I wonder if it’s prepared me better than a CS degree for the actual work I do.
What did I learn with my RELS degree? Hermeneutics— understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time. Anyone who’s worked on any production code can see the benefit of being trained in that kind of thinking.
The classes I took on theology and philosophy helped train my brain to organize ideas. I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming — Plato would’ve loved it too, I think.
Classes on ethics have come in handy too.
Oh and just, we did a TON of writing in college. Lots and lots of writing, lots of research papers. I had to learn something new, read all about it, and put together a document carefully explaining the idea, with lots of evidence and citations. That skill has come in SUPER handy for everything from bug reports to API clients, to customer-facing documentation, to internal memorandums.
"understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time"
That's brilliant and obviously useful for software engineers. Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.
I'm a bit worried that both the coworkers, the writer of that comment and everyone else in that thread all somehow don't know to put one line of sed in a githook to fix that problem?
Easily the most trivial objection I've ever seen in the never ending spaces/tab debate.
Many people I know customise their local environment to suit.
I felt a disturbance in the force. It was as though 1000 angry hn users cried out in pain.
It is amusing to see how directly those skills taught in a religious context apply towards being a good engineer. Perhaps they're more universal than many realize?
I often used to do this to save myself from sinking feeling of how I made a bad choice and wasted precious time that I could never get back. But let's face it... You can make this argument pretty much with any degree, let it be art, humanities, literature or whatever. But, no it didn't prepare you better than actual CS degree. All those things you described could be perfectly done as part of CS degree as well. Most good CS programs are much more than just code and equations and these days even includes bit of ethics and humanities. However, the point is that the time you could have spent in learning actual CS material, strengthening the foundation and acquiring advanced skills was instead spent in memorizing and rationalizing virtually unrelated minutia about largely outdated and mostly unverified beliefs. It's one thing if you loved this field and wanted to study anyway but quite another if you ended up there without knowing what you are getting in to. It's better to understand this so if someone comes to you for advice or if you are making these decisions for your child, you don't repeat the same mistakes again.
I would say it prepared you differently. The argument is between specialisation and generalisation. It could be argued that a large proportion of a CS degree is useless for one particular application. Who cares about assembly when you do python all day? Or how does that computer graphics module help you with a back end server? Especially when most people have forgotten it when they did it 5,10, 20 years ago.
Ah but one might argue there is transferable knowledge in these areas! Your knowledge of assembly helps you to know what’s actually happening to the computer and why that bug happened; or that algorithm for graphics is very similar to this one for a server. These are very valid arguments, and a similar thing is true for an even broader education. Deciphering ancient religious texts gave him a similar skill set as needed for programming, and potentially a different one to most other programmers. So much of life is learning how to reason in different ways, often they come in handy, and different experience leads to a diversity in thoughts, which gives an edge in solving new problems.
I am very much a proponent of generalisation and then specialisation (along with variety in this path) for optimal performance.
> instead spent in memorizing and rationalizing virtually unrelated minutia about largely outdated and mostly unverified beliefs.
That’s not what my religious studies degree was about. It wasn’t expensive Sunday school. They didn’t teach apologetics. They taught scholarship, empiricism and critical inquiry. Philosophy and theology were taught from a historical/critical/contextual perspective, not a devotional/didactic one.
I remember one asking a RELS professor about his internal religious beliefs once (in private) and got a stern talking to about how deeply inappropriate that was.
I appreciate and agree with your comment generally, but your characterization of my degree is not factual.
I repeatedly encounter engineers who struggle to write even the most basic JIRA tickets. It was a real eye-opener on how many technical people, while brilliant, tend to take writing skills (or communication skills in general) for granted.
Funny thing is that it's deemed unimportant when they have to do it themselves, but appreciate it when presented with well-documented tooling/libraries.
A lot of technical people don't care to be good at writing.
Not that they actively want to be bad at it, but they do not see it as a priority, they hate doing it, and they are unwilling to put effort into being decent at it.
In more extreme cases, they will even make somewhat absurd excuses to justify it. My favorite is, "We shouldn't write documentation. It's harmful because it just goes out of date." True, documentation gets out of date, but you can plan to maintain it, or you can just mark it as out of date so people aren't misled.
Many are bad at communicating in general, e.g. selectively ignoring/missing parts of an email, incomplete sentences, typos. Some also have the nasty habit of skimming stuff and replying to what they thought they read.
I've seen this from interns to CTOs and remain baffled by its prevalence.
> Many are bad at communicating in general, e.g. selectively ignoring/missing parts of an email, incomplete sentences, typos. Some also have the nasty habit of skimming stuff and replying to what they thought they read.
I've seen this as well. It really makes one wonder how they're able to code properly since programming is, in a sense, also the expression of ideas as text.
Well, it's human nature to try and efficiently summarize. You may have to adjust your communication methods to account for that. For example, I almost always try to write emails that contain one central point.
I have a colleague who's a brilliant developer, but trying to wade through his codebase is literally like going through a session of Chinese water torture. And the 'comments' in his code are more mind-boggling than explanatory.
My philosophy degree has been extremely helpful throughout my software engineering career, for many of the same reasons. Clear, concise writing is crucial in code reviews, documentation, product requirements documents, and all sorts of ad hoc communication (Slack, emails, wiki comments, Jira cards, etc). This is doubly true for remote work.
Just like writing code, written communication is a difficult skill requiring lots of practice and feedback. A liberal arts degree provides that in spades!
philosophy degree here too. in general, the ability to approach a problem from multiple angles is helpful, not only in software, but (imo) for life in general.
I'd started with software well before university (5th grade - maybe 6th?) and there were not many resources. Our school had a computer, but no classes as such - the staff weren't really even sure what to do with the 3 we had. HS - there were some "computer classes" - intro to BASIC sort of things. I'd already been programming (mostly BASIC, a bit of z80 and 6502) by the time those classes were available.
CS was a thing in university, but just taking one class (some Pascal class), I was generally put off doing it "professionally" by the difficult social nature of the people in the main computer departments. I was not the social butterfly, and they were really offputting (and I may have been not very helpful as well) but I never clicked in that class or the lab, and so dropped that idea as a profession, but fell in to it years later accidentally.
long time followup. i'd programmed (basic, a touch of z80 machine code, etc) since the early 80s, and after school just started applying (via newspaper classifieds) to anything that sounded vaguely computerish. I got a letter back saying "I've never met anyone with a philosophy degree before - come on in for an interview". And I started doing low-end work for a company reselling OS/2 stuff...
> Oh and just, we did a TON of writing in college. Lots and lots of writing, lots of research papers. I had to learn something new, read all about it, and put together a document carefully explaining the idea, with lots of evidence and citations. That skill has come in SUPER handy for everything from bug reports to API clients, to customer-facing documentation, to internal memorandums.
IMHO the worst bottleneck in both practical computing and even much of computer science is the struggle to explain/document the work in, say, English.
Funny, I'm similar. I have an English Degree (Fiction Writing emphasis) and minored in Religious studies. It's proven to be a positive in so many ways, mostly because I am an excellent communicator and able to explain complex subjects to non-tech folk. I've also been told that I stand out as totally different from every candidate they've interviewed, prior. I started programming on my own at age 11 and have been passionate about coding my entire life.
I just posted some rambling thoughts in this thread about not having a CS degree (or any real degree) and being successful as a self-taught software engineer.
I briefly mentioned how my non-formal studies of religion and philosophy have helped to inform me - mainly in the context of "machine learning".
Your thoughts about how such studies apply to CS in general, though, are interesting. I noted that there are extreme overlaps between CS and many, many other areas of study that I believe both informs and is informed by those areas (whether known consciously or not).
We may actually be doing a disservice to ourselves (and perhaps for the world) by having (though rightly, I suppose) tying Computer Science so tightly with that of Mathematics.
Of course, that could just mean that mathematics also in turn informs and is informed by those subjects, I suppose...? Which is arguably true from what I understand of mathematics and the history of mathematics!
I guess, though, is what I am getting at is that we - humanity that is - have somewhat "enclosed" CS as a subset or adjunct of mathematics. Many don't seem to understand or "see" that so many other subjects and topics are involved. Not having that understanding may be hindering our advancement (both in CS and perhaps even as a species).
Yes. But cs degrees are not about learning coding. We have coding schools for that. It’s about learning the intersection of computing and math. But having science in the name sounds cooler so people take that instead.
Anyone with a CS degree will be able to tell you there's a huge difference between being a programmer/coder, and being a Computer Scientist.
Yes, most people can learn to code without a degree but to be able to fully understand the scientific/mathematical foundation of why things are the way they are, and to use those skills to create something scientifically new, probably requires a degree.
> I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming
Indeed, Object-Oriented Programming is harder to learn for programmers who have experience with other languages already (no pun intended) ;-)
When you know a language like C/C++/Java and you learn about OOP you think you understand, but in fact, you don't. So while functional programming was probably the easiest course for me in university, it took me 1,5 semesters to actually understand OOP. In the end, it is not that complicated, it is just that you have to think more on the meta-level than on the implementation-level and I think, for someone who doesn't have access to the implementation-level, it is easier because it doesn't get in the way.
These programming paradigms are really all about impedance match with a model that's already in some human's brain -- going from the brain-space model to code with the least amount of transformation. So if you're struggling to get to the mind-model, something is wrong! It definitely doesn't make sense to begin looking at the implementation details. They're only there to facilitate that simple transformation from thoughts to code.
OOP is a concept. It doesn't care about the implementation and neither should you. So if you are talking about integers, don't care about the implementation which might have limitations like MAX_INT, care about the idea of having a number which you can increase and decrease. That is a concept and it can be implemented in different languages and with different limitations.
Next, understand the idea of 'Everything is an Object'. This means that you have a class hierarchy and at the top is the class 'Object' (so everything can do, what 'Object' can do). Objects can receive so-called 'Messages'. When an Object receives a Message, it calls the corresponding method. So for example, in Smalltalk (the mother of Object-Orientation) the expression '1 + 2' means, you have an Object '1' (always the first thing) which receives a message '+ 2' and when the method '+' is being called, it returns an Object ('3').
I think that is part of the secret sauce that many tutorials are missing. You can read a lot about the class hierarchy (inheritance, class variables, instance variables, ...), but few seem to care to explain what 'Everything is an Object' really means.
So your OOP program is basically sending different messages to different objects.
Finally, what makes OOP so powerful is that there are some attributes which are being enabled by placing your classes in the right spot of the class hierarchy, so that an object of that class does not just inherit all the attributes, but can also be used as one of its superclasses (polymorphism). That way you can write code that works with a wide variety of objects.
I am sure I missed a few things, but for me, understanding the clean syntax of Smalltalk and the implications of 'Everything is an Object' changed my perception of the OOP concept.
Frankly and in retrospect, I consider this difficulty a sign of the unsoundness if OOP. While with typed FP you can get entangled into some seriously complex mathematical models, in OOP it’s just a bunch of metaphors and mental models you have to convince yourself are true. The effort poured into memorizing one rarely transfers to unrelated frameworks or different languages, or at least does so to such a high level that it doesn’t help that much anyway.
OOP is easier to use when describing a mental model as-is, without the analytical deconstruction that (typed) FP would demand.
You could certainly see it that way, but I found that it is a good example to illustrate the intention of having a very simple syntax and processing logic (up to the point where arithmetic expressions are not what you expect them to be).
I'm 39 years into a coding career with no CS degree. But as a compulsive auto-didact (probably a common syndrome among HN readers) it hasn't been a barrier. Self-learning is a continual, daily requirement for coders. If you can continue your education as needed for this job you probably also have the skills and interest to learn from scratch.
I studied the same books and did the same exercises as my brother the CS major and do feel that my training would be incomplete without that. But I don't feel disadvantaged by not doing that within a class structure.
The main thing I lack is access to government jobs, which routinely require credentials I don't have. But I've probably had a more diverse and satisfying career as a big fish in small private sector ponds.
Not everyone can learn coding without externally imposed structure. But those who can't probably have an ongoing problem in keeping up with the state of the art.
> Not everyone can learn coding without externally imposed structure.
That's actually not what a CS degree is primarily about. You learn to code in maybe the first 2 or 3 classes. After that, it's assumed that you can translate ideas into code and you start learning about different areas of computer science.
If you just need to learn to code for a job, there are bootcamps that can teach you that in a fraction of the time and cost.
> But those who can't probably have an ongoing problem in keeping up with the state of the art.
Personally, I wasn't able to learn to code in any meaningful way before college. I had tried to learn from books and online sources but never got beyond basic scripting. After working my way through a bachelor's degree and PhD, I don't have much trouble keeping up with the state of the art now.
Good comment. I can code, and I am knowledgeable about computing in general terms, but I am not a computer scientist as I haven't benefitted from the rigour of formal training. (I am a lawyer, fwiw).
There's no real fixed meaning to computer scientist, so you can call yourself one if you like. I considered myself one when I was doing computer science research for my PhD, but I don't consider myself one now that I'm working as a software engineer.
I suffered the opposite experience. I can’t learn in an academic setting. If I’m faced with a problem (read: motivation) I’ll learn what I need to solve it.
You're lucky. When I worked for the federal government(USDA/USFS), there was no way I was going to get access to non-windows servers for deploying my projects. When we brought up the idea of using AWS, they told is that it was impossible as they had no way to handle reoccurring monthly billing. (obviously, this is a lazy excuse). The only node project I managed to get deployed ran behind Apache on Windows Server 2003... and it performed as horribly as one might expect an event-loop to perform behind a threaded proxy.
I think it's possible but when bidding for contracts I think it matters. When I worked at a smaller company that worked government contracts my lead was always telling me I should work on getting a masters as it looks more attractive.
>a custom build of the open-source search engine Solr, a highly responsive UI engineered on top of React, a high performance distributed brokerage system, and cloud-based hosted services with Kubernetes in Amazon Web Services. The primary programming languages are Python, Java, and JavaScript.
I'm in a similar situation. Dropped out of uni because it bored me, easily got a dev job (I was really lucky), worked for years as a developer, and then an architect.
I eventually did study part time for a degree, mainly out of belief that it might help with future career opportunities, but also because I might enjoy it.
I got a 1st, with honours. TBH, the only part I truely enjoyed was the final project. The rest was mildly interesting at best, and a bore at worst. I found 80% of it easy, 10% difficult (maths), and 10% challenging (the final project, but only because I made it challenging).
In retrospect, I don't think it's really made any difference to my career, as I'd proved myself long before getting the degree. I don't necessarily regret it either though - maybe the most useful thing was getting me into the groove of reading academic papers, which had benefited me greatly, both work-wise and in my personal life (health issues).
The part about needing to continue your education daily is something a lot of non-CS/IT/programmers people don't understand. I know a lot of friends who want to get into a tech career (say, webdev) who don't get this. They think all they need to do is get a CS degree, or take a course and they'll be set for life.
A lot of people IN the industry (especially, but absolutely not exclusively folks who come from alternate backgrounds).
Ive been a consultant at several companies where other software engineers REFUSED to learn anything unless:
A) it was during work hours
B) the company provided a structured environment to learn the thing (usually in the form of paid 3rd party trainers coming on site).
Needless to say, those teams were far from successful.
There's also more and more folks coming in for the money (nothing wrong with that) expecting it to be a 9 to 5 job. It absolutely CAN be a 9 to 5 job given the right environment/company/structure, but no one in their right mind would pay average west/east coast software engineer salary for a 9 to 5 employee. The extra responsibilities, continual learning, possible on-call, etc, are all baked in those crazy 6 figure salaries everyone drool over.
There's totally a time and place for more typical schedule. Just expect to be paid accordingly. In the short term the market isn't quite adjusted to the idea that not all software eng roles are the same, so there's plenty of people who make 200k+ for doing essentially clerical work (that just happens to involve code) but its just a matter of time before that changes (its already happening).
From what I saw it is individual and also based on area of CS. There are lots of people who are for example very good in JS, CSS and HTML, doing fantastic UI work while not having CS degree. And there are some with CS degree who can't really solve real tasks effectively. Some people learn only what is needed to pass an exam. And some people continuously want to learn more an be better. I, for one, started doing a degree but dropped due to lack of time and lot of work opportunities. And while school learned me some useful stuff and it could learn that way even more, I continued on my own. I am an introvert, not hating math and having lot of patience. I learned so much over years, for example C, python, PHP, bash, vim, linux administration, docker, kubernetes, mysql, golang, html, css, vue, flutter, http, cors, CSP, opengl, linear algebra in graphics, mutexes, atomic ops, Atmel AVR programming. I also learned abou free software, GNU history, Mozilla/Netscape story, Gopher. Majority of this self-tought because my life is CS, I am reading or doing something CS-related whole days because nothing interests me more. Yesterday I discovered dgraph and I am excited to learn in. There are math-heavy and scientific problems which require more school-type skills. But most real-world work is surprisingly not like this. On the other hand, lots of people lack CS history - I've heard some modern web devs don't even know what a http header really is.
Hey, founder of Dgraph Labs here. If you are interested, we would love to consider you for a role at Dgraph. Feel free to reach out to me at Manish at Dgraph.io.
> The main thing I lack is access to government jobs
I guess my question would be which government? I do government contracting (US), and degrees are not required. The labor categories are typically written so that if you don't have a degree, you just need an additional 4 years of experience. On almost every contract I've worked on I've met a developer without a degree.
It depends on the position. It's a lot harder to get work as a government employee without a degree in the US, but contractors seem to have more flexibility. I worked for a government agency while I was in the military, and I can't even get an interview for the exact position I was doing for a couple of years because I don't have a degree. I know a few people who've missed out on jobs because the government position has a hard requirement for a degree, even if it's not relevant to the position (like computer science for a security position).
A decade ago when I was on the job market I saw lots of ads for government IT jobs, seemingly all listing CS degree requirements. So I didn't bother applying. Maybe it wasn't a hard a requirement then, maybe it has changed, or both. I have an ethical preference for market transactions, so didn't push on that door as hard as I might have if other opportunities weren't readily available.
Can you elaborate on some of these books you are referring to? I'm a self taught developer in his first real, institutional engineering role and I am worried I'm in over my head sometimes and would love to read some "must haves".
I got into this stuff in early high-school, and those were just "intro to C++" books.
The book that kind of changed my life (and a bunch of other people's as well) is one I bought when I was 19 called "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP for short). It's a bit heavy, but if you know the basics of programming it's not too difficult. This book really teaches you a lot of fundamentals of software, and to me is the must-have book in compsci, and it's available for free of MIT's website.
Then I just went on ebay and looked up "discrete math textbooks" and "discrete structures textbooks", and bought a few of the cheaper ones.
Then I started finding individual topics that interested me, which largely dealt with distributed computing, weird abstract math, and video processing. For that, I bought the book "Programming Distributed Computing Systems" by Varela, "Certified Programming with Dependent Types" by Chlipala, and random books on Fourier Transforms from eBay.
This is over the course of a few years, and it was intermixed with about a million different blogs and tutorials to get me better. I've found if you stick with the more "theory-heavy" languages like Coq, Idris, or Haskell, you end up picking up a lot more of the compsci concepts that you might learn in school, just because there aren't a million people constantly yelling "OMG YOU DON'T NEED MATH FOR <insert language here>".
Yeah, agreed about the language choice. With math-y languages, the overall quality of presentation and material is higher than what you would get if learning the same thing in Python or JS.
As others have mentioned, there are many folks working in the gov world without CS degrees. This is especially true for older workers who graduated at a time when CS departments weren't common place at every college as they are now. However, if it's credentials that you are after, governments love certifications as well.
38 years here, I had undergrad in Chem and part of a masters. Had no college classes or experience when I got my first programming job. Always worked at the leading edge of whatever I did and always had success. Was never an issue. Today I wonder if I would have even gotten an interview.
Since these articles seem to be putting a cash value on the word "success" (or at the very least an instagram buzz value), I would point that IMHO, most of this success comes from people skill.
You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.
Congratulations, you're making money by manipulating someone into giving you their money. Awesome ! Thanks for playing, please leave.
I guess the point of the website is to encourage people without a CS degree to learn programming. That's great. The disctinction beetween CS graduates and non-graduates seems to be very unfruitful IMHO so encouraging people to pick up a computer is cool.
What I would sugget is to stop promoting sensationnal stories like the kid that is making 15k$ a month. This is purely manipulative and dishonest. This kind of journalism is plain wrong. Even if the number are true (which I highly doubt) encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.
More, maybe encouraging good engineering (or craftmanship whatever you want to call it) instead of instagram buzz and money would make tomorrow's software a little less frustrating to use and a little less bloated.
I would love to see a story, just once, with the title "this guy made a beautiful piece of software, and it's awesome"
> Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.
I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it's becoming more and more fiscally irresponsible for most people to attend higher education, taking on the mountains of debt necessary to make it possible.
So the sensational stories of survivorship bias about the one-off people making exorbitant amounts of money can definitely go... but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical, and I expect it to get much worse.
Maybe is the US the college debt is a problem but they are a lot of countries where education is not as expensive. I attended engineering school for 200€ a year plus help from the government for accommodation.
That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.
> but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical
In the US*
All that means is that either alternate methods (eg: trade school) will become much more sophisticated, or that the US will fall behind countries that have solid, but much cheaper CS degree programs (helllllllo Waterloo)
This is turning into a "I'm self taught and I can code juste as well as the next CS graduate" debate.
I totally agree with that proposition. The degree is not a sine qua none condition of competence.
My point was that success stories about kids making a lot of cash on a self taught developer skillset are pure and simple lies. They hide the truth to those who really want to get into the IT industry and make a living with it. That truth is : work your engineering skills if you want to build cools things.
I said make a living. Not get crazy rich. Engineers don't get crazy rich. Salesmen (and salewomen) do.
People that did not have the ressources or desire to go to uni would get a lot more encouragement and from real developer tales : stories about smart engineering, beautiful UIs, dedication to a craft and passion, or even sly hacking.
Instead they read stories about skilled salesmen. The stories are not even that good. Glengary glen ross and the wolf of wall street are much better.
"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. "
What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university?
(lack of formal education, money, time ...)
And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success stories, so thats why you see such success stories much more ..
Of course encouraging people to try and get in the IT industry even without a degree is good too. I thought I said so in my comment. I am in no way a college elitist. I know not everyone can go to uni.
My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.
I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.
I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.
You see success stories of people becoming actors, musicians, or popular YouTubers but not once in a million years would I encourage a kid to pursue that path full time without them knowing what they're getting into. I feel like there are too many success stories in programming without enough stories of failure or hard work.
At some point the saturation for (entry-level) programmers with degrees will be enough that (entry-level) programmers who are self-taught will be in zero demand.
This assumes that a) the number of CS graduates keeps growing at a steady rate, and b) that the market puts a significant amount of value on a degree. Personally, I don't think either of those is true, especially the latter. With the cost of education continuing to rise in the US, I actually believe the value of a CS degree is trending towards zero, considering that the cost of the alternatives (code school and self-teaching) is much lower in terms of both money and time. And anecdotally, I've noticed that software engineers are in such demand right now that even companies that officially require a CS degree are easing that requirement, opting to instead focus on the potential of the candidates at face value.
Doubtful, you're ignoring the fact that self-taught (entry-level) programmers cannot simply be replaced by (entry-level) programmers with degrees (or vice versa).
Both have their up- and downsides, and treating them like equals is ignoring that which makes them each of them unique.
There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.
As an employer, I want the best. All other things held equal, someone trained from some kind of institution will give me more confidence for employment than someone self-taught. Self-taught shows initiative, but institutional learning applies a baseline training employers can trust.
Agree 100%. Not to mention, having a degree opens up a lot of opportunities in case you ever want to leave the field. Many people get sick of coding after doing it a while due to its highly repetitive nature. Having a degree essentially gives you a pass to enter a myriad of fields that still require one.
I'm not sure that makes complete sense. I don't have a degree in CS as I was self taught and actually bothered to follow online courses and read documentation. If I get sick of coding and want to move elsewhere I still have the option to go to university.
I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.
In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.
In my situation I thought I learned to code at a young age. That's a great way to phrase it too. If one (cough, OP's article) is using phrases like "learned coding [in x months]" then they have the same misunderstanding that I did when I packed up and went off to college thinking I was hot shit at 16 with 4 years of BASIC and PHP web dev under my belt. In my case it took college to expose me to a whole universe of new ideas and really get the point across that "coding" isn't a thing you can "learn" in some number of months. Given that nerdy teenagers are notoriously both cocky and stupid, I suspect that this is a common experience.
Of course there are the Peter Deutsch wunderkinds and the people who get a really good secondary education and can jump into CLRS on their own without hand holding from college, but I don't think there are very many of them out there.
And adult learners are a whole different matter for whom the decision to go to college for CS is radically different.
It's also called burn out. Often times you will spend years slaving over one program, making improvements and changes for different cases while simultaneously maintaining it, installing it, documenting it.
After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.
You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.
There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.
> You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.
Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process.
Job security is a thing of the past, whether you went to school or not.
The "ideal" developer isn't some kind of monk who dedicates his entire life to one firm.
Making money doesn't mean your product is bad, useless or badly designed. It also doesn't necessarily mean you're the best salesman.
Sometimes experienced developers without a CS degree and without sales skills still get paid a lot because:
A) the requirement doesn't call for advanced computer science knowledge
B) the requirement does call for a significant amount of practical experience and business knowledge
C) it's a highly profitable industry and the specific work being done will generate the company profit and/or cut costs
It can be perfectly legitimate to perform jobs like this without having a CS degree or ever intending to get one.
It can be perfectly legitimate to work your way up the ladder of such jobs and jump from job to job in the process.
Some of us want to raise a family and/or be able to retire one day. Why should we put our careers on hold to pursue a degree?
The difference between manipulation and influencing is whether or not something underhanded has occurred. You can sell yourself while being totally honest.
So many things in business are sales transactions, and it's better to come to peace with that early on. Sure, we're engineers but if you want your value to be recognized you have to learn to be a businessperson too.
Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.
This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.
Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".
That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.
It's fun when people assume a CS Degree means you are a developer. Practically all development is self-taught, a CS degree is only handy for those moments where you dig into some abstract theory, which in most development jobs hardly ever happens.
You mostly spend (or waste) time on tools, frameworks and interaction (both with humans and other systems). Lots of common development is rather mundane compared to all the beautiful theory behind it. Which is not automatically bad, but also doesn't require a CS Degree to get going.
CS is more than abstract theory. It gives you a foundation that you otherwise are unlikely to get. Self-taught means learning things useful for your existing job or things you find interesting. I'm work almost exclusively on the frontend, but my CS degree gave me enough foundation that I'm fairly familiar with compilers (I wrote one in college for a required course).
