Make $30 an hour, no bachelor's degree required • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by nbouscal » Wed, May 22, 2013, 1:47 PM UTC

readme wrote: post #21

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…

>Things like not knowing what SQL injection is, not knowing what version control is, never having heard of unit tests, etc. These things are more commonly learned in the field than in school. When people don't know, teach. Don't sit there and gripe about how they might cripple the company. Your anecdotes are irrelevant. There are just as many people with CS degrees who would get stumped on one of the three things abo…

I've also run into people who don't know what a transaction or foreign-key constraint is, and who don't know what big-Oh notation even means. I agree that web development doesn't require a CS degree, and I agree that CS degrees don't teach you the main things you need to know. What I'm saying is that that is a negative indicator of the state of the profession. We don't have a proper degree program, so we hire self-taught people, but we don't have any standard way of determining if those self-taught people actually know what they're doing.

The problem isn't with self-teaching per se, but with the complete lack of standardization. One method of standardizing a professional education is to route it through college, but as you've noted, CS degrees don't accomplish that for aspiring web developers. Another way is certifications, but we don't really have any of those either. I'm not arguing for any particular solution, I'm just arguing that there is a problem.

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

#62

Post by nbouscal » Wed, May 22, 2013, 1:54 PM UTC

mikeho1999 wrote: post #48

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, r…

I think you're dead on, and I think the reason for it ends up being pretty simple once you dissect it. Programming is an umbrella that covers a huge number of other skills to varying degrees. Many of them we don't even think about day-to-day, because like you said, we've been programming since we were 5.

Easy example: typing speed. I can type ~140 wpm, and I know I'm not alone in that among developers. That doesn't make me a better programmer… but it would probably be a hell of a lot harder to learn how to code if you were still trying to figure out how to type from the home row.

There are plenty of other skills that we don't really think about, but that make our lives as coders way easier. Someone who has never used computers outside of MS Office for high school book reports is going to have a completely different experience learning to code. Even completely mundane things like knowing what Alt+Tab (or Cmd+Tab) does can make a difference in your workflow. Add up all the little things, and you end up with a pretty big gap.

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

#63

Post by nbouscal » Wed, May 22, 2013, 1:59 PM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #46

jonknee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're right that we treat it that way, and I think that it's a problem. If you missed out on learning something about game art design, the worst that can happen is the game art isn't quite as good as it could have been. If you missed out on learning something about software development, you can cause significant economic damage. You can check portfolio for basic programming ability, but it's non-trivial to check for all of the other supplemental knowledge.