I'm a dev with no formal education of any kind, but self taught math and CS. I think it helped me a lot to be exploring the concepts out of a passion for understanding and seeking truth, rather than doing homework I don't understand or care about.
No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
371–380 of 480 posts
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#372I 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 often used to do this to save myself from sinking feeling of how I made a bad choice and wasted precious time that I could never get back. But let's face it... You can make this argument pretty much with any degree, let it be art, humanities, literature or whatever. But, no it didn't prepare you better than actual CS degree. All those things you described could be perfectly done as part of CS degree as well. Most good CS programs are much more than just code and equations and these days even includes bit of ethics and humanities. However, the point is that the time you could have spent in learning actual CS material, strengthening the foundation and acquiring advanced skills was instead spent in memorizing and rationalizing virtually unrelated minutia about largely outdated and mostly unverified beliefs. It's one thing if you loved this field and wanted to study anyway but quite another if you ended up there without knowing what you are getting in to. It's better to understand this so if someone comes to you for advice or if you are making these decisions for your child, you don't repeat the same mistakes again.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#373I'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 doctor. No medical degree.
the real question is: are you self-taught or not?
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to learn most things through self-study. But the vast majority of people will only learn the parts that they find fun and interesting. They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program. For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by get…
Like whatshisface said above, quality self-study is rare. As you point out, people will learn what is fun/interesting, but I will also add that they will just learn what they need to get whatever job done. I have a friend who does webdev (mostly Wordpress, some Drupal) who did not have go through a CS program, though he took a few web dev classes in college. He goes good work, but he has a very loose grasp on fundame…
I agree on difficulty of self study by remembering my student days, simply I was asking the lecturer about why we have to study some of uninteresting CS topics. They were quite boring but really got their benefit in the long run.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#375I am trying to transition from C programming on Tandem(also called HP/Nonstop) to Java and web technologies. The main reason I want to move out of Tandem is that there are only few companies having that system and jobs are few. I have basic Java knowledge but don't have any experience developing for web. The new jobs posting all talk about lot of skill set - Struts, Spring. When I got a job interview I got unrelated…
Switching from C to Java with Spring/Struts shouldn't be that hard, because you are still on the safe side (the server). The real fun with web technologies starts when you are in the browser. So if you have no prior experience with the web-technologies, I would recommend you to learn a bit of HTML/CSS/JS until you are familiar with them (build a simple, plain HTML page, add some CSS to change the layout, throw in som…
Thank you
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Still ongoing with no end in sight
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#377Since 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…
> 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 not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman. Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process. Job se…
Everything you wrote is true and in no way disagrees with what I wrote.
I think you mistook my A => B assumptions for a no B => no A which is a flawed logical reasoning.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, document…
Many are bad at communicating in general, e.g. selectively ignoring/missing parts of an email, incomplete sentences, typos. Some also have the nasty habit of skimming stuff and replying to what they thought they read.
I've seen this from interns to CTOs and remain baffled by its prevalence.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#379Since 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…
"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…
Of course encouraging people to try and get in the IT industry even without a degree is good too. I thought I said so in my comment. I am in no way a college elitist. I know not everyone can go to uni.
My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.
I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.
I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.
Re: No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, document…
Many are bad at communicating in general, e.g. selectively ignoring/missing parts of an email, incomplete sentences, typos. Some also have the nasty habit of skimming stuff and replying to what they thought they read. I've seen this from interns to CTOs and remain baffled by its prevalence.
Well, it's human nature to try and efficiently summarize. You may have to adjust your communication methods to account for that. For example, I almost always try to write emails that contain one central point.