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

• steven777400 10y ago
  The author's comment on access to a mediocre/unknown university instructor for a high fee vs free access to a very good set of lectures (Khan) is one of the doubts that led me to quit my job as a college instructor. I had kind of the existential "what are we doing here?" question -- why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online? Combined with a couple of education futurists predicting the imminent demise of in-person college (to be replaced by canned lectures from the best speakers and an army of automated or mechanical-turk graders), I decided to be first out rather than forced out and quit. That was five years ago and the landscape hasn't changed much. The school I taught at, a community college issued associate's degrees in computer programming, is still going strong largely as it was back then. I still don't have an answer to my question, though: why are students paying for that?
  • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    Because it gives them a piece of paper that some people care about. That is, compared to learning more but not having the paper, it improves the odds on them being hired. How do we fix that? We need somebody to become credentialed (or some institution that already is credentialed) as an institution of higher learning, that will curate a list of online classes (not necessarily their own), provide some way of grading those classes (online testing), and issue a diploma that is recognized by the offline world.
  • noonespecial 10y ago
    People are still paying because the sheep-skin still opens doors that Kahn doesn't. Until that reality (or perception) changes its still the way to go. Note that the author had a degree (and a fairly prestigious one at that), it just happened not to be a CS degree.
    • dorfsmay 10y ago
      Don't confuse accreditation with education. John Bear wrote a few books about the subject that I highly recommend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bear
  • YZF 10y ago
    There's a big difference between having an instructor and learning things from a book or video lectures. An instructor can correct your mistakes and give you feedback. A book or a video can't do that. Some people presumably don't have a right kind of discipline to study on their own. This is why remote study programs can be a lot more difficult to complete vs. on-site programs. EDIT: There's a known effect, discussed in the Coursera "Learning How to Learn" course, where you read through the material/watch a video and think that you've actually mastered or learnt it while in fact you have not. If you're aware of this and test your knowledge you can fix that but it's another reason why a structured program with an instructor can have an advantage...
    • hackerboos 10y ago
      The Open University in the UK has a dropout rate of 87% [1] I'd imagine that's even higher for online courses. I can only speak for myself but I would not have been self-disciplined enough to complete the courses that I did during my undergraduate CS degree. The added bonus was the degree allowed me to emigrate fairly easily. [1] - https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-university-ou-needs-to-make-it-personal#survey-answer https://www.timeshighereducation.com/letters/the-open-univer...
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • yarper 10y ago
        Wow! I did not know the dropout rate was so high for the OU
      • FLGMwt 10y ago
        If the dropout rate is 87% with 100,000 enrollees, but if a university is 90% with 5,000 enrollees, the Open University still wins. And then you take into account the number of people who enroll for OU who enrolled because of the lower barrier to entry vs their level of commitment.
      • dorfsmay 10y ago
        As an OU graduate (late 90s), my first thought was that a lot of people just try the OU, others just like to take some classes without sticking to a program and with no intention of getting a degree... > the cost for an equivalent course for a resident of England is £2,786 The OU used to be about giving a chance to education to everybody. This is sad...
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • bdamm 10y ago
    Meeting a new and somewhat like-minded group of peers is an element of college that I could not have attained with online coursework. Also, I personally can not stomach day after day, year after year, of staring at a monitor with talking heads. I just can't do it. Computers are great, but they are only one element of a learning environment.
  • overcast 10y ago
    Because the majority of people in this world, are not the type to proactively self learn things on their own. They require structure, teachers, and environments to force them into learning, and then being told what to do. Hacker News is a very small slice of proactive individuals, who are what I would consider the exact opposite. A lot of us are constantly trying new things, building new applications, doing whatever to progress. Most of the people that fall into this category, were probably ALREADY programmers, and went to school just to have the special piece of paper. But would do very well without it regardless. While everyone else is completely content, with going to an office, being told what to do, doing it, coming home, and not doing anything related to computers / software until 830am the next morning. These people went to school to learn to be programmers, so they could get a job, and get paid. That's it. It's a completely different mentality, and that is why formal education exists. It's the difference between a job, and a passion. I don't learn very well sitting in a class, and listening to someone yap. I prefer jumping into something, and learning as I go. One project, building upon another.