I don't necessarily enjoy writing compilers. But the fact remains that I can write a compiler. I can program in C or C++. I do understand pointers. None of this may hold any real value, but I wouldn't be able to do any of them if not for the degree.
> But the fact remains that I can write a compiler. I can program in C or C++. I do understand pointers. None of this may hold any real value, but I wouldn't be able to do any of them if not for the degree.
I liked your initial point, but the argument weakens... People absolutely have learned all the above things (and very well), on their own, outside of a CS degree, and I bet you could've.
I wasn't advocating that people don't. There are absolutely vastly better compiler programmers than I am that have never taken a formal class.
My point was that I wouldn't have learned it because I don't enjoy it. And sometimes, professionally, we get to do stuff that isn't fun. The nature of being self-taught is heavily biasing the things that interest you. College forces you outside of the box. Outside of the box happens to be those things for me, but they'll be other things for other people.
As a self taught developer I can say your point assumes self teaching is all about following your interests. This is simply not true. Self teaching is a combination of following your interests and figuring out your areas of weakness and attacking them. Part of my self learning involves browsing college degree requirements or graduate programs to identify must know topics, I learn them regardless if I have a particular interest. If college is the only thing forcing you to think outside the box, what hope is there for your long term learning.
My point assumes people bias their learning towards their interests. That isn't an opinion, that's just human nature. That's not to say you can't learn things that don't interest you, but if you aren't going to do it formally you certainly have to be driven by filling those gaps and most people aren't.
Learning to think outside the box and learning about specific specialties that you don't find interesting aren't even remotely the same thing. If you read what I wrote, you'll notice the example areas I gave. None of them were "thinking outside of the box", they were fields that didn't interest me.
The value they bring is that I learned a common language. I can talk to ML engineers or Compiler Engineers in a common language because I have experience in those fields that I wouldn't had I taken a different route. That isn't even remotely a requirement for my field. It's just useful for discussions with other people.
Maybe you'll spend hours and hours learning compiler design and implementation so you can have a friendly conversation with a colleague at lunch, but I'm not going to. Formal education forced that on me. That's been healthy for my professional networking, but that's about it. I still consider it useful, but had I skipped the CS degree I wouldn't do it. Nor would most people.
At the same time people who are self taught typically have more time and energy to attack things in more depth. My cs classes are pretty 'standard' and on my free time I can go on long tangents where I really learn. I learned about assembly programming and the bacics of how cpu's work from self learning rather than getting a very simplified understanding from a class. There are many things in cs that can not be learned in 1 semester and people who are self taught have the ability to take things at their own pace and jump to different topics, something that busy college studens have little time to do
No, I'm speaking about human nature. Most people don't learn things they dislike because it fills a knowledge gap. How many people do you know with hobbies they hate?
It's natural to gravitate towards things that interest you. Some people are driven by gaps and learn things regardless, most people do not. That's not even controversial.
Would just like to say that this is a fantastic point, and really makes the case for a formal education. It takes a special kind of self-motivation (which I readily admit I do not have) to diligently learn those uninteresting-but-necessary parts of the CS curriculum.
There is actually a difference between being self-taught as you describe it, and being an autodidact.
The latter is able to identify holes in his own knowledge, and find appropriate material to educate himself on. That ability is what defines an autodidact in the first place.
This is also the very same thing you get taught in basically all sciences: How to aquire knowledge about a subject matter you yet know nothing about.
So, an autodidactic Programmer without a degree will most certainly have similar knowledge as a CS graduate, simple because that is how such people "tick".
It's just that not every self-taught programmer is an autodidact. And in that case I agree with your argument.
Exactly this. The way I think of it: It expanded the space in which I can search for solutions. I have enough underlying detail of the computer science map to pinpoint where fruitful design opportunities lie, and what patterns are likely to fit, /and/ which concepts would make a poor mapping for a given problem, leading to bad abstractions.
> But the fact remains that I can write a compiler. I can program in C or C++. I do understand pointers.
EDIT: Note - I see your replies and reasoning with others on what you meant; I do agree with you there, too.
---
I know you can do all of them without a CS degree.
Where a CS degree really helps, though - and this is something that I know I lack (but real-world experience has taught me enough that I can get by) - are what could be almost considered CS fundamentals:
* Data Structures
* Sorting Algorithms
* General Algorithms
Fortunately, in the day-to-day realm of most programming, you don't need to implement any of them from scratch, and most of them you can learn the basics of (or "best common examples") fairly quickly, which is where I am at mostly.
The problem happens when you run into a situation that isn't seemingly addressed by that level of knowledge (which again, thankfully, in most day-to-day work is extremely rare); by having that prior exposure via a CS degree, you would at least potentially know some words or phrases to look up to refresh your memory on concepts.
Further, you would also have the knowledge (or refreshing of knowledge) to be able to understand any new developments that may have occurred since you were taught (and so could easily read any research papers on the topics).
If I were in such a situation, I would need to break out some google searches on various xyz (ie structures and/or algorithms), use whatever understanding I have to understand those to a level to be able to pick out potential candidates to study in more depth, and maybe hope to run across more recent stuff that may be better (and pray I could understand it enough to implement it).
The one upside in this day and age, though, is that for all of these, for virtually any language I currently understand, someone has likely written an implementation of it - which can be extremely helpful both in the solution to a problem, and in understanding that solution.
But a CS degree would make things much simpler, were it something I had time to pursue. I could probably find the time, but the cost vs benefit ratio no longer works out to my favor, beyond self-edification, given my age and current life obligations.
The failing here is that you have put a (rather low) ceiling to what an auto-didact can achieve. There are no hard limits to a self-taught scholar of computing, certainly not things as elementary as data structures and algorithms.
Writing a compiler is just the side effect of showing it could be useful. It’s not hard programming equals cs. It’s the science part of computer science that matter.
I'm about 3/4 of the way through writing a book on implementing interpreters and compilers [0]. My day job is as a software engineer at Google working on the Dart language.
My highest attained degree is a high school diploma from a shitty public high school in southern Louisiana. I went to LSU for a year and a half and dropped out.
No, and my post never implied anything like it. On the contrary, my point was that I was forced into it by degree requirements. I'd know nothing of compiler design or implementation today without being forced to learn it. It's a valuable skill to be sure, but not one I'll ever use professionally because I find it frustrating and boring.
And that's my point. If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate. Most successful self-taught programmers do exactly that. Most people don't.
> If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate.
Not necessarily, you could also just find all that CS stuff interesting.
The CS program taught me the history and context for Computer Science. It taught me the fundamental physics that make a gate work and how to put those gates together to make a logic circuit. It then built on this one step at a time, walking us through each layer from how machine code manipulates bits to how to properly evaluate the run time of a complex algorithm. CS told me the comprehensive story.
Earning my BS and then my MS did not increase the amount of money people were willing to pay me to build things. However, I can generally tell when I'm working with someone who is entirely self taught and I assume others with degrees can tell also.
1. "I can just tell that person is self-taught." (No, they went to a contemporary dotcom feeder vocational CS program, and spent all their time adding the latest framework keywords, and drilling for the leetcode whiteboard interview.)
2. "It hasn't occurred to me that other person might be self-taught." (Yes, they are.)
Further, the book on which the curriculum is based. Diligently going through them will often teach you more than the structured class based on them. When coursera first came out I was very excited to take CS classes from top universities. Then... I was surprised at how generally poor quality the lectures and material were. Outside a few standouts, I think you are vastly better off reading quality, well reviewed books / papers than taking a course / watching lectures. (Unsurprisingly this felt true of my actual degree's as well).
At my University, CS mostly meant learning to program and hack on things unless you specifically did the theory track. Only two of the required classes were theory classes. Compilers and operating systems had some theory in it, but it was mostly about learning how these things work by building your own.
I sometimes feel like I have a leg up based on when I learned computers (self taught mid 80's to early 90's). At that time, everything was more low level, and there were fewer, yet higher quality books on the market. So I started off with W. Richard Stephens, K&R, Pike, Sedgewick, and others that you either had to really get it, or you wouldn't get anything. Not that this was the best way to learn, but you knew coming out of it what you learned.
I have a CS degree (in fact, I have both a BS and a Master's degree in CS) - I'm still "self taught" in the sense that I learned to program the same way you did, by reading Stevens, K&R, Knuth, etc. outside of my coursework. Don't get me wrong - I learned a lot of interesting stuff: I never would have learned calculus if it hadn't been a degree requirement, and it helps to understand a lot of AI, but learning to program is sort of a "side effect" of academic computer science.
I think that's one thing that's making me think twice about doing a CS degree now e.g. by night — a lot of what you learn at university isn't in lectures, it's in the ample free time that you have between lectures.
With limited free time, it's hard to know whether it's better to self study or do a degree (or even just follow along a curriculum online)
I go between trying to work through things systematically to get a good grounding where I have knowledge gaps, and jumping to what I think will help me best on my job at this point in time.
It would probably be better to stick to one approach or the other to make more focused use of time, but I'm not sure which way is best! :)
I also have both a BS and a Masters in CS. I took a required software engineering course in either 1999 or 2000. I think that there may not be a single thing taught in that course I would agree with now.
I learned a lot of useful things, like how to write a compiler. But I would say that in the sense of what I really do day-to-day to "program", I'm effectively self-taught too.
(I walk the walk, too; I can and have hired people without degrees, and it's been fine.)
That was similar to my experience on a CS course - you were expected to do a lot of development, but nobody really specifically taught you about it and you were expected to pick that up by yourself as you went along.
In this field, you're always going to have to learn things on your own... The trivial example is new technologies that weren't available when you were in university.
That's how my CS program was (late 90s) as well. You were expected to be somewhat proficient already in C/C++ programming going into the major. Much of the program was mathematics courses. It was brutal. They eventually saw the high drop out rate and re-configured the major. I envy the kids who get to go through the major now. The courses look much more interesting and it's comprised of more actual software engineering coursework.
I graduated with a masters in 2013 and my courses involved a lot of calculus, and some courses on theoretical foundations of computing ++
Still learned most of how to be a developer on my own, but I find immense value in the education. I learned to see how nothing in computing is magic, just hard work. In 2014 they changed the algorithm introduction course from C++/java to python, which I reckon is a good thing.
I finished my CS degree in 06' and it still was more about math than programming (C++, no Java). To graduate I had to take single/multi variable calculus, linear algebra, vector geometry, discrete mathematics, differential equations, combinatorics and numerical methods. When I started there were 600 in my class, when I graduated I think there were only 60!
I started programming properly in 2010 when I was 12 or 13. Before that I did some small things in Inform 7, and now I remember it, Visual Basic, but I don't really consider that 'proper programming' as it was mostly cutting and pasting code with little understanding. I started with Inform 7, Python, and a little bit of Processing and Lua. I did three or four ludum dares and at some point I made most of a game in Lua with Love2d (around October 2012ish).
Maybe a few years later I started delving into 'hacker culture', and I picked up C with K&R (since it was almost universally recommended and easy to read), I also at some point picked up UNIX Power Tools (recommended in Linux Format) and The Practice of Programming. At some point after that I became really interested in Compilers and Operating Systems.
When I went for my first internship three years ago, the interviewer said I knew more about the things we talked about, than most other bona fide engineers they interviewed. The university-hired interns that sat next to me couldn't read the Erlang manual or documentation because it just didn't click with them, which while I can appreciate on some level that people have different sources of information that suit them best, it's still astonishing to me.
Consider that programmers started out as secretaries learning how to program the machine from the specification and the schematics given. A lot of the programmers I have met, probably wouldn't be able to cope with such a task, I include myself in that category.
I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.
Can you imagine a modern language like Swift or Rust being taught to the same level, in the same space as K&R? I can't!
> I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.
This is a common misconception. There were plenty of shit books then, too, you just won't find people remembering and recommending them. Whereas we haven't, collectively, discarded the shit books of today, yet.
I don't think that's quite the case. I think there are more books in the 2000s written about basically nothing. Look at the "For Dummies" series of books. They're accessible but the content they teach could be condensed into one or two blog posts with nothing lost except the material is easier to read in a single sitting and much easier to reference.
Those books are still quite useful today: I learned C from The C Programming Language, for example, and I’d still recommend it as the best book to read to learn the language (though a nice supplement that covers how modern compilers work would be useful to accompany it).
I started with MASM-style assembly, and transitioned to higher level languages when I got frustrated.
I think this angle has made a huge positive difference in my ability to reason about my work. I think if you start with high level languages, it's easy to ignore what you're actually doing.
Same here. The added benefit of there being a handful of really good resources to learn. The manual if my C64 pretty much taught me all the basics in a very approachable manner (I was 7 when I started).
Nowadays, there are so many resources (mostly low quality) that people waste too much time trying to decide or lesrning things wrong.
I had a similar experience with C64 and its User and Reference manuals at that age. I was thinking about that a couple of months back, and found that they're still out there as PDFs of the originals:
I think its pretty well known that you can work as a successful developer without a CS degree. However , as someone who is currently working through a masters in CS (after working in software the last decade), I would say that CS courses (some, not all) provide invaluable foundation that would be difficult to obtain (of course you can self study CS). Sure — you don’t need to know how the OS works to write a web app that rakes in cash . But there’s something beautiful about peeling back the layers of abstraction : you gain an appreciation of how things work underneath the hood.
You can "peel back the layers of abstraction" without a CS degree, all it takes is time and (admittedly rare) dedication. Webservers, operating systems and books on theoretical CS are all out there, you just have to be interested.
It's possible to learn most things through self-study. But the vast majority of people will only learn the parts that they find fun and interesting.
They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program.
For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by getting a CS degree.
I worked for years as a self taught professional developer before going back btw, and I've hired/interviewed many boot camp graduates, self taught programmers, and degree holders.
Like whatshisface said above, quality self-study is rare. As you point out, people will learn what is fun/interesting, but I will also add that they will just learn what they need to get whatever job done.
I have a friend who does webdev (mostly Wordpress, some Drupal) who did not have go through a CS program, though he took a few web dev classes in college. He goes good work, but he has a very loose grasp on fundamentals. He showed me a side project he was doing (a web based clicker game) and after looking at the code, I suggested he try adding some classes to reduce his code reuse. After explaining the basics (and some quick research on how classes work in Javascript), it kind of blew his mind. He never used classes before in his code because he just had no reference point.
We've all seen the utter messes that recent CS graduates have made with classes, unnecessary inheritance and over complicating problems, while being unable to do fundamentally basic logic, you must know the opposite problem is equally true.
CS majors who cannot program applying academic theory without understanding.
I'm old enough to remember graduates rolling their own sorting algos, or building classes 6 levels of inheritance deep. While simultaneously creating massive if/else nesting, with tons of duplicated code, unable to understand how to use basic ideas like functions and recursion, even though I'm sure they probably had a whole one lecture on the subject, mixed in with whole modules on pointless compiler lectures.
Because that's what their CS degree taught them.
How both CS graduates and non-graduates really learn is by seeing what other programmers do in the industry, or by making their own mistakes.
I agree on difficulty of self study by remembering my student days, simply I was asking the lecturer about why we have to study some of uninteresting CS topics. They were quite boring but really got their benefit in the long run.
No, you don't need a degree. All you need is a resolution to learn the things that you're missing. I covered C++ in all its hairy glory, assembly, SIMD, data structures and algorithms (implementing them, not just using them) and concurrent and lock free algorithms and data structures. Some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers. I might do them as an in depth blog post one day.
I went way beyond what any CS grad does, and it cost me nothing in money and less time than a CS degree. If you're motivated you can beat a university CS education - it's actually really not that high a bar.
I agree with you that most people won't do that. I was home schooled so I have a different attitude about learning than most people - and that's made all the difference. But is fundamentally a problem of motivation and goals, you don't need university for either.
> some of the data structures I created perform better than anything in the published literature - but I couldn't be bothered to write papers.
You can probably imagine why many people wouldn't believe you. "My work is amazing but I am too lazy to publish it" is a peak stereotype for self-educated people. My prior on this being ignorance rather than genius is super high. And if it is true that you are a once in a generation genius who could outpace the research community then your experience is completely useless for others, given that you'd be so much smarter than a typical person who is doing self-education and trying to get a job.
It's not really that hard. For example I made a queue that outperforms the lynx queue. My fundamental instinct after reading that paper was that there's no way faults out perform bounds checks in a modern, speculating out of order CPU. I ran some tests and yes my instinct is correct. Maybe the result wouldn't hold under peer review for some reason, I just tested a few more ideas / criticisms with a colleague and moved on. I don't personally benefit from trying to publish the result and I have enough demands on my time.
I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those. It's true I'm well above average though, so perhaps my experiences don't generalize. I don't believe that though. I still think it's motivation and goals that count.
Haha, well I'm not sure I can honestly deny an accusation of being a genius, at the same time I'm not sure I can affirm it either - and just to talk about it seems to imply a lack of humility. Irrespective, there are lots of kinds of intelligence and I'm blessed with some of the less useful forms of it that happen to test well.
So, in reality, you have no idea if your idea is truly better and it looks like you just ran some specific test cases and assumed it applied.
Still paper worthy, but far from thinking that you made anything better than published literature.
And the goal isn't to "personally benefit" it's to know that your ideas survive scrutiny and contribute something meaningful to the world.
You're making a lot of assumptions there about which your mistaken. I don't need to defend myself here. If that's what you want to believe, that's fine.
The only assumptions I'm making is what you explicitly stated. And the cardinal rule is, what's stated without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Either way, if you don't want to defend yourself. That's fine.
Because you've claimed that you made substantial strides in algorithms that nobody else has supposedly done. Why not get a free PhD out of the deal? If anything, you can show it to a professor and they should be able to recognize it. After all, you could be advancing the field directly.
Honestly, if you think writing a two to three page paper is "a lot of effort", I doubt you've done what you've claimed.
You overestimate the value of a paper. It's worth approximately $0. But would cost maybe a week of time or about $6000 if you only count what I can sell my time for. Terrible deal.
Yet your ideas could get you millions in publicity, fame, etc. to spend literally one week to advance the field.
The fact that you actually argue against this is laughable, not to mention incredibly selfish.
What makes you think the idea is significant enough to get “millions in publicity”, etc.?
He’s not claiming he invented cold fusion, just something that would be an iterative step in improving the state of the art, probably worth one paper in a decent but not super prestigious journal. Where do you get the idea that it’s worth a free Ph.D, fame and fortune, and all that?
Because I’m aware enough of the CS world that I just know that an iterative improvement in an obscure data structure is not enough to become rich and famous.
This. It's an iterative improvement on a data structure that in reality isn't useful as used on benchmarks and the benchmark performance is a totally artificial environment with little practical significance. It warrants a blog post more than a paper. Nobody is going to get rich or famous off of it. If someone wants to write it up as a blog post, I'll give them the code.
Why do you assume it is an iterative improvement? You can get a free PhD for a lot less. You can get rich and famous for a lot less. You don't have to make cold fusion viable.
This is absolutely true, however in reality (= in practice) very few non-CS degree devs _will_ reach the same level of knowledge.
When you have to learn all that stuff to get your degree, then you just have to learn it. Period. Also people who are full time students have more time to spend on these topics, but when you are actually working 8h+ per day and your career is mostly around JS frameworks it becomes much harder to invest time into these things.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd say it applies for most.
I don't disagree with you, but I don't completely agree with your implications either. From my experience, most people with a CS degree will not attain that level as well. Even at the masters level, a number of people will not understand. It's sad. I really feel this is a failure of universities not forcing students to learn, but I know there are a number of politics etc that factor into how hard they can make courses, and what they can teach.
There's a difference between learning specifics, and learning habits of thought.
The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research.
Both of those are excellent training for at least some aspects of being developer.
But that doesn't mean the details are inherently useful. There are very few situations where you will be expected to write a compiler. So in that sense compiler theory itself is optional - far less useful than the experience of having to handle a complex set of data structures and relationships, which could in theory come from other kinds of projects.
Academic CS also tends to miss out a lot of useful practical skills. It won't teach you much about management (from either side), salary negotiations, office politics and co-worker relationships, or business theory.
It may not even teach you how to write good clean code that's easy to read and maintain.
So IMO the ideal CS degree doesn't exist. The ideal degree would be a good mix of theory with plenty of industry practice - possibly with some standardised requirements that would lead to a Chartered Developer qualification that was better at guaranteeing a working blend of practical skill, theoretical understanding, and analytical talent than current degrees seem to be.
>The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to
work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research.
I agree that should be the case, and sadly enough, I've seen a number of people graduate college with degrees in CS and not have that. There have been a number of times when I'd mention some non-esoteric concept that should have been covered and the response is something like "huh"? I'm not talking about things like "Oh you don't understand how to implement Redux?", it's more things like "Ok, you need to compute the intersection of these two arrays." You are right, they probably have been exposed to these concepts, but they have no idea how to actually do it. More importantly, they grasp so little, they didn't even know where to start. The saddest one I saw was a student that was wicked smart, and the school didn't challenge him enough to struggle through any projects. When he came to intern, he was lost, because he'd never been actually challenged. (He was from a major public university too.)
Don't get me wrong, I disagree, there are a number of great CS programs from both public and private universities, and actually the good ones are exactly like you mention (both theoretical and practical application), but there are a lot that aren't.
There's a huge difference between taking the easiest path through a degree (mostly Cs, the easiest electives you can take etc...), and someone who pushed themselves while in college. That's why if the degree is a big part of someone's resume, I ask for a transcript.
Theoretical and CS fundamentals has never been an issue for me (no degree), because I find them interesting. Probably more interesting than most of my coworkers. I think you'll find this is the case for many people who end up in this industry out of passion rather than educational path. A year unemployed during the .com crash gave me lots of time to work on open source hobby projects, where I wrote my own virtual machine, compiler, etc. That was fun. Wish I could afford to do that again.
Honestly, what I find I'm missing is mostly class status and a piece of paper.
I'm at a point where I don't want to do (web) app development anymore and want to switch to something more interesting (to me)so I'm not stuck doing something I hate for the next x decades. Unfortunately, it seems that what I want to get into (low level embedded stuff, firmware development, etc) seem almost neccessary to have a degree (or even a Masters or PhD). I assume this isn't mostly because of the level of EE knowledge required. Unfortunately going back to school is out of reach now
It actually is because of the theory required. If you go low enough, more happens in your head and less in your tooling. It's why there are low-level and high-level languages.
The lower you go, the more you need to know (and do) yourself. That is where CS degrees do help, because without the benefit of layered architectures of shared libraries, systems and code in general you need to know what those layers did in order to know how to do the work without them. That said, low-level doesn't always mean the same thing. Some people think writing software in C is low-level, but when I think low-level I mostly think of assembly on bare metal with no OS or anything like that.
I have coworkers doing that without a degree. They did however show up with experience.
Personal projects will do. You could work on Open Source software. Obvious choices: qemu, valgrind, FreeRTOS, RTEMS, Linux (kernel), SeaBIOS, gcc, clang, ghidra, binutils, MAME, OpenOCD, gdb, dosemu, dosbox, FreeDOS, Wine, SDCC, dolphin-emu, Xenia, coreboot
Your comment goes to the heart of the debate: does understanding what’s going on behind the scene of your tools help you become better at using them? I think for the vast majority of jobs it does not, but for a few it absolutely does.
For me, understanding how a compiler and cpu/RAM works and is put into machine code and later on a programming language means that I fully understand what programming is.
It allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice.
This again gives me a good feeling of whether something will be easy/quick to learn.
If so, though, then a CS degree in general is sort of pointless, isn’t it? But if you can say that about a CS degree, what degree could you really not say it about? I suppose a medical degree is “meaningful” in the sense that you can’t get access to bodies to dissect without attending medical school, but if a CS degree is a waste of time, then pretty much every degree is a waste of time.
It seems like you’re saying it’s nice to know the layers of abstraction but it sounds like you don’t use it in real life.
As a non CS degree developer I can’t really see anything that I’m missing because of not having the degree. I have a successful business, get hired for freelance jobs for a good salary, can build anything I want, ...
Would love to know what one would get out of having the degree versus self study.
The original comment is about engineering competence and having the comprehensive understanding of subject, which is not just limited to running business and getting monthly paycheck to pay the bills.
Some benefits that it will give you:
- It will actually let you move into different positions within tech/it industry when you have wider/deeper understanding of how things works.
- As someone said already in this thread: "allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice."
- You'll be better at your job. Maybe not every day you need to know what's happening under the hood, but there are and there will be days when you need to. Even if you only developed JS frontend apps whole your career.
When you actually say "I can build anything I want", then (although I don't know you) I'm pretty sure that you can't. People who get that deeper understanding of things also understand how complex some things are and how complex some things can get.
Self-study verses earning a degree is a red herring. While there are some advantages to studying in an institution, the degree is simply there to tell others that you have studied a particular curriculum. My only concern with self-study is that a lot of resources are the educational equivalent of get-rich-quick schemes, but that says more about the people who create those resources than the learners themselves.
As for knowing the theoretical basis of computer science, that will have value in some parts of industry and very little value in other parts of industry. While someone in your position may have a high degree of success working in the upper layers of abstraction, someone has to develop, advance, and maintain the lower levels of abstraction that you depend upon. None of that is meant to say that you need that theoretical knowledge to be successful, rather it is important for some people to have that theoretical knowledge to ensure the success of the industry.
Engineers with degrees work for the contractors. They minimize materials and cost. The result doesn't always remain standing, even without an earthquake:
If you had a CS degree, you'd know you can't build anything you want cough halting problem cough.
I'm surprised this got down voted since it's 100% true.
I completely agree, Hackernews has really helped me personally. Tons of interesting articles over the years on LLVM or the inner machinations of garbage collections. Picking the brains of clever CS friends also helps a lot too!
I work with a twenty-something year old right now. He graduated from high school. Had his own non-tech company for a while after high school. Decided he wanted to go into coding. One of the best damn coders I've worked with in 25 years. Gives the toughest, most consistent code reviews. He's the type of programmer you can build a startup around.
In another comment a few days ago, I mentioned a 10x engineer I knew. Graduated from high school. Went into the military. Came out and coded. He is the best coder I've worked with.
College education is not necessary to be a successful programmer. You do need to have some predisposition to coding, but you definitely don't need a degree.
That doesn't matter. If there's one thing my years in this career has taught me, it's that the client(s) don't GAF what language or framework or system you used to solve their problem(s).
What they care about is if you have given them a solution that solves their problem(s). They don't care how you got there. They don't care what technology you used. Just as long as you solved the problem(s) they were having, and that you did it in the time/budget allotment for the job.
