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Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

money.cnn.com

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Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#41

Post by jonknee »

minimax wrote: post #36

"Nobody really cares about your education in this field -- it's can you do it, or can you not?" Is this unique to software development? Like, if I wanted to break into the fast paced world of industrial fastener sales would prospective employers be worried about my undergraduate degree? My experience on both sides of the interview table has been that after a few (2-3?) years of working in a field, your professional e…

No, but if you wanted to actually design the industrial fasteners your education would probably be questioned. That's more akin to software development.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#42

Post by SatvikBeri »

citricsquid wrote: post #10

Since then, he has worked for Percolate, Vimeo and other startups, and now, at age 25, he's earning more than six figures. Six figures is $100,000 - $999,999. More than six figures = $1,000,000+.

I know it's not precise, but most people parse "six figures" as $100,000. "Multiple six figures" = $200k or more and "more than (six figures)" just means > $100k. The reason this happens is because it's often considered gauche to talk about income directly.

I know it's imprecise and annoying, but it's a lot faster to adapt to the way the rest of the world speaks than to try to get them to change.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#43

Post by sabalaba »

This is the market at work.

A massive demand for web development combined with a low supply of competent engineers leads to high salaries relative to the amount of time you need to invest to command such a salary. This leads to entities like Dev Bootcamp and Coursera charging to provide the necessary training, they can also command a hefty bonus for making a hiring referral. An influx of newly minted developers enter the market, prices go down as the supply curve slides to the right.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#44

Post by munchbunny »

Without a bachelor's degree, you can be quite a good developer. I've seen plenty of such people, but they've all had several years of self-learning and experience, often substantially more than their college-trained comrades.

I wish the article would get that across - in lieu of a degree, you had to have spent years programming on your own time.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#45

Post by yen223 »

nbouscal wrote: post #16

This is not necessarily a good thing for the web development field. This is how you end up with people with large gaps in their knowledge responsible for parts of your codebase. To be clear, it is entirely possible to be self-taught and learn everything you need to know. I'm self-taught, and I like to think I've filled in most of the gaps by now. I've also worked with a few self-taught people who make me feel like a…

As a fellow self-taught software guy, I agree with you. The tricky part about self-learning are the unknown unknowns - you can't teach yourself version control if you've never even heard of version control. A good CS education should at least expose you to such concepts.

The biggest thing I missed out on are the bread-and-butter topics of CS - data structures and algorithms. I program robots now, and if I had known about graph theory a few years earlier, the software that I write would have been a lot more sophisticated now.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#46

Post by sanxiyn »

jonknee wrote: post #41
minimax wrote: post #36

"Nobody really cares about your education in this field -- it's can you do it, or can you not?" Is this unique to software development? Like, if I wanted to break into the fast paced world of industrial fastener sales would prospective employers be worried about my undergraduate degree? My experience on both sides of the interview table has been that after a few (2-3?) years of working in a field, your professional e…

No, but if you wanted to actually design the industrial fasteners your education would probably be questioned. That's more akin to software development.

To me software development seems more akin to (say) game art design. As long as you can program (or draw) -- which can be checked by portfolio -- education is less important.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#47

Post by VLM »

patatino wrote: post #12

A lot of people ask my why I never got a degree. As a .net web developer I don't wan't so spend 4 years part time (no money for fulltime) studying java, because that's what you mostly learn in our country. Edit: I maybe should add theres nothing wrong with java. It's just not my choice that's all. And in my country (switzerland) the education system looks little bit different. I started a education at age 16 as softw…

You might be surprised how little time you'd spend studying Java. I compared the curriculum at the little private college I graduated from almost a decade ago to the current curriculum of the local state-U today and you can escape typically with about 3 classes of pure software coding, the rest of the degree is "other computer stuff" aside from the liberal arts. For me it was two semesters of C++ and believe it or not, COBOL. I already had a job in the field and wanted to expand my horizons, so "learning" what I already do at work would have completely missed the point. COBOL was in fact a total trip and pretty wild experience, although I'm glad I don't have to earn a living coding it.

Over the last decade not much has changed. You'll have a data structures type class although most grads seem to completely forget everything taught. Typically some kind of theory of languages/theory of computing/computability/scaling. Everyone still suffers thru intro to databases complete with explanations of codd-normal forms and drawing E-R diagrams and such. Everyone suffers thru an intro to operating systems class. Everyone has some sort of intro to algorithms, aka welcome to Knuth, class.

"learn to code java" is probably less than 10% of the total class time. All the upper level classes I took demanded some form of working code but they didn't care what language. Remember its education not job training. They thought psuedocode was fine on tests.

Three notable changes: 1) No more discrete math. Huh? Even with discrete math most grads seem mystified by multiple simple conditionals. Maybe its rolled into the first lectures of theory of computing or whatever. 2) No more required systems analysis. Maybe its kinda rolled into "software engineering" ...perhaps. 3) Capstone project senior year type things seem very popular now a days. I donno if that's in addition to, or in replacement of, the liberal arts survey class I had to take in my last semester.

Re: Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required

#48

Post by mikeho1999 »

nbouscal wrote: post #16

This is not necessarily a good thing for the web development field. This is how you end up with people with large gaps in their knowledge responsible for parts of your codebase. To be clear, it is entirely possible to be self-taught and learn everything you need to know. I'm self-taught, and I like to think I've filled in most of the gaps by now. I've also worked with a few self-taught people who make me feel like a…

Actually, I don't think it's as much as self-taught vs. formal CS training at a 4-year university vs. some sort of vocational schooling vs. whatever...

I think it's more the question of: what is the driving motivation for getting into the industry in the first place?

The best developers I've worked with and have had the most respect for were ones that have had a lifelong love for computers and computing technology, reflected through things like always tinkering with software (and even hardware), enjoyment in building their own linux boxes, and/or having the proverbial "I've been programming since I was 5" type of story. In my experience, I've found that these type of candidates have the highest chance for success, regardless of the type of formal training that they may or may not have had.

The ones that I'm a bit more suspect on are the ones that think about getting into this industry mostly because of articles like this that focus on the "OMG he's making $$$ 6-figures", but that have never shown much of a prior interest for software, programming, etc.. Basically, for folks in this group, it seems like they get excited for coding only after they've heard stories like this and maybe started checking out Codecademy or decided to take CS 101 because it fulfilled a core / distribution requirement at their 4-year university.

Am I saying that the folks in the second group are not going to be good programmers? By all means no. But I'm just saying as a level of chance vs. risk, I feel that those in the first group have a higher chance of producing as a quality software engineer than those in the second group.

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