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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

#351

Post by RussianCow »

adamredwoods wrote: post #345
hutzlibu wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. " What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university? (lack of formal education, money, time ...) And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success storie…

At some point the saturation for (entry-level) programmers with degrees will be enough that (entry-level) programmers who are self-taught will be in zero demand.

This assumes that a) the number of CS graduates keeps growing at a steady rate, and b) that the market puts a significant amount of value on a degree. Personally, I don't think either of those is true, especially the latter. With the cost of education continuing to rise in the US, I actually believe the value of a CS degree is trending towards zero, considering that the cost of the alternatives (code school and self-teaching) is much lower in terms of both money and time. And anecdotally, I've noticed that software engineers are in such demand right now that even companies that officially require a CS degree are easing that requirement, opting to instead focus on the potential of the candidates at face value.

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

#352

Post by module0000 »

asdfman123 wrote: post #294
methodover wrote: post #277

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 thinki…

"understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time" That's brilliant and obviously useful for software engineers. Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.

> Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.

This prepared him/her to understand the great conflict of vim and emacs users no doubt.

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

#353

Post by klingonopera »

adamredwoods wrote: post #345
hutzlibu wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. " What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university? (lack of formal education, money, time ...) And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success storie…

At some point the saturation for (entry-level) programmers with degrees will be enough that (entry-level) programmers who are self-taught will be in zero demand.

Doubtful, you're ignoring the fact that self-taught (entry-level) programmers cannot simply be replaced by (entry-level) programmers with degrees (or vice versa).

Both have their up- and downsides, and treating them like equals is ignoring that which makes them each of them unique.

There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.

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

#354

Post by lowercased »

module0000 wrote: post #352
asdfman123 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time" That's brilliant and obviously useful for software engineers. Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.

> Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too. This prepared him/her to understand the great conflict of vim and emacs users no doubt.

tabs v spaces may be an even greater conflict.

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

#355

Post by jshowa3 »

School-Cotton wrote: post #343
jshowa3 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think that they wouldn't? That's why I used the operative word "could".

Because I’m aware enough of the CS world that I just know that an iterative improvement in an obscure data structure is not enough to become rich and famous.

Why do you assume it is an iterative improvement? You can get a free PhD for a lot less. You can get rich and famous for a lot less. You don't have to make cold fusion viable.

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

#356

Post by mattmar96 »

munificent wrote: post #286
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…

> There's clearly strong feelings in this thread. It's always like this when it comes up, which is fairly often here, and I think you're right to point this out. It's an emotionally loaded topic, which means it's a hard one to actually get useful data from. I think there's a couple of things going on here: The path someone takes to get where they are is a huge part of their identity. So when they look back on their o…

Appreciate your perspective on this. Thanks :)

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

#357

Post by lowercased »

alexandec wrote: post #320
methodover wrote: post #277

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 thinki…

My philosophy degree has been extremely helpful throughout my software engineering career, for many of the same reasons. Clear, concise writing is crucial in code reviews, documentation, product requirements documents, and all sorts of ad hoc communication (Slack, emails, wiki comments, Jira cards, etc). This is doubly true for remote work. Just like writing code, written communication is a difficult skill requiring…

philosophy degree here too. in general, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles is helpful, not only in software, but (imo) for life in general.

I'd started with software well before university (5th grade - maybe 6th?) and there were not many resources. Our school had a computer, but no classes as such - the staff weren't really even sure what to do with the 3 we had. HS - there were some "computer classes" - intro to BASIC sort of things. I'd already been programming (mostly BASIC, a bit of z80 and 6502) by the time those classes were available.

CS was a thing in university, but just taking one class (some Pascal class), I was generally put off doing it "professionally" by the difficult social nature of the people in the main computer departments. I was not the social butterfly, and they were really offputting (and I may have been not very helpful as well) but I never clicked in that class or the lab, and so dropped that idea as a profession, but fell in to it years later accidentally.

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

#358

Post by adrianmonk »

cjvirtucio wrote: post #344
methodover wrote: post #277

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 thinki…

I repeatedly encounter engineers who struggle to write even the most basic JIRA tickets. It was a real eye-opener on how many technical people, while brilliant, tend to take writing skills (or communication skills in general) for granted. Funny thing is that it's deemed unimportant when they have to do it themselves, but appreciate it when presented with well-documented tooling/libraries.

A lot of technical people don't care to be good at writing.

Not that they actively want to be bad at it, but they do not see it as a priority, they hate doing it, and they are unwilling to put effort into being decent at it.

In more extreme cases, they will even make somewhat absurd excuses to justify it. My favorite is, "We shouldn't write documentation. It's harmful because it just goes out of date." True, documentation gets out of date, but you can plan to maintain it, or you can just mark it as out of date so people aren't misled.

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

#359

Post by jandrewrogers »

There are some interesting exceptional cases where a CS degree can be a disadvantage for developing advanced software applications, though you still need to know CS.

For example, the conceptual framework for reasoning about distributed systems provided by chemical engineering is superior to the traditional CS version when applied to software systems, and more mature. This has been a persistent advantage over the course of my career designing scalable software. And it is much easier for a chemical engineer to learn computer science than the other way around.

I've come across a few other examples of this in computer science, particularly as it relates to complex systems design and behavior, and not just in relation to chemical engineering. Extremely complex real-world systems as a model are relatively new to CS but have highly evolved solutions in other disciplines out of necessity. There is still much value to be had in learning CS from an unorthodox perspective.

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

#360

Post by a-nikolaev »

tombert wrote: post #328
nwalker85 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on some of these books you are referring to? I'm a self taught developer in his first real, institutional engineering role and I am worried I'm in over my head sometimes and would love to read some "must haves".

Not the OP but I am another non-CS degree person. I got into this stuff in early high-school, and those were just "intro to C++" books. The book that kind of changed my life (and a bunch of other people's as well) is one I bought when I was 19 called "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP for short). It's a bit heavy, but if you know the basics of programming it's not too difficult. This book reall…

Yeah, agreed about the language choice. With math-y languages, the overall quality of presentation and material is higher than what you would get if learning the same thing in Python or JS.
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