That said, as the solution provider you should have found out both their current use cases and potential future use cases, in order to select the tools you'll need for the immediate solution, and ideally for any updates or improvements that may be needed later on.
Because they will care, for instance, if the code you wrote was in a language that won't allow them to scale up quickly and easily (assuming you wrote the rest of the system to allow for this of course), or has some other kind of issue that prevents the client from moving forward with a change.
The last thing a client wants to hear is "complete rewrite using different language/framework/system" just to implement an extension or upgrade path (the best you can usually get by with is a refactor of the existing code base - but you better have a damn good reason and plan for that refactor).
You said a lot of words and assumed a hell of a lot of things that were not contained in my question.
I simply asked a simple question out of curiosity, JFC. Does curiosity matter?
For the record, all code is ephemeral so since you're going to end up throwing it away anyway one day, it doesn't fucking matter what language you start with. Pretty much any language can back-end an API until a certain (large) number of users. #ProblemsWe'dLikeToHave
Twitter threw away Ruby and went to Scala; Facebook is slowly replacing PHP with... whatever, pretty much anything is superior to PHP; plenty of other companies have had to do partial or full rewrites of core functionality on a new stack. Paul Graham himself had his Lisp code tossed in a rewrite.
While the evidence provided is anecdotal (that is to say: outliers exist in successfully learning anything outside of a formal education), there are languages designed to be more friendly and more fun for newcomers (Ruby, for example) while others are designed to be translate more directly to the instructions a machine might execute. More anecdotal evidence indicating that one language might facilitate informal learning better might be interesting or helpful.
I'm an engineer. No CS degree. I coded for fun on various side projects from 2006-2012. I didn't consider myself very good.
I worked at a couple startups from 2012-2013. During that time, I became very proficient in Coffeescript and a couple popular frontend frameworks. I was very productive in terms of pumping out lines of code (that somehow resulted in a working product).
However, I didn't know how to write a for loop. If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about asking me how setTimeout has to do with the call stack.
The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.
In 2013, I began to realize my (glaring) deficiencies as a programmer. That was the point when I started spending all my free time doing online CS courses. They helped a lot with filling in the knowledge gaps that I didn't even know I had.
The main reason I'm posting this is to give a shoutout to Project Euler.
Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net/) is an amazing way to test yourself (and learn) CS concepts. If you've done a coding bootcamp and want to do a "gut check" to see how much you learned (or how much you have left to learn), I'd highly recommend Project Euler.
(I'm happy to say that in 2019, I can write for loops all day long...)
> The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you
This is absolutely key. One of the main advantages of a solid undergraduate curriculum is that it forces you to work your way through things that are important, but don't interest you as much. And this path is designed and supported by people with a much better broad view of the field than you have.
Now, you'll still always gain knowledge faster in the areas that interest you most, but if you only indulge this approach you will have significant gaps.
One thing I always recommend to people self-studying (when they ask) is to find someone you trust who really knows the area and ask them for recommended courses/books. Then follow that advice.
To some degree MOOCs etc. try and do this for you by designing course progressions, but there are limitations and constraints there that can have you spinning your wheel.
Being disciplined about both breadth and depth in a new subject is difficult. One of the underlying themes of a post-graduate degree, particularly a PhD, is to give you tools to do this for yourself repeatedly. It's not impossible to gain these skills properly with little or no formal education, but it is quite difficult.
Another way of putting this: a primary function of a curriculum - university or otherwise - is to convert unknown unknowns (things you don't know exist) into known unknowns (things you are aware of but not fully versed in) and known knowns (things you fully grok). This is why we shouldn't replace college with nothing: this is an important function.
Self-study isn't exactly nothing. I do find that there are a lot of people, especially web developers, who don't understand a lot of the basics, or even the language they're using.
I got into development from doing design work, also self taught back in the 90's. I wanted to do something... spent a very rapid weekend learning JS from a very large book, then applied what I needed the next monday. Spent the next weekend finishing that book and the next month swallowing three other large books on the subject (two more on JS, one on HTML). From there was VB5 then Access & VBA... then I started working as a developer. From there I learned more about databases and data structures, dabbled in C/C++ then circled around to VB6 when it came out. From there around the end of 2001 (after 9/11) I was unemployed and no jobs to be found. While crashing at a friend's house I learned C# with the command line compiler and another large book (didn't have VS). Since then more databases and db types, more C# and when it came out Node.js (had done a lot of classic ASP in JS along the way too).
I spent about 5 years working in eLearning, writing simulations of systems for learning/training as well as courseware. Really enjoyed that time in my life as I was constantly taking in domain knowledge as well as a very varied environment. Unfortunately after a while all the context switching and constant intake took a toll and I took a few more boring jobs doing corporate/banking work.
In any case, you'd be surprised how much you can learn without a formal education, or anything really structured at all. To this day I tend to take in new stuff rapidly and get bored once I've figured out the hard parts. Currently working on learning Rust and Kubernetes, short break on rust as the async syntax gets implemented and settles in.
I think my statement was too strong; I definetely don't mean to suggest that nobody who has never followed a curriculum of any sort can ever be successful. What I mean is that in general, as a policy, it is useful to have some curriculum to shed light on the unknown unknowns.
But to respond to "self-study isn't nothing": that's true, but your self study didn't replace college, it replaced self study. What I mean is that everyone has to do that self study and job training targeted at the specific stuff they're doing. Self study is necessary to expand "known knowns" in targeted areas, which is really necessary. It's just not as good at illuminating "unknown unknowns" as a curriculum put together by a person or group of people who know the breadth and history of a field.
I think it depends on the person and the experience. It's easy to say that a particular course was helpful, because it often is. But what's the opportunity cost? What other things didn't you learn because of all that time learning about, say, OS schedulers?
Also, it assumes that you have access to a very high quality education. In lots of cases, the teaching might be mediocre (perhaps even at elite universities that care more about research grants than education).
There's a lot of value in having a standardized base of knowledge, where you learn all the things that a practicing engineer should know. But in reality, the sum of things you "should" do takes more than a lifetime. And you have to find some ways to differentiate your knowledge and expertise if you want to innovate.
Yes, nothing is perfect. But in general, it is hard to be a good guide to yourself in a new area. You can do it, but it is a skill that needs to be developed and most people don't have it (or rather, they typically have the depth-first part but not the breadth-first part, if that makes sense).
I wasn't even talking about the course quality (which as you note, is very variable) but about the curriculum.
One thing you can do as an individual teaching yourself CS, say, is to try and follow the curriculum of a known good CS program. There are issues with this, too, but at least you are getting some guidance.
The opportunity cost issue is a good point. One problem with following undergrad programs, say, is that only part of what they are doing is teaching you material, the other part is learning-how-to-learn stuff. If you are an independent learner of sufficient skill, some courses will be way too slow for you.
It would be optimal in some sense to have high level "key concept" material that you can survey efficiently and then decide when and where you need to dig deeper. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, because if you are insufficiently skilled you will do poorly at the second part...
As mentioned in another comment for this post, Cracking the Code Interview is probably a good place to start in terms of reviewing some key concepts, assuming you don't have a CS degree and are largely self taught.
Of course given the libraries and systems already available, you don't practically need a lot of this knowledge, but it does help. When certain portions of an application just don't perform well, or when you hit really weird side effects of race conditions on static properties etc. I think it's also important to know the language and tools that you are working with as well as possible. It's not always possible to know everything, but you should probably read and complete at least one book on the language you are using. You can hack away in any given language for years. But until you've actually read cover to cover on a comprehensive book, you won't necessarily understand some concepts, or better still you will learn how the language does something for you, that you've been doing the hard way.
I've been really involved in teaching people with non-traditional backgrounds (e.g. no cs degree) to program lately, and this has been my biggest struggle. There are people who are working in the field as a web dev and have been for years and can't do simple stuff like iterate. They have no understanding of what the stuff they're actually doing means or does. It's just copy and pasting snippets they see online and fiddling with it til it works.
I've taken to offering three pieces of advice to these people:
1) Go through the basic language tutorial of whatever language you use (e.g. how to declare variable, conditionals, loops)
2) Go read through the essentials guide to your languages (will be slightly higher level stuff)
3) Go read the sections on Data Structures, Concepts and Algorithms and Knowledge Base in Cracking The Coding Interview skipping the problems that aren't answered in chapter. Why? Because it's a solid primer for CS Concepts that people just don't pick up unless they have to, and most importantly short enough (< 100 pages) people will actually go through it. Large CS books with the dense writing intimidate people and so they never follow through.
I've had a lot of success with this method. It's not a formal cs education by any means but I've found it's enough to get people past the constant beginner part.
It is funny that people constantly mention these supposed developers who have jobs but cant program. Where are these jobs? I have a recent cs degree, did resume coaching, and worked through a couple coding interview exercise books. Still having trouble finding work. Show me one of these mythical jobs poorly trained programmers get, I will blow them out of the water. In reality I think most of those jobs have been outsourced and no longer exist.
Apply for bank outside of a tech hub, or any job outside of the major US cities. There's plenty of positions full of people riding the "expert beginner" status, blissfully unaware of how far behind they are because top performers leave for the hubs and the better opportunities offered there.
Boring corporation jobs are fantastic in these cases. The performance bar is low, and due to inertia within the org, you can usually learn faster as an IC and bounce somewhere better rapidly, versus being somewhere like a startup where the treadmill moves too fast for your own personal development needs.
Sounds like he’s talking about defense contractors. Many contracting firms just need “butts in seats” that they can bill out. Mediocre developers are better in some regards there: they bill out more hours since they’re slower, don’t mind 10+ year obsolete tech, and they don’t complain as much, which could endanger relations with the bureaucracy (customer.)
Often "approved" by people who have very little idea about what they actually need in a hire. And even they're measured on how well they can keep things staffed and they're often requesting requirements for roles that are unreasonable or downright ridiculous at the pay rates they expect. So they end up with people who are good at formally ticking the right boxes, but have no Godly idea about how to enable the mission or be aware of the broader purpose behind the tasks set out for them.
It depends heavily on your COR and government leads, but the good ones are few enough that they don't get to send the norm. There are enough people who are sufficiently checked out that contracting/staffing firms can get away with murder. Indeed, it might just be impossible for them to do a good job based on what sorts of requirements they're expected to adhere to.
I worked at a defense contractor for years. Some of the guys I knew could barely program, despite years of experience, but looked good on paper. Approving them individually doesn't mean that they're not a "butt in seat" kinda person.
It's always a real shock to get an elite CS degree and then be told we aren't as smart as the people who got their job because they were friends with someone at the company and just happened to know Java.
> However, I didn't know how to write a for loop.
> If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I
> wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about
> asking me how setTimeout has to do with
> the call stack.
I'm self taught, I started with the C64 in the early 80s. By the time I was 15 I was working in assembly, had an excellent knowledge of what we would now call embedded software development and a working knowledge of algorithms.
I'm glad that you took the step to get a proper education. With the modern internet it's extremely easier and the quality is incomparably better than my experience of the UK educational system. Between Coursera, MIT and the vast number of excellent books it's a dream.
It's an eye-opener to me that someone can be self-taught and not understand something as basic as loops. It has been my experience hiring developers that the self-taught type are considerably stronger than those who are purely college educated. I've also noticed that the self-taught type who consider themselves software engineers all went through a two year period of intense studying of computer science and software engineering in their own time. The combination of a real working understanding of software creation with passion is an extremely strong combination.
What I've noticed is that your type don't get scared of technical changes because you're basically able to learn anything. The "college career" type tend to scare easily and also jump into management the second they get a sniff of it.
All of this said, if I was 18 now I would strongly advise myself to do 3/4 STEM A-levels (Math, Physics and something else) and then go study Computer Science at a university which has a good program. By good program - one where I'd write a compiler from scratch, learn the theory (finite automata etc), machine learning, linear algebra and hopefully something fun like building a 3d engine or game engine or something. You can do it all yourself but a three-year program certainly makes life a lot easier, plus you get to make friends and network. AND you have a nice piece of paper.
I'm self-taught since age 16. I've been able to write a for- loop since age 16. Maybe it helps that I'm self taught in a pre-google, pre-stackoverflow world. Any beginning programming book will teach for-loops.
I do have gaps in my knowledge but if I lose internet access I can still be productive. I mostly google for how to optimize when some API is slow or remind myself some method name.
I just wanted to pipe up because the top comment is "I couldn't write a for-loop" and I don't want all of us who are self taught being lobbed into that category.
At my last job I regularly had to help colleagues (some who held degrees) solve issues. Strangely they had trouble starting from scratch on something new vs maintaining old code. They found the latter easier. They also sometimes chose the wrong data structures (e.g. looping through an array every time you want an item with id=x instead of just using a hashtable)
> (e.g. looping through an array every time you want an item with id=x instead of just using a hashtable)
Huh, I had almost the exact same experience with senior devs here - they were checking if elements were in a (huge) list in nested loops, instead of using a set. Switching brought the runtime from around 2 hours to 2 minutes.
> The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.
Which is not necessarily a bad (for whatever definition of bad) thing.
For the startups you worked at, your ability to write code was far more valuable than your understanding of underlying CS concepts.
Kudos to you for having the maturity to acknowledge the gaps in your education and to address them in a manner that complements your life.
> The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.
I think this is the case even if you receive a formal CS education. I picked the most difficult or interesting classes and got As in them, and barely passed everything else in order to graduate in 4 years. Many students avoided the hard professors to protect their GPA, so it was really easy to register for them since 25% of students might drop the class.
Probably the most important thing a formal CS education does is expose you to CS fundamentals, but in my experience you end up having to be self-taught in a university setting anyway. Most of the professors I had were more interested in research than in lecturing - many lectures were completely incomprehensible. And even with amazing lecturers, I would still have to spend hundreds of hours reading and practicing on my own.
One of those classes I barely passed was algorithms, since my other workload was too great. I eventually had to self-study this subject years later to pass the tech interview torture chamber.
College was mostly an exercise in self-learning or learning how to learn for me - something I am still reaping the benefits of today.
I'm a self-taught developer with haskell in my arsenal, although that being said I have an MSc in theoretical physics which probably helps me appreciate the power of its paradigm.
You are sure he was never at a university? And why are you drawn to Haskell?
For me I only had to deal with it a bit at university and I found the concept interesting, but could not imagine non math people to use it for anything as a language of choice
And I think imperative languages are way more easy and clear to read and write.
I allways imagined that you have to be a math nerd to prefer Haskell, but apparently this guy is not a math guy, but loves Haskell .. so ok, good counterpoint.
> And I think imperative languages are way more easy and clear to read and write.
Because it's what you've had exposure to. Perhaps, they're even objectively easier to read and write, I don't know. It's also completely besides my point.
My point was that I want my programs to work as desired. That's orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write. I don't want runtime exceptions where I could've gotten a compile-time error.
But I had exposure to math functions much earlier. And I never liked their syntax. I did understood the math, but the math language made it harder for me.
And null pointer exceptions? They only happen to me very rarely, when I quickly hack something together and then it is a "oh forgot - and fixed" problem. The problems I do struggle with are non reproducable race condition fun etc. and I doubt haskell could help me with them.
Or I struggle, because I do not really understand my problem, or a certain libary ... or, because I misunderstood existing code.
So how on earth are correct programms orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write them?!? Did you ever had to use someone else code?
Or your own that you wrote 5 years ago (or sometimes 5 days)?
With any bigger project it is all about how easy it is to read and write them.
> And null pointer exceptions? They only happen to me very rarely, when I quickly hack something together and then it is a "oh forgot - and fixed" problem.
And you never run into NPEs in production? It's something you always discover during development? How?
> The problems I do struggle with are non reproducable race condition fun etc. and I doubt haskell could help me with them.
In a pure system, thread race conditions are impossible. You can still get race conditions for your external effects, which is unavoidable.
The parent said they didn't know what for-in was, which implies they were using a language like C for their side projects which only has for (i=0;i<n;i++) loops.
My CS degree (2002-2006) did not explicitly cover "for x in y" iterators. But it did cover an understanding of algorithms and data structures well enough that I could implement one.
That was probably before they were really in style e.g. C# didn't add foreach / iterators until ~2005 with v2.0 and your curriculum probably lags a bit behind the industry state-of-the-art unless it was Ivy league
It has not been very long since CS degrees were taught entirely in C89 or C++98, and there are a lot of us who won't touch Python or Java unless forced to.
exactly - I had a similar learning curve (and no CS degree) where I could never remember what certain methods did but I knew exactly what to google for the answer
Is Project Euler better than LeetCode for "gut checking"?
I've probably done 300 or so LC, and do some every week, mostly as an insurance policy for technical interviews if I ever opportunistically interviewed in a short time frame.
They're geared towards different goals. LC is for interviews: solving small scale problems of the scale you might get asked in an interview or come up against every day in a software job. PE is more of about curiosity and personal intellectual development. It asks something that you might never have heard about and might never see again but is often very interesting, and will stretch your ability to develop your own algorithms or to apply learnt methods to unfamiliar scenarios.
I'd recommend LC to someone who has an interview in a month, PE to someone who has one in a year.
Speaking of LeetCode, don't overlook the discussions for each problem. I think a lot of people just solve the problem, and then move on to another problem.
In the discussions many people post their solutions, and those often have bugs in obscure cases that the LeetCode grader doesn't hit. Another common thing is for the posted solutions to always give the correct answer, but miss the time or space constraints that the problem statement asked for.
I've found that reviewing those other solutions to find those issues to be quite instructive. Also, there will sometimes be a solution in there that is better than mine, which is also instructive.
This is interesting, but I don't think it's the norm for self-taught devs to not recognize a for..in. I would find that surprising. (I'm also a self-taught developer, and now I work at a larger corporation.)
Right on! Plenty of people can teach themselves to code without a university education. But the degree gives you a broad exposure to parts of CS that you may never explore as a self-taught developer. And it gives employers confidence that you have the skillset to handle whatever they throw at you.
> And it gives employers confidence that you have the skillset to handle whatever they throw at you.
Blindly having confidence in someone with a degree vs. someone with no degree is a bad mistake in this industry, IMO, sadly it happens.
It really comes down to the person, self taught or not, if you don’t pursue continuing education (which is a must in this industry) whatever CS knowledge you learnt with your degree will only take you so far.
Also said “broad exposure” can be well… self taught as well, algorithms, data structures, OS, etc… all things you can learn and "master" with no CS degree.
With all that said, I do agree CS education is essential to become a better developer. As a self thought myself, learning CS has made me a way better developer for sure, and I would advise all self taught devs to do the same, it will pay off immensely and best of all no student loan to repay.
I think you’re missing the point your parent was making...
In a good CS program you will be presented a series of challenges below your “depth”....
“wait, you want me to WRITE a data structure? I usually just use a good one from a library”
“wait, you want me to fix a compiler? I have only ever run a compiler”
“wait, you want me to write code that CREATES processes out of nothing? I am used to letting the OS create processes”
... etc. These provide you a series of epiphanies, “wow, I can build a compiler from scratch, that means I could fux with LLVM if I had to”.
Ideally, these programs are designed to take you all the way down to the bottom of the machine. For some students, the end result is confidence in their ability to “dive in” to a problem anywhere in the system.
If your point is that you can teach yourself that outside of school—absolutely. But... well, in my case I doubt I ever would have. It wasn’t fun, I was pushed to do things I would never have followed through on if I was just casually teaching myself about programming languages or operating systems.
And if your point is that students can get away without learning the material—well, also yes. Of course.
But you are wrong to dismiss the idea that a CS degree is just another few things to learn. This business of “get all the way down to the bottom and challenge yourself at every step” is kind of the whole point of a CS degree, and the world outside is not going to encourage you to do it the way your profs will.
I have seen plenty of CS grads that can barely code or put together a real solution to a problem. There is no guarantee just because someone was able to muddle through a CS degree that they can do these things. In almost all cases, you really need to evaluate whether an individual shows the aptitude to solve your problems you need solved and crank out good well thought out practical solutions that fit the scale of the business problem. The degree paper is not all that important. I would give bonus points to a candidate if they came from an accomplished but different background than CS that shows they are capable of success/mastery in multiple areas, they are adept at learning and researching new material, and they have the matching technical prowess to spearhead a real project. For instance I have known many engineering (of the physical paradigm) types that are self-taught with no CS degree that I would trust to tackle a project over any random CS degree candidate.
Self taught, I remember loops were the last thing I learnt as a kid when I was working on my own Tibia servers using Lua. I remember the day it finally clicked. It helped having a forum where you could ask more experienced people to explain it plainly.
Self taught from ages 9-18, Qbasic -> C -> C++ -> PHP
I did go to college and learned Java and UML and a few other esoteric things - until I got into my data structures classes. If a self-taught software engineer feels like something is missing, take a few data structures classes. That helps a lot.
But yeah, self taught can take you pretty much anywhere unless the job reqs prevent it.
Nice to see that reference about projecteuler. Although I study Computer Engineering, which is very close to Computer Science with Electrical Engineer grade, I really focus too much in the subjects which interests me.
BTW, I reforce a lot of aspects about analysis, optimization and programming with ProjectEuler by doing Polyglot programming with some friends: https://github.com/DestructHub/ProjectEuler
i agree. i'm happy to have some CS students point me to some areas which are useful even if they are not interesting for hobbyists. There's also a lot of value in learning academic methods of investigation and research (if you are at a good university). A lot of self-taught learn a lot about computers or some programming languages, but a CS degree like any degree also teaches a lot of other valuable competences which can be hard to come by from own inspiration / initiative.
Another thing is that following and completing a degree is a practice in going from start to finnish in a multi-year project which the degree is, which is also very valuable in life in general. being able to see fruits in the distant future of your current work, and having that motivate and drive you.
A lot of people i meet who are self-taught will give up more easily due to this. not that they are quitters, but they tend to lean towards their interests, which is not always in their best interest :)
Formal bs/ms ee here as well. Started off wanting to do hardware and looked at programming as an afterthought. After a few years of working in embedded and realizing how many gaps there are in my knowledge, and how beautiful the field is, considering a doctorate in CS.
I think a lot of people learn a given language by hacking away at something they either want to create of modify. For example, in web development, I'd say most developers haven't ever read a cover to cover book on JavaScript.
I've tended to take the opposite approach, read first so I can at least grasp what I need to look for, then start applying. This of course is a mixed bag for rapidly changing/evolving tech and newer languages.
I take the same approach you do. When mentoring new developers I also start them off by assigning them tasks to read the docs for the core of the language we are working with.
There's clearly strong feelings in this thread. Whether or not a degree is necessary, I think we can say there's two groups:
- People who went to university, going through significant effort for their degree, and want to defend that choice
- People who _didnt_ go to school, perhaps suffering from a touch of imposter syndrome, who want to hide their insecurity
I'm a 20yr old "self-taught" dev. I'm considering going back to school this year. But its a tough choice. Things are going very well for me in the professional world so far. I was in a CS undergrad program for a year but didn't feel like I was learning as well as I was on my own, to be honest.
What I think I can say with confidence is theres not much point in arguing about this. If you want to go then go. If not, don't. Why do we have to prescribe a gospel on this? Let people decide what they want to do. Part of why "self-taught" devs like myself often suffer from insecurity is people shouting the absolute necessity of a degree. I don't see it.
I went to school for CS after 10 years as a self-taught profession dev. The main value I derived from it was the experience. Specifically, learning how to meet new people. Being a shy person by nature, I forced myself to make two new friends in every class, and it worked really, really well and it's something that I probably could not replicate outside of a similar environment.
Additionally, I legitimately enjoyed the coursework and learning about high(ish)-level math, art, and engineering that I may otherwise not have. It also gave me free time to pursue fitness and personal projects.
I'm probably not a better programmer as a result. And I'm probably not wealthier either, as I failed to leverage my degree into a position in Big Tech, though as a middling developer, it does make it easier to find jobs. But I do think I'm a better, happier, healthier person, and I would do it again.
The parent is exactly how I feel about my degree also. I didn't go back to school, I went to uni right on the "normal" schedule.
The discussion today seems to be all about the logic of it (how will you know what's in a uni degree unless you go?) That was the logic that convinced me to go. It wasn't until I graduated that I could say, with confidence, none of the classes contained anything I didn't already know.
(Yes, yes, including the theory classes.)
But the parent is exactly right: going to uni is a complex decision with multiple independent axes to evaluate: will you make more money over your lifetime (probably not)? Will you get that job you want (probably not, it's more down to people skills)? What will you do with your spare time while in uni (you will have some spare time)? What will you do with the opportunities to meet people?
Then there's what uni you want to attend. How you plan to pay for it. Whether you want to live in a dorm, live with your parents, or go online.
It's always like this when it comes up, which is fairly often here, and I think you're right to point this out. It's an emotionally loaded topic, which means it's a hard one to actually get useful data from.
I think there's a couple of things going on here:
The path someone takes to get where they are is a huge part of their identity. So when they look back on their own history, they want to feel that that path is a good, valuable one because it implies that they are valuable people. So everyone who doesn't have a degree has an incentive to feel it's not important. Likewise, everyone who has a degree wants to feel it is.
The thing is, they're both right. There are many many paths and almost all of them are worthwhile human experiences. Many of them even lead to being a good software engineer. (And of those that don't, they still often lead to being a valuable human in other, often more important ways.)
But the reason it's useful to write about this stuff is for people that are looking ahead and trying to choose a path. Those people want to know the odds of each path and how likely it is to work out for them. Unfortunately, a long list of anecdotes is really hard to synthesize into that. It's like trying to figure out where to eat dinner when every single restaurant review is five stars.
I don't have good data either, but if you're trying to pick your path, I would think about your personality and how that's likely to interact with your choice:
Not going to school gives you more freedom to explore your interests and choose a unique, idiosyncratic path. If you are driven and focused, you can get farther down a road than most others will because you have the freedom to focus on areas where you are passionate. If you want to stand out, it's easier to do so this way.
At the same time, if you aren't self-directed and passionate, you can end up meandering and going nowhere. No one will tell you what to do and it's easy to end up doing nothing, or just dabbling a little in a million things. All of the onus to create structure and discipline is on you.
School will give you a structured environment to learn in. It gives you a curriculum crafted by experts so you will be introduced to topics in a reasonable order and you'll be shown things you might not have realized are important. You'll also absorb much of the culture and tribal knowledge of the field. However, this is skewed towards academia, and if your goal is ultimately industry, this may not be pure win.
Personally, I think going to school is generally a good, safe bet. You'll learn a lot, have a good experience, and meet a lot of people. You'll take a bunch of non-CS classes that will round you out as a human. Even though I dropped out, I got a ton out of my limited college experience, mostly not related to programming.
