What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
1–10 of 161 posts
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#2I mostly agree with this, although I don't think classically trained programmers fare much better on average. I've had many university educated programmers that I've had to teach basic parsing, data structures, and algorithms such as tree traversal.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#3The list they've put together it long enough that I would expect nearly everyone to be missing a few.
Compilers and Machine learning are probably the two that you don't see in self-taught people much. The ones you do see it in generally go to university shortly after having been self-taught anyway.
Most of the other things on the list you learn if you deal with particular programming languages. And a university degree doesn't really supply breadth much more than being self-taught does. But someone who was self-taught and then did a degree will be much broader in skill, which is why those people seem to have such diverse skills.
The actual answer is that the self-taught programmer needs to keep learning and broadening into other languages etc. Which is exactly the same thing any other programmer needs to do.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#4Interpersonal relationship skills.
Even universities don't teach social skills for life.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#5Self taught programmer here. I would like to think I have at least a bit of knowledge about each of these topics (though definitely not an expertise in most) I would say the one I know the least about is Machine learning, but i'm actively working on changing that :) I just bought this book (and enjoying it!) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262013193
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#6The list they've put together it long enough that I would expect nearly everyone to be missing a few. Compilers and Machine learning are probably the two that you don't see in self-taught people much. The ones you do see it in generally go to university shortly after having been self-taught anyway. Most of the other things on the list you learn if you deal with particular programming languages. And a university degre…
Maybe I'm an outlier, but the self-taught people I know fare particularly well on compilers and machine-learning among my peers. Maybe it's the circles I travel in, though. :)
FWIW, I'm a self-taught information-retrieval / compiler / linguistics geek, currently studying machine learning. I've been programming since I was 5, and I always wanted to be a super-librarian, whatever that meant.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#7That just looks like the table of contents to an introductory Comp Sci textbook.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#8My hypothesis is that a CS education would be most useful after you have already spent 5-10 years in industry. Unfortunately for most people life just isn't structured in a way to allow for full time education later in life.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#9I grew up on computers, and am exclusively self-taught, yet I have an in-depth knowledge of how computers actually work from spending time learning how to crack programs. A decent understanding of some fairly complex algorithms from writing RTS, Chess and other games and working on some awesome ML applications professionally. And a good understanding of FP from playing with langs like Haskell and implementing a lisp interpreter.
I have also never learned a single thing from sitting in a lecture hall (though I did do a two year CS diploma, the hardest thing we ever had to do was an Address Book in VB), the most important things I have learned with regard to programming have all come from tutorials on the net and the few books I have bought over the years. In a sense, I have been taught by some of the best people in their fields including K&R, Abelson and Sussman, Denthor, CLRS, _why and too many others to mention.
Since I am self-taught, I can't really give a good answer to the question, but imho, our biggest problem, is that we don't know what we don't know... And that we usually don't a solid understanding of the maths behind what we are doing, something I recently realised the importance of, and am trying to remedy in myself.
Aside: What is really meant by "self-taught programmer" anyway? I have managed and worked with people who came out of university and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?
#10I grew up on computers, and am exclusively self-taught, yet I have an in-depth knowledge of how computers actually work from spending time learning how to crack programs. A decent understanding of some fairly complex algorithms from writing RTS, Chess and other games and working on some awesome ML applications professionally. And a good understanding of FP from playing with langs like Haskell and implementing a lisp…
Aside: What is really meant by "self-taught programmer" anyway? I have managed and worked with people who came out of university and couldn't program their way out of a paper bag.
This one always makes me raise an eyebrow too. My experience at university was that students who didn't teach themselves anything didn't really succeed in class either.