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What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack?

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

#111

Post by sevenproxies »

Osiris wrote: post #72

I'm a self-taught programmer also, as many others have mentioned. I believe a CS degree can certainly be a launching point for people passionate about programming and computers. I actually did a year of CS before switching to a humanities degree. Part of it was I got a little scared off by some of the complex algorithms that came in the second year and I didn't have a good foundation. I ended up teaching myself PHP a…

One of the reasons I'm currently studying Software Engineering (UK) is to learn about things that will not necessary be taught on a job. Topics such as logic, formal specifications, algorithms and concurrency. It's one thing to know how to use threads etc in a language but you miss out on the underlying theory. I found these topics challenging to understand and thats with a lecture and tutorial (working on exercises from the lecture). I would have given up long ago if I was trying to learn on my own.

Now, this knowledge would be useless if I'm not in a position to guide development of a product but I certainly wouldn't discount a degree (or any formal education) as only being a launching point. I think the general consensus is that the best learning mechanism is a mix of both formal education and work experience. Formal education to learn theory and work experience to solidify the knowledge.

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

#112

Post by anacrolix »

wtn wrote: post #68
danilocampos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Look to someone like Aaron Patterson. He studied CS at university but he did not really understand programming. Out of school, he took a job where he wrote bad Perl. After many years of experience and a lot of dedication—he expended much effort reading CS books on different topics—he came to be a solid practitioner and now is a leader in the Ruby community.

Haha. Bad programmer uses Perl and becomes inventor of Ruby. Why does this not surprise me?

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

#113

Post by sayemm »

I'm also a so-called self-taught programmer. I thought about this very question a while ago and came across this definitive answer by Joel Spolsky: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/414779/what-should-a-self...

He also nails it again in his post, "The Perils of JavaSchools" - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchool...

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

#114

Post by kd0amg »

mkramlich wrote: post #92

After digesting the Quora thread some more, I think it's yet another "bait" question -- meaning, one not seriously asked, because both (a) it's loaded, and (b) the answer(s) are obvious and no need to discuss among serious people with reasonable intelligence. For example this: >> And as a follow-up, where can said self-taught programmers find good resources on the above subject matter? Come on. In 2011, where could o…

In 2011, where could one possibly find good resources for the above. Let me rack my brain... Hmmmm.... Maybe.... rhymes with Internet? Rhymes with Google? Rhymes with bookstores?

The problem is that these are also effective ways to find bad resources. At Quora, OP can find people with education/experience to identify which resources are worth the time/money.

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

#115

Post by troels »

dougws wrote: post #102
troels wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odd indeed. Javascript and Ruby are quite FP (At least in the lisp sense of FP) and they are predominantly hacker languages, meaning that they are used more by self-taught programmers than CS graduates.

Okay, there are some gigantic generalizations being made here, both in this post and others. I'm currently a senior at a liberal arts school, majoring in CS. Of the 10 or so CS majors in my class, I'd say half are also "hackers" in that they spend significant free time programming outside of class, for work and for fun. All of these people know at least one of {Ruby,Javascript} (Ruby happens to be less popular around…

Thanks for correcting me - You're quite right.

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

#116

Post by Jgrubb »

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?

None here. I'm pretty proud of how much I suck.

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

#117

Post by singular »

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?

I, for one, feel incredibly inadequate for lacking the stuff that you'd get on a CS course which I think actually matters - stuff like algos, operating systems architecture, etc.

I think lack of confidence is a huge factor and it's one that's plagued me for a long time, though I don't want to project my issues with it onto all self-taught programmers.

I had a somewhat unique situation when it came to choosing my degree course - having been brought up in a new-age spiritual belief system, I was pressured into asking a woman in Indonesia what I ought to pursue (yeah seriously :-S), and ended up doing civil engineering despite having no interest in it. I had grown up coding from age 9, and that along with maths were my passions.

I had the added pleasure of having a vast family crisis occur during the degree which caused me to fail a year and end up with, though a good grade (a british 2:1), nowhere near the performance I could have achieved had the shit not been going on.

So I've got a degree in the wrong subject, and have had to work from scratch into some sort of development career, and now I'm in an internal job working on CRUD apps.

The really frustrating thing is that many (though thankfully not all) potential good employers seem convinced that you must have a computer science degree or otherwise you're not worth considering (and yeah, I'm looking at you google and microsoft), I know I can learn the things I'm missing and contribute to oss, etc. to become a viable coder at a good place, but if you are basically turned away at the door because you lack the right degree it just doesn't matter.

Obviously for me personally, my degree was plagued with problems which weren't my fault, another way in which I can potentially be deselected from the hiring pool.

To end on a positive note - I am working on fixing these things by filling in the gaps and contributing to OSS - a good solution for people who feel similarly inadequate I feel.

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

#118

Post by al05 »

nicpottier wrote: post #82
kd0amg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You haven't interviewed enough then. I interviewed dozens upon dozens of candidates who couldn't describe to me the underlying data structure for a hash table, all with degrees from reputable schools. This was at Amazon of all places, where they did a decent job of filtering before they even got to me. Don't even get me started on post-grad degrees. Those that have only PhD's or Masters in CS have been especially bad…

Not in my experience, those have patience to study a phd or a masters are those who are really passionate about the subject. Those who move on to them tend to be the hardcore kids who started programming from 13 years old.

They may not be good in work environment doing some random UI work, it would turn their brains to mash.

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

#119

Post by al05 »

Kliment wrote: post #80
owls wrote: post #49

How many of these things can one really be missing and still call themselves a programmer? I'm self taught myself. Pointers? Really? You can learn pointers in about 20 minutes.

It's interesting, but it seems some people need a lot more work when learning pointers than others. I struggled with operator precedence issues when I first encountered pointers, but didn't have a problem with the concept itself. But I know people who never really managed to wrap their minds around it.

A basic diagram with some arrows explains pointers pretty well.

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

#120

Post by veidr »

I think we tend to lack a deep knowledge of those aspects of programming that bore us.

I love learning, and I still do a lot of it by myself. But there's an infinite amount of cool shit out there to learn, and a finite amount of time.

That's why--despite having written several commercial software products, and having worked on systems deployed for years at a stretch--I can't even code a bubble sort or a quicksort, in any language, without resorting to google. ☆blush☆

The implied deficiency doesn't offend me; I don't really want to sit through two semesters of algorithms classes in C or Java, but at this point I definitely wouldn't mind having done so fifteen years ago.

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