Not getting a degree is a higher variance path. You may blaze a trail and end up somewhere exciting and unique. You could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Or you could end up flipping burgers, or underpaid because you're at a company that values degrees.
Not going to school gives you more freedom to explore your interests and choose a unique, idiosyncratic path. If you are driven and focused, you can get farther down a road than most others will because you have the freedom to focus on areas where you are passionate.
This is me, but I know this is not for everyone. I would advise going to school to make it easier in the long run.
Passion for your work and the focus to pursue it is very important to get somewhere.
If school worked like it does today, 20 years ago, then maybe I could've finished it.
I'm learning to code at the moment (Python this summer after learning the basics.)
I kept talking to developers online to find out about their backgrounds as I don't have a CS degree. I figured as I was already asking people how they learned to code I might as well write up some proper interviews and share them with other people. This way I can scratch my own itch and stay motivated as well as sharing motivation with other people.
You can check out my traffic/revenue at my open page which I have started from day one instead of waiting until big numbers www.nocsdegree.com/open
Thanks for this. I began programming when I was 8 on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K from books I liberated from my Mom back in 1983. I grew up as the internet was just becoming a thing, communicating with other would be developers and hackers on IRC channels. I still haven't lost the bug. I'd like to say my CS degree studies were useful, but they were hopelessly inadequate and so constrained and tedious as to kill any further interest in formal education. I ended up dropping out and continued to learn informally and build a successful career over the next 23 years.
It's inspiring to read about developers who are also informally educated. It brings a sense that people like us are more common than we think and that we're really not alone. They're also finding great success despite the prevailing wisdom that you can't make it without a degree. People like that are proof that you can.
Well, I started on ZX-80 at school then did a CS degree which I didn't really get at first so I struggled in the first year - but in subsequent years I came to really enjoy the more abstract and maths oriented parts of the course.
I don't know where the idea that a CS course is a good practical training for a career in development came from - I'm pretty glad the course I did included almost nothing that was attempting to "train" you and focused mostly on the absolute conceptual fundamentals (from the electrical engineering side through general engineering maths to specialised CS subjects) as well as letting us loose to actually build stuff with minimal supervision but careful evaluation.
[The thing that really got my attention was the lambda calculus course where the lecturer mentioned the S & K combinators, of course the same course covered the Y-combinator!]
I'll be interested to see what variety of stories and individuals you interview. I know learning to code today is far different than it was 25 years ago. It would be cool to see the stories on a timeline once you have more.
"This 22 year old self-taught PHP developer earns $15k a month and lives in an Austrian farmhouse"
I mean, f*cking seriously?
Yeah, that's harsh, but such a headline's an insult to those with a CS degree and serious self-taught developers alike.
To those who made this stay on the front page: given you're competent, you already make the same or more money as those with a CS degree, even if you might know less about the fundamentals, get over it! Upvoting cruft like this isn't going to vindicate your choice.
1) You're allowed to curse on the internet. HN doesn't have a content filter. Saying "f*cking" reduces the impact the curse is supposed to have. If you feel it's appropriate to curse then just fucking do it.
2) Not everyone does well in a formal school environment. This site shows people that self-taught can still earn good money.
3) Even if a CS degree would increase the Austrian's earnings, how much would it increase it by? Would it offset the cost of the education? Would it offset the wages earned during the years he was in school?
4) People don't always upvote something to the front page because they agree with it. Sometimes people do it to encourage discussion around a topic.
regarding 2 and 3. My complaint isn't about having or not having a CS degree, I didn't even get that far.
It's about the Taboola-like quality of the headline. They're an insult to one's intelligence. If I want to be insulted on the Internet, I'd go elsewhere.
Which part is insulting? That he's young? That he's writing PHP or he makes a shitload of money? I'm envious, I admit it, but I don't find it insulting.
Regarding 2, I'd like to point out this is both 100% true and somewhat misleading. You certainly can be successful with no degree, but I think anyone without one will tell you it's a significantly more difficult path than a CS grad takes. If you are driven enough to pass some of the most difficult interviews in the industry, I'd argue you probably could have done well in a formal school environment, since the interviews are largely borrowed from it.
Recursion and Abstraction, like love and herpes, are a form of disease which once caught cannot be lost, but can be shed, and so spread. Your brain is wired to look for both opportunistically, in any problem.
What a CS degree does, is teach you how to apply the infection. Some CS degrees are like innoculation against them and you come out with a degree, but no grasp of the fundamentals. Others, you learn so much you become a vector of the disease.
I disagree. To consider something overrated, its value has to be little in comparison to the effort to learn it.
For some problems, recursion is vastly superior e.g. for recursive data structure like trees. And coincidentally, often those structures are much better at delivering high-performance solutions than their naive loop-based counterparts.
Granted, it isn't easy to learn, but also not that hard. Overall, I think the gains easily outweigh the effort. And it is not like I am writing recursions all day long. Most of the time I write loops, but you should know when using recursions is the better way to go and for those times you should know how to handle them.
Note that using function-call based recursion is a programming mistake in most common programming languages, as they have a fixed sized stack.
This includes many "functional" languages like Scala. Even Haskell had a default stack size limit until some years ago, and many Haskell based parsers crashed on large inputs due to that.
If you write programs that are supposed to process arbitrarily large inputs, you cannot use function call recursion in most cases.
(Of course this says nothing about recursion as a concept, which is fundamental and unavoidable unless you're programming, say, a traffic light.)
I have no CS degree, and I've been in the industry in various forms since the mid-90s, software developer full time since about 2001 or so. I have no CS degree because I just did not have the math grades to get entrance to university.
I've been working at Google as software engineer for 7.5 years now.
I guess you could say this is success, but I would not recommend this path; even after 20 years, there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out. Impostor syndrome can be an issue.
At my age with family mortgage kids, it's too late and pointless to go back and re-do all the HS math etc. I'd need to get into a CS program. But I do wish I'd done this. It took me a long time to elbow my way to where I am now.
> there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out.
I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?
I've had a similar experience to other poster, but relative to tech stack.
I learned .NET and Javascript early in my career. Every single job interview I had at a .NET shop brought up my lack of a college degree as a possible barrier to "handling" or being "good enough" for the position (their words). Not a single one of these companies invited me back for another interview.
Never had the same problem with JS, and now I happily work as senior-level engineer (using Python and Javascript) while encouraging other more junior engineers to take up and pursue the JS ecosystem.
I've never encountered anything like that (or maybe didn't read the signals?), if anything people are usually impressed by the fact that I'm self taught if they knew me beforehand. I've never felt like it's held me back in my career, but I do feel the lack of some of the math background sometimes.
If I had a gray beard... 30+ years as working dev.
I've never taken a 'computer class' while in school, although I've taken some instruction while working.
Entirely self-taught. I do this because I like it. Back in the day, I never played video games, I taught myself, and wrote, code. To this day, I don't play video games.
It's been my experience that hiring degreed CS graduates may not be the best course. Theirs a big difference between being 'book-smart' and real world smart. I tend to give preference to guys who write code for fun over those who are in it for the money.
Case in point, we just brought on a high-school student who is about to start his comp-sci degree. He has written code for years for fun. He's just rocking it. I'm sure he'll be invited back each summer until his degree is complete and will likely be offered continued employment after.
If that works for you, then great, but you’re locking yourself out of an entire world of software professionals who only code for work. I suspect those who don’t code outside work outnumber those who do.
If their understanding that amateurs make for better hires than professionals is correct, then amateurs being the minority makes an even stronger case for filtering.
I agree 100%. I used to code all the time, prior to my CS degree, in High School, etc. But now I'm a professional programmer. I don't code outside of work, because coding is what I already do 4-6 hours a day. Now that it's my job, I've taken to other hobbies (and raising a family). I love what I do, but I don't live for it.
Which is fine. But that doesn't mean you should be favored in an interview and it certainly doesn't mean you're a better programmer than I am. My point was: favoring people that code for fun is just as bad as favoring people who only received formal degrees.
I didn't get that "point" from your post. I was just trying to assert the oft-ignored type of person (I am not an aberration) that still likes coding, after a lifetime. Even when I am inevitably confined to a hospital bed, I will code in my head.
I think the biggest difference between successful devs and unsuccessful ones is the hunger for constant learning and improvement. You can lack that hunger if you have a CS degree or not. I've observed this at my company and others I've worked for as an almost constant.
yes, completely agree with this. To be successful, it has to be your hobby and you have to be hungry to know more and improve. It is also required anyway because CS and technologies changes rapidly. For example it is not common to write UI apps in Tcl anymore. :) but it is now more common to use LXC and Docker instead of virtual machines and shared library versioning hedeaches.
I have a CS degree, and while I agree with the general idea that you don't need a CS degree to be a successful programmer I'd say the biggest barrier to entry is in the start of your career - both getting a job and keeping that job.
I've worked with loads of self-taught developers, mostly from tech/coding bootcamps, and I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out due to a number of factors:
1. Bootcamps are hard, but suddenly these developers find themselves in a harder environment where 12 weeks of coding experience might not be enough to get them out of a problem.
2. Bootcamps cost a lot of time/money, without the option for a student loan, so many people put themselves into debt to switch careers, and that added pressure is a lot for people - especially when they've been sold a lucrative career and find that a company has hired them because they are cheap.
The CS knowledge aspect is largely irrelevant, because many developers can get by quite happily without ever using a linked list or priority queue, or knowing anything about quicksort, merge sort, etc. For most projects where you need to merge k sorted arrays, concatenating them and running the standard language sort function is good enough.
IMO, the problem has never been one of skill, because many industries have developed skills on-the-job or with time spent in industry. Where a CS degree comes in handy is in giving a student a structured approach to learning over a respectable amount of time, and offering a step above the entry-level barrier of entry.
fringe opinion. video courses in non-visual topics are a complete waste of time, made because the masses can't read and are lazy. there is a corresponding book better than the course available for everything listed. good books will have good exercises and solutions available.
video courses just won't teach as much. very easy to find best book available for each subject. even going partway through a book will offer more. can skip topics, look at syllabuses for classes offered in higher education that use said book if you want to know what to skip (many syllabuses available online).
for example, instead of taking the operating systems class you can simply actually read either of the two books suggested by this very page.
I'm turning 30 this year, a professional accountant and started out as a hobbyist, but work in data engineering consultancy as middle management, leading efforts into getting our team to adopt Rust of all languages.
I've found being willing to learn more to help me out, my breadth of knowledge is good enough that in many languages and concepts, I can hold my own against CS graduates.
I think knowing what you don't know is important, because you get incentivized to expand your knowledge. I'm currently studying Maths and Stats, because they're a good base for data science, and where I want to go in my life out of corporate.
The value that I bring to the table is no longer fluency in about 7 languages and a skill to learn more quickly (I've done obscure things like reverse engineering 'complex' accounting rules written in COBOL). What I bring to the table is the ability to solve problems using my financial expertise and technology.
So if anyone's reading this, don't be intimidated by "coding". I see writing software as a natural extension of what's on my mind, using what I understand technology to enable me.
So, stretch your mind, it's a very powerful thing. Have faith in yourself, and do great like the people on No CS Degree
In the very early days (60's-80's) when the needs for programming outweighed the supply... Most programmers were being cross trained from other professional disciplines, such as accounting.
Not sure if you would consider a two year associate degree in computer technologies as a CS degree because pretty much what I recall from my studies, we were working on understanding the computer parts and components, doing some typing (data entry exercises) and understanding what software and productivity suites are. We did embark on some nifty console programming and writing batch files, but never fully immersing into the bits and pieces of what makes up software (algorithms, binary, lists, etc).
I work professionally as a software developer for quite a while, and what I have seen in the industry is that you gain more merit when you are able to ship product(s) that people will use (or perhaps automate a process that was previously done in a manual manner).
Yes, you can get past the initial gates of hiring qualifications (such as having a CS degree certificate) as well as the coding tests that lots of companies use as a gauge to test your technical capabilities. But no amount of CS degree or certificate would be enough to patch for example when you are dealing with real world software issues.
I wrote a lot of software before I ever took a CS class in college. The only things you'll get from a CS degree are the ability to prove problems are NP-Complete, learn how to do Dynamic Programming, reductions from one problem to another, Linear Programming, Graph Theory, and a bunch of other math tricks (random hashing, fast modular exponentiation, The Gauss multiplication trick, etc.). You don't need any of that to write a Chrome Extension.
If you need software to scale to hundreds of millions of users, then you probably need people who have CS degrees to think about your hard problems and how best to optimize them and which ones have no polynomial time solutions for all inputs (problems to be avoided or worked around somehow).
I can do RSA by hand (on small messages), quickly tell (with only pencil and paper) what 2^1027 mod 3 is and do Euclid and Extended Euclid by hand to find multiplicative inverses (in one pass). But I can write code that runs pretty well, too, and I can do that with or without a CS degree. So can most people.
There are some interesting exceptional cases where a CS degree can be a disadvantage for developing advanced software applications, though you still need to know CS.
For example, the conceptual framework for reasoning about distributed systems provided by chemical engineering is superior to the traditional CS version when applied to software systems, and more mature. This has been a persistent advantage over the course of my career designing scalable software. And it is much easier for a chemical engineer to learn computer science than the other way around.
I've come across a few other examples of this in computer science, particularly as it relates to complex systems design and behavior, and not just in relation to chemical engineering. Extremely complex real-world systems as a model are relatively new to CS but have highly evolved solutions in other disciplines out of necessity. There is still much value to be had in learning CS from an unorthodox perspective.
No degree here, but it was a unique time in the industry.
Long story condensed: I grew up dirt poor. Went to college. Got my first computer that could get on the Internet (1998). Wasted time online, missed classes, lost financial aid. Ended up going to work for local ISP doing tech support. Quickly moved into web work, and then development. (mostly ColdFusion) This was late 1999, when things were booming and everyone was hiring.
I took a 6 month contract - low on the contracting end of things, but great money for me. Next job was in HR department attached to the airline industry, which was a good job even when the "dot com crash" was occurring. That job ended do to effect of 9/11 on stock prices, but by then I already had a couple of years of work experience under my belt and was on my way.
Today: director of technology for a small company (fancy way of saying I'm the lead developer and lead architect)
What was true for me then is true for many developers today: some are very cut out for this. Looking back, I've always been a programmer; it wasn't a trade someone told me to go to because of the income. That's why I think some bootcampers succeed, and some fail: truth be told, this industry isn't for everyone (alas, I saw many leave the industry in the early 2000s who went on to do accounting or management or car sales or whatever they're a better fit for). Those same students, and myself, would also succeed with a CS degree. I think the lack of one is a matter of circumstance, not a formula for success or failure.
I will say that there are certain jobs I'm not necessarily equipped for due to some missing foundational information. Those situations are the examples that everyone goes to, but the reality is, the world is bigger than SF and FAANG. (And even at the FAANG's there's plenty of Python, Ruby, and JavaScript slingers... the only time they may have used their CS degree was to get past the ego-stroking whiteboard interview)
40 years writing software for a living, dropped out of college after 3 years. I'd taken all the CS that I could, and took graduate level courses my last year because I had run out of other interesting classes. That final year of school just didn't look important compared to getting my dream job at the time (writing games for Atari).
No real regrets, though I had (and still have) a sense of inferiority that drives me to study. Last year I threw out many boxes full of papers that I've read over the years (they're mostly available online now). I have bookcases and bookcases of CS-related material. I've read Knuth, etc. (okay, still going through Vol 4...).
My only regrets are not getting a better math background (a decent calculus-based probability and statistics course would have helped). I took linear algebra in school, but didn't really get it until I started doing graphics and then I needed much more than my college course provided anyway.
Tried going back to school a couple of times. Work always got the better of me. Finally I realized that the degree just wasn't important to myself or my employers, and that I wouldn't learn anything anyway. Lack of a degree has never been a problem when finding a job (except once, and I actually felt pretty good about that one . . . maybe I'll tell the story some day).
I think the key to long-term success (whether you have a degree or not) is continuing self-education. I try to keep up by reading papers and digging into promising new tech. The industry is bigger and moving faster these days, so you have to pick and choose what to stay current on. It's a good idea to branch out anyway (if you read ten papers on storage, networking or graphics, read a couple on something unrelated, like AI or queuing theory or dig into biology or astrophysics -- stretch your head). Helps to do different types of projects, too.
I plan to work until I drop; I feel fantastically lucky to have found a career that I enjoy this much. My father-in-law retired from writing code at age 75, I think I can go longer.
Much like CJ (upthread) I'm a completely self-taught developer. I started building apps to scratch my own itch, and eventually found out the only way to accomplish what I wanted at a larger scale was to build a company. Last year we sold to Facebook, and I continue to develop software as well as manage a team working on our vision.
I'm writing mostly to hopefully let others know you can be self taught and be super impactful.
25 years in. No CS, just 1 semester of LAS at UIC. Apart from the obvious stuff, have worked on distributed systems and routing protocols, operating system kernels, and compilers. I feel like having to start my career in C probably helped me a bit.
I’m a programmer who studied information technology (with a number of programming courses, but zero true CS coursework) first at community college and then at a budget brand state college. I’m now a senior developer/engineer and frequently work on projects alongside CS graduates from prestigious schools who seem incapable of completing even the most simple coding tasks - this is the case nearly 100% of the time in my experience with these CS grads. That said, I’m sure there are many such graduates that are more than capable, but a persons degree and where it’s from doesn't seem to indicate much other than socioeconomic background.
Most people that graduate with CS degrees took a few actual programming classes. The majority of the rest is a the same well-rounded classwork you took (English, History, etc) and a lot of theory and mixed-theory/applications classes like AI, Operating Systems, Compilers etc.
The practical real-world applications of those classes aren't 1:1 with their first job. I'm a frontend engineer and took 0 classes that are even remotely relevant to my day to day work. That said, foundation adds value. I can speak a common language with other engineers, including those that are completely different than my specialty.
To suggest a persons degree is meaningless is just as nonsensical as saying being self-taught is meaningless. I've also worked with both prestigious graduates that can't program and self-taught brilliant programmers. However, they are exceptions to the rule. The only thing that doesn't indicate much is anecdata, which both of us have now provided.
As an aside, your attitude towards entry-level programmers is likely similar to the attitude of senior programmers when you were entry-level. "Simple" is relative. You were undoubtedly a considerably worse programmer when you graduated as well, assuming your current title was earned through merit. Perspective.
> equently work on projects alongside CS graduates from prestigious schools who seem incapable of completing even the most simple coding tasks
It's possible there's selection bias going on. The wheat end up at the Apples and Googles of the world and the chaff end up working with you.
This isn't intended to be an insult. People who attend ivy leagues are given such a huge leg up that even an average graduate probably make it further than most of us plebeians.
Right...Which is why I was pointing out that perhaps you're getting stuck working with the dregs of the ivy leagues, and that you're experience may not be representative due to bias.
I work in big tech. I know lots of folks who fall into your camp. Anecdotally from interviewing and working with other software engineers, site reliability engineers, software development engineers, and <insert whatever your company calls it here>, how prestigious your undergrad institution was reflects little to none in your ability to solve real world problems. It does help open doors though, as every FAANG I’ve worked at heavily recruits from these schools.
I have worked with some people that are self-taught that ended up being incredibly good. However, I still bias myself a bit to people coming from a CS background because of other non-knowledge related reasons. Examples.
They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs, painfully stepping through the code for the 110th time to find the erratic bug, or boring documentation, also part of the job.
They are less inclined to just copy-paste a solution that you found on StackOverflow and more agreeable to go into the R&D mode of finding the right algorithm. This can be a blessing and a curse.
People that have been through several years of education are more inclined to follow a schedule. We are very relaxed at Silicon Valley and yes some people do their best work from home, but sometimes you just have to be here. College helps form some of these habits.
Last, a degree comes with a lot of soft skills that Universities just throw in sometimes. Communication skills, the ability to summarize properly, grammar and spelling .. not required for a coder but definitely useful for someone that wants to grow into a career into software, eventually you need to interact with Product Managers, Business, Customers, and those unrelated-to-the-job skills start becoming very handy.
I don't buy into the argument that you need to have a degree because getting one is tedious. There are plenty of places in life that will teach you this lesson. I work at a coding school, we have lots of students that did things that make a university look like a joyride. Try doing a tech support job for years 10+ hours a day, now that is tedious.
Is this something that necessarily needs to come from a university? All of the things you mentioned seem like skills one would pick up in an entry-level job. Is there something about a job that makes it easier to never develop these habits?
There's a specific case in France, where most developpers I know don't have a proper "CS degree" but have a more generalist "engineering diploma".
I can even speak for myself. I didn't learn to code at school much , did some bash and C here and there but that was not the point of my study. We mostly had math, physics and electronic-oriented courses and more precisely in my case a lot of telecommunication courses.
Still, for a first programming job, engineers (as in those with an engineering school diploma) are often preferred to people with a CS degree, which did a lot more programming that we did.
I would guess that it mostly has to do with the reputation of both the schools and the students from there. When it comes to STEM, engineering school is seen as much more prestigious than studying in a university. Young people with higher grades wishing to make a career in programming more often than not tend to choose the former over the latter - even if it means less focused courses.
And yet having said all that, I wouldn't say that french developpers are worse in any way than developpers from other places. Even if most of us learn to truly program at our first job.
I'm not at all saying that a CS degree has no point, but as long as you have the minimum knowledge about the field when starting, it's very efficient to learn on the job the specificities.
I've been doing this stuff professionally since 1982 including some stints at what might be called a fairly high level (household name companies in silicon valley). For all the people I've met/worked with, where I ended up hearing their education background, I'm absolutely sure no more than 20% had CS degrees. I also feel like there is a correlation between the extremely good people I've encountered, and _not_ having a CS degree.
That said, most folks did have some sort of science-related degree. People with no higher education aren't unknown, but quite rare ime. People with higher education only in non-science fields have also been quite rare. I haven't run into many shit hot coder history majors, frankly, but those I have encountered were so smart I'm certain they could have aced any degree they took the time to study for.
Last thought: architecture, design and coding seem more akin to creative endeavors such as writing a novel or play, making movies, that don't seem to be easy to "teach". e.g. nobody is marveling that J.K. Rowling doesn't have an English Literature degree (French, to save you checking..) and nobody is seriously trying to "teach" folks to write the Harry Potter series.
> I also feel like there is a correlation between the extremely good people I've encountered, and _not_ having a CS degree.
I'm willing to bet there's some selection bias here. If you got a job and don't have a cs degree it's probably because you're so good you don't need a degree. The skills outweigh the lack of a degree, which means higher risk. The piece of paper sets the bar lower because there's more trust and thus lower risk.
As someone getting a graduate CS degree and coming from a different degree I notice that there's definitely Swiss Cheese knowledge. I got here because I could code (half my peers can't in their first year of graduate school. This surprised me a lot!). But on the theoretical side they have less Swiss Cheese knowledge than I do. It's a weird dynamic.
Honestly, as someone who laboured in a CS degree and work as an employee for 10+ years, I feel frustrated that I feel stuck.
It feels like that the reason that I am still working in mediocre jobs is because I don't know how to generate ideas. Or how to make prototypes using design tools. Or how to go about as an entrepreneur.
It's both inspiring and deflating at the same time to people, especially young people, succeed in things that I have dreamed about when I was young.
Between the requirements of a degree and silly things like "10 years experience with X" for a CRUD develeoper, I have a hard time getting through HR when applying for jobs. If I can get to a technical manager or another developer, we can talk shop and show code and I'm good.
Just remember it comes down to who you know or who you can meet, you might as well have worked at Burger King by the way some of the filters work.
I fall into this category. I have no CS degree. I'm the author of numerous things with the best known probably being the ZeroTier network virtualization engine.
I got my first programming exposure when I was 5 or 6 on a Commodore VIC-20. By 10 or so I was doing 6502 machine language on a Commodore 64. I went from there.
I have a BS degree in biology. I studied that because I wanted to study something new, but more importantly because I was interested in AI. I always thought (and still think) the best way to learn about intelligence is to study the only existing examples of intelligent systems. These are found in biology. The University of Cincinnati let me do a little bit of a "design my own major" thing so I designed one in "organic intelligence" with classes in genomics, evolution, neuroscience, and ecology. Those are the four scales at which intelligence is found in nature.
I work in computers now (founder of ZeroTier) but still follow AI and biology avidly and would like to return to some of those areas of study someday. I also find that my study of biology deeply influenced me as an engineer and the types of systems I design.
I'm self-taught, but the thing about being self-taught is that I enjoy learning. Not like whatever some random person says "I enjoy learning" in a job interview, but actually enjoy it such that I've taught myself proficiency in a few different fields. One of the things I decided early on was that I didn't like the thing that is always implied when people say "self-taught" and so over the years I've procured the services of 300-400-level and postgrad tutors of the fields I'm interested in (CS, math, and molecular bio) to help "fill in the holes". It's admittedly a bit weird approaching someone to tutor you without actually being enrolled somewhere, and of course you need to be located near a university, but this has been so helpful for me that I highly recommend this to any of my fellow autodidacts. If you do a little shopping, you can find amazing tutors that won't cost very much at all (and I dunno if it's normal to tip tutors, but I'm a big tipper in general and this has always paid big dividends).
I had been a graphic:web designer since I was 14 years old. I taught myself Photoshop and Dreamweaver and became proficient with creating layouts with frames, tables, and of course eventually css.
I graduated from college with a degree in Philosophy where I was focused on logical systems. I recall one of my favorite professors being intrigued to know whether I could program and disappointed when I confessed that I only did the design side of web development.
I of course had a strong interest in code, having gone through interactive online python tutorials but I wasn’t able to make a the leap into becoming a developer.
The wall, I realized, was my lack of knowledge in the unix command line. Once I learned about bash, ssh, and setting up basic web servers, my learning skyrocketed.
With a background in logical systems, I was able to grasp the model of computing very rapidly. While I cannot claim to be advanced in algorithms or data structures, I feel comfortable being able to develop solutions that work.
With your background picking up algorithms and data structures shouldn't be hard. It's just a matter of studying them like anything else. (I program and my degree is in science.)
I have no CS degree. I see a lot of these comments poo-pooing the skills of people who taught themselves to program. From my experience, some of the best developers I have worked with do not have CS degrees. I have given many interviews where candidates could explain what an abstract class is, but then when it came time to actually write code they could not even build something that compiled, or their code was really messy and unorganized because they had no concept of maintainable code since they have never had to do anything other than academic exercises where style apparently is unimportant.
It's like they memorized some books and definitions but never actually had to build anything.