    • bobbington 10y ago
      I was shocked when I went to college about how crazily obsessed the school was about "getting a job". Nobody ever talked about the amazing things we were going to be able to do with the knowledge we learned! I dropped out when I started making enough money in my own programming deal, and am glad I got out of that hellhole where u work like a dog and get treated like one too. I'd rather get paid to do work (my company) vs pay to do it (school) I was also shocked when I met somebody who was just happy to go to work... This is why my kids will be homeschooled. School is more about daycare and prepping people to be good employees than real learning. There is a reason why Elon musk started a new, different school without grades for his kids
    • mtreis86 10y ago
      "I got up at 4am to be here working on my passions" vs "I'll get to the office when I am supposed to, to do the work they tell me to do"
  • austenallred 10y ago
    I have been teaching a free live code bootcamp on YouTube over the past couple of days (https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp https://lambdaschool.com/mini-bootcamp). I've noticed a couple things: 1. People get stuck. A lot. Especially in the beginning. Perhaps the biggest difficulty of learning on your own is the "I'm stuck" problem. I learned by hassling people in IRC, but man they were saints and I feel bad for constantly bothering them with my stupid questions. We use Slack to connect the students, and it's a constant flow of people getting stuck and getting help (about 4,000 people in there now). 2. Credentials and requirements have been drilled into students' mind far past a rational level. I probably get asked 20x/day if we offer a certificate for graduates. I eventually started saying "yes" because so many people would be shaken up if I said "no." I can create a certificate and put your name on it, sure. It's not worth anything, but it's almost a compulsive need people have now. Along those lines I probably get asked 20x a day if something is "required." I don't understand the mentality of joining a free code bootcamp and asking if something is required, but maybe that's just me. 3. Material isn't the hard part anymore. I'm sure there are better teachers than us out there, but I'm convinced the number of people who can learn that way are a small fraction of the population. Most people aren't motivated and/or disciplined enough to go through that on their own. I personally dropped out of college, but if I think back to my Shakespeare class, for example, would I have worked that hard if I were self-educating? Even though I think a lot of the assignments were relatively worthless, there is something about the forcing function of deadlines, social pressure, and working at the same time as peers that really does a lot for human psychology. I can't imagine the other students in any of my classes working that hard to learn anything on their own. I look at the completion rates of MOOCs and other online programs, and it's tiny. Sure, you might say, some people are just sampling, but I would guess than this doesn't tell the whole story. There's something that's missing from the "here's a book teach yourself" method for most people. My personal thesis for a high-quality, low-cost education for the masses includes material, but material isn't the point. The point is incentivizing people to do things they normally wouldn't do by "forcing" them to do so somehow.
    • mdpopescu 10y ago
      I agree with all your points. I can't help but wonder though: is it a GOOD idea to force people to do something that ultimately helps them, instead of letting them filter out? That is, is it better for society to have two layers, successful self-made people and unsuccessful people who were incapable of improving without being forced? Or is it better to force the second type to learn something, at the expense of this degree inflation? I haven't decided for myself, and in fact am struggling with this as the parent of two under-achieving daughters :)
  • jotux 10y ago
    The actual education part of a university is really a small part of what students leave with. What you're really getting is a network of professors (with ties to employers) and other students that become your friends. Once everyone leaves the university you now have a large network of people that can vouch for your technical knowledge and personality. What you don't get with an online education is the proximity to other students and professors that facilitate strong relationships.
    • throwaway2048 10y ago
      you also dont get a peice of paper at the end that employers give a shit about.
    • sdflkd 10y ago
      Getting employment opportunities through professors (outside of research) doesn't really apply where I am from.
    • luck_fenovo 10y ago
      Well I feel cheated, as an introvert that never stayed in touch with anyone from college and who went into a wildly divergent field from my major. I didn't experience either of the major benefits you're touting; the education was everything. I still think it was worth it, but I absolutely think it could have been done better and cheaper online.
