No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers

> However, I didn't know how to write a for loop. > If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I > wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about > asking me how setTimeout has to do with > the call stack.

I'm self taught, I started with the C64 in the early 80s. By the time I was 15 I was working in assembly, had an excellent knowledge of what we would now call embedded software development and a working knowledge of algorithms.

I'm glad that you took the step to get a proper education. With the modern internet it's extremely easier and the quality is incomparably better than my experience of the UK educational system. Between Coursera, MIT and the vast number of excellent books it's a dream.

It's an eye-opener to me that someone can be self-taught and not understand something as basic as loops. It has been my experience hiring developers that the self-taught type are considerably stronger than those who are purely college educated. I've also noticed that the self-taught type who consider themselves software engineers all went through a two year period of intense studying of computer science and software engineering in their own time. The combination of a real working understanding of software creation with passion is an extremely strong combination.

What I've noticed is that your type don't get scared of technical changes because you're basically able to learn anything. The "college career" type tend to scare easily and also jump into management the second they get a sniff of it.

All of this said, if I was 18 now I would strongly advise myself to do 3/4 STEM A-levels (Math, Physics and something else) and then go study Computer Science at a university which has a good program. By good program - one where I'd write a compiler from scratch, learn the theory (finite automata etc), machine learning, linear algebra and hopefully something fun like building a 3d engine or game engine or something. You can do it all yourself but a three-year program certainly makes life a lot easier, plus you get to make friends and network. AND you have a nice piece of paper.

Boring corporation jobs are fantastic in these cases. The performance bar is low, and due to inertia within the org, you can usually learn faster as an IC and bounce somewhere better rapidly, versus being somewhere like a startup where the treadmill moves too fast for your own personal development needs.

> College was mostly an exercise in self-learning or learning how to learn for me

Definitely agree with this.

I think my data structures professor spent more time talking about chess rather than data structures.

I have a religious studies degree.

I wonder if it’s prepared me better than a CS degree for the actual work I do.

What did I learn with my RELS degree? Hermeneutics— understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time. Anyone who’s worked on any production code can see the benefit of being trained in that kind of thinking.

The classes I took on theology and philosophy helped train my brain to organize ideas. I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming — Plato would’ve loved it too, I think.

Classes on ethics have come in handy too.

Oh and just, we did a TON of writing in college. Lots and lots of writing, lots of research papers. I had to learn something new, read all about it, and put together a document carefully explaining the idea, with lots of evidence and citations. That skill has come in SUPER handy for everything from bug reports to API clients, to customer-facing documentation, to internal memorandums.

I'm self-taught since age 16. I've been able to write a for- loop since age 16. Maybe it helps that I'm self taught in a pre-google, pre-stackoverflow world. Any beginning programming book will teach for-loops.

I do have gaps in my knowledge but if I lose internet access I can still be productive. I mostly google for how to optimize when some API is slow or remind myself some method name.

I just wanted to pipe up because the top comment is "I couldn't write a for-loop" and I don't want all of us who are self taught being lobbed into that category.

At my last job I regularly had to help colleagues (some who held degrees) solve issues. Strangely they had trouble starting from scratch on something new vs maintaining old code. They found the latter easier. They also sometimes chose the wrong data structures (e.g. looping through an array every time you want an item with id=x instead of just using a hashtable)