The developers that didn't have a formal background in CS almost always did poorly on the technical questions, but I found about half the time it was simply a lack of knowing the terminology. She might not know what a monad is, even though she implemented in her own code.
I have always been into computers, but didn't really consider it as a career until I got a job that required me to do a lot of data entry, so I started teaching myself how to automate things. I turned a 40 hour per week data entry job into a single button click on Monday. This meant I had a bunch of free to time to develop my skills and work on additional programs that would help our organization. I fell in love with programming. I eventually interviewed for a position but failed the technical questions miserably, I didn't understand a lot of the terminology like "linked list", "adapter patern" or what "bubble sort" was. So, after that I got a book just about programming interviews, and realized I had actually implemented most of the practical things in that book, I just didn't know the technical name for it.
After I read that book I interviewed at another location and was immediately hired. The only difference was that I took maybe a week to learn some terms.
I like to think of it as there being two aspects to software engineering: there's the abstraction side, and then there's the craft side. CS graduates tend to be heavily weighted toward the abstraction side, and weak at the craft. Self-taught ones are weighted the other way around.
I really appreciate this as a self taught dev with a full time full stack job. I worked my ass off for 3 years, taking online courses, building product after product for people to actually use and ultimately landing a well paying and satisfying job. Things like this make imposter syndrome a little less nagging in my every day life.
That's awesome! Honestly, I have interviewed tonnes of people already that are doing great with no degree. A friend of mine just got a job after taking a few months out to learn from scratch with Udemy, etc
Another one of these articles. For novelty, I'm expecting to see an article about the novel idea of there being successful developers who do have CS degrees. It can happen!
The site seems to lean pretty heavily on contradicting the remarkable idea that you might need a CS degree to slap together a website and write some lines of PHP.
But that being said, there's a lot of evidence that some people who don't have CS degrees can do great programming and even great CS, and a lot of evidence that some people with CS degrees can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to run around with their dresses over their heads every time this comes up; although it does provide a good venue for people to indulge in the harmless pleasure of praising oneself on HN.
Even with a degree the learning process NEVER stops. Most important imo for new developers (self taught or otherwise) is to learn from multiple disciplines. CS without math and statistics is basically mindless data entry. Adding in high level concepts like category theory not only improves you as a coder but deepens your overall understanding of concepts that will allow you to excel in any language or atmosphere. While I think that a lot can be gained from a formal education there are other options provided someone is willing to put in the work. I have done work before getting my degrees and work after and in the end what sets coders and engineers apart is their “portfolio” which is generally a display of their side interests and their willingness to keep learning.
I have no CS degree, but at the time I was in college, CS programs seemed embarrassingly poor compared to today. I took a few, elective CS courses and did CS research back then and remember numerous graduate students trying to cheat off of the undergraduate English major.
I'll say this. There's advantages starting both ways. By starting from a CS background, you're likely to get a formal education into concepts and terminology that might seem boring otherwise. By starting from a non-CS background, you begin with the most important skill a programmer requires-- the ability and passion to teach yourself new technologies and concepts.
Any developer who begins with a CS background can learn to be self-taught.
Any developer who begins without a CS degree can learn algorithms and advanced concepts.
1. You can be highly educated in a subject without getting a formal degree.
2. A CS degree is not a programmer/developer degree. CS is to programming as art is to drawing.
3. Having knowledge of CS might mean you can more easier adopt to a variety of roles (front-end, back-end, systems programming) but comes at a cost that you probably have less practical skills than someone who is specialized in this (because of self-education/going to a trade school/learning on the job).
I have a bachelor in informatics, master in CS and PhD in informatics (technically informatics is not CS, but there's a lot of overlap), but I would say I gained most programming/development knowledge through internships and working on personal projects.
In my opinion CS degree gets bonus when hiring because it weeds out people that are not interested. With 160 people in same year as me starting it ended up with 90 people getting bachelors, and maybe 60 masters. Then out off all that graduated maybe 30 went into software dev, others went into testing and support roles, maybe even into other stuff not CS related.
If you are starting career, how are you going to convince someone that it is not passing fad for you, that after 6 months you would say "ok I am done, I am bored with it". There is no way to show people how much time you invested in your self study. It is not about what you know, it is about other people getting to know so they can hire you.
> There is no way to show people how much time you invested in your self study. It is not about what you know, it is about other people getting to know so they can hire you.
Your point still holds true in this industry when you get as much as 300+ candidates applying for 1 graduate job. As much as I hate it, unfortunately some companies would hire internal candidates than external ones even if they were highly qualified, because they are highly networked within the company.
Having just a CS degree in 2019 is not enough to market youself as a better candidate. It is meerly seen as a minimum expectation from larger companies.
Typically CS degree means that you can finish something regardless if it makes sense or not. That skill is in demand in large corporations that require people to follow stupid processes and complete tasks that don't reflect on what are the actual needs.
Of course there are good CS degrees, but these are not as common as one thinks.
The purpose of universities was to gather knowledge and pass it on where it was not possible otherwise to do so. These days people have open access to all kind of knowledge and universities are not as much important as they were.
If company lists CS degree as a job requirement, that for me is a good indication of a place I don't want to work in.
I’m self taught and do data science for work and game dev for hobby.
Functional programming has seemed much easier to pick up without formal teaching than object oriented. The latter appears to have many more unknown unknowns.
e.g. in game dev I did not know that static methods and objects existed, so I built a bunch of dictionaries in an instance of a single use class to store some data for a game. It works, but its garbage.
But hey, all things are discoverable eventually, and I would argue going through the experience of why things are nice before learning they exist has some merit to it. I don’t blame companies which require credentials though. Hiring is hard, especially hiring many people at once.
The knowledge earned with CS degree is priceless on tech interviews - where else can you be asked what red-black trees are and O(x) notation for hash map. When you hired it's different, just get this damn Hibernate mapping working)
One of the top devs I ever worked with, I hired him, his previous job was a fitness instructor. He had left school at 16. Had done some programming on his home computer, and wanted to be a programmer for a living.
I was blown away by his methodical approach to a simple problem I gave him. Less than year later he was running his own team that had people in it that had been to some of the top universities in the UK, like Brunel, and they all respected him. He'd completely taken control of that project. That was all using VB6. 20 years on he's now a leading C++ expert.
I am trying to transition from C programming on Tandem(also called HP/Nonstop) to Java and web technologies. The main reason I want to move out of Tandem is that there are only few companies having that system and jobs are few. I have basic Java knowledge but don't have any experience developing for web. The new jobs posting all talk about lot of skill set - Struts, Spring. When I got a job interview I got unrelated things like Solr. Each of these frameworks seems to be massive. How do I proceed to level up to the current technologies? Your help is much appreciated.
Switching from C to Java with Spring/Struts shouldn't be that hard, because you are still on the safe side (the server). The real fun with web technologies starts when you are in the browser.
So if you have no prior experience with the web-technologies, I would recommend you to learn a bit of HTML/CSS/JS until you are familiar with them (build a simple, plain HTML page, add some CSS to change the layout, throw in some JS to load some content asynchronously and maybe add some JS buttons to make the page interactive via JS (e.g. change the content when pressing a button)). Nothing too fancy, just make should you know what every language looks like and which language to use for what use-case.
Next, you should find out which Java Framework you really need to learn. When I learned Struts 2 a couple of years ago, I remember that it was considered outdated already.
And then start doing the tutorials of the frameworks, followed by building something you want to build with those technologies (start small and keep adding stuff). At least that is the path of the self-taught developer.
I'm a 40ish FAANG Manager without a CS degree. I would point out that while I agree that it is possible to have a great development career without a CS degree, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way if you have a choice. So, if you are contemplating dropping out or skipping doing a CS degree and going right into the industry, you are going to face obstacles and bias throughout your career that having the CS degree will mitigate.
No one second guesses a CS degree, but a good chunk of CS grads (your future coworkers and hiring managers) will second guess a self-taught education.
I learn some of the most interesting shit that I would never have thought to teach my self. Data structures, discrete math, and theory of computation come to mind.
Learning about how grammar and linguistics are so heavily tied into CS has been eye opening and has helped me understand so much more about what's going on in a computer. I never would've learned that on my own.
Sure, probably don't need that to get a job as a developer. But, having a CS degree != being a developer in the first place. I get that they can go hand in hand but it's just not the same.
I am mechanical engineer and still working as a mechanical engineer. I started to coding when i was 16yo.(now 31)I still yo contunie to side projects. I am not succesfull in side project(due to ideas)
I'm a self-taught Senior Engineer doing this professionally for the past 10 years. I've never taken a single course in Computer Science and dropped out of business school to start my own. Amazingly, some of my work has been used by universities, 20 million have watched my Programming YouTube channel and 50k+ have signed up for my online courses.
Most companies don't have a hardline requirement for having a degree anymore, but if they do, even for management, I'll do my best to avoid them.
No degree here. Started programming when I was 14 on MUDs. I actually went to college for CS, quit, went back 6 years later, and quit just shy of my BS. I need 9 or so hours. I moved to another state and didn't want to go through the transfer process and probably end up taking repeat classes...
I'm at the ceiling pay-grade wise now, and burnt out, but that's another issue :) The moral of the story is, you can progress really well in this field if you can prove yourself. Experience > Education
It is luckily easy to prove what you can in IT, as you can just show own succesful projects. But at least in germany here, you will still have a hard time getting the same pay, no matter the actual skills, as they are very often bound to formal education.
I also have no CS degree, I have a law degree though. I could say that "development" is like lego construction - yeah you can do that with a very specific preparation, but nobody actually stops you from reading the F manual ( RTFM ) and do it on your own.
However I think that people loving the job are better than the ones that were learning for it, so no wonders sites like this exists.
And in any case I wouldn't go to a self-taught doctor, so something will probably change in the future.
It's interesting that not having a degree is equated to being self taught developer. What if you chose to take all CS major courses but nothing else? University degrees are supposed to give you generic background on many subjects, on which you can specialize later, not to set you up as a "developer". This is why it is even called computer "Science" and not "dev ops certification".
I just quit my old job after 10 year at the company 6 of which I was an App Dev for. I applied for several jobs did three interviews for Sr. Dev positions and received 2 offers. After I received each offer I expressed that my highest level of education was a GED, each time it was stated that is not a problem. I don't even have an education portion in my resume. It's been a non-issue so far.
No CS degree is fine when you’re doing trivial programming work that doesn’t really matter, such as application frontends.
But could you imagine riding in a plane or using critical infrastructure services programmed by people with absolutely no computer science degree to their name? Not a chance. Like getting surgery from a butcher.
Ehmm ... do you think all airplane programmers are CS graduates? They are not. At least not at SAAB. Actually, very few are CS. Most are mechanic, electric and fluid engineers.
In at least Sweden's machine industry programming is just something you learn in your engineering role by osmosis and revulations from God, and typically one to three 7 week courses at university.
People with CS degree have more theoretical knowledge, for sure. But people without it, self taught, have more practical knowledge, cause they simply done things instead of learning about them. Decide yourself, which is better.
I don't think that many self taught developers have any practical knowledge related to avionics control systems, there is only so much you can do on your own.
I'm confused how you accomplished anything without some type of looping abstraction. If you understand one of them most of the rest are fairly intuitive except looping with recursion. It just seems bizarre that you were working somewhere and being productive without knowing what a for loop was.
The value of college to me was mainly the degree and an internship that resulted in a good reference. Nobody in practice seems to care about personal or volunteer projects unless it's maybe contributing to Mozilla or something. Degree is necessary to be interviewed by 99.99% of openings.
How many working developers actually have CS degrees? When I began a long time ago it was quite rare. In fact most of my peers had liberal arts degrees. I definitely meet more CS grads among younger devs now, as well as EEs and SEs, but I wonder what the actual breakdown is these days.
I just find these odd. Does anyone struggle with this stuff? They just make it all look so easy.
I for one struggle quite a bit with coding, design, theory, and other aspects. I just don't get how so many people think coding is as easy as "reading a book" or "doing a tutorial".
Well, you're literally writing step-by-step instructions that a computer will faithfully perform without deviation. Once you understand how a computer works and how to talk to it, it should be as easy as having a conversation.
I don't think this is easy, but when you've been doing it for years and years, it feels that way.
Computers don't even operate solely step by step anymore. They often operate asynchronously, through interrupts, or compute things in parallel across multiple threads.
Maybe if you're programming something simple, it will be "step by step". But most programs are not this simple.
"Coding" is as meaningless a term as "writing". Much in the same way you can leverage basic writing skills to achieve entrepreneurial success, you can do so with coding skills. A literary academic may still consider writing to be a substantial exercise, probably more so than the untaught.
That's because the academic knows not to produce low quality content. The untaught often does not. I'm still reeling from having to maintain spaghetti code that some untaughts have churned out in my career.
I'm a dev with no formal education of any kind, but self taught math and CS. I think it helped me a lot to be exploring the concepts out of a passion for understanding and seeking truth, rather than doing homework I don't understand or care about.
Can we have an interviews with people who failed to self-taught themselves to developers?
We know about a lot of examples of successful people who dropped college, but what about those people who dropped college and achieved nothing?
i'm self taught without a CS degree. I filled in many of the gaps by studying for technical interviews. I can rattle off every type of data structure, every type of classical algorithm (even the inefficient ones for historical reasons), write HLDs and LLDs and sequence diagrams and component diagrams, and can work my way through almost every problem on those leetcode type sites (if given enough time).
can i write a compiler or a lexical parser or am I versed in distributed computing and/or other highly specialized technical areas? not off the top of my head, but give me a few days/weeks and I know I'll be able to.
Every one will have knowledge gaps, the skills for CS degree and real world programming will have some overlap, but there is whole lot of distinction in both.
I am very glad for having studied software engineering at university. I believe it's more productive to learn when we have guidance, colleagues and a proper environment.
While I don't have CS degree, I studied 3 years for BS and got some ideas and associations that I can explore more when needed. Not quite 20:80, but maybe like 50:80.
I grew up surrounded by computers, but took relatively few classes. I took AP Computer Science in high school, but had to teach myself the “B” part of the class because the other students couldn’t keep up and our AB class just reverted to just the A portion but that was too easy for me. I also took an “honor programming in C” class from the same teacher, but it was essentially just two hours a day for me to program silly games using some Borland graphics library. I spent a lot more time being familiar with networking at the time really, and despite the CS parts seeming easy, anything web related outside of HTML was a mystery to me.
I did music for college and the only programming I did was in csound and max/msp.
Long story short, music doesn’t pay much. I just started reading and doing programming. I got gigs almost immediately for solving simple data problems for people (extract these CSV files into this format and pull down web data, etc). Fortunately I had companies where they were happy for me to take on whatever programming I felt comfortable with, despite being in a non-dev role originally there.
12 years later, I’m damn good at this. It helps that I can generally just read a book and absorb it. I’ve read books on CS, but haven’t taken any more CS classes outside watching some MIT course 6 videos. I did take some machine learning classes at MIT over IAP and those were fun. One weird thing, I’ve never taken beyond pre-calculus, but the linear algebra stuff in most ML things isn’t that hard for me. Maybe I’m just lucky? I’m a total hack at math, but can understand concepts quickly still and apply them in code.
One weird quirk was that I had to learn that not everyone can learn like I can. I taught for a few years at General Assembly and learned immediately that most people don’t like being throw in the deep end, or being told to read something and apply it the next day. They need smaller and better defined problems to build confidence. Only 5% of student actually enjoy things on hard mode. That’s ok- it’s just different than me.
Like, at work right now I’m probably going to need to do some Go work. I’ve never used Go outside the first 10 project ruler problems. But- I don’t mind telling them that sure, I can do some work in Go. It’s just code, and if I sit down for 8 hours I can get decent with the language.
The only things I’ve encountered so far that felt were “hard” were Haskell, and anything with shaders and modern 3D programming. I’ll figure them out eventually. TouchDesigner has also been tricky, but it’s mostly that their documentation is scattered (so much in videos) and the ui/workflow is non-obvious. I should write a book on it.
Interesting. I am starting to teach my siblings to code (they are with non-cs degree) and don't know where to start. Do you guys have any thoughts about this?
I am sure there are people who disagree, but if someone really wants to learn about 'Coding and Computers', my choice would be Go.
Let me explain: When I learned to program, QBasic was the first language I had contact with. I could make the computer beep but never achieved anything useful. Next, I learned HTML and was very happy about creating something. In school, I learned a little bit about Delphi and while GUI programming was cool, I preferred doing things on the web. A little time, later I came across PHP and was finally able to create real websites. So I coded a few projects with PHP and had my first struggles with arrays and the likes.
Finally, I arrived at the stage where I wanted to learn a real programming language. So I learned C. C was great. I mean, it was also very complex, but finally, I had control over every bit.
At that point, I started a CS degree and learned about pure languages like Smalltalk (Object Orientation) and Scheme (Functional Programming). Those languages were beautiful but felt like a step back in terms of practicality.
When the JS frameworks poped-up I learned to use a few of them too and still use some of them today and while JS is a great language to create results, it doesn't feel to me like a language that teaches you how to write good code.
Along the way, I encountered other languages like Java, C++, Python, Rust and those are certainly not bad languages, but I wouldn't recommend them for beginners.
What makes Go so special, in my opinion, is that it reduces the complexity of C while not taking away its purism. It comes with all the tools you need (except a text editor) and encourages to write good code. Finally, it has good support for building web applications so finding a good use-case shouldn't be that hard. After all, good use-cases motivate students ;-)
I am well aware, that one could certainly argue for every programming language to be the perfect candidate, so please remember that this is a personal opinion.
Thanks! That's an interesting perspective. Golang is getting more traction, maybe I will take this road. However, I don't want to intimidate first learners with difficulties of the language. All languages are similar in some way.
I'm listening to the excellent BBC podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon about the Apollo program, can you guess how many CS degrees worked on programming the Apollo Guidance Computer?
In my opinion, software is more of an art and design discipline than other types of engineering. The traditional notions of what constitutes an engineer do not apply as much to software. This is clear in the fact that we have no formal certification.
I'm a mostly self-taught CSE with no CS degree, with well over 25 years of professional experience. I feel that not having the degree has stunted me in some ways, but has also gave me a bit more freedom in others, because I could explore areas for solutions without realizing "how things are done".
That can be both a good and a bad thing.
Lately, I've been exploring other areas of CS which have always interested me, even as a child with my first computer, namely that of "machine learning". Where I have found I fall down in that area is in understanding the deeper level math concepts. I know these aren't really required to come up with solutions to problems using the existing toolsets for machine learning (as long as one can understand the math and concepts at those levels, which is arguably simpler) - but not having that understanding (or only a partial understanding) makes me frustrated that I can't understand exactly what is going on inside "the black boxes".
For instance, I (mostly) understand how MSE and backprop works in a neural network. I also understand why and when to use RELU vs sigmoid (or some other activation function). But could I derive any of that from first principles? Not at my current level of understanding (all those damn rules of calculus - which I don't understand). In many cases, though, I don't need to - I can treat them as a black box. But I don't like it. I do intend to fix this someday.
Of course - this subject - machine learning - has over the years led me down interesting and surprising paths (long before I started really studying it as a subject, in 2011, when I took the "ML Class" and "AI Class" MOOCs). Things more philosophical in nature, but all seemingly related in some manner, at least to my mind:
* Chaos theory
* Network theory
* Emergence and Complexity
* Theory of Mind
* Various topics in neuroscience
* Various topics and ideas in psychology
* Etc
...with "Etc" encompassing robotics, engineering, electronics, ethics, history, religion - and all the interactions and branches and spaghetti in between.
So much of that I wish I could have a more formal grounding in; I also wish I could speak with (and have the language to speak with) those who have this knowledge and grounding. I know that to be an impossibility, even if I were 20-30 years younger.
It astonishes me that many don't see how much CS in general touches and interacts (and both informs and is informed by) with all those topics and more. I see this, even if I don't understand it completely, and sometimes wonder or suspect that maybe I am wrong at some level? Maybe the lack of a formal education in all of those subjects has caused me to see things which aren't there...?
Alternatively, it could be that by not having such an education, I am - like before - not "constrained in a bubble" so that I don't see those things?
I am not saying I am special in this regard - I have read and spoke with others who have similar ideas to one extent or another, and in many cases their understandings have informed mine.
I'm just not sure if I should focus narrowly at this point in my life at 46 years of age, or go more broadly; both are fascinating paths for me. From what I have seen and read, it seems like the "broad path" would be more immersion in studying philosophy, perhaps with a greater focus on the philosophy of mind and/or consciousness.
At the same time, I like to think about and focus on the idea (and fantasize of solving it - fat chance) of the "wrongness" of backprop - and whether another solution exists for neural network learning that is more biomemetic?
...and at this point, I'm rambling - so I'll shut up.
Why does this title presuppose that people with CS degrees can't also be self-taught? A degree is a piece of paper that employers need; it has little to do with learning anything useful.
Firstly, depends on the university - not all degrees are equal. I did most of a degree after working in the industry for seven years, and having programmed on and off since the zx81 - the degree was pointless. Only one course was interesting, AI, and the only time I've ever used that knowledge is tinkering at home.
Hm - maybe not, but why is that, exactly? I don’t think that anybody believes that if you admit an otherwise stupid person to Harvard, they would become intelligent through the instruction they’d receive there. Instead, the degree and the institution are a signal - this person had to have been smart in the first place to get in, so you can assume that they’re going to do smart things for your business.
I think for anyone that started programming in the early days of home computers like the ZX81, C64 and BBC Micro, except for the fundamentals, most CS courses seemed to be completely useless. I cannot honestly say anything I learned in my course was useful compared to pursuing my own interests.
I missed undergrad, and managed to weasel my way into graduate school after 15 years as a programmer. ultimately research isn't for me, but I found basic CS theory both interesting and useful in my later life.
certainly agree that the systems and programming coursework wasn't particularly useful.
There is no such thing as self-taught, (doesn't even make sense). No one opens a computer, figures out how the processor takes instructions and invents their own language. If you went to college, you listened, you studied, and you practiced. If you did't go to college, you studied, you practiced, and you had to have found someone who will answer your questions.
It's hard for everyone to enter the industry, especially now, college or not. It's not about how smart you are, or your identity, or your environment. It's how bad you want it, how hard you'll work for it, and if someone is willing to help you.
As software engineers, degrees or not, focus on that last part. Be there for someone learning, studying or just trying to figure it out. Feels great to see a finished product. Feels even better to teach someone how to fish, (code for money). I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for people along the way, giving pointers, telling me where to look, telling me what not to do. I was a gawd dang line cook. Be that helpful person.
Make peace with this fact: you can most definitely build businesses and add value to any organization. But you won't be able to optimize Twitch's video codec or any other very low level, uber-specific, high impact code.
Business need both types in this world. No shame in that, but don't lie to yourself into thinking that you can do _both_ with no CS degree. You can't.
Nonsense. You can absolutely teach yourself to optimize low-level code if that's what you want to do. The amazing thing about today's world is that all of the incredible resources available for learning just about anything in science and engineering to anyone who has the time to consume them. And you can work on open source projects to build your native skills.
The difficult part for you will be obtaining an interview. Because all of the other candidates will have CS degrees, and increasing numbers of them will have graduate degrees. You are at a disadvantage.
The main difference is that more resources are now publicly available to everyone to look up on the internet which was a different story 40 years ago. This is why companies at the time hired grads that can re-implement closed-source software from scratch from a reference spec or by reverse-engineering from another company to stay ahead. This has happened with device drivers and closed-source compilers.
To some extent open-source has removed the cost for reinventing libraries, reverse engineering and there is little need to study specific elements in a subject to solve such a problem when you can grab lib_whatever or a free compiler for a language.
You are right that in interviews at famous companies (FAANG, asset management companies, aerospace / embedded systems companies) being self-taught here isn't enough. Instead, they require specific certifications and they look for the graduate with a strong engineering degree rather than someone who is self-taught.*
Right now in 2019, I would do both.
*Having a serious open-source project or significant contributions is actually a huge advantage over recent graduates.
The other difficult part is to put aside time and money. I mean the information is most likely free but you still need food. Food is not free. Then you have to work so you can buy food. If you work, you will have less time to study by yourself.
In this sense, UBI is a godsend. But of course, we assume all actors are rational and self-disciplined.
How would a CS degree help with any of that? I'm someone with experience in weird uber-specific, low-level areas of computer graphics/imaging with no CS degree, and none of the CS graduates I know have been taught those things at university.
Some PhDs and math students yes (at least, with regards to the algorithmic portions), but otherwise you have to learn the low-level esoteric stuff on your own, or be lucky enough to have a specialized optional course at your university.
And the cutting-edge will rarely be available to undergraduates anyway. All my CS graduate colleagues learned about codecs was how to compute a DCT by hand - they certainly didn't learn the modern 4x4 and 8x8 spatial block transform approximations as used in h264, or any motion vector calculation algorithms, or the x86_64 SIMD intrinsics, or any of the modern entropy coding methods.
I agree. Nothing in a typical CS degree would help with this. Maybe if your Masters was specifically in this obscure part of the field. On the other hand, I used to work in the video game industry where degrees (used to be) relatively rare and I probably knew 12 different guys who could optimize this kind of thing in their sleep.
So you're saying a highly motivated individual with an access to World Wide Web and physical textbooks can't teach him/herself to optimize "Twitch's video codec" or any low-level problems on their own ?
I wonder if it’s prepared me better than a CS degree for the actual work I do.
What did I learn with my RELS degree? Hermeneutics— understanding ancient texts written by lots of different authors in their original historical contexts, often which has been deeply redacted over time. Anyone who’s worked on any production code can see the benefit of being trained in that kind of thinking.
The classes I took on theology and philosophy helped train my brain to organize ideas. I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming — Plato would’ve loved it too, I think.
Classes on ethics have come in handy too.
Oh and just, we did a TON of writing in college. Lots and lots of writing, lots of research papers. I had to learn something new, read all about it, and put together a document carefully explaining the idea, with lots of evidence and citations. That skill has come in SUPER handy for everything from bug reports to API clients, to customer-facing documentation, to internal memorandums.
That's brilliant and obviously useful for software engineers. Don't forget that you've probably also studied holy wars in considerable depth, too.
This prepared him/her to understand the great conflict of vim and emacs users no doubt.
Easily the most trivial objection I've ever seen in the never ending spaces/tab debate.
Many people I know customise their local environment to suit.
https://githooks.com/
It is amusing to see how directly those skills taught in a religious context apply towards being a good engineer. Perhaps they're more universal than many realize?
That’s not what my religious studies degree was about. It wasn’t expensive Sunday school. They didn’t teach apologetics. They taught scholarship, empiricism and critical inquiry. Philosophy and theology were taught from a historical/critical/contextual perspective, not a devotional/didactic one.
