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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

#381

Post by chaoticmass »

hirundo wrote: post #9

I'm 39 years into a coding career with no CS degree. But as a compulsive auto-didact (probably a common syndrome among HN readers) it hasn't been a barrier. Self-learning is a continual, daily requirement for coders. If you can continue your education as needed for this job you probably also have the skills and interest to learn from scratch. I studied the same books and did the same exercises as my brother the CS ma…

The part about needing to continue your education daily is something a lot of non-CS/IT/programmers people don't understand. I know a lot of friends who want to get into a tech career (say, webdev) who don't get this. They think all they need to do is get a CS degree, or take a course and they'll be set for life.

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

#382

Post by taway555 »

i'm self taught without a CS degree. I filled in many of the gaps by studying for technical interviews. I can rattle off every type of data structure, every type of classical algorithm (even the inefficient ones for historical reasons), write HLDs and LLDs and sequence diagrams and component diagrams, and can work my way through almost every problem on those leetcode type sites (if given enough time).

can i write a compiler or a lexical parser or am I versed in distributed computing and/or other highly specialized technical areas? not off the top of my head, but give me a few days/weeks and I know I'll be able to.

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

#383

Post by boblebricoleur »

snoman wrote: post #330
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…

> Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way. I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it'…

Maybe is the US the college debt is a problem but they are a lot of countries where education is not as expensive. I attended engineering school for 200€ a year plus help from the government for accommodation.

That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.

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

#384

Post by boblebricoleur »

klingonopera wrote: post #353
adamredwoods wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does make a self-taught special?

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

#385

Post by truthwhisperer »

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…

so you fully understnad what it takes to start a crusade against the pHp religion.

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

#386

Post by dvirsky »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #42

I have no CS degree, and I've been in the industry in various forms since the mid-90s, software developer full time since about 2001 or so. I have no CS degree because I just did not have the math grades to get entrance to university. I've been working at Google as software engineer for 7.5 years now. I guess you could say this is success, but I would not recommend this path; even after 20 years, there's hiring manag…

I've never encountered anything like that (or maybe didn't read the signals?), if anything people are usually impressed by the fact that I'm self taught if they knew me beforehand. I've never felt like it's held me back in my career, but I do feel the lack of some of the math background sometimes.

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

#387

Post by boblebricoleur »

asdfman123 wrote: post #321
bpchaps wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think an undertone point might be that sales is manipulation.

The difference between manipulation and influencing is whether or not something underhanded has occurred. You can sell yourself while being totally honest. So many things in business are sales transactions, and it's better to come to peace with that early on. Sure, we're engineers but if you want your value to be recognized you have to learn to be a businessperson too.

Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.

This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.

Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".

That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.

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

#388

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

huehehue wrote: post #378
adrianmonk wrote: post #358

Earlier 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.

> 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 as well. It really makes one wonder how they're able to code properly since programming is, in a sense, also the expression of ideas as text.

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

#389

Post by shados »

chaoticmass wrote: post #381
hirundo wrote: post #9

I'm 39 years into a coding career with no CS degree. But as a compulsive auto-didact (probably a common syndrome among HN readers) it hasn't been a barrier. Self-learning is a continual, daily requirement for coders. If you can continue your education as needed for this job you probably also have the skills and interest to learn from scratch. I studied the same books and did the same exercises as my brother the CS ma…

The part about needing to continue your education daily is something a lot of non-CS/IT/programmers people don't understand. I know a lot of friends who want to get into a tech career (say, webdev) who don't get this. They think all they need to do is get a CS degree, or take a course and they'll be set for life.

A lot of people IN the industry (especially, but absolutely not exclusively folks who come from alternate backgrounds).

Ive been a consultant at several companies where other software engineers REFUSED to learn anything unless:

A) it was during work hours B) the company provided a structured environment to learn the thing (usually in the form of paid 3rd party trainers coming on site).

Needless to say, those teams were far from successful.

There's also more and more folks coming in for the money (nothing wrong with that) expecting it to be a 9 to 5 job. It absolutely CAN be a 9 to 5 job given the right environment/company/structure, but no one in their right mind would pay average west/east coast software engineer salary for a 9 to 5 employee. The extra responsibilities, continual learning, possible on-call, etc, are all baked in those crazy 6 figure salaries everyone drool over.

There's totally a time and place for more typical schedule. Just expect to be paid accordingly. In the short term the market isn't quite adjusted to the idea that not all software eng roles are the same, so there's plenty of people who make 200k+ for doing essentially clerical work (that just happens to involve code) but its just a matter of time before that changes (its already happening).

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

#390

Post by shados »

snoman wrote: post #330
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…

> Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way. I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it'…

> but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical

In the US*

All that means is that either alternate methods (eg: trade school) will become much more sophisticated, or that the US will fall behind countries that have solid, but much cheaper CS degree programs (helllllllo Waterloo)

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