      • pmiller2 10y ago
        I also didn't get any networking opportunities through professors, and not a lot through friends. I think my undergrad degree was worth it just as a signal to employers, but I would gladly trade back my graduate education and the right to say I ever attended in return for cancelling all the student loans I (stupidly) took out to fund it.
      • megablast 10y ago
        You know how they tell you, you get out of it what you put into it. You didn't put anything into it.
  • lutorm 10y ago
    I can think of a few reasons. First, because personalized instruction and discussion makes a big difference in actually gaining real understanding. Second, because most people won't push themselves as hard on their own. Third, because having someone with personal knowledge of you and your capabilities means something, especially with online things when cheating is trivial.
  • mikekchar 10y ago
    I spent 5 years teaching English as a foreign language in a Japanese high school. In Japan, the school system is keen to hire foreigners who are fluent in English because they recognise that their students lack fluency. They think the problem lies in the instructor. However, the teachers at the school I taught in were almost all very accomplished English speakers. Yes, they had an accent. Yes, they made mistakes. But they were all fluent and proficient to a very high level. One of the things I asked the teachers was, "How did you get to be fluent in English?" As I expected, not one replied that they became fluent at school. Then I asked, "Where did you learn most of your English?" Again, not one replied that they learned most of their English at school. In reality, it is impossible to learn English in a classroom. The subject is too big. There are about 1500 common grammar rules in the language, so it is common to ask the students to memorise that grammar. It's achievable in 3-5 years. But you won't get fluency. Neither will you get proficiency with the 20,000 word families that you need to achieve adult level proficiency. In the end you get students who can tell you what a subjunctive clause is (well, they can tell you in Japanese, anyway), but who can't order a drink at MacDonald's. This is not really a failure of the system because while we can teach fluency, you still won't get students who are proficient to any degree at the end of 3-5 years of classroom study. There just aren't enough hours. The students do not have enough desire or even need to learn the language. Only those who study independently will learn English.... and they would have learned English anyway. Or would they? At the end of my tenure, I decided to change tracks. Luckily I was given free reign at my school. Instead of teaching English, per se, I taught my students how to learn English on their own. For a 50 minute class I kept my instruction time down to 5 minutes (which was hellishly difficult, I can tell you). The rest of the class was a series of explorations in things like, "If I don't know, how can I find out?", "How do I read a book to get information out of it?", "How do a read a book for pleasure?", "How do I watch TV and understand what's going on?", "How can I improve my pronunciation without paying someone to train me?", etc, etc. My hope was not that my students could speak English at the end of the class. That was impossible. My hope was that my students would feel, "I can learn English if I want to. I know how to do it." It's now about 5 years since I left teaching and many of my students can speak English very well. Several of them got jobs where speaking English was the key component of their job. I like to think that my classes helped them out, but of course the reality is that the thousands of hours they put in after my course is what taught them English. I hope I was able to nudge them into a place where those thousands of hours were possible for them.
  • fizixer 10y ago
    Automated homework/exam creation and cheat-proof (or cheat-resistant) grading needs to catch up. In my opinion, it is making progress but isn't quite there yet. Once that is done, it's over!
    • fizixer 10y ago
      Correction: not just grading but testing as well. (cheat-resistant testing and grading).
  • neurocroc 10y ago
    I am quite excited about my project that I have been working on. Do you think presenting all the knowledge of the world in this visual way (https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/knowledge-map) can be of benefit?
  • FLUX-YOU 10y ago
    >Combined with a couple of education futurists predicting the imminent demise of in-person college (to be replaced by canned lectures from the best speakers and an army of automated or mechanical-turk graders), I decided to be first out rather than forced out and quit. How do you get students in fields without easy lab set ups to get lab experience? CompSci/Software? We can build entire networks with a single script that were managed by dozens of people 10-20 years ago. We have millions of programs and scripts available to us freely through public code hosting providers. Structure Engineering and Architecture could conceivably simulate a lot of things. Chemistry? Doing this at home without people qualified for safety is a recipe for disaster. Same for microbiology, medicine, nursing, and psychiatry. Also for many trade skills. You can study a lot, but the practical, hands-on knowledge is essential because it is muscle memory or social practice too. Colleges could become hubs of hands-on and bespoke learning and trip-taking lectures while the classroom material and tests are sourced elsewhere. I would be completely fine with that evolution because you are right -- there's certain reasons I go into work, but it's not because I can only do my work at my workplace.