I remember one asking a RELS professor about his internal religious beliefs once (in private) and got a stern talking to about how deeply inappropriate that was.
I appreciate and agree with your comment generally, but your characterization of my degree is not factual.
Funny thing is that it's deemed unimportant when they have to do it themselves, but appreciate it when presented with well-documented tooling/libraries.
Not that they actively want to be bad at it, but they do not see it as a priority, they hate doing it, and they are unwilling to put effort into being decent at it.
In more extreme cases, they will even make somewhat absurd excuses to justify it. My favorite is, "We shouldn't write documentation. It's harmful because it just goes out of date." True, documentation gets out of date, but you can plan to maintain it, or you can just mark it as out of date so people aren't misled.
I've seen this from interns to CTOs and remain baffled by its prevalence.
I've seen this as well. It really makes one wonder how they're able to code properly since programming is, in a sense, also the expression of ideas as text.
Just like writing code, written communication is a difficult skill requiring lots of practice and feedback. A liberal arts degree provides that in spades!
I'd started with software well before university (5th grade - maybe 6th?) and there were not many resources. Our school had a computer, but no classes as such - the staff weren't really even sure what to do with the 3 we had. HS - there were some "computer classes" - intro to BASIC sort of things. I'd already been programming (mostly BASIC, a bit of z80 and 6502) by the time those classes were available.
CS was a thing in university, but just taking one class (some Pascal class), I was generally put off doing it "professionally" by the difficult social nature of the people in the main computer departments. I was not the social butterfly, and they were really offputting (and I may have been not very helpful as well) but I never clicked in that class or the lab, and so dropped that idea as a profession, but fell in to it years later accidentally.
IMHO the worst bottleneck in both practical computing and even much of computer science is the struggle to explain/document the work in, say, English.
I briefly mentioned how my non-formal studies of religion and philosophy have helped to inform me - mainly in the context of "machine learning".
Your thoughts about how such studies apply to CS in general, though, are interesting. I noted that there are extreme overlaps between CS and many, many other areas of study that I believe both informs and is informed by those areas (whether known consciously or not).
We may actually be doing a disservice to ourselves (and perhaps for the world) by having (though rightly, I suppose) tying Computer Science so tightly with that of Mathematics.
Of course, that could just mean that mathematics also in turn informs and is informed by those subjects, I suppose...? Which is arguably true from what I understand of mathematics and the history of mathematics!
I guess, though, is what I am getting at is that we - humanity that is - have somewhat "enclosed" CS as a subset or adjunct of mathematics. Many don't seem to understand or "see" that so many other subjects and topics are involved. Not having that understanding may be hindering our advancement (both in CS and perhaps even as a species).
Yes, most people can learn to code without a degree but to be able to fully understand the scientific/mathematical foundation of why things are the way they are, and to use those skills to create something scientifically new, probably requires a degree.
Indeed, Object-Oriented Programming is harder to learn for programmers who have experience with other languages already (no pun intended) ;-)
When you know a language like C/C++/Java and you learn about OOP you think you understand, but in fact, you don't. So while functional programming was probably the easiest course for me in university, it took me 1,5 semesters to actually understand OOP. In the end, it is not that complicated, it is just that you have to think more on the meta-level than on the implementation-level and I think, for someone who doesn't have access to the implementation-level, it is easier because it doesn't get in the way.
OOP is a concept. It doesn't care about the implementation and neither should you. So if you are talking about integers, don't care about the implementation which might have limitations like MAX_INT, care about the idea of having a number which you can increase and decrease. That is a concept and it can be implemented in different languages and with different limitations.
Next, understand the idea of 'Everything is an Object'. This means that you have a class hierarchy and at the top is the class 'Object' (so everything can do, what 'Object' can do). Objects can receive so-called 'Messages'. When an Object receives a Message, it calls the corresponding method. So for example, in Smalltalk (the mother of Object-Orientation) the expression '1 + 2' means, you have an Object '1' (always the first thing) which receives a message '+ 2' and when the method '+' is being called, it returns an Object ('3').
This leads to some odd situations like
becauseObject 1 receives message + 2 returns object 3. Object 3 receives message * 3 returns object 9.
I think that is part of the secret sauce that many tutorials are missing. You can read a lot about the class hierarchy (inheritance, class variables, instance variables, ...), but few seem to care to explain what 'Everything is an Object' really means.
So your OOP program is basically sending different messages to different objects.
Finally, what makes OOP so powerful is that there are some attributes which are being enabled by placing your classes in the right spot of the class hierarchy, so that an object of that class does not just inherit all the attributes, but can also be used as one of its superclasses (polymorphism). That way you can write code that works with a wide variety of objects.
I am sure I missed a few things, but for me, understanding the clean syntax of Smalltalk and the implications of 'Everything is an Object' changed my perception of the OOP concept.
OOP is easier to use when describing a mental model as-is, without the analytical deconstruction that (typed) FP would demand.
I think this is a failure of Smalltalk, not OOP. I tried it in Ruby and Python (languages where everything is an object), both return 7.
I studied the same books and did the same exercises as my brother the CS major and do feel that my training would be incomplete without that. But I don't feel disadvantaged by not doing that within a class structure.
The main thing I lack is access to government jobs, which routinely require credentials I don't have. But I've probably had a more diverse and satisfying career as a big fish in small private sector ponds.
Not everyone can learn coding without externally imposed structure. But those who can't probably have an ongoing problem in keeping up with the state of the art.
That's actually not what a CS degree is primarily about. You learn to code in maybe the first 2 or 3 classes. After that, it's assumed that you can translate ideas into code and you start learning about different areas of computer science.
If you just need to learn to code for a job, there are bootcamps that can teach you that in a fraction of the time and cost.
> But those who can't probably have an ongoing problem in keeping up with the state of the art.
Personally, I wasn't able to learn to code in any meaningful way before college. I had tried to learn from books and online sources but never got beyond basic scripting. After working my way through a bachelor's degree and PhD, I don't have much trouble keeping up with the state of the art now.
Doing cs is not coding just to clarify.
https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/government/
Here's one:
https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/539439100
>a custom build of the open-source search engine Solr, a highly responsive UI engineered on top of React, a high performance distributed brokerage system, and cloud-based hosted services with Kubernetes in Amazon Web Services. The primary programming languages are Python, Java, and JavaScript.
https://18f.gsa.gov/join/
I eventually did study part time for a degree, mainly out of belief that it might help with future career opportunities, but also because I might enjoy it.
I got a 1st, with honours. TBH, the only part I truely enjoyed was the final project. The rest was mildly interesting at best, and a bore at worst. I found 80% of it easy, 10% difficult (maths), and 10% challenging (the final project, but only because I made it challenging).
In retrospect, I don't think it's really made any difference to my career, as I'd proved myself long before getting the degree. I don't necessarily regret it either though - maybe the most useful thing was getting me into the groove of reading academic papers, which had benefited me greatly, both work-wise and in my personal life (health issues).
Ive been a consultant at several companies where other software engineers REFUSED to learn anything unless:
A) it was during work hours B) the company provided a structured environment to learn the thing (usually in the form of paid 3rd party trainers coming on site).
Needless to say, those teams were far from successful.
There's also more and more folks coming in for the money (nothing wrong with that) expecting it to be a 9 to 5 job. It absolutely CAN be a 9 to 5 job given the right environment/company/structure, but no one in their right mind would pay average west/east coast software engineer salary for a 9 to 5 employee. The extra responsibilities, continual learning, possible on-call, etc, are all baked in those crazy 6 figure salaries everyone drool over.
There's totally a time and place for more typical schedule. Just expect to be paid accordingly. In the short term the market isn't quite adjusted to the idea that not all software eng roles are the same, so there's plenty of people who make 200k+ for doing essentially clerical work (that just happens to involve code) but its just a matter of time before that changes (its already happening).
I guess my question would be which government? I do government contracting (US), and degrees are not required. The labor categories are typically written so that if you don't have a degree, you just need an additional 4 years of experience. On almost every contract I've worked on I've met a developer without a degree.
I got into this stuff in early high-school, and those were just "intro to C++" books.
The book that kind of changed my life (and a bunch of other people's as well) is one I bought when I was 19 called "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (SICP for short). It's a bit heavy, but if you know the basics of programming it's not too difficult. This book really teaches you a lot of fundamentals of software, and to me is the must-have book in compsci, and it's available for free of MIT's website.
Then I just went on ebay and looked up "discrete math textbooks" and "discrete structures textbooks", and bought a few of the cheaper ones.
Then I started finding individual topics that interested me, which largely dealt with distributed computing, weird abstract math, and video processing. For that, I bought the book "Programming Distributed Computing Systems" by Varela, "Certified Programming with Dependent Types" by Chlipala, and random books on Fourier Transforms from eBay.
This is over the course of a few years, and it was intermixed with about a million different blogs and tutorials to get me better. I've found if you stick with the more "theory-heavy" languages like Coq, Idris, or Haskell, you end up picking up a lot more of the compsci concepts that you might learn in school, just because there aren't a million people constantly yelling "OMG YOU DON'T NEED MATH FOR <insert language here>".
You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.
Congratulations, you're making money by manipulating someone into giving you their money. Awesome ! Thanks for playing, please leave.
I guess the point of the website is to encourage people without a CS degree to learn programming. That's great. The disctinction beetween CS graduates and non-graduates seems to be very unfruitful IMHO so encouraging people to pick up a computer is cool.
What I would sugget is to stop promoting sensationnal stories like the kid that is making 15k$ a month. This is purely manipulative and dishonest. This kind of journalism is plain wrong. Even if the number are true (which I highly doubt) encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.
More, maybe encouraging good engineering (or craftmanship whatever you want to call it) instead of instagram buzz and money would make tomorrow's software a little less frustrating to use and a little less bloated.
I would love to see a story, just once, with the title "this guy made a beautiful piece of software, and it's awesome"
I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it's becoming more and more fiscally irresponsible for most people to attend higher education, taking on the mountains of debt necessary to make it possible.
So the sensational stories of survivorship bias about the one-off people making exorbitant amounts of money can definitely go... but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical, and I expect it to get much worse.
That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.
In the US*
All that means is that either alternate methods (eg: trade school) will become much more sophisticated, or that the US will fall behind countries that have solid, but much cheaper CS degree programs (helllllllo Waterloo)
I totally agree with that proposition. The degree is not a sine qua none condition of competence.
My point was that success stories about kids making a lot of cash on a self taught developer skillset are pure and simple lies. They hide the truth to those who really want to get into the IT industry and make a living with it. That truth is : work your engineering skills if you want to build cools things.
I said make a living. Not get crazy rich. Engineers don't get crazy rich. Salesmen (and salewomen) do.
People that did not have the ressources or desire to go to uni would get a lot more encouragement and from real developer tales : stories about smart engineering, beautiful UIs, dedication to a craft and passion, or even sly hacking.
Instead they read stories about skilled salesmen. The stories are not even that good. Glengary glen ross and the wolf of wall street are much better.
What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university?
(lack of formal education, money, time ...)
And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success stories, so thats why you see such success stories much more ..
My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.
I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.
I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.
Both have their up- and downsides, and treating them like equals is ignoring that which makes them each of them unique.
There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.
I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.
In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.
Of course there are the Peter Deutsch wunderkinds and the people who get a really good secondary education and can jump into CLRS on their own without hand holding from college, but I don't think there are very many of them out there.
And adult learners are a whole different matter for whom the decision to go to college for CS is radically different.
After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.
You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.
There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.
Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process.
Job security is a thing of the past, whether you went to school or not.
The "ideal" developer isn't some kind of monk who dedicates his entire life to one firm.
Making money doesn't mean your product is bad, useless or badly designed. It also doesn't necessarily mean you're the best salesman.
Sometimes experienced developers without a CS degree and without sales skills still get paid a lot because:
A) the requirement doesn't call for advanced computer science knowledge
B) the requirement does call for a significant amount of practical experience and business knowledge
C) it's a highly profitable industry and the specific work being done will generate the company profit and/or cut costs
It can be perfectly legitimate to perform jobs like this without having a CS degree or ever intending to get one.
It can be perfectly legitimate to work your way up the ladder of such jobs and jump from job to job in the process.
Some of us want to raise a family and/or be able to retire one day. Why should we put our careers on hold to pursue a degree?
I think you mistook my A => B assumptions for a no B => no A which is a flawed logical reasoning.
It's not manipulation. It's always a sales proposition, but you're either doing it well or you're doing it poorly.
Obviously, there is no external, impartial arbiter of what makes a "good" programmer (or products, or services). There is only perception.
I used to drift around but I've learned the importance of selling myself so I can be sure I get the value I deserve.
So many things in business are sales transactions, and it's better to come to peace with that early on. Sure, we're engineers but if you want your value to be recognized you have to learn to be a businessperson too.
This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.
Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".
That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.
Anne-Laure made a wellness plugin.
Steph won an Inclusion prize for calculating how many women contribute on Product Hunt.
Harry Dry made a funny dating site for Kanye West fans.
You mostly spend (or waste) time on tools, frameworks and interaction (both with humans and other systems). Lots of common development is rather mundane compared to all the beautiful theory behind it. Which is not automatically bad, but also doesn't require a CS Degree to get going.
I don't necessarily enjoy writing compilers. But the fact remains that I can write a compiler. I can program in C or C++. I do understand pointers. None of this may hold any real value, but I wouldn't be able to do any of them if not for the degree.
I liked your initial point, but the argument weakens... People absolutely have learned all the above things (and very well), on their own, outside of a CS degree, and I bet you could've.
My point was that I wouldn't have learned it because I don't enjoy it. And sometimes, professionally, we get to do stuff that isn't fun. The nature of being self-taught is heavily biasing the things that interest you. College forces you outside of the box. Outside of the box happens to be those things for me, but they'll be other things for other people.
Sorry if that point wasn't clear.
Learning to think outside the box and learning about specific specialties that you don't find interesting aren't even remotely the same thing. If you read what I wrote, you'll notice the example areas I gave. None of them were "thinking outside of the box", they were fields that didn't interest me.
The value they bring is that I learned a common language. I can talk to ML engineers or Compiler Engineers in a common language because I have experience in those fields that I wouldn't had I taken a different route. That isn't even remotely a requirement for my field. It's just useful for discussions with other people.
Maybe you'll spend hours and hours learning compiler design and implementation so you can have a friendly conversation with a colleague at lunch, but I'm not going to. Formal education forced that on me. That's been healthy for my professional networking, but that's about it. I still consider it useful, but had I skipped the CS degree I wouldn't do it. Nor would most people.
It's natural to gravitate towards things that interest you. Some people are driven by gaps and learn things regardless, most people do not. That's not even controversial.
The latter is able to identify holes in his own knowledge, and find appropriate material to educate himself on. That ability is what defines an autodidact in the first place.
This is also the very same thing you get taught in basically all sciences: How to aquire knowledge about a subject matter you yet know nothing about.
So, an autodidactic Programmer without a degree will most certainly have similar knowledge as a CS graduate, simple because that is how such people "tick".
It's just that not every self-taught programmer is an autodidact. And in that case I agree with your argument.
EDIT: Note - I see your replies and reasoning with others on what you meant; I do agree with you there, too.
---
I know you can do all of them without a CS degree.
Where a CS degree really helps, though - and this is something that I know I lack (but real-world experience has taught me enough that I can get by) - are what could be almost considered CS fundamentals:
* Data Structures
* Sorting Algorithms
* General Algorithms
Fortunately, in the day-to-day realm of most programming, you don't need to implement any of them from scratch, and most of them you can learn the basics of (or "best common examples") fairly quickly, which is where I am at mostly.
The problem happens when you run into a situation that isn't seemingly addressed by that level of knowledge (which again, thankfully, in most day-to-day work is extremely rare); by having that prior exposure via a CS degree, you would at least potentially know some words or phrases to look up to refresh your memory on concepts.
Further, you would also have the knowledge (or refreshing of knowledge) to be able to understand any new developments that may have occurred since you were taught (and so could easily read any research papers on the topics).
If I were in such a situation, I would need to break out some google searches on various xyz (ie structures and/or algorithms), use whatever understanding I have to understand those to a level to be able to pick out potential candidates to study in more depth, and maybe hope to run across more recent stuff that may be better (and pray I could understand it enough to implement it).
The one upside in this day and age, though, is that for all of these, for virtually any language I currently understand, someone has likely written an implementation of it - which can be extremely helpful both in the solution to a problem, and in understanding that solution.
But a CS degree would make things much simpler, were it something I had time to pursue. I could probably find the time, but the cost vs benefit ratio no longer works out to my favor, beyond self-edification, given my age and current life obligations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_semantics
Writing a compiler is just the side effect of showing it could be useful. It’s not hard programming equals cs. It’s the science part of computer science that matter.
I'm about 3/4 of the way through writing a book on implementing interpreters and compilers [0]. My day job is as a software engineer at Google working on the Dart language.
My highest attained degree is a high school diploma from a shitty public high school in southern Louisiana. I went to LSU for a year and a half and dropped out.
[0]: http://craftinginterpreters.com/
And that's my point. If you're self-taught you have to be willing to learn things you find completely uninteresting (or boring, hard, whatever) if you want to be as well-rounded as a CS graduate. Most successful self-taught programmers do exactly that. Most people don't.
Not necessarily, you could also just find all that CS stuff interesting.
Earning my BS and then my MS did not increase the amount of money people were willing to pay me to build things. However, I can generally tell when I'm working with someone who is entirely self taught and I assume others with degrees can tell also.
1. "I can just tell that person is self-taught." (No, they went to a contemporary dotcom feeder vocational CS program, and spent all their time adding the latest framework keywords, and drilling for the leetcode whiteboard interview.)
2. "It hasn't occurred to me that other person might be self-taught." (Yes, they are.)
3. "100% so far."
All the stuff that your CS degree taught you is also possible to learn by reading books.
ITT people are focusing too hard on the content of a CS program and too little on the more general goals of an undergraduate degree:
- expose you to multiple fields of knowledge while focusing on a main thread
- help you develop generic thinking skills that should translate to a variety of fields of application (there are many CEOs with art history degrees)
- lead you through a first approximation of a scientific project, qualifying you for graduate-level research
- signalling to the world that you have the chops and the work ethic to go through with a major project with many frustrating stepping stone
- etc.
i.e., hazing.
You demonstrate commitment by surviving the hazing ritual.
With limited free time, it's hard to know whether it's better to self study or do a degree (or even just follow along a curriculum online)
I go between trying to work through things systematically to get a good grounding where I have knowledge gaps, and jumping to what I think will help me best on my job at this point in time.
It would probably be better to stick to one approach or the other to make more focused use of time, but I'm not sure which way is best! :)
I learned a lot of useful things, like how to write a compiler. But I would say that in the sense of what I really do day-to-day to "program", I'm effectively self-taught too.
(I walk the walk, too; I can and have hired people without degrees, and it's been fine.)
Still learned most of how to be a developer on my own, but I find immense value in the education. I learned to see how nothing in computing is magic, just hard work. In 2014 they changed the algorithm introduction course from C++/java to python, which I reckon is a good thing.
The only thing I've never had any use for is differential equations. I have for instance never worked with signal processing.
Maybe a few years later I started delving into 'hacker culture', and I picked up C with K&R (since it was almost universally recommended and easy to read), I also at some point picked up UNIX Power Tools (recommended in Linux Format) and The Practice of Programming. At some point after that I became really interested in Compilers and Operating Systems.
When I went for my first internship three years ago, the interviewer said I knew more about the things we talked about, than most other bona fide engineers they interviewed. The university-hired interns that sat next to me couldn't read the Erlang manual or documentation because it just didn't click with them, which while I can appreciate on some level that people have different sources of information that suit them best, it's still astonishing to me.
Consider that programmers started out as secretaries learning how to program the machine from the specification and the schematics given. A lot of the programmers I have met, probably wouldn't be able to cope with such a task, I include myself in that category.
I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.
Can you imagine a modern language like Swift or Rust being taught to the same level, in the same space as K&R? I can't!
This is a common misconception. There were plenty of shit books then, too, you just won't find people remembering and recommending them. Whereas we haven't, collectively, discarded the shit books of today, yet.
I think this angle has made a huge positive difference in my ability to reason about my work. I think if you start with high level languages, it's easy to ignore what you're actually doing.
Nowadays, there are so many resources (mostly low quality) that people waste too much time trying to decide or lesrning things wrong.
https://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/
They generally won't wrestle with the tough sections in a systemic fashion, the way you are forced to in a decent CS program.
For most people (even most professional developers) the only practical way to gain the equivalent knowledge you'd get with a CS degree, is by getting a CS degree.
I worked for years as a self taught professional developer before going back btw, and I've hired/interviewed many boot camp graduates, self taught programmers, and degree holders.
I have a friend who does webdev (mostly Wordpress, some Drupal) who did not have go through a CS program, though he took a few web dev classes in college. He goes good work, but he has a very loose grasp on fundamentals. He showed me a side project he was doing (a web based clicker game) and after looking at the code, I suggested he try adding some classes to reduce his code reuse. After explaining the basics (and some quick research on how classes work in Javascript), it kind of blew his mind. He never used classes before in his code because he just had no reference point.
CS majors who cannot program applying academic theory without understanding.
I'm old enough to remember graduates rolling their own sorting algos, or building classes 6 levels of inheritance deep. While simultaneously creating massive if/else nesting, with tons of duplicated code, unable to understand how to use basic ideas like functions and recursion, even though I'm sure they probably had a whole one lecture on the subject, mixed in with whole modules on pointless compiler lectures.
Because that's what their CS degree taught them.
How both CS graduates and non-graduates really learn is by seeing what other programmers do in the industry, or by making their own mistakes.
I went way beyond what any CS grad does, and it cost me nothing in money and less time than a CS degree. If you're motivated you can beat a university CS education - it's actually really not that high a bar.
I agree with you that most people won't do that. I was home schooled so I have a different attitude about learning than most people - and that's made all the difference. But is fundamentally a problem of motivation and goals, you don't need university for either.
You can probably imagine why many people wouldn't believe you. "My work is amazing but I am too lazy to publish it" is a peak stereotype for self-educated people. My prior on this being ignorance rather than genius is super high. And if it is true that you are a once in a generation genius who could outpace the research community then your experience is completely useless for others, given that you'd be so much smarter than a typical person who is doing self-education and trying to get a job.
I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those. It's true I'm well above average though, so perhaps my experiences don't generalize. I don't believe that though. I still think it's motivation and goals that count.
> I'm not a genius, unless you count an online IQ test I took in my early twenties, but I'm deeply skeptical of those
You do sound smart though. Just... one of the benefits of a challenging formal education is a large dose of humility.
Honestly, if you think writing a two to three page paper is "a lot of effort", I doubt you've done what you've claimed.
He’s not claiming he invented cold fusion, just something that would be an iterative step in improving the state of the art, probably worth one paper in a decent but not super prestigious journal. Where do you get the idea that it’s worth a free Ph.D, fame and fortune, and all that?
When you have to learn all that stuff to get your degree, then you just have to learn it. Period. Also people who are full time students have more time to spend on these topics, but when you are actually working 8h+ per day and your career is mostly around JS frameworks it becomes much harder to invest time into these things.
Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd say it applies for most.
The two best things a CS degree can do is expose you to ideas you wouldn't otherwise know about, and to force you to work on hard projects that require a combination of multi-level analytical thinking and research.
Both of those are excellent training for at least some aspects of being developer.
But that doesn't mean the details are inherently useful. There are very few situations where you will be expected to write a compiler. So in that sense compiler theory itself is optional - far less useful than the experience of having to handle a complex set of data structures and relationships, which could in theory come from other kinds of projects.
Academic CS also tends to miss out a lot of useful practical skills. It won't teach you much about management (from either side), salary negotiations, office politics and co-worker relationships, or business theory.
It may not even teach you how to write good clean code that's easy to read and maintain.
So IMO the ideal CS degree doesn't exist. The ideal degree would be a good mix of theory with plenty of industry practice - possibly with some standardised requirements that would lead to a Chartered Developer qualification that was better at guaranteeing a working blend of practical skill, theoretical understanding, and analytical talent than current degrees seem to be.
I agree that should be the case, and sadly enough, I've seen a number of people graduate college with degrees in CS and not have that. There have been a number of times when I'd mention some non-esoteric concept that should have been covered and the response is something like "huh"? I'm not talking about things like "Oh you don't understand how to implement Redux?", it's more things like "Ok, you need to compute the intersection of these two arrays." You are right, they probably have been exposed to these concepts, but they have no idea how to actually do it. More importantly, they grasp so little, they didn't even know where to start. The saddest one I saw was a student that was wicked smart, and the school didn't challenge him enough to struggle through any projects. When he came to intern, he was lost, because he'd never been actually challenged. (He was from a major public university too.)
Don't get me wrong, I disagree, there are a number of great CS programs from both public and private universities, and actually the good ones are exactly like you mention (both theoretical and practical application), but there are a lot that aren't.
Or you could just do the bare minimum that your class’s TA will let you get away with, which usually means not much at all…
Honestly, what I find I'm missing is mostly class status and a piece of paper.
The lower you go, the more you need to know (and do) yourself. That is where CS degrees do help, because without the benefit of layered architectures of shared libraries, systems and code in general you need to know what those layers did in order to know how to do the work without them. That said, low-level doesn't always mean the same thing. Some people think writing software in C is low-level, but when I think low-level I mostly think of assembly on bare metal with no OS or anything like that.
Personal projects will do. You could work on Open Source software. Obvious choices: qemu, valgrind, FreeRTOS, RTEMS, Linux (kernel), SeaBIOS, gcc, clang, ghidra, binutils, MAME, OpenOCD, gdb, dosemu, dosbox, FreeDOS, Wine, SDCC, dolphin-emu, Xenia, coreboot
It allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice.
This again gives me a good feeling of whether something will be easy/quick to learn.
As a non CS degree developer I can’t really see anything that I’m missing because of not having the degree. I have a successful business, get hired for freelance jobs for a good salary, can build anything I want, ...
Would love to know what one would get out of having the degree versus self study.
Some benefits that it will give you:
- It will actually let you move into different positions within tech/it industry when you have wider/deeper understanding of how things works.
- As someone said already in this thread: "allows me to make sharper categorizations whether something is mathematical, architectural, security, programming, framework related or a best practice."
- You'll be better at your job. Maybe not every day you need to know what's happening under the hood, but there are and there will be days when you need to. Even if you only developed JS frontend apps whole your career.
