What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack? • Hacker News Board

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#31

Post by silentbicycle » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 3:57 AM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #26

jsdalton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to disagree. The converse -- what skills does a programmer who has never left academia lack? -- strikes me as perfectly valid. And surely there must be some benefit to taking four (or more) years out of your productive life to the study of programming? But I say this as a self-taught programmer, so perhaps it's just that I'm envious of those who've had the benefit of a formal CS education.

I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?

It's called "imposter syndrome", and you are not alone. It's a powerful motivation, but don't let it make you suffer.

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#32

Post by andywood » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 3:57 AM UTC

jedsmith wrote: post #18

It's interesting that this question implied the negative -- not what's the difference between , not even what are the strengths and weaknesses of , but: > What pieces of the whole are missing? The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain whole , anyway? This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious…

I'm also saddened to see such a misguided stereotype on the front page here. It's damaging in the same way as the old question, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

To my mind, this question, and the answers given, would only begin to make sense if it were phrased "What skills do people who are not interested in Computer Science commonly lack?"

And pointers? Really? That would make sense if the question was "What skills do people who have never used a language with pointers commonly lack?"

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#33

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 3:58 AM UTC

danilocampos wrote: post #26

jsdalton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inclined to disagree. The converse -- what skills does a programmer who has never left academia lack? -- strikes me as perfectly valid. And surely there must be some benefit to taking four (or more) years out of your productive life to the study of programming? But I say this as a self-taught programmer, so perhaps it's just that I'm envious of those who've had the benefit of a formal CS education.

I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?

[deleted]

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#34

Post by danilocampos » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:02 AM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #33

danilocampos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?

[deleted]

I didn't know you were self-taught — I wasn't projecting, but literally confessing my agreement toward the bias you described. As to the parent, envy is typically felt from a position of disadvantage or inferiority.

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#35

Post by jedsmith » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:07 AM UTC

andywood wrote: post #32

jedsmith wrote: post #18

It's interesting that this question implied the negative -- not what's the difference between , not even what are the strengths and weaknesses of , but: > What pieces of the whole are missing? The implication being that without a formal CS education, it is an impossibility to obtain a whole. As if whole matters; how does one obtain whole , anyway? This is a very loaded question and perspective that betrays a serious…

I'm also saddened to see such a misguided stereotype on the front page here. It's damaging in the same way as the old question, "When did you stop beating your wife?" To my mind, this question, and the answers given, would only begin to make sense if it were phrased "What skills do people who are not interested in Computer Science commonly lack?" And pointers ? Really? That would make sense if the question was "What…

In fairness, once pointers clicked for me, a heaping pile of computing made sense. I banged my head on x86 assembly for a few weeks when I was 14, went back to C and got pointers, then reapproached assembly later and was delighted at how easily it fell into place.

It's my personal belief that a firm grasp of C and any processor's assembly -- protected-mode Intel is a can of worms, there's easier architectures like ARM -- is crucial to success as a programmer. Crucial. Enough so that I weigh a CS program based on their application of it, and so far I've been mostly disappointed. Hence why I remain an autodidact.

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#36

Post by danilocampos » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:08 AM UTC

silentbicycle wrote: post #31

danilocampos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same. Inferiority complexes for the self-taught?

It's called "imposter syndrome", and you are not alone. It's a powerful motivation, but don't let it make you suffer.

Yeah, it's comforting to have a label for it. I had a bit of a catharsis with imposter syndrome in this blog post I wrote for my esteemed employer:

http://blog.hipmunk.com/hipmunk-for-iphone-post-mortem

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#37

Post by bugsy » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

There's a comment there where someone says you go to school to learn how to learn. Clearly self-taught programmers already have this part mastered.

It leads me to wonder why we aren't asking, "What skills do school-taught programmers commonly lack?"

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#38

Post by Hominem » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

Not surprising. That is a list of things 99% of working developers do not do on a daily basis. And I'm not sure most of that will help 99% of developers on a day to day basis.

I once had a project to extract customer contact information from an Excel spredsheet. I use Bayesian probability to determine if a column was a first or last name and trained it using US census data. Then used Levenshtein distance to find names that were possible misspellings. It worked great, but on the POS computers that most people in the company had it took so long they usually just gave up. I would have been better off just sticking a DDL and letting them select what each column was.

Oh well, maybe If I was actually trained I would have figured out how to do it by writing my own compiler or Excel extraction DSL

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#39

Post by Fluxx » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:14 AM UTC

I'm a self taught programmer and have been doing a lot of interviews with developers, both self taught and schooled lately. In general, self taught programmers seem to fall in to two categories.

1. They learned one language (PHP or C#), just enough to be productive, and manage to get jobs and make a career out of small "programming" jobs. Sharepoint monkeys, small consulting gigs for web development clients, etc.

2. They have an insatiable appetite for programming and never have stopped learning or expanding their skill set. I fall in this category. I'm constantly reading books, learning from coworkers and never settle for my skill set. I've also gone back and taken some college-level CS courses, which have helped me greatly as well. I'm currently in the process of reading all the seminal computer science books (currently reading the gang of four design patterns book).

In general though, having a CS background doesn't make you a good developer any more than getting an MBA makes you good at business. It's about how you apply it. Plus, you can be a good developer and valuable employee for lots of other reasons besides being book smarts: dependable, productive, smart instincts, etc.

Re: What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

#40

Post by humbledrone » Tue, Apr 05, 2011, 4:15 AM UTC

The question must have been typoed. Given that list, I think the question was supposed to be, "What skills do novice programmers commonly lack?"

Anyway, I know first hand (from interviewing quite a number of people) that a lot of university graduates lack the listed skills. Sure, they might be familiar with the term "compiler," but that doesn't mean that they have the skills to actually write one.

Don't get me wrong -- for some people, a university education is perfect. There are plenty of grads that know what the hell they're doing. But getting a degree is far from the only way to learn what you need to know to be a decent programmer, and it certainly doesn't guarantee that you'll be one.