The Apprentice Programmer
tobi.lutke.com
The Apprentice Programmer
1–10 of 156 posts
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#2I wish we had these type of programs in my Country...
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#3I have a master's in Electrical Engineering and I'm a genius.
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#4In Portugal we adopted the same system, 5 years ago or so, and i can say its not working as good as in Germany, for young adults who live in rural areas they don´t have the industry to get an apprenticeship like you did,not everybody gets a chance to work with smart minds like you did, and have the adult discern like you did to make yourself useful at such early years of life. That´s is a good story, i can tell you that. But it does not means that its reachable to everyone everywhere.
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#5I feel like confirmation bias is in play when you read about successful people who have dropped out of school, succeed, and then blogged about it. You have to keep in mind the hordes of people who have followeded a similar path only to archive not enough to blog about.
Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#6I feel like confirmation bias is in play when you read about successful people who have dropped out of school, succeed, and then blogged about it. You have to keep in mind the hordes of people who have followeded a similar path only to archive not enough to blog about. Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.
Yes, but you could say the same thing about people who went to traditional schools. How many people went through that system and succeeded--and then how many people went through that system and didn't?
I agree with you in that I don't know we have the data to argue that apprenticeships are better, but I don't think we have data to argue that they're worse either, and I can't see how having it as an option is bad at all.
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#7I feel like confirmation bias is in play when you read about successful people who have dropped out of school, succeed, and then blogged about it. You have to keep in mind the hordes of people who have followeded a similar path only to archive not enough to blog about. Self education may appeal to many of us here, but it applies to less than it appeals to.
Obviously - the system clearly doesn't just produce huge successes. I simply wanted to tell my story because it's sufficiently different from most people's background to be interesting, or so I was told.
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#8I was an apprentice, fairly recently actually, only last year. I loved it - the crappy pay, the meaningless jobs and the terrible teaching aside - I found that I was in my element.
Half my life I've been fascinated with computers, for a quarter of it, I've been actively building programs to populate them, replacing the typical childhood experience with code and logic.
When I got my first job in programming I had been a hobbyist for a few years and I was a fresh mind to mold, but I felt used, I had a house and food to pay for and it was a hard experience.
It's more than a year ago now and I'm at another company, one which valued my skills in a better way, more money, better prospects and far better training, I feel like I learn more every week at my current job than my entire time at my last job.
To anyone out there who is young and jobless, or unsure of what they want to do, or sick of stacking shelves at Asda, I implore you, try one out, the job satisfaction and the change in your mentality will be more than worth the effort.
You don't need to program from your youth like me, most people start between the ages of 16 and 21 (so far as I can tell) and codecademy and other services are making it a lot simpler to learn these days - anyone else remember learning HTML from W3SCHOOLS?
I said this to my best friend a few months ago, when he had just had his baby and had no job: Why do nothing, when you can do something you will love?
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#9This is well written, but I feel as though I'm missing something.
The best way to get better at being a career programmer is to be a career programmer. This is understandable! And the author's initiative at 16 years of age to identify his passions and stick with them at the exclusion of higher education is commendable.
But I've learned a whole, whole lot in college -- and yes, I completely agree with the author that the amount of time I spent tinkering around with computers is smaller than it otherwise would. Instead, I spent time joining a fraternity; taking classes comparing Milton to Bradbury; learning how to pitch a stock; volunteering with the homeless; getting blackout drunk on a Tuesday night; learning the differences between Brahman and Brahma.
Do those things make me a better programmer? No, but I absolutely think they make me a better person than had I spent the past four years as an apprentice. (And, I'd wager that they're better for my career in the long term, but that's not really relevant to this discussion.)
So, I guess, my takeaway: if you know with absolute certainty that computer programming is your sole passion in life, then college is probably not your best choice. (I'm not saying that the author is being anti-college in this post: but I fear most of the readers might interpret his post as such.)
Re: The Apprentice Programmer
#10In Portugal we adopted the same system, 5 years ago or so, and i can say its not working as good as in Germany, for young adults who live in rural areas they don´t have the industry to get an apprenticeship like you did,not everybody gets a chance to work with smart minds like you did, and have the adult discern like you did to make yourself useful at such early years of life. That´s is a good story, i can tell you t…
I can see the problem there. Germany has the advantage of the Mittelstand, a strong net of middle class companies layered over the whole country. Even ever-so-small villages oftentimes have one mid-size company that does processing, engineering, or something else to modify or edit products for another companies toolchain.
However, oftentimes these jobs are mostly catering to blue-collar workers. If, instead, you want an apprenticeship as a programmer or something other more white collar, then - in a small village - chances are dim, too. In my case I had to move to a different city, so I could find one. Which is something many of my friends did, in order to find a suitable apprenticeship: Move away.