When you actually say "I can build anything I want", then (although I don't know you) I'm pretty sure that you can't. People who get that deeper understanding of things also understand how complex some things are and how complex some things can get.
As for knowing the theoretical basis of computer science, that will have value in some parts of industry and very little value in other parts of industry. While someone in your position may have a high degree of success working in the upper layers of abstraction, someone has to develop, advance, and maintain the lower levels of abstraction that you depend upon. None of that is meant to say that you need that theoretical knowledge to be successful, rather it is important for some people to have that theoretical knowledge to ensure the success of the industry.
The difference is one will remain standing after an earthquake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...
Building good bridges without an engineering degree is easy. You simply don't minimize materials and cost.
You don’t need a professor to tell you what books to read. You can just read them.
In another comment a few days ago, I mentioned a 10x engineer I knew. Graduated from high school. Went into the military. Came out and coded. He is the best coder I've worked with.
College education is not necessary to be a successful programmer. You do need to have some predisposition to coding, but you definitely don't need a degree.
What they care about is if you have given them a solution that solves their problem(s). They don't care how you got there. They don't care what technology you used. Just as long as you solved the problem(s) they were having, and that you did it in the time/budget allotment for the job.
That said, as the solution provider you should have found out both their current use cases and potential future use cases, in order to select the tools you'll need for the immediate solution, and ideally for any updates or improvements that may be needed later on.
Because they will care, for instance, if the code you wrote was in a language that won't allow them to scale up quickly and easily (assuming you wrote the rest of the system to allow for this of course), or has some other kind of issue that prevents the client from moving forward with a change.
The last thing a client wants to hear is "complete rewrite using different language/framework/system" just to implement an extension or upgrade path (the best you can usually get by with is a refactor of the existing code base - but you better have a damn good reason and plan for that refactor).
I simply asked a simple question out of curiosity, JFC. Does curiosity matter?
For the record, all code is ephemeral so since you're going to end up throwing it away anyway one day, it doesn't fucking matter what language you start with. Pretty much any language can back-end an API until a certain (large) number of users. #ProblemsWe'dLikeToHave
Twitter threw away Ruby and went to Scala; Facebook is slowly replacing PHP with... whatever, pretty much anything is superior to PHP; plenty of other companies have had to do partial or full rewrites of core functionality on a new stack. Paul Graham himself had his Lisp code tossed in a rewrite.
Uber's ripping out Python and going to a bunch of other langs: https://eng.uber.com/tech-stack-part-one/
Uber and Reddit have schemaless db backends for scalability reasons; I doubt they started out that way.
And yet, Discord is still on Elixir. Isn't that interesting. But I think they're putting in pieces of Rust.
So... I just asked a question.
Yes.
While the evidence provided is anecdotal (that is to say: outliers exist in successfully learning anything outside of a formal education), there are languages designed to be more friendly and more fun for newcomers (Ruby, for example) while others are designed to be translate more directly to the instructions a machine might execute. More anecdotal evidence indicating that one language might facilitate informal learning better might be interesting or helpful.
I worked at a couple startups from 2012-2013. During that time, I became very proficient in Coffeescript and a couple popular frontend frameworks. I was very productive in terms of pumping out lines of code (that somehow resulted in a working product).
However, I didn't know how to write a for loop. If you had asked me what "for...in" was, I wouldn't have had a clue. And forget about asking me how setTimeout has to do with the call stack.
The problem with being self taught, at least in my experience, is that you end up being very strong in whatever areas it is that interests you, and whatever areas of CS are relevant to the projects you're working on day-to-day.
In 2013, I began to realize my (glaring) deficiencies as a programmer. That was the point when I started spending all my free time doing online CS courses. They helped a lot with filling in the knowledge gaps that I didn't even know I had.
The main reason I'm posting this is to give a shoutout to Project Euler.
Project Euler (https://projecteuler.net/) is an amazing way to test yourself (and learn) CS concepts. If you've done a coding bootcamp and want to do a "gut check" to see how much you learned (or how much you have left to learn), I'd highly recommend Project Euler.
(I'm happy to say that in 2019, I can write for loops all day long...)
This is absolutely key. One of the main advantages of a solid undergraduate curriculum is that it forces you to work your way through things that are important, but don't interest you as much. And this path is designed and supported by people with a much better broad view of the field than you have.
Now, you'll still always gain knowledge faster in the areas that interest you most, but if you only indulge this approach you will have significant gaps.
One thing I always recommend to people self-studying (when they ask) is to find someone you trust who really knows the area and ask them for recommended courses/books. Then follow that advice.
To some degree MOOCs etc. try and do this for you by designing course progressions, but there are limitations and constraints there that can have you spinning your wheel.
Being disciplined about both breadth and depth in a new subject is difficult. One of the underlying themes of a post-graduate degree, particularly a PhD, is to give you tools to do this for yourself repeatedly. It's not impossible to gain these skills properly with little or no formal education, but it is quite difficult.
I got into development from doing design work, also self taught back in the 90's. I wanted to do something... spent a very rapid weekend learning JS from a very large book, then applied what I needed the next monday. Spent the next weekend finishing that book and the next month swallowing three other large books on the subject (two more on JS, one on HTML). From there was VB5 then Access & VBA... then I started working as a developer. From there I learned more about databases and data structures, dabbled in C/C++ then circled around to VB6 when it came out. From there around the end of 2001 (after 9/11) I was unemployed and no jobs to be found. While crashing at a friend's house I learned C# with the command line compiler and another large book (didn't have VS). Since then more databases and db types, more C# and when it came out Node.js (had done a lot of classic ASP in JS along the way too).
I spent about 5 years working in eLearning, writing simulations of systems for learning/training as well as courseware. Really enjoyed that time in my life as I was constantly taking in domain knowledge as well as a very varied environment. Unfortunately after a while all the context switching and constant intake took a toll and I took a few more boring jobs doing corporate/banking work.
In any case, you'd be surprised how much you can learn without a formal education, or anything really structured at all. To this day I tend to take in new stuff rapidly and get bored once I've figured out the hard parts. Currently working on learning Rust and Kubernetes, short break on rust as the async syntax gets implemented and settles in.
But to respond to "self-study isn't nothing": that's true, but your self study didn't replace college, it replaced self study. What I mean is that everyone has to do that self study and job training targeted at the specific stuff they're doing. Self study is necessary to expand "known knowns" in targeted areas, which is really necessary. It's just not as good at illuminating "unknown unknowns" as a curriculum put together by a person or group of people who know the breadth and history of a field.
Also, it assumes that you have access to a very high quality education. In lots of cases, the teaching might be mediocre (perhaps even at elite universities that care more about research grants than education).
There's a lot of value in having a standardized base of knowledge, where you learn all the things that a practicing engineer should know. But in reality, the sum of things you "should" do takes more than a lifetime. And you have to find some ways to differentiate your knowledge and expertise if you want to innovate.
I wasn't even talking about the course quality (which as you note, is very variable) but about the curriculum.
One thing you can do as an individual teaching yourself CS, say, is to try and follow the curriculum of a known good CS program. There are issues with this, too, but at least you are getting some guidance.
The opportunity cost issue is a good point. One problem with following undergrad programs, say, is that only part of what they are doing is teaching you material, the other part is learning-how-to-learn stuff. If you are an independent learner of sufficient skill, some courses will be way too slow for you.
It would be optimal in some sense to have high level "key concept" material that you can survey efficiently and then decide when and where you need to dig deeper. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem though, because if you are insufficiently skilled you will do poorly at the second part...
Of course given the libraries and systems already available, you don't practically need a lot of this knowledge, but it does help. When certain portions of an application just don't perform well, or when you hit really weird side effects of race conditions on static properties etc. I think it's also important to know the language and tools that you are working with as well as possible. It's not always possible to know everything, but you should probably read and complete at least one book on the language you are using. You can hack away in any given language for years. But until you've actually read cover to cover on a comprehensive book, you won't necessarily understand some concepts, or better still you will learn how the language does something for you, that you've been doing the hard way.
It's obviously true that you don't need to know these things to perform your current job, but that's not what the OP was talking about.
I've taken to offering three pieces of advice to these people:
1) Go through the basic language tutorial of whatever language you use (e.g. how to declare variable, conditionals, loops)
2) Go read through the essentials guide to your languages (will be slightly higher level stuff)
3) Go read the sections on Data Structures, Concepts and Algorithms and Knowledge Base in Cracking The Coding Interview skipping the problems that aren't answered in chapter. Why? Because it's a solid primer for CS Concepts that people just don't pick up unless they have to, and most importantly short enough (< 100 pages) people will actually go through it. Large CS books with the dense writing intimidate people and so they never follow through.
I've had a lot of success with this method. It's not a formal cs education by any means but I've found it's enough to get people past the constant beginner part.
We all know hiring and interviewing are basically a crapshoot. Good people sometimes don't get hired and bad people sometimes do.
a.) Be able to pass a drug test
b.) Not have any problematic debts or associations with problematic groups (e.g. Aryan Nation, ISIS)
c.) Have a certification or degree that is related to the very specific thing they are asking for.
It's entirely clearing a checklist when they're recruiting. They have no idea how to evaluate for actual competence.
It depends heavily on your COR and government leads, but the good ones are few enough that they don't get to send the norm. There are enough people who are sufficiently checked out that contracting/staffing firms can get away with murder. Indeed, it might just be impossible for them to do a good job based on what sorts of requirements they're expected to adhere to.
Unsolicited feedback: I think it should be pointed out that your attitude probably isn't helping in your job search.
I'm self taught, I started with the C64 in the early 80s. By the time I was 15 I was working in assembly, had an excellent knowledge of what we would now call embedded software development and a working knowledge of algorithms.
I'm glad that you took the step to get a proper education. With the modern internet it's extremely easier and the quality is incomparably better than my experience of the UK educational system. Between Coursera, MIT and the vast number of excellent books it's a dream.
It's an eye-opener to me that someone can be self-taught and not understand something as basic as loops. It has been my experience hiring developers that the self-taught type are considerably stronger than those who are purely college educated. I've also noticed that the self-taught type who consider themselves software engineers all went through a two year period of intense studying of computer science and software engineering in their own time. The combination of a real working understanding of software creation with passion is an extremely strong combination.
What I've noticed is that your type don't get scared of technical changes because you're basically able to learn anything. The "college career" type tend to scare easily and also jump into management the second they get a sniff of it.
All of this said, if I was 18 now I would strongly advise myself to do 3/4 STEM A-levels (Math, Physics and something else) and then go study Computer Science at a university which has a good program. By good program - one where I'd write a compiler from scratch, learn the theory (finite automata etc), machine learning, linear algebra and hopefully something fun like building a 3d engine or game engine or something. You can do it all yourself but a three-year program certainly makes life a lot easier, plus you get to make friends and network. AND you have a nice piece of paper.
I do have gaps in my knowledge but if I lose internet access I can still be productive. I mostly google for how to optimize when some API is slow or remind myself some method name.
I just wanted to pipe up because the top comment is "I couldn't write a for-loop" and I don't want all of us who are self taught being lobbed into that category.
At my last job I regularly had to help colleagues (some who held degrees) solve issues. Strangely they had trouble starting from scratch on something new vs maintaining old code. They found the latter easier. They also sometimes chose the wrong data structures (e.g. looping through an array every time you want an item with id=x instead of just using a hashtable)
Huh, I had almost the exact same experience with senior devs here - they were checking if elements were in a (huge) list in nested loops, instead of using a set. Switching brought the runtime from around 2 hours to 2 minutes.
Which is not necessarily a bad (for whatever definition of bad) thing.
For the startups you worked at, your ability to write code was far more valuable than your understanding of underlying CS concepts.
Kudos to you for having the maturity to acknowledge the gaps in your education and to address them in a manner that complements your life.
I think this is the case even if you receive a formal CS education. I picked the most difficult or interesting classes and got As in them, and barely passed everything else in order to graduate in 4 years. Many students avoided the hard professors to protect their GPA, so it was really easy to register for them since 25% of students might drop the class.
Probably the most important thing a formal CS education does is expose you to CS fundamentals, but in my experience you end up having to be self-taught in a university setting anyway. Most of the professors I had were more interested in research than in lecturing - many lectures were completely incomprehensible. And even with amazing lecturers, I would still have to spend hundreds of hours reading and practicing on my own.
One of those classes I barely passed was algorithms, since my other workload was too great. I eventually had to self-study this subject years later to pass the tech interview torture chamber.
College was mostly an exercise in self-learning or learning how to learn for me - something I am still reaping the benefits of today.
Definitely agree with this.
I think my data structures professor spent more time talking about chess rather than data structures.
I don't know why you want to call that a "loop", but, sure, you do you, you crazy imperative programmers.
edit: Sigh. I was jockingly mocking.
How did he solve the iteration problem? A for loop is just syntactic sugar for a while loop.
> why are you drawn to Haskell?
I just want my programs to work. I've seen too many null pointer exceptions and other runtime errors. Runtime errors = bad. Compile errors = good.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20112065
Me too ...
And I think imperative languages are way more easy and clear to read and write.
I allways imagined that you have to be a math nerd to prefer Haskell, but apparently this guy is not a math guy, but loves Haskell .. so ok, good counterpoint.
Because it's what you've had exposure to. Perhaps, they're even objectively easier to read and write, I don't know. It's also completely besides my point.
My point was that I want my programs to work as desired. That's orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write. I don't want runtime exceptions where I could've gotten a compile-time error.
And null pointer exceptions? They only happen to me very rarely, when I quickly hack something together and then it is a "oh forgot - and fixed" problem. The problems I do struggle with are non reproducable race condition fun etc. and I doubt haskell could help me with them. Or I struggle, because I do not really understand my problem, or a certain libary ... or, because I misunderstood existing code.
So how on earth are correct programms orthogonal to how easy it is to read and write them?!? Did you ever had to use someone else code? Or your own that you wrote 5 years ago (or sometimes 5 days)?
With any bigger project it is all about how easy it is to read and write them.
And you never run into NPEs in production? It's something you always discover during development? How?
> The problems I do struggle with are non reproducable race condition fun etc. and I doubt haskell could help me with them.
In a pure system, thread race conditions are impossible. You can still get race conditions for your external effects, which is unavoidable.
They use enumeration (list/array traversal) to process a list/array of inputs.
And it entirely makes impossible the off-by-one error.
I am happy if I never have to see a for-loop again. (Even in JS, I use iteration/enumeration constructs as much as possible.)
It is one of several programming paradigms, after all. Am I missing something?
Maybe I should become a high school CS teacher, because I would not curse anyone with a procedural language.
Which is better? YMMV.
> I didn't know how to write a for loop
If
I've probably done 300 or so LC, and do some every week, mostly as an insurance policy for technical interviews if I ever opportunistically interviewed in a short time frame.
I'd recommend LC to someone who has an interview in a month, PE to someone who has one in a year.
In the discussions many people post their solutions, and those often have bugs in obscure cases that the LeetCode grader doesn't hit. Another common thing is for the posted solutions to always give the correct answer, but miss the time or space constraints that the problem statement asked for.
I've found that reviewing those other solutions to find those issues to be quite instructive. Also, there will sometimes be a solution in there that is better than mine, which is also instructive.
Blindly having confidence in someone with a degree vs. someone with no degree is a bad mistake in this industry, IMO, sadly it happens.
It really comes down to the person, self taught or not, if you don’t pursue continuing education (which is a must in this industry) whatever CS knowledge you learnt with your degree will only take you so far.
Also said “broad exposure” can be well… self taught as well, algorithms, data structures, OS, etc… all things you can learn and "master" with no CS degree.
With all that said, I do agree CS education is essential to become a better developer. As a self thought myself, learning CS has made me a way better developer for sure, and I would advise all self taught devs to do the same, it will pay off immensely and best of all no student loan to repay.
In a good CS program you will be presented a series of challenges below your “depth”....
“wait, you want me to WRITE a data structure? I usually just use a good one from a library”
“wait, you want me to fix a compiler? I have only ever run a compiler”
“wait, you want me to write code that CREATES processes out of nothing? I am used to letting the OS create processes”
... etc. These provide you a series of epiphanies, “wow, I can build a compiler from scratch, that means I could fux with LLVM if I had to”.
Ideally, these programs are designed to take you all the way down to the bottom of the machine. For some students, the end result is confidence in their ability to “dive in” to a problem anywhere in the system.
If your point is that you can teach yourself that outside of school—absolutely. But... well, in my case I doubt I ever would have. It wasn’t fun, I was pushed to do things I would never have followed through on if I was just casually teaching myself about programming languages or operating systems.
And if your point is that students can get away without learning the material—well, also yes. Of course.
But you are wrong to dismiss the idea that a CS degree is just another few things to learn. This business of “get all the way down to the bottom and challenge yourself at every step” is kind of the whole point of a CS degree, and the world outside is not going to encourage you to do it the way your profs will.
I did go to college and learned Java and UML and a few other esoteric things - until I got into my data structures classes. If a self-taught software engineer feels like something is missing, take a few data structures classes. That helps a lot.
But yeah, self taught can take you pretty much anywhere unless the job reqs prevent it.
BTW, I reforce a lot of aspects about analysis, optimization and programming with ProjectEuler by doing Polyglot programming with some friends: https://github.com/DestructHub/ProjectEuler
Another thing is that following and completing a degree is a practice in going from start to finnish in a multi-year project which the degree is, which is also very valuable in life in general. being able to see fruits in the distant future of your current work, and having that motivate and drive you.
A lot of people i meet who are self-taught will give up more easily due to this. not that they are quitters, but they tend to lean towards their interests, which is not always in their best interest :)
I've tended to take the opposite approach, read first so I can at least grasp what I need to look for, then start applying. This of course is a mixed bag for rapidly changing/evolving tech and newer languages.
- People who went to university, going through significant effort for their degree, and want to defend that choice
- People who _didnt_ go to school, perhaps suffering from a touch of imposter syndrome, who want to hide their insecurity
I'm a 20yr old "self-taught" dev. I'm considering going back to school this year. But its a tough choice. Things are going very well for me in the professional world so far. I was in a CS undergrad program for a year but didn't feel like I was learning as well as I was on my own, to be honest.
What I think I can say with confidence is theres not much point in arguing about this. If you want to go then go. If not, don't. Why do we have to prescribe a gospel on this? Let people decide what they want to do. Part of why "self-taught" devs like myself often suffer from insecurity is people shouting the absolute necessity of a degree. I don't see it.
Additionally, I legitimately enjoyed the coursework and learning about high(ish)-level math, art, and engineering that I may otherwise not have. It also gave me free time to pursue fitness and personal projects.
I'm probably not a better programmer as a result. And I'm probably not wealthier either, as I failed to leverage my degree into a position in Big Tech, though as a middling developer, it does make it easier to find jobs. But I do think I'm a better, happier, healthier person, and I would do it again.
The discussion today seems to be all about the logic of it (how will you know what's in a uni degree unless you go?) That was the logic that convinced me to go. It wasn't until I graduated that I could say, with confidence, none of the classes contained anything I didn't already know.
(Yes, yes, including the theory classes.)
But the parent is exactly right: going to uni is a complex decision with multiple independent axes to evaluate: will you make more money over your lifetime (probably not)? Will you get that job you want (probably not, it's more down to people skills)? What will you do with your spare time while in uni (you will have some spare time)? What will you do with the opportunities to meet people?
Then there's what uni you want to attend. How you plan to pay for it. Whether you want to live in a dorm, live with your parents, or go online.
It's always like this when it comes up, which is fairly often here, and I think you're right to point this out. It's an emotionally loaded topic, which means it's a hard one to actually get useful data from.
I think there's a couple of things going on here:
The path someone takes to get where they are is a huge part of their identity. So when they look back on their own history, they want to feel that that path is a good, valuable one because it implies that they are valuable people. So everyone who doesn't have a degree has an incentive to feel it's not important. Likewise, everyone who has a degree wants to feel it is.
The thing is, they're both right. There are many many paths and almost all of them are worthwhile human experiences. Many of them even lead to being a good software engineer. (And of those that don't, they still often lead to being a valuable human in other, often more important ways.)
But the reason it's useful to write about this stuff is for people that are looking ahead and trying to choose a path. Those people want to know the odds of each path and how likely it is to work out for them. Unfortunately, a long list of anecdotes is really hard to synthesize into that. It's like trying to figure out where to eat dinner when every single restaurant review is five stars.
I don't have good data either, but if you're trying to pick your path, I would think about your personality and how that's likely to interact with your choice:
Not going to school gives you more freedom to explore your interests and choose a unique, idiosyncratic path. If you are driven and focused, you can get farther down a road than most others will because you have the freedom to focus on areas where you are passionate. If you want to stand out, it's easier to do so this way.
At the same time, if you aren't self-directed and passionate, you can end up meandering and going nowhere. No one will tell you what to do and it's easy to end up doing nothing, or just dabbling a little in a million things. All of the onus to create structure and discipline is on you.
School will give you a structured environment to learn in. It gives you a curriculum crafted by experts so you will be introduced to topics in a reasonable order and you'll be shown things you might not have realized are important. You'll also absorb much of the culture and tribal knowledge of the field. However, this is skewed towards academia, and if your goal is ultimately industry, this may not be pure win.
Personally, I think going to school is generally a good, safe bet. You'll learn a lot, have a good experience, and meet a lot of people. You'll take a bunch of non-CS classes that will round you out as a human. Even though I dropped out, I got a ton out of my limited college experience, mostly not related to programming.
Not getting a degree is a higher variance path. You may blaze a trail and end up somewhere exciting and unique. You could be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Or you could end up flipping burgers, or underpaid because you're at a company that values degrees.
Not going to school gives you more freedom to explore your interests and choose a unique, idiosyncratic path. If you are driven and focused, you can get farther down a road than most others will because you have the freedom to focus on areas where you are passionate.
This is me, but I know this is not for everyone. I would advise going to school to make it easier in the long run. Passion for your work and the focus to pursue it is very important to get somewhere.
If school worked like it does today, 20 years ago, then maybe I could've finished it.
I kept talking to developers online to find out about their backgrounds as I don't have a CS degree. I figured as I was already asking people how they learned to code I might as well write up some proper interviews and share them with other people. This way I can scratch my own itch and stay motivated as well as sharing motivation with other people.
You can check out my traffic/revenue at my open page which I have started from day one instead of waiting until big numbers www.nocsdegree.com/open
It's inspiring to read about developers who are also informally educated. It brings a sense that people like us are more common than we think and that we're really not alone. They're also finding great success despite the prevailing wisdom that you can't make it without a degree. People like that are proof that you can.
I don't know where the idea that a CS course is a good practical training for a career in development came from - I'm pretty glad the course I did included almost nothing that was attempting to "train" you and focused mostly on the absolute conceptual fundamentals (from the electrical engineering side through general engineering maths to specialised CS subjects) as well as letting us loose to actually build stuff with minimal supervision but careful evaluation.
[The thing that really got my attention was the lambda calculus course where the lecturer mentioned the S & K combinators, of course the same course covered the Y-combinator!]
I had a ZX Spectrum but unfortunately just used it to play Fantasy World Dizzy.
I mean, f*cking seriously?
Yeah, that's harsh, but such a headline's an insult to those with a CS degree and serious self-taught developers alike.
To those who made this stay on the front page: given you're competent, you already make the same or more money as those with a CS degree, even if you might know less about the fundamentals, get over it! Upvoting cruft like this isn't going to vindicate your choice.
2) Not everyone does well in a formal school environment. This site shows people that self-taught can still earn good money.
3) Even if a CS degree would increase the Austrian's earnings, how much would it increase it by? Would it offset the cost of the education? Would it offset the wages earned during the years he was in school?
4) People don't always upvote something to the front page because they agree with it. Sometimes people do it to encourage discussion around a topic.
It's about the Taboola-like quality of the headline. They're an insult to one's intelligence. If I want to be insulted on the Internet, I'd go elsewhere.
What a CS degree does, is teach you how to apply the infection. Some CS degrees are like innoculation against them and you come out with a degree, but no grasp of the fundamentals. Others, you learn so much you become a vector of the disease.
For some problems, recursion is vastly superior e.g. for recursive data structure like trees. And coincidentally, often those structures are much better at delivering high-performance solutions than their naive loop-based counterparts.
Granted, it isn't easy to learn, but also not that hard. Overall, I think the gains easily outweigh the effort. And it is not like I am writing recursions all day long. Most of the time I write loops, but you should know when using recursions is the better way to go and for those times you should know how to handle them.
This includes many "functional" languages like Scala. Even Haskell had a default stack size limit until some years ago, and many Haskell based parsers crashed on large inputs due to that.
If you write programs that are supposed to process arbitrarily large inputs, you cannot use function call recursion in most cases.
(Of course this says nothing about recursion as a concept, which is fundamental and unavoidable unless you're programming, say, a traffic light.)
Right up until the point where you have to traverse a nested data structure.
I've been working at Google as software engineer for 7.5 years now.
I guess you could say this is success, but I would not recommend this path; even after 20 years, there's hiring managers or recruiters that won't look at me, and coworkers whose behavior changes when they find out. Impostor syndrome can be an issue.
At my age with family mortgage kids, it's too late and pointless to go back and re-do all the HS math etc. I'd need to get into a CS program. But I do wish I'd done this. It took me a long time to elbow my way to where I am now.
I am very surprised to hear you say this. My background appears to be similar to yours (no CS degree, programming full-time since the mid-90s), and although I did see some resistance in job interviews for about the first 5 years of my career, once I had enough experience under my belt nobody cared what my education was. I've never encountered the type of elitism you describe. Maybe it's a Google thing?
I learned .NET and Javascript early in my career. Every single job interview I had at a .NET shop brought up my lack of a college degree as a possible barrier to "handling" or being "good enough" for the position (their words). Not a single one of these companies invited me back for another interview.
Never had the same problem with JS, and now I happily work as senior-level engineer (using Python and Javascript) while encouraging other more junior engineers to take up and pursue the JS ecosystem.
U.S. East Coast.
I've never taken a 'computer class' while in school, although I've taken some instruction while working.
Entirely self-taught. I do this because I like it. Back in the day, I never played video games, I taught myself, and wrote, code. To this day, I don't play video games.
It's been my experience that hiring degreed CS graduates may not be the best course. Theirs a big difference between being 'book-smart' and real world smart. I tend to give preference to guys who write code for fun over those who are in it for the money.
Case in point, we just brought on a high-school student who is about to start his comp-sci degree. He has written code for years for fun. He's just rocking it. I'm sure he'll be invited back each summer until his degree is complete and will likely be offered continued employment after.
If their understanding that amateurs make for better hires than professionals is correct, then amateurs being the minority makes an even stronger case for filtering.
