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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

#451

Post by jki275 »

icedchai wrote: post #426
jki275 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's heavily dependent on where you are in government. It's not true any of the places I've worked.

Sounds like he’s talking about defense contractors. Many contracting firms just need “butts in seats” that they can bill out. Mediocre developers are better in some regards there: they bill out more hours since they’re slower, don’t mind 10+ year obsolete tech, and they don’t complain as much, which could endanger relations with the bureaucracy (customer.)

I am a defense contractor. That's not how it works. Every person on the contract has to be approved by the government individually.

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

#452

Post by icedchai »

jki275 wrote: post #451
icedchai wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he’s talking about defense contractors. Many contracting firms just need “butts in seats” that they can bill out. Mediocre developers are better in some regards there: they bill out more hours since they’re slower, don’t mind 10+ year obsolete tech, and they don’t complain as much, which could endanger relations with the bureaucracy (customer.)

I am a defense contractor. That's not how it works. Every person on the contract has to be approved by the government individually.

I worked at a defense contractor for years. Some of the guys I knew could barely program, despite years of experience, but looked good on paper. Approving them individually doesn't mean that they're not a "butt in seat" kinda person.

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

#453

Post by naravara »

jki275 wrote: post #451
icedchai wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like he’s talking about defense contractors. Many contracting firms just need “butts in seats” that they can bill out. Mediocre developers are better in some regards there: they bill out more hours since they’re slower, don’t mind 10+ year obsolete tech, and they don’t complain as much, which could endanger relations with the bureaucracy (customer.)

I am a defense contractor. That's not how it works. Every person on the contract has to be approved by the government individually.

Often "approved" by people who have very little idea about what they actually need in a hire. And even they're measured on how well they can keep things staffed and they're often requesting requirements for roles that are unreasonable or downright ridiculous at the pay rates they expect. So they end up with people who are good at formally ticking the right boxes, but have no Godly idea about how to enable the mission or be aware of the broader purpose behind the tasks set out for them.

It depends heavily on your COR and government leads, but the good ones are few enough that they don't get to send the norm. There are enough people who are sufficiently checked out that contracting/staffing firms can get away with murder. Indeed, it might just be impossible for them to do a good job based on what sorts of requirements they're expected to adhere to.

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

#454

Post by inson »

arendtio wrote: post #280
inson wrote: post #206

Interesting. I am starting to teach my siblings to code (they are with non-cs degree) and don't know where to start. Do you guys have any thoughts about this?

I am sure there are people who disagree, but if someone really wants to learn about 'Coding and Computers', my choice would be Go . Let me explain: When I learned to program, QBasic was the first language I had contact with. I could make the computer beep but never achieved anything useful. Next, I learned HTML and was very happy about creating something. In school, I learned a little bit about Delphi and while GUI p…

Thanks! That's an interesting perspective. Golang is getting more traction, maybe I will take this road. However, I don't want to intimidate first learners with difficulties of the language. All languages are similar in some way.

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

#455

Post by TheKarateKid »

cr0sh wrote: post #314
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 just posted some rambling thoughts in this thread about not having a CS degree (or any real degree) and being successful as a self-taught software engineer. I briefly mentioned how my non-formal studies of religion and philosophy have helped to inform me - mainly in the context of "machine learning". Your thoughts about how such studies apply to CS in general, though, are interesting. I noted that there are extreme…

Anyone with a CS degree will be able to tell you there's a huge difference between being a programmer/coder, and being a Computer Scientist.

Yes, most people can learn to code without a degree but to be able to fully understand the scientific/mathematical foundation of why things are the way they are, and to use those skills to create something scientifically new, probably requires a degree.

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

#456

Post by _bhlv »

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.

I have a colleague who's a brilliant developer, but trying to wade through his codebase is literally like going through a session of Chinese water torture. And the 'comments' in his code are more mind-boggling than explanatory.

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

#457

Post by saltminer »

arendtio wrote: post #368
pstuart wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a tl;dr you would care to share?

Well, my attempt to summarize OOP: OOP is a concept. It doesn't care about the implementation and neither should you. So if you are talking about integers, don't care about the implementation which might have limitations like MAX_INT, care about the idea of having a number which you can increase and decrease. That is a concept and it can be implemented in different languages and with different limitations. Next, unde…

>1+2*3=9

I think this is a failure of Smalltalk, not OOP. I tried it in Ruby and Python (languages where everything is an object), both return 7.

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

#458

Post by methodover »

sytelus wrote: post #372
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 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 g…

> instead spent in memorizing and rationalizing virtually unrelated minutia about largely outdated and mostly unverified beliefs.

That’s not what my religious studies degree was about. It wasn’t expensive Sunday school. They didn’t teach apologetics. They taught scholarship, empiricism and critical inquiry. Philosophy and theology were taught from a historical/critical/contextual perspective, not a devotional/didactic one.

I remember one asking a RELS professor about his internal religious beliefs once (in private) and got a stern talking to about how deeply inappropriate that was.

I appreciate and agree with your comment generally, but your characterization of my degree is not factual.

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

#459

Post by reallydude »

jhall1468 wrote: post #173
reallydude wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've written code for fun since I first taught myself how to do it. After decades of work, I still do it for fun.

Which is fine. But that doesn't mean you should be favored in an interview and it certainly doesn't mean you're a better programmer than I am. My point was: favoring people that code for fun is just as bad as favoring people who only received formal degrees.

I didn't get that "point" from your post. I was just trying to assert the oft-ignored type of person (I am not an aberration) that still likes coding, after a lifetime. Even when I am inevitably confined to a hospital bed, I will code in my head.

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

#460

Post by hutzlibu »

tasuki wrote: post #445
hutzlibu wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just want my programs to work" Me too ... And I think imperative languages are way more easy and clear to read and write. I allways imagined that you have to be a math nerd to prefer Haskell, but apparently this guy is not a math guy, but loves Haskell .. so ok, good counterpoint.

> And I think imperative languages are way more easy and clear to read and write. Because it's what you've had exposure to. Perhaps, they're even objectively easier to read and write, I don't know. It's also completely besides my point. My point was that I want my programs to work as desired. That's orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write. I don't want runtime exceptions where I could've gotten a compile-time…

But I had exposure to math functions much earlier. And I never liked their syntax. I did understood the math, but the math language made it harder for me.

And null pointer exceptions? They only happen to me very rarely, when I quickly hack something together and then it is a "oh forgot - and fixed" problem. The problems I do struggle with are non reproducable race condition fun etc. and I doubt haskell could help me with them. Or I struggle, because I do not really understand my problem, or a certain libary ... or, because I misunderstood existing code.

So how on earth are correct programms orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write them?!? Did you ever had to use someone else code? Or your own that you wrote 5 years ago (or sometimes 5 days)?

With any bigger project it is all about how easy it is to read and write them.

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