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How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

billmei.net

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Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#131

Post by BinaryIdiot »

popdoit wrote: post #27
komali2 wrote: post #6

Damn, that guy busted his butt. I got a creative writing degree from a decent but relatively unheard of Texas state school, spent a month studying Javascript, got into a bootcamp, worked for the bootcamp as TA for 3 months, then got a ~120k/yr job in the bay area within a month of leaving the bootcamp. I had 3 projects on my resume and absolutely nothing technical to show for the time period prior to the bootcamp, ot…

May I politely say "fuck you" for getting a 120k job after completing a bootcamp. Starting salary of 120k/yr for someone with a 3-month vocational program and an unrelated undergrad degree? That is literally insane.

So a $120k salary may be on the high range but graduating from a boot camp in the Bay area and going straight into a tech company job is actually crazy common. I work with people who have done it. Now it'll be a junior position most likely but in the Bay area a junior position is typically around $100k.

Also I have yet to interview at a tech company out here that actually cares at all about my degree. Might as well not even put it on my resume at this point and it's only a 2 year degree. Many of the devs I know have similar experiences.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#132

Post by gjm11 »

hackerboos wrote: post #8
YZF wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures. An instructor can correct your mistakes and give you feedback. A book or a video can't do that. Some people presumably don't have a right kind of discipline to study on their own. This is why remote study programs can be a lot more difficult to complete vs. on-site programs. EDIT: There's a known effect, discussed…

The Open University in the UK has a dropout rate of 87% [1] I'd imagine that's even higher for online courses. I can only speak for myself but I would not have been self-disciplined enough to complete the courses that I did during my undergraduate CS degree. The added bonus was the degree allowed me to emigrate fairly easily. [1] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-univer...

If that dropout rate is the fraction of people who take at least one OU course but don't get an OU degree, it seems kinda misleading; some people may take OU courses with no intention of getting a degree.

(I followed the THES link but didn't find anything about the OU dropout rate at the other end of it.)

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#133

Post by m23khan »

This is the main reason I love being in IT - I myself have a MSc in Computer Science but whenever I come across folks in IT who don't have CS or IT-related degree (most of whom are as-smart-as or smarter then me), I look at them as motivating and inspirational individuals.

This is the beauty of IT and the core of our industry's success - the experience and thought processes of all the individuals from diverse academic and work experiences combine to make IT a truly multi-dimensional job field.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#134

Post by porter »

Back in 2010 I quit my banking job and took all of the undergrad computer science courses at a state college. This was still at the bottom of the recession, before all these coding bootcamps got started. I learned a ton and taught myself python/django on the side. Then I built a saas product and have been doing that full time ever since. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm good enough to work with developers I now hire. Back when I did this everyone thought I was crazy and most finance people still thought programming was lame. Now that seems to have totally switched and everyone wants to be a programmer. It's a bit surreal looking back, but if I could do it again I'd probably consider one of the programming bootcamps. Of course now you're probably better off doing the uncool thing, like becoming a banker.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#135

Post by BinaryIdiot »

qplex wrote: post #124
komali2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it for all sorts of learning. It worked for me because I had literally gambled everything on it - if I dropped out or got kicked out, I'd be 17k in debt living in the most expensive city in america with almost no savings. Failure wasn't an option. Furthermore, my fallback options were shitty. 40k/year doing sales or recruitment, busting my ass to reach 6 figures, being stepped on the wh…

So I guess you should do something that makes you happy (good for you!), but please do consider that actions actually have other implications than money. The fact that you can make more money making webpages than teaching some poor kid english is mostly sad.

> The fact that you can make more money making webpages than teaching some poor kid english is mostly sad.

You're right in a sense; things that matter the most seem to pay the least. Teachers shape our kids tremendously and yet it's common they need donations just to buy simple school supplies.

Now I'm not sure it's fair to necessarily compare the two but it is still sad.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#136

Post by laichzeit0 »

mdpopescu wrote: post #116
laichzeit0 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A college degree signals to an employer that "this person can finish something". That's why the worst thing you can ever do is put on your resume "Some college". That signals "this person cannot finish something". It doesn't matter what the reason is, just don't put it on. I have to interview a lot of people and I look for qualities that signal the person has the type of personality that can work on a problem, even a…

An alternative way of judging a degree (I'm not just playing Devil's advocate, this is what I believe) is that people who finished college - or worse, have a PhD - are people who do well in artificial, hierarchical environments, where prestige is overwhelmingly more important than knowledge or "getting things done". (You can see a similar mentality with government employees, for example.) A good exemplification of th…

Yeah that's definitely a possibility. I personally know a guy who took 8 year to finish his Masters degree. It wasn't especially difficult, he's just overly pedantic and perfectionist. But I'd probably ask someone why they took so long to complete.

Actually come to think of it that type of person you describe is perfect for a corporate environment. They want someone that can follow process, not rock the boat, and eventually get something done. Perfect for government too.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#137

Post by navinsylvester »

Really heart warming to see this kid. Hope he achieves the success he deserves.

But he has to understand what skill sets him apart. The things that stood out were all the non technical part. He looks like a solid entrepreneur material. Hope he realizes and quit working for others soon.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#138

Post by danielbarla »

markatkinson wrote: post #115

I studied finance and logistics despite the fact that I had been programming since grade 6. I have no idea why. So when I started working in finance the ball dropped that I actually wanted to be a programmer. Well trying to become a software developer with no relevant qualifications and only a grade 6 award for programming in Pascal is difficult, especially when you are located in South Africa. Luckily I worked for a…

I'm also in SA, and although I can't comment from a personal level (have degree), I don't think we have it as bad as some other countries in terms of degree snobbery. Sure, it will definitely lock you out of many large corporations at an HR level. But many more are just hungry for developer talent, and wouldn't think twice about hiring those without a degree. If it was up to me, I'd hire anyone who a) shows a lot of interest in programming, and b) can actually back that up in some fashion. Sadly it's often not up to us techies, so it's definitely a disadvantage if you don't have one.

(Come to think of it, I've worked with a dev at one of the big 4 banks who didn't even have a matric / grade 12. There may have been some protectionism in the initial hiring, but nobody batted an eyelid after that since he was a very good developer.)

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#139

Post by treehau5 »

YZF wrote: post #5
steven777400 wrote: post #2

The author's comment on access to a mediocre/unknown university instructor for a high fee vs free access to a very good set of lectures (Khan) is one of the doubts that led me to quit my job as a college instructor. I had kind of the existential "what are we doing here?" question -- why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online? Combined with a couple of educati…

There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures. An instructor can correct your mistakes and give you feedback. A book or a video can't do that. Some people presumably don't have a right kind of discipline to study on their own. This is why remote study programs can be a lot more difficult to complete vs. on-site programs. EDIT: There's a known effect, discussed…

> There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures.

Absolutely. Anders Ericcson makes this point very clear in his research and also the book "Peak"

In order to become an expert, you need feedback from other experts. I used to think "well who broke through the field first? who became the first expert?" and to that I say that is how human knowledge works. It's built on top of one another, whether we think about it consciously when trying to learn a new concept in a new field, or we are using it subconsciously in the form of an abstraction.

As an anecdote, my first "real" job after getting my CS degree out of college, I worked at a place for about 2 years. In 1 and a half of those years, I felt like I was barely getting by, not meeting my knowledge goals. Then we decided to get crazy, and try this agile and pair programming thing. I worked under one of the most productive developers we had there at the time for 3 months. 5 years later, I still contest, I learned more in that short 3 months under his guidance than I have in my whole career on my own. I have been searching for that experience again ever since.

Re: How I got my dream job in the tech industry without a CS degree

#140

Post by ghaff »

YZF wrote: post #45
komali2 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you feel about structured, graded MOOCs like Harvard's CS50x? I'm also curious about how you feel things like /r/learnprogramming, stackoverflow, and stackoverflow IRC can act as surrogates for teachers.

I can't comment on this specific MOOC but I've done MOOCs where there were a lot of quizzes, active forums, extra-curricular activities, and involvement from the course staff (E.g. Dan Ariely's on Coursera). Those are certainly better than just reading a book or watching a video. I think there was still a very high dropout rate. Having any sort of online community certainly helps as well. I've learnt to play the guit…

In general, I've found the forums on MOOCs pretty useless other than for dealing with specific technical issues with the course itself. They just don't scale well and there's a huge disparity in the level of the participants a lot of the time. In programming courses, you've got some people asking about some nuance of an algorithm while others aren't sure how to install a text editor. Any course built around having meaningful discussions in the forums has been a tire fire in my experience.

Automated code checkers are definitely useful but, other than that, I'm not sure I've found MOOCs much different from watching YouTube videos. Nothing wrong with that--especially with top-flight lecturers--but they're hardly revolutionary. Videos of lectures have pretty much been a solved problem since VCRs went mainstream.

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