get, I will blow them out of the water

Unsolicited feedback: I think it should be pointed out that your attitude probably isn't helping in your job search.

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

#259

Post by javier2 »

mtberatwork wrote: post #160
arethuza wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was similar to my experience on a CS course - you were expected to do a lot of development, but nobody really specifically taught you about it and you were expected to pick that up by yourself as you went along.

That's how my CS program was (late 90s) as well. You were expected to be somewhat proficient already in C/C++ programming going into the major. Much of the program was mathematics courses. It was brutal. They eventually saw the high drop out rate and re-configured the major. I envy the kids who get to go through the major now. The courses look much more interesting and it's comprised of more actual software engineeri…

I graduated with a masters in 2013 and my courses involved a lot of calculus, and some courses on theoretical foundations of computing ++

Still learned most of how to be a developer on my own, but I find immense value in the education. I learned to see how nothing in computing is magic, just hard work. In 2014 they changed the algorithm introduction course from C++/java to python, which I reckon is a good thing.

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

#260

Post by mywittyname »

jtdev wrote: post #207
mywittyname wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

As I said above, these are “CS graduates from prestigious schools” - including ivy league - that I’m referring to and working alongside.

Right...Which is why I was pointing out that perhaps you're getting stuck working with the dregs of the ivy leagues, and that you're experience may not be representative due to bias.
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