11–20 of 161 posts
It's a hard question to answer because "self-taught" spans too wide a range of skill.
The 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.
I think it reinforces the point that self-taught people become very knowledgeable about the things they're interested in. The average self-taught programmer is likely to be more motivated than the average new CS grad. Although this may be becoming less true as more of the less purely interested people move to the more "practical" software related degrees that exist.
I 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…
Some of us never had a formal programming education, we've just spent years (perhaps decades) chasing things that have interested us and learned plenty of useful skills along the way.
I 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.
At the vast majority of even quite decent research universities, CS majors are there to get in, get out, and get a job writing very basic plumbing/form-handling/gluing-stuff-together-code. Or they get an ops job where configuring stuff and keeping it running is important. It works for most of them, too, as that's probably what most programmer-related work is. And most of it doesn't need to scale, so it doesn't hurt too badly that they don't understand algorithmic complexity.
My 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.
I 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.
> 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 bias, in my opinion. That we're making a generalization out of humanity's life experiences is futile in itself, but alas, the application of said generalization here is far more interesting to me.
I 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…
I feel that way about everything I've tried to learn on my own. The process of becoming an expert in a field I think is largely learning what you don't know.
So long as there isn't a deficit in the total volume of knowledge, maybe it's a good thing that there be more variety in which subset everyone picks up.
My 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.
self taught programmers lack talent and the ability to get accepted into a good CS program