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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

#261

Post by plorntus »

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.

I'm not sure that makes complete sense. I don't have a degree in CS as I was self taught and actually bothered to follow online courses and read documentation. If I get sick of coding and want to move elsewhere I still have the option to go to university.

I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.

In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.

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

#262

Post by jhall1468 »

spamizbad wrote: post #203
jhall1468 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS is more than abstract theory. It gives you a foundation that you otherwise are unlikely to get. Self-taught means learning things useful for your existing job or things you find interesting. I'm work almost exclusively on the frontend, but my CS degree gave me enough foundation that I'm fairly familiar with compilers (I wrote one in college for a required course). I don't necessarily enjoy writing compilers. But t…

Is there any reason to suspect a self-taught developer couldn't also self-teach themselves simple compiler writing?

No, and my post never implied anything like it. On the contrary, my point was that I was forced into it by degree requirements. I'd know nothing of compiler design or implementation today without being forced to learn it. It's a valuable skill to be sure, but not one I'll ever use professionally because I find it frustrating and boring.

And that's my point. If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate. Most successful self-taught programmers do exactly that. Most people don't.

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

#263

Post by thanatropism »

rsuelzer wrote: post #248

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…

If you really find someone who reinvented monads independently, don't hog them. Send them to graduate school, they're of another class entirely.

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

#264

Post by oarabbus_ »

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 bit confused at how you were able to be a successful developer, even if leveraging frameworks, without understanding loops?

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

#265

Post by javier2 »

jgalentine007 wrote: post #201
mtberatwork wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 finished my CS degree in 06' and it still was more about math than programming (C++, no Java). To graduate I had to take single/multi variable calculus, linear algebra, vector geometry, discrete mathematics, differential equations, combinatorics and numerical methods. When I started there were 600 in my class, when I graduated I think there were only 60!

Same, I graduated in 2013. nearly the entire class feel through in the process.

The only thing I've never had any use for is differential equations. I have for instance never worked with signal processing.

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

#266

Post by tzs »

tempsy wrote: post #105
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…

Is Project Euler better than LeetCode for "gut checking"? I've probably done 300 or so LC, and do some every week, mostly as an insurance policy for technical interviews if I ever opportunistically interviewed in a short time frame.

Speaking of LeetCode, don't overlook the discussions for each problem. I think a lot of people just solve the problem, and then move on to another problem.

In the discussions many people post their solutions, and those often have bugs in obscure cases that the LeetCode grader doesn't hit. Another common thing is for the posted solutions to always give the correct answer, but miss the time or space constraints that the problem statement asked for.

I've found that reviewing those other solutions to find those issues to be quite instructive. Also, there will sometimes be a solution in there that is better than mine, which is also instructive.

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

#267

Post by icedchai »

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…

Try large boring corporations, such as banks and insurance companies.

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

#268

Post by kqr »

fao_ wrote: post #186
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 started programming properly in 2010 when I was 12 or 13. Before that I did some small things in Inform 7, and now I remember it, Visual Basic, but I don't really consider that 'proper programming' as it was mostly cutting and pasting code with little understanding. I started with Inform 7, Python, and a little bit of Processing and Lua. I did three or four ludum dares and at some point I made most of a game in Lua…

> I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.

This is a common misconception. There were plenty of shit books then, too, you just won't find people remembering and recommending them. Whereas we haven't, collectively, discarded the shit books of today, yet.

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

#269

Post by munificent »

spamizbad wrote: post #203
jhall1468 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CS is more than abstract theory. It gives you a foundation that you otherwise are unlikely to get. Self-taught means learning things useful for your existing job or things you find interesting. I'm work almost exclusively on the frontend, but my CS degree gave me enough foundation that I'm fairly familiar with compilers (I wrote one in college for a required course). I don't necessarily enjoy writing compilers. But t…

Is there any reason to suspect a self-taught developer couldn't also self-teach themselves simple compiler writing?

I suppose I'm an evidence proof of the contrary.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through writing a book on implementing interpreters and compilers [0]. My day job is as a software engineer at Google working on the Dart language.

My highest attained degree is a high school diploma from a shitty public high school in southern Louisiana. I went to LSU for a year and a half and dropped out.

[0]: http://craftinginterpreters.com/

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

#270

Post by xmprt »

pmarreck wrote: post #179
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?

Any functional language, pretty much. They use enumeration (list/array traversal) to process a list/array of inputs. And it entirely makes impossible the off-by-one error. I am happy if I never have to see a for-loop again. (Even in JS, I use iteration/enumeration constructs as much as possible.)

I find it hard to believe a beginner with no theoretical CS background would pick up a functional language first. So the question still stands.
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