No CS Degree – Interviews with self-taught developers • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by eloff » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

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.

This. It's an iterative improvement on a data structure that in reality isn't useful as used on benchmarks and the benchmark performance is a totally artificial environment with little practical significance. It warrants a blog post more than a paper. Nobody is going to get rich or famous off of it. If someone wants to write it up as a blog post, I'll give them the code.

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

#402

Post by dboreham » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 10:57 PM UTC

I've been doing this stuff professionally since 1982 including some stints at what might be called a fairly high level (household name companies in silicon valley). For all the people I've met/worked with, where I ended up hearing their education background, I'm absolutely sure no more than 20% had CS degrees. I also feel like there is a correlation between the extremely good people I've encountered, and _not_ having a CS degree.

That said, most folks did have some sort of science-related degree. People with no higher education aren't unknown, but quite rare ime. People with higher education only in non-science fields have also been quite rare. I haven't run into many shit hot coder history majors, frankly, but those I have encountered were so smart I'm certain they could have aced any degree they took the time to study for.

Last thought: architecture, design and coding seem more akin to creative endeavors such as writing a novel or play, making movies, that don't seem to be easy to "teach". e.g. nobody is marveling that J.K. Rowling doesn't have an English Literature degree (French, to save you checking..) and nobody is seriously trying to "teach" folks to write the Harry Potter series.

Disclosure: EEE major

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

#403

Post by pmarreck » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #331

pmarreck wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What languages do they use?

That doesn't matter. If there's one thing my years in this career has taught me, it's that the client(s) don't GAF what language or framework or system you used to solve their problem(s). What they care about is if you have given them a solution that solves their problem(s). They don't care how you got there. They don't care what technology you used. Just as long as you solved the problem(s) they were having, and tha…

You said a lot of words and assumed a hell of a lot of things that were not contained in my question.

I simply asked a simple question out of curiosity, JFC. Does curiosity matter?

For the record, all code is ephemeral so since you're going to end up throwing it away anyway one day, it doesn't fucking matter what language you start with. Pretty much any language can back-end an API until a certain (large) number of users. #ProblemsWe'dLikeToHave

Twitter threw away Ruby and went to Scala; Facebook is slowly replacing PHP with... whatever, pretty much anything is superior to PHP; plenty of other companies have had to do partial or full rewrites of core functionality on a new stack. Paul Graham himself had his Lisp code tossed in a rewrite.

Uber's ripping out Python and going to a bunch of other langs: https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/

Uber and Reddit have schemaless db backends for scalability reasons; I doubt they started out that way.

And yet, Discord is still on Elixir. Isn't that interesting. But I think they're putting in pieces of Rust.

So... I just asked a question.

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

#404

Post by godelski » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:06 PM UTC

dboreham wrote: post #402

I've been doing this stuff professionally since 1982 including some stints at what might be called a fairly high level (household name companies in silicon valley). For all the people I've met/worked with, where I ended up hearing their education background, I'm absolutely sure no more than 20% had CS degrees. I also feel like there is a correlation between the extremely good people I've encountered, and _not_ having…

> I also feel like there is a correlation between the extremely good people I've encountered, and _not_ having a CS degree.

I'm willing to bet there's some selection bias here. If you got a job and don't have a cs degree it's probably because you're so good you don't need a degree. The skills outweigh the lack of a degree, which means higher risk. The piece of paper sets the bar lower because there's more trust and thus lower risk.

As someone getting a graduate CS degree and coming from a different degree I notice that there's definitely Swiss Cheese knowledge. I got here because I could code (half my peers can't in their first year of graduate school. This surprised me a lot!). But on the theoretical side they have less Swiss Cheese knowledge than I do. It's a weird dynamic.

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

#405

Post by pmarreck » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:11 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #221

pmarreck wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What languages do they use?

Does that matter? They probably use the right language to get the job done. Depends of the area of their work.

See my answer to the same question (except posed in a far more hostile manner) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20511025

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

#406

Post by pmarreck » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:21 PM UTC

xmprt wrote: post #270

pmarreck wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "advanced intro CS" class at Cornell (CS 212, at least at the time) used Scheme.

Maybe I should become a high school CS teacher, because I would not curse anyone with a procedural language.

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

#407

Post by jgalentine007 » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

javier2 wrote: post #265

jgalentine007 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likewise. I did well in diffeq thanks to a really good professor. Sadly I remember the least about it because I haven't had to use it since the class.

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

#408

Post by daveFNbuck » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #364

james_in_the_uk wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good comment. I can code, and I am knowledgeable about computing in general terms, but I am not a computer scientist as I haven't benefitted from the rigour of formal training. (I am a lawyer, fwiw).

At what point do I get to call myself a computer scientist? I dropped out of college halfway through.

There's no real fixed meaning to computer scientist, so you can call yourself one if you like. I considered myself one when I was doing computer science research for my PhD, but I don't consider myself one now that I'm working as a software engineer.

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

#409

Post by SEJeff » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:34 PM UTC

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.

I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as though 1000 angry hn users cried out in pain.

It is amusing to see how directly those skills taught in a religious context apply towards being a good engineer. Perhaps they're more universal than many realize?

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

#410

Post by sanderjd » Tue, Jul 23, 2019, 11:39 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #292

sanderjd wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another way of putting this: a primary function of a curriculum - university or otherwise - is to convert unknown unknowns (things you don't know exist) into known unknowns (things you are aware of but not fully versed in) and known knowns (things you fully grok). This is why we shouldn't replace college with nothing: this is an important function.

Self-study isn't exactly nothing. I do find that there are a lot of people, especially web developers, who don't understand a lot of the basics, or even the language they're using. I got into development from doing design work, also self taught back in the 90's. I wanted to do something... spent a very rapid weekend learning JS from a very large book, then applied what I needed the next monday. Spent the next weekend…

I think my statement was too strong; I definetely don't mean to suggest that nobody who has never followed a curriculum of any sort can ever be successful. What I mean is that in general, as a policy, it is useful to have some curriculum to shed light on the unknown unknowns.

But to respond to "self-study isn't nothing": that's true, but your self study didn't replace college, it replaced self study. What I mean is that everyone has to do that self study and job training targeted at the specific stuff they're doing. Self study is necessary to expand "known knowns" in targeted areas, which is really necessary. It's just not as good at illuminating "unknown unknowns" as a curriculum put together by a person or group of people who know the breadth and history of a field.