I've worked with loads of self-taught developers, mostly from tech/coding bootcamps, and I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out due to a number of factors:
1. Bootcamps are hard, but suddenly these developers find themselves in a harder environment where 12 weeks of coding experience might not be enough to get them out of a problem.
2. Bootcamps cost a lot of time/money, without the option for a student loan, so many people put themselves into debt to switch careers, and that added pressure is a lot for people - especially when they've been sold a lucrative career and find that a company has hired them because they are cheap.
The CS knowledge aspect is largely irrelevant, because many developers can get by quite happily without ever using a linked list or priority queue, or knowing anything about quicksort, merge sort, etc. For most projects where you need to merge k sorted arrays, concatenating them and running the standard language sort function is good enough.
IMO, the problem has never been one of skill, because many industries have developed skills on-the-job or with time spent in industry. Where a CS degree comes in handy is in giving a student a structured approach to learning over a respectable amount of time, and offering a step above the entry-level barrier of entry.
video courses just won't teach as much. very easy to find best book available for each subject. even going partway through a book will offer more. can skip topics, look at syllabuses for classes offered in higher education that use said book if you want to know what to skip (many syllabuses available online).
for example, instead of taking the operating systems class you can simply actually read either of the two books suggested by this very page.
I've found being willing to learn more to help me out, my breadth of knowledge is good enough that in many languages and concepts, I can hold my own against CS graduates.
I think knowing what you don't know is important, because you get incentivized to expand your knowledge. I'm currently studying Maths and Stats, because they're a good base for data science, and where I want to go in my life out of corporate.
The value that I bring to the table is no longer fluency in about 7 languages and a skill to learn more quickly (I've done obscure things like reverse engineering 'complex' accounting rules written in COBOL). What I bring to the table is the ability to solve problems using my financial expertise and technology.
So if anyone's reading this, don't be intimidated by "coding". I see writing software as a natural extension of what's on my mind, using what I understand technology to enable me. So, stretch your mind, it's a very powerful thing. Have faith in yourself, and do great like the people on No CS Degree
Found interviews with self taught people who hacked together websites and built businesses.
Admirable but misleading. Suggested title: “No CS Degree required - interviews with entrepreneurs who learned to hack code”
I work professionally as a software developer for quite a while, and what I have seen in the industry is that you gain more merit when you are able to ship product(s) that people will use (or perhaps automate a process that was previously done in a manual manner).
Yes, you can get past the initial gates of hiring qualifications (such as having a CS degree certificate) as well as the coding tests that lots of companies use as a gauge to test your technical capabilities. But no amount of CS degree or certificate would be enough to patch for example when you are dealing with real world software issues.
If you need software to scale to hundreds of millions of users, then you probably need people who have CS degrees to think about your hard problems and how best to optimize them and which ones have no polynomial time solutions for all inputs (problems to be avoided or worked around somehow).
I can do RSA by hand (on small messages), quickly tell (with only pencil and paper) what 2^1027 mod 3 is and do Euclid and Extended Euclid by hand to find multiplicative inverses (in one pass). But I can write code that runs pretty well, too, and I can do that with or without a CS degree. So can most people.
For example, the conceptual framework for reasoning about distributed systems provided by chemical engineering is superior to the traditional CS version when applied to software systems, and more mature. This has been a persistent advantage over the course of my career designing scalable software. And it is much easier for a chemical engineer to learn computer science than the other way around.
I've come across a few other examples of this in computer science, particularly as it relates to complex systems design and behavior, and not just in relation to chemical engineering. Extremely complex real-world systems as a model are relatively new to CS but have highly evolved solutions in other disciplines out of necessity. There is still much value to be had in learning CS from an unorthodox perspective.
Long story condensed: I grew up dirt poor. Went to college. Got my first computer that could get on the Internet (1998). Wasted time online, missed classes, lost financial aid. Ended up going to work for local ISP doing tech support. Quickly moved into web work, and then development. (mostly ColdFusion) This was late 1999, when things were booming and everyone was hiring.
I took a 6 month contract - low on the contracting end of things, but great money for me. Next job was in HR department attached to the airline industry, which was a good job even when the "dot com crash" was occurring. That job ended do to effect of 9/11 on stock prices, but by then I already had a couple of years of work experience under my belt and was on my way.
Today: director of technology for a small company (fancy way of saying I'm the lead developer and lead architect)
What was true for me then is true for many developers today: some are very cut out for this. Looking back, I've always been a programmer; it wasn't a trade someone told me to go to because of the income. That's why I think some bootcampers succeed, and some fail: truth be told, this industry isn't for everyone (alas, I saw many leave the industry in the early 2000s who went on to do accounting or management or car sales or whatever they're a better fit for). Those same students, and myself, would also succeed with a CS degree. I think the lack of one is a matter of circumstance, not a formula for success or failure.
I will say that there are certain jobs I'm not necessarily equipped for due to some missing foundational information. Those situations are the examples that everyone goes to, but the reality is, the world is bigger than SF and FAANG. (And even at the FAANG's there's plenty of Python, Ruby, and JavaScript slingers... the only time they may have used their CS degree was to get past the ego-stroking whiteboard interview)
No real regrets, though I had (and still have) a sense of inferiority that drives me to study. Last year I threw out many boxes full of papers that I've read over the years (they're mostly available online now). I have bookcases and bookcases of CS-related material. I've read Knuth, etc. (okay, still going through Vol 4...).
My only regrets are not getting a better math background (a decent calculus-based probability and statistics course would have helped). I took linear algebra in school, but didn't really get it until I started doing graphics and then I needed much more than my college course provided anyway.
Tried going back to school a couple of times. Work always got the better of me. Finally I realized that the degree just wasn't important to myself or my employers, and that I wouldn't learn anything anyway. Lack of a degree has never been a problem when finding a job (except once, and I actually felt pretty good about that one . . . maybe I'll tell the story some day).
I think the key to long-term success (whether you have a degree or not) is continuing self-education. I try to keep up by reading papers and digging into promising new tech. The industry is bigger and moving faster these days, so you have to pick and choose what to stay current on. It's a good idea to branch out anyway (if you read ten papers on storage, networking or graphics, read a couple on something unrelated, like AI or queuing theory or dig into biology or astrophysics -- stretch your head). Helps to do different types of projects, too.
I plan to work until I drop; I feel fantastically lucky to have found a career that I enjoy this much. My father-in-law retired from writing code at age 75, I think I can go longer.
I'm writing mostly to hopefully let others know you can be self taught and be super impactful.
I've dealt with a lot in my life, and our ride wasn't smooth sailing -- https://twitter.com/randallb/status/1110669172487286784
But regardless, now I build things that are high quality and fun.
The practical real-world applications of those classes aren't 1:1 with their first job. I'm a frontend engineer and took 0 classes that are even remotely relevant to my day to day work. That said, foundation adds value. I can speak a common language with other engineers, including those that are completely different than my specialty.
To suggest a persons degree is meaningless is just as nonsensical as saying being self-taught is meaningless. I've also worked with both prestigious graduates that can't program and self-taught brilliant programmers. However, they are exceptions to the rule. The only thing that doesn't indicate much is anecdata, which both of us have now provided.
As an aside, your attitude towards entry-level programmers is likely similar to the attitude of senior programmers when you were entry-level. "Simple" is relative. You were undoubtedly a considerably worse programmer when you graduated as well, assuming your current title was earned through merit. Perspective.
It's possible there's selection bias going on. The wheat end up at the Apples and Googles of the world and the chaff end up working with you.
This isn't intended to be an insult. People who attend ivy leagues are given such a huge leg up that even an average graduate probably make it further than most of us plebeians.
They are more ok with doing 'not fun' stuff, because they have suffered doing a bunch of homework. At work, maybe a percentage of the job is fun, and some things you need to power through. Tuning logs, painfully stepping through the code for the 110th time to find the erratic bug, or boring documentation, also part of the job.
They are less inclined to just copy-paste a solution that you found on StackOverflow and more agreeable to go into the R&D mode of finding the right algorithm. This can be a blessing and a curse.
People that have been through several years of education are more inclined to follow a schedule. We are very relaxed at Silicon Valley and yes some people do their best work from home, but sometimes you just have to be here. College helps form some of these habits.
Last, a degree comes with a lot of soft skills that Universities just throw in sometimes. Communication skills, the ability to summarize properly, grammar and spelling .. not required for a coder but definitely useful for someone that wants to grow into a career into software, eventually you need to interact with Product Managers, Business, Customers, and those unrelated-to-the-job skills start becoming very handy.
I can even speak for myself. I didn't learn to code at school much , did some bash and C here and there but that was not the point of my study. We mostly had math, physics and electronic-oriented courses and more precisely in my case a lot of telecommunication courses.
Still, for a first programming job, engineers (as in those with an engineering school diploma) are often preferred to people with a CS degree, which did a lot more programming that we did.
I would guess that it mostly has to do with the reputation of both the schools and the students from there. When it comes to STEM, engineering school is seen as much more prestigious than studying in a university. Young people with higher grades wishing to make a career in programming more often than not tend to choose the former over the latter - even if it means less focused courses.
And yet having said all that, I wouldn't say that french developpers are worse in any way than developpers from other places. Even if most of us learn to truly program at our first job.
I'm not at all saying that a CS degree has no point, but as long as you have the minimum knowledge about the field when starting, it's very efficient to learn on the job the specificities.
That said, most folks did have some sort of science-related degree. People with no higher education aren't unknown, but quite rare ime. People with higher education only in non-science fields have also been quite rare. I haven't run into many shit hot coder history majors, frankly, but those I have encountered were so smart I'm certain they could have aced any degree they took the time to study for.
Last thought: architecture, design and coding seem more akin to creative endeavors such as writing a novel or play, making movies, that don't seem to be easy to "teach". e.g. nobody is marveling that J.K. Rowling doesn't have an English Literature degree (French, to save you checking..) and nobody is seriously trying to "teach" folks to write the Harry Potter series.
Disclosure: EEE major
I'm willing to bet there's some selection bias here. If you got a job and don't have a cs degree it's probably because you're so good you don't need a degree. The skills outweigh the lack of a degree, which means higher risk. The piece of paper sets the bar lower because there's more trust and thus lower risk.
As someone getting a graduate CS degree and coming from a different degree I notice that there's definitely Swiss Cheese knowledge. I got here because I could code (half my peers can't in their first year of graduate school. This surprised me a lot!). But on the theoretical side they have less Swiss Cheese knowledge than I do. It's a weird dynamic.
It feels like that the reason that I am still working in mediocre jobs is because I don't know how to generate ideas. Or how to make prototypes using design tools. Or how to go about as an entrepreneur.
It's both inspiring and deflating at the same time to people, especially young people, succeed in things that I have dreamed about when I was young.
Just remember it comes down to who you know or who you can meet, you might as well have worked at Burger King by the way some of the filters work.
I got my first programming exposure when I was 5 or 6 on a Commodore VIC-20. By 10 or so I was doing 6502 machine language on a Commodore 64. I went from there.
I have a BS degree in biology. I studied that because I wanted to study something new, but more importantly because I was interested in AI. I always thought (and still think) the best way to learn about intelligence is to study the only existing examples of intelligent systems. These are found in biology. The University of Cincinnati let me do a little bit of a "design my own major" thing so I designed one in "organic intelligence" with classes in genomics, evolution, neuroscience, and ecology. Those are the four scales at which intelligence is found in nature.
I work in computers now (founder of ZeroTier) but still follow AI and biology avidly and would like to return to some of those areas of study someday. I also find that my study of biology deeply influenced me as an engineer and the types of systems I design.
I graduated from college with a degree in Philosophy where I was focused on logical systems. I recall one of my favorite professors being intrigued to know whether I could program and disappointed when I confessed that I only did the design side of web development.
I of course had a strong interest in code, having gone through interactive online python tutorials but I wasn’t able to make a the leap into becoming a developer.
The wall, I realized, was my lack of knowledge in the unix command line. Once I learned about bash, ssh, and setting up basic web servers, my learning skyrocketed.
With a background in logical systems, I was able to grasp the model of computing very rapidly. While I cannot claim to be advanced in algorithms or data structures, I feel comfortable being able to develop solutions that work.
On algorithms, I think being able to use the work of others is already very empowering. Perhaps one day I’ll get into it deep.
It's like they memorized some books and definitions but never actually had to build anything.
The developers that didn't have a formal background in CS almost always did poorly on the technical questions, but I found about half the time it was simply a lack of knowing the terminology. She might not know what a monad is, even though she implemented in her own code.
I have always been into computers, but didn't really consider it as a career until I got a job that required me to do a lot of data entry, so I started teaching myself how to automate things. I turned a 40 hour per week data entry job into a single button click on Monday. This meant I had a bunch of free to time to develop my skills and work on additional programs that would help our organization. I fell in love with programming. I eventually interviewed for a position but failed the technical questions miserably, I didn't understand a lot of the terminology like "linked list", "adapter patern" or what "bubble sort" was. So, after that I got a book just about programming interviews, and realized I had actually implemented most of the practical things in that book, I just didn't know the technical name for it.
After I read that book I interviewed at another location and was immediately hired. The only difference was that I took maybe a week to learn some terms.
The site seems to lean pretty heavily on contradicting the remarkable idea that you might need a CS degree to slap together a website and write some lines of PHP.
But that being said, there's a lot of evidence that some people who don't have CS degrees can do great programming and even great CS, and a lot of evidence that some people with CS degrees can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
I'm not sure why everyone feels the need to run around with their dresses over their heads every time this comes up; although it does provide a good venue for people to indulge in the harmless pleasure of praising oneself on HN.
I'll say this. There's advantages starting both ways. By starting from a CS background, you're likely to get a formal education into concepts and terminology that might seem boring otherwise. By starting from a non-CS background, you begin with the most important skill a programmer requires-- the ability and passion to teach yourself new technologies and concepts.
Any developer who begins with a CS background can learn to be self-taught.
Any developer who begins without a CS degree can learn algorithms and advanced concepts.
1. You can be highly educated in a subject without getting a formal degree.
2. A CS degree is not a programmer/developer degree. CS is to programming as art is to drawing.
3. Having knowledge of CS might mean you can more easier adopt to a variety of roles (front-end, back-end, systems programming) but comes at a cost that you probably have less practical skills than someone who is specialized in this (because of self-education/going to a trade school/learning on the job).
I have a bachelor in informatics, master in CS and PhD in informatics (technically informatics is not CS, but there's a lot of overlap), but I would say I gained most programming/development knowledge through internships and working on personal projects.
If you are starting career, how are you going to convince someone that it is not passing fad for you, that after 6 months you would say "ok I am done, I am bored with it". There is no way to show people how much time you invested in your self study. It is not about what you know, it is about other people getting to know so they can hire you.
Your point still holds true in this industry when you get as much as 300+ candidates applying for 1 graduate job. As much as I hate it, unfortunately some companies would hire internal candidates than external ones even if they were highly qualified, because they are highly networked within the company.
Having just a CS degree in 2019 is not enough to market youself as a better candidate. It is meerly seen as a minimum expectation from larger companies.
Functional programming has seemed much easier to pick up without formal teaching than object oriented. The latter appears to have many more unknown unknowns.
e.g. in game dev I did not know that static methods and objects existed, so I built a bunch of dictionaries in an instance of a single use class to store some data for a game. It works, but its garbage.
But hey, all things are discoverable eventually, and I would argue going through the experience of why things are nice before learning they exist has some merit to it. I don’t blame companies which require credentials though. Hiring is hard, especially hiring many people at once.
I was blown away by his methodical approach to a simple problem I gave him. Less than year later he was running his own team that had people in it that had been to some of the top universities in the UK, like Brunel, and they all respected him. He'd completely taken control of that project. That was all using VB6. 20 years on he's now a leading C++ expert.
Degrees don't mean anything imho.
So if you have no prior experience with the web-technologies, I would recommend you to learn a bit of HTML/CSS/JS until you are familiar with them (build a simple, plain HTML page, add some CSS to change the layout, throw in some JS to load some content asynchronously and maybe add some JS buttons to make the page interactive via JS (e.g. change the content when pressing a button)). Nothing too fancy, just make should you know what every language looks like and which language to use for what use-case.
Next, you should find out which Java Framework you really need to learn. When I learned Struts 2 a couple of years ago, I remember that it was considered outdated already.
And then start doing the tutorials of the frameworks, followed by building something you want to build with those technologies (start small and keep adding stuff). At least that is the path of the self-taught developer.
No one second guesses a CS degree, but a good chunk of CS grads (your future coworkers and hiring managers) will second guess a self-taught education.
I learn some of the most interesting shit that I would never have thought to teach my self. Data structures, discrete math, and theory of computation come to mind.
Learning about how grammar and linguistics are so heavily tied into CS has been eye opening and has helped me understand so much more about what's going on in a computer. I never would've learned that on my own.
Sure, probably don't need that to get a job as a developer. But, having a CS degree != being a developer in the first place. I get that they can go hand in hand but it's just not the same.
Most companies don't have a hardline requirement for having a degree anymore, but if they do, even for management, I'll do my best to avoid them.
Last thing, I started coding at 28.
I'm at the ceiling pay-grade wise now, and burnt out, but that's another issue :) The moral of the story is, you can progress really well in this field if you can prove yourself. Experience > Education
However I think that people loving the job are better than the ones that were learning for it, so no wonders sites like this exists.
And in any case I wouldn't go to a self-taught doctor, so something will probably change in the future.
By the way, my site does use HTTPS and for analytics, Simple Analytics so no cookies.
But could you imagine riding in a plane or using critical infrastructure services programmed by people with absolutely no computer science degree to their name? Not a chance. Like getting surgery from a butcher.
In at least Sweden's machine industry programming is just something you learn in your engineering role by osmosis and revulations from God, and typically one to three 7 week courses at university.
Volvo Cars, Volvo Trucks, Scania, SAAB etc.
I for one struggle quite a bit with coding, design, theory, and other aspects. I just don't get how so many people think coding is as easy as "reading a book" or "doing a tutorial".
I don't think this is easy, but when you've been doing it for years and years, it feels that way.
Maybe if you're programming something simple, it will be "step by step". But most programs are not this simple.
> spaghetti code that some untaughts have churned out
Now we see both sides of the coin.
can i write a compiler or a lexical parser or am I versed in distributed computing and/or other highly specialized technical areas? not off the top of my head, but give me a few days/weeks and I know I'll be able to.
Every one will have knowledge gaps, the skills for CS degree and real world programming will have some overlap, but there is whole lot of distinction in both.
I did music for college and the only programming I did was in csound and max/msp.
Long story short, music doesn’t pay much. I just started reading and doing programming. I got gigs almost immediately for solving simple data problems for people (extract these CSV files into this format and pull down web data, etc). Fortunately I had companies where they were happy for me to take on whatever programming I felt comfortable with, despite being in a non-dev role originally there.
12 years later, I’m damn good at this. It helps that I can generally just read a book and absorb it. I’ve read books on CS, but haven’t taken any more CS classes outside watching some MIT course 6 videos. I did take some machine learning classes at MIT over IAP and those were fun. One weird thing, I’ve never taken beyond pre-calculus, but the linear algebra stuff in most ML things isn’t that hard for me. Maybe I’m just lucky? I’m a total hack at math, but can understand concepts quickly still and apply them in code.
One weird quirk was that I had to learn that not everyone can learn like I can. I taught for a few years at General Assembly and learned immediately that most people don’t like being throw in the deep end, or being told to read something and apply it the next day. They need smaller and better defined problems to build confidence. Only 5% of student actually enjoy things on hard mode. That’s ok- it’s just different than me.
Like, at work right now I’m probably going to need to do some Go work. I’ve never used Go outside the first 10 project ruler problems. But- I don’t mind telling them that sure, I can do some work in Go. It’s just code, and if I sit down for 8 hours I can get decent with the language.
The only things I’ve encountered so far that felt were “hard” were Haskell, and anything with shaders and modern 3D programming. I’ll figure them out eventually. TouchDesigner has also been tricky, but it’s mostly that their documentation is scattered (so much in videos) and the ui/workflow is non-obvious. I should write a book on it.
Let me explain: When I learned to program, QBasic was the first language I had contact with. I could make the computer beep but never achieved anything useful. Next, I learned HTML and was very happy about creating something. In school, I learned a little bit about Delphi and while GUI programming was cool, I preferred doing things on the web. A little time, later I came across PHP and was finally able to create real websites. So I coded a few projects with PHP and had my first struggles with arrays and the likes.
Finally, I arrived at the stage where I wanted to learn a real programming language. So I learned C. C was great. I mean, it was also very complex, but finally, I had control over every bit.
At that point, I started a CS degree and learned about pure languages like Smalltalk (Object Orientation) and Scheme (Functional Programming). Those languages were beautiful but felt like a step back in terms of practicality.
When the JS frameworks poped-up I learned to use a few of them too and still use some of them today and while JS is a great language to create results, it doesn't feel to me like a language that teaches you how to write good code.
Along the way, I encountered other languages like Java, C++, Python, Rust and those are certainly not bad languages, but I wouldn't recommend them for beginners.
What makes Go so special, in my opinion, is that it reduces the complexity of C while not taking away its purism. It comes with all the tools you need (except a text editor) and encourages to write good code. Finally, it has good support for building web applications so finding a good use-case shouldn't be that hard. After all, good use-cases motivate students ;-)
I am well aware, that one could certainly argue for every programming language to be the perfect candidate, so please remember that this is a personal opinion.
https://imgur.com/a/6RGJQQ1
In my opinion, software is more of an art and design discipline than other types of engineering. The traditional notions of what constitutes an engineer do not apply as much to software. This is clear in the fact that we have no formal certification.
That can be both a good and a bad thing.
Lately, I've been exploring other areas of CS which have always interested me, even as a child with my first computer, namely that of "machine learning". Where I have found I fall down in that area is in understanding the deeper level math concepts. I know these aren't really required to come up with solutions to problems using the existing toolsets for machine learning (as long as one can understand the math and concepts at those levels, which is arguably simpler) - but not having that understanding (or only a partial understanding) makes me frustrated that I can't understand exactly what is going on inside "the black boxes".
For instance, I (mostly) understand how MSE and backprop works in a neural network. I also understand why and when to use RELU vs sigmoid (or some other activation function). But could I derive any of that from first principles? Not at my current level of understanding (all those damn rules of calculus - which I don't understand). In many cases, though, I don't need to - I can treat them as a black box. But I don't like it. I do intend to fix this someday.
Of course - this subject - machine learning - has over the years led me down interesting and surprising paths (long before I started really studying it as a subject, in 2011, when I took the "ML Class" and "AI Class" MOOCs). Things more philosophical in nature, but all seemingly related in some manner, at least to my mind:
* Chaos theory
* Network theory
* Emergence and Complexity
* Theory of Mind
* Various topics in neuroscience
* Various topics and ideas in psychology
* Etc
...with "Etc" encompassing robotics, engineering, electronics, ethics, history, religion - and all the interactions and branches and spaghetti in between.
So much of that I wish I could have a more formal grounding in; I also wish I could speak with (and have the language to speak with) those who have this knowledge and grounding. I know that to be an impossibility, even if I were 20-30 years younger.
It astonishes me that many don't see how much CS in general touches and interacts (and both informs and is informed by) with all those topics and more. I see this, even if I don't understand it completely, and sometimes wonder or suspect that maybe I am wrong at some level? Maybe the lack of a formal education in all of those subjects has caused me to see things which aren't there...?
Alternatively, it could be that by not having such an education, I am - like before - not "constrained in a bubble" so that I don't see those things?
I am not saying I am special in this regard - I have read and spoke with others who have similar ideas to one extent or another, and in many cases their understandings have informed mine.
I'm just not sure if I should focus narrowly at this point in my life at 46 years of age, or go more broadly; both are fascinating paths for me. From what I have seen and read, it seems like the "broad path" would be more immersion in studying philosophy, perhaps with a greater focus on the philosophy of mind and/or consciousness.
At the same time, I like to think about and focus on the idea (and fantasize of solving it - fat chance) of the "wrongness" of backprop - and whether another solution exists for neural network learning that is more biomemetic?
...and at this point, I'm rambling - so I'll shut up.
You can still teach your things, but as soon as you submit to formal training you are no longer “self taught”. That’s what self taught means.
All professional knowledge is self-learning. The founder of The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow.
[The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow)
Hm - maybe not, but why is that, exactly? I don’t think that anybody believes that if you admit an otherwise stupid person to Harvard, they would become intelligent through the instruction they’d receive there. Instead, the degree and the institution are a signal - this person had to have been smart in the first place to get in, so you can assume that they’re going to do smart things for your business.
certainly agree that the systems and programming coursework wasn't particularly useful.
It's hard for everyone to enter the industry, especially now, college or not. It's not about how smart you are, or your identity, or your environment. It's how bad you want it, how hard you'll work for it, and if someone is willing to help you.
As software engineers, degrees or not, focus on that last part. Be there for someone learning, studying or just trying to figure it out. Feels great to see a finished product. Feels even better to teach someone how to fish, (code for money). I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for people along the way, giving pointers, telling me where to look, telling me what not to do. I was a gawd dang line cook. Be that helpful person.
Business need both types in this world. No shame in that, but don't lie to yourself into thinking that you can do _both_ with no CS degree. You can't.
The difficult part for you will be obtaining an interview. Because all of the other candidates will have CS degrees, and increasing numbers of them will have graduate degrees. You are at a disadvantage.
To some extent open-source has removed the cost for reinventing libraries, reverse engineering and there is little need to study specific elements in a subject to solve such a problem when you can grab lib_whatever or a free compiler for a language.
You are right that in interviews at famous companies (FAANG, asset management companies, aerospace / embedded systems companies) being self-taught here isn't enough. Instead, they require specific certifications and they look for the graduate with a strong engineering degree rather than someone who is self-taught.*
Right now in 2019, I would do both.
*Having a serious open-source project or significant contributions is actually a huge advantage over recent graduates.
In this sense, UBI is a godsend. But of course, we assume all actors are rational and self-disciplined.
Some PhDs and math students yes (at least, with regards to the algorithmic portions), but otherwise you have to learn the low-level esoteric stuff on your own, or be lucky enough to have a specialized optional course at your university.
And the cutting-edge will rarely be available to undergraduates anyway. All my CS graduate colleagues learned about codecs was how to compute a DCT by hand - they certainly didn't learn the modern 4x4 and 8x8 spatial block transform approximations as used in h264, or any motion vector calculation algorithms, or the x86_64 SIMD intrinsics, or any of the modern entropy coding methods.