  • ChuckMcM 10y ago
    The error you make in your reasoning is that all learning is equivalent for all students. This is clearly not the case given the various surveys of the effectiveness of MOOCs, Universities, and 'trade' schools. I think it is great that the author was able to make this work for their learning style and their goals. Some people require the 'deadline' aspects of turning in assignments getting graded. Others learn best by exploring a topic and experimenting with it to test its limits and to test their understanding. Still more learn best by working with an expert and watching their work and asking questions to understand their process. None of these are 'best' or 'worst' or even moderately comparable. It can help a person to be more successful if they can identify what environment is most effective for them to learn something and then optimizing around creating that environment. So to answer your question, the teacher/lecture/lab/homework environment works well for some learners. They can readily exchange money for additional knowledge which they can then turn into more money by applying it to a job.
  • foota 10y ago
    As someone who's in school now, I feel one of the advantages of being in a physical class is that lectures are interactive. There are also the motivational advantages mentioned other places. There also also advantages to being surrounded by people that are also learning new things, you can study together, help each other, and encourage each other. To be frank, it's also probably in part a social thing.
    • ghaff 10y ago
      Although my understanding is that, at a number of large schools that routinely video their big lectures, a lot of students just watch the videos. My recollection of 100+ person lectures is that the interaction was pretty limited. The other points you make are certainly true. Whether or not you attend the lectures in person you're still in an overall environment that can help learning.
      • foota 10y ago
        This is true, class sizes at some schools are just ridiculous. I attend a smaller state school, it's a great environment. Largest CS class I've had after the intro was 30-40 people.
  • bobbington 10y ago
    You were probably a great teacher!
  • rezashirazian 10y ago
    A college degree, in my opinion, has little to do with the degree or the technical material you learn. the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. Is it worth going into debt? I'm not sure, I'm Canadian and was able to get a CS degree for 50K (Not that crippling of a debt). For me, it was worth the time and money.
    • lacampbell 10y ago
      the value of attending college and completing a four-year degree at an accredited university comes from the environment you're ingrained in for that time. The people you meet, the conversations you have and experiences you expose yourself supersedes the raw material in the curriculum. Don't get me wrong, the stuff in the textbox are important but I think you get your real value from the experiences and the relationships you make with your peers and instructors. This is an extremely romanticised view of university, IMO. Maybe you went to a particularly good one. I studied computer science. My experience was nothing like that at all. The vast majority of the people I met had no real interest or passion about the subject. They took no interest in anything outside of the course work, and certainly weren't up for any interesting discussions about our field. The motivations seemed to be purely financial - jump through these hoops and get a job. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just hope people considering attending university consider that their experience may match mine. You may walk into a lecture full of shy people, who have divided themselves along ethnic lines, who are not interested in the subject, or stimulating discussion, or being friends, or anything outside their grades. The lecturer will pick up on it and be appropriately unmotivated. YMMV, but for me it was literally just getting a piece of paper that stopped recruiters and HR deleting my CV. I learned far more chatting in IRC than I did in my courses. I'm 3 years out from university and no longer speak to anyone I met there.
      • rezashirazian 10y ago
  • awesomepantsm 10y ago
    >when better instruction is available for free online? Have you watched khan academy videos? Or online lectures in general? 90% of it is complete garbage. You can listen to Sal repeat every sentence 5 times if you really want to, but are you actually learning?
  • 2_listerine_pls 10y ago
    It's fairly obvious: The experience, meeting people, etc...
  • segmondy 10y ago
    For every one student who is very driven and motivated to self-study, there are 99 who are not and need the coercion of a teacher and threat of a bad grade to study.
    • mdpopescu 10y ago
      See my other comment - is it a good idea to force them to get a degree? Doesn't it make the degree worthless? Instead of signalling "this person was able to learn something important" it says "this person has been forced to spend X years in a place where he was bored to death". (I think there was an Army joke saying something like "private X is able to work when cornered and closely supervised", or something like that.)
  • discombobulate 10y ago
    A degree is mostly signalling. See Michael Spence's work (if you really want to understand why).
  • jboggan 10y ago
    Because the current post-secondary education system is for social filtering and conferring status, not teaching anything in particular.
  • jacquesm 10y ago
    I suspect that to have structure in your life imposed is a big factor in that. I know some very clever people that could not learn even the simplest things on their own with a book or a network connection. But put them in a classroom and they shine.
  • digitalzombie 10y ago
    > why are students coming here and paying us money when better instruction is available for free online I'm paying for it. Cause I can get government assisted loans and go full time. Also I get classmates that I can study together. The environment of school, at least to me, enable to me to study and concentrate instead at home distracted. Also I network with tons of people and all but one of my professors is my friend now. I have connection, hook up, network, etc... In fact I getting an internship through one of them working with the gov. I could study online and continue as a programmer. But I rather go full time. Also paying for a university via online degree I feel cheated. I want to see my professor face to face during office hours and ask for help and such.
  • zerr 10y ago
    In many cases mediocrity is assigned because of the lack of "pedigree". But if the student cares more about the actual learning and content rather than elite badge, it makes sense to come to such universities.
  • zamalek 10y ago
    Ultimately its for a piece of paper that opens doors. It may not be a job, it could be a visa. That being said, after my incomplete stint at college I came away entirely unimpressed. The model for teaching medicine (for example) is completely unsuitable for CS - yet that is how it is done. Tertiary CS could really use a renaissance.
  • k-mcgrady 10y ago
    >> why are students paying for that? Because it's a LOT better than online courses are at the moment. I've used Coursera/iTunes U/Udemy etc. a lot since they came out and only ever finished a couple of things. Motivation is a big issue. Also very little of the knowledge I gained through it has stuck because it is not very engaging. I recently started University (mature student) and the things I'm learning stick much easier as you are constantly forced to pair with people to debate problems and work as teams to answer questions. This repetition and group debate is invaluable. Despite participating on the forums when doing online courses they don't come close. Previously, as a self-taught programmer I couldn't see the value in 90% of university courses and thought they were going to start struggling thanks to MOOC's. Now, as a student, I can see that they do offer quite a lot of value (by value I mean increasing my knowledge, not salary after degree). They are certainly very inefficient, but I would certainly consider my program value for money (although I am a student in the UK so fees are lower than a lot of places).
    • garysieling 10y ago
      It sounds like my experience with school is similar to yours - I also felt that being self-taught it was helpful to have a program of courses, to round out deficiencies in my own knowledge. Among the things you can get for free online, I think conference talks can be a better value for the time than some of the online classes. They are more self-contained, so you don't have to worry about finishing an entire course, and generally more focused on real-world use cases. I've also found that browsing at random, and watching things that sound interesting works well for increasing what I remember. I'm currently building a search engine around this idea- https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Conference https://www.findlectures.com/?p=1&class1=Technology&type1=Co...
  • s_dev 10y ago
    >"what are we doing here?" Assessment. A university standard of assessment is better than anyones standard of self assessment.
    • digler999 10y ago
      Generally yes. My gripes in assessment were mainly with science classes that asked subtly different questions on exams than what was covered in class, and english/humanities teachers who had broad reign to judge your performance based on whether you found some highly subjective moral or nugget of wisdom in the literature material. Both cases to me felt more like Three Card Monte [1] than a straightforward "Here's some information, learn it, we'll test you on it." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte
  • zengid 10y ago
    I'm going back for a masters in IT. For me: Job fairs, Internships, and the 'stamp of approval' that a degree translates to for hiring managers. Basically its a way to get my foot in the door. Also If I weren't getting a spouse-discount I probably would do the Khan academy thing.
  • tastythrowaway2 10y ago
    People are paying for that because employers are demanding it. Sure a few are begrudgingly realizing that an alma mater is irrelevant pedigree (the fact they can pay qualified people less without a degree surely helps), but the lion's share still filter for those with undergraduate degrees or higher. I have no idea how to change this, although personally I have two degrees and believe I would be orders of magnitude better at my profession had I simply worked on my own for the duration of my studies.
• komali2 10y ago
  Damn, that guy busted his butt. I got a creative writing degree from a decent but relatively unheard of Texas state school, spent a month studying Javascript, got into a bootcamp, worked for the bootcamp as TA for 3 months, then got a ~120k/yr job in the bay area within a month of leaving the bootcamp. I had 3 projects on my resume and absolutely nothing technical to show for the time period prior to the bootcamp, other than a single Intro to CS MOOC. I always marveled at the people like this that seemed to do so much more concrete things than me. I leveraged my strength - talking, knowledgeably - and that worked well, but many of my peers got in on their technical ability and work ethic alone. I haven't written as in-depth a blog post as this guy but I have a couple articles for those interested: 1. Linkedin tips for bootcamp grads http://blog.calebjay.com/2016/11/14/how-to-use-linkedin-as-a-coding-bootcamp-grad/ http://blog.calebjay.com/2016/11/14/how-to-use-linkedin-as-a... 2. Jobsearch tips for bootcamp grads http://blog.calebjay.com/2016/10/18/how-this-coding-bootcamp-grad-found-a-job/ http://blog.calebjay.com/2016/10/18/how-this-coding-bootcamp... This makes me think maybe I should put together a more holistic article on the entire process. EDIT: I'll be watching this for a while if anybody has questions on the bootcamp experience, resulting jobsearch, etc.
  • jhmj98foeiedkj 10y ago
    "spent a month studying Javascript" + 3 months seems surprisingly short; a very large return on investment. I'm CS undergrad(almost half-way), but by job requirements none of my skills are even close to being employable. I guess I should start Js If you don't mind sharing, What topics/frameworks did you learn in that time and if not the same, what frameworks/skillets are mostly used day-to-day?
    • komali2 10y ago
      There's about 1,000 Web-dev specific jobs posted to Linkedin, daily, in the SF Bay Area, so yes if you're interested in getting a job fast I recommend it. But if you're a CS undergrad I'd target some of the more niche stuff that you can leverage your degree to get, like Machine Learning, Machine Vision, AI type stuff that are inaccessible to me until I get projects under my belt. If you're halfway, in two years you'll be up against even more bootcamp grads than I was - not something that would be much fun. We focused on: Javascript Node Express, and building a server/routing HTML CSS Angular React Backbone MVC client-side Security and XSS basics Auth basics (I wish they had focused on this more) Basic algorithms and data structures (your binary search trees and whatnot) Interview Prep SCRUM stuff (couple group projects) Git Deployment (mostly heroku) To condense it down, I'd say you should be able to, upon graduation: Build from scratch a functioning web application, with a backend that you wrote, that is accessible via the internet one way or the other. You should definitely have some projects published by the time you graduate, because you'll be going up against bootcamp grads with 2-3, or more, demonstrable projects. A big sell the bootcamps go on is that their grads are actually more "job-ready" than someone fresh out of a CS program, the perception being the CS person will have a spotty knowledge of actual hands on programming and deployment. Obviously your program results may vary, but just be aware that's the perception bootcamps and their grads are exfiltrating into the tech community, so it'd be a very bad idea to fall on that radar. EDIT: I'm remembering now that a lot of CS applicants to my bootcamp would have projects on github, but would need to be pulled down and compiled to actually work (python projects and whatnot). If you end up with a lot of these from your classes, see if you can use that language's server systems to set up a simple API, with a very basic front-end, that allows interaction via the internet. Being able to, in a job fair, literally pull a project up on my phone and show it to a company rep was a very powerful tool.
• whack 10y ago
  This article is so much more inspiring than the title suggests. The fact that this guy got a job at FutureAdvisor after graduating with a business degree... isn't really all that interesting. But the thought process and out-of-the-box thinking he showed at every step, was awe inducing. Getting a business degree instead of just sticking with something he had already mastered, was both smart and brave at the same time. I may not agree with every decision he made, but the fact that he abandoned well-trodden paths, and instead created his own roadmap, is what impressed me the most. Bill, if you're reading this and would like to collaborate together on any side projects at some point, just shoot me an email (it's on my profile). P.S. If anyone wants to read another story about non-CS-majors transitioning into the SW industry, here's mine: http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/tech_blog/107 http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/tech_blog/107
  • diminoten 10y ago
    If you think about it, him working at FutureAdvisor and getting a business degree is, if nothing else, consistent with what he finds interesting and rewarding. I just wish I could be 10% as productive as he is in this story. It's really incredible, and there doesn't seem to be a "magic sauce" to it, other than the obvious dogged persistence.
• TheGRS 10y ago
  Great story! It kind of makes me wonder about my own story to be honest, since I also do not have a CS degree yet I've learned to love coding. I am not really sure what my "dream job" would be though. I've thought about it on a few occasions and I always fall short of coming up with something that really "wow's" me enough to start down a new career path. Would be interested if anyone else has that same sort of existential crisis. I enjoy my job enough that I can't seem to come up with anything else that I'd love doing with my time, but I'm also not "in love" with my current job.
  • framebit 10y ago
    Your career does not have to be the great love of your life. It's okay to have a job that's just a good day job and let your real passion live outside of it: family, hobbies, volunteering, maybe religious practice if you're so inclined. There is so much more to life than just your career.
• yonatron 10y ago
  Good story. Well played! (Note: it's "cede control", not "secede control".)
• acchow 10y ago
  A bit odd to put "dream job" in the title and start the article with a picture of him in the Googleplex... But in the end find out he doesn't work at Google. In any case, I meet people on the regular working at top tech companies without a STEM degree, some without any degree at all. The stories are all pretty similar: 1) Teach themselves programming 2) Make lots of actual software
  • pacaro 10y ago
    My path, with an allegedly irrelevant degree (History and Philosophy of Science) was 1) tinker with computers as a kid 2) go to university and study something I wanted to learn about, randomly learning C in passing (from a friend and a stolen copy of turbo c) because I was interested 3) get a job at a small local ISV, qualified by having a degree in anything and knowing how to write simple code 4) spend 4 years as an apprentice (informally) taking every opportunity to learn 5) get a job at a startup 6) join Microsoft through acquisition 7) ... Up until step 6, my resume probably didn't look that interesting, but once you have one of the household name software companies on your resume the rest becomes irrelevant
    • acchow 10y ago
      My early steps were pretty similar as well, tho I kind of "hacked" my way into the industry by getting an internship 1) Tinker with computers as a kid 2) Go to University to study something I wanted to learn (Biochemistry) - took CS101 to learn some programming 3) Go to grad school for something else unrelated (economics) 4) Work in something unrelated 5) Learn programming in spare time. 6) Quit job. Learn programming hardcore. Enroll in CS classes at a University to become eligible for internships. 7) Land an internship at Google. After that, it was smooth sailing.
      • ryandrake 10y ago
        Just curious, how close are you and pacaro to 40? Congratulations on your success but you guys might find the smooth sailing become much less smooth the older you get.
• hbcondo714 10y ago
  > I also signed up for Hired which ended up having the best response rate—their platform is where I eventually found my current job. Would the author of the article mind sharing their Hired.com preferences? I've been trying Hired.com for 5 months and still receive the same response: "You have great experience! Unfortunately, at this time we don’t have enough opportunities that match your role and location preferences. We’ve added your name to our waitlist and will be in touch as soon as we’re confident that we can provide you with quality opportunities!"
• kcorbitt 10y ago
  Very inspirational, but I'd be interested in knowing what exactly the author was optimizing for in his job search, and how he decided that FutureAdvisor "best aligned with [his] personal values." In the current hiring climate it's not exactly hard to find a software development job in the Bay Area if you show a bit of talent, so I'm assuming with the number of contacts he made he wasn't just looking for the first company that would take him on.
• DigitalSea 10y ago
  I don't think getting a programming job without possessing a degree is that rare of a story anymore. You can teach yourself anything online. I am actually self-taught developer and when I started, I was working primarily with people who had degrees, occasionally coming across another self-taught developer. I started about 12 years ago, but now I am increasingly encountering self-taught programmers who can run rings around developers with degrees.
• austincheney 10y ago
  This article is full of assumptions. First of all you don't need a college education to work in software development. I have a Bachelor's, but not in CS and I have known some great developers who have no college at all. I am completely self-taught. You have endless time to learn this stuff on military deployments. Developers, who don't suck, are in crazy demand... particularly if you have web skills and don't suck. I rarely see CS graduates writing original JavaScript applications without large frameworks, for example. Secondly, it appears his dream job is in the bay area. If you are young and single this might be true. The Y Combinator folks claim it is the place to be to start a company, but for everybody else it is expensive. I can have a larger house in Texas for 20% of the cost and reduced cost of living across the board. That said I see little value in moving to the bay area because I doubt there is a corporate dream job that is going to pay me 5x more to live just as well. I have known several people who have moved from CA to TX just to afford a house (any house). Finally, there are major differences between development skill and marketing skill (promotions). You can suck at one and rock at the other, but only one of those is going to make a solid first impression and only one will actually define your value after a year of employment.
• halfnibble 10y ago
  This exact process is something I seriously considered doing, but then I couldn't convince myself to spend that much time and effort trying to work for someone else. So, I work for myself on behalf of some very grateful clients. And that has turned out to be my dream job. (This became entirely too obvious when I found the espresso machine in my kitchen to be better than those in the most desirable Seattle-area startups).
• ryandrake 10y ago
  I'm surprised the author mentioned taking linear algebra in high school. My high school math was bottom-of-the-barrel shitty (we barely touched on calculus, and the teacher didn't even know what an integral was). I don't know a single person whose high school math curriculum contained more than one calculus class, let alone linear algebra.
  • dboreham 10y ago
    Basic Linear Algebra (Matrices and operations thereon) is in the US High School "Algebra 2" class. 10th grade or thereabouts. It was also covered when I attended school in Scotland a million years ago.
  • bigger_cheese 10y ago
    I was taught simple linear Algebra in year 11/12 in Australia during early 00's. Stuff like Matrix alegbra, vector multiplication and simple matrix transformations (rotations, shear etc). This was in the advanced math class at a public school. At the time I thought it was pretty poorly taught and I didn't really understand it very well until we covered the same topics in first year of university.
• jaimex2 10y ago
  Whats the tldr of this story?
  • aquabib 10y ago
    He got a programming job without a CS degree. There are so many programmers working without any degree, I fail to see why this blog post was worth writing and posting anywhere. Nothing special here. Actually he does not even state that the job he got was a programming job, just that it was his "dream job." But what makes it a dream job?
• rebootthesystem 10y ago
  Love these stories. That's the way you do it. No whining. Pick a goal and work harder than others to achieve it. Plain and simple. Also very much related to another discussion where the top n% (the rich) are blamed for just about everything. Here's where I get pounded [1] for daring to say opportunity in the US is what you make of it and the top n% have nothing to do with it. I am sure there are a thousand people who want to be Bill Mei. Yet few are willing to take the risk and invest the time and effort he did in order to rise well past the average. What's sad is when some choose to blame people like Bill for their own failings. Want a formula to be rich by the time you retire at, say, 55 years of age? Work your tail off so that by the time you are 20 you can start to put away $1,000 per month. In other words, be Bill. Be frugal. Invest the money somewhere relatively safe where you can earn at least 7% per year on average. If you pay attention that is not difficult at all in the long term. Marry well. Be frugal. Do this and you'll reach 55 years of age with around two million dollars in the bank. Continue to do it until you are 65 and you'll have nearly four million. Or, if you actually start drawing $25,000 a year from your investment at 56 years of age, you will reach nearly $3.4 million by age 65. It's actually better than that because I compounded interest annually in my calculation. With the opportunities available today in the US (and other places) almost anyone can work hard for a couple of years and get to the point where they can save $1,000 a month. This is particularly true for a couple. The key is not to burn cash on stupid shit, which can be hard. After a while you make it part of your normal process. I drive a car with over 200,000 miles. I can go out and pay cash for just about any new car in the market today. Waste of money. Not that hard folks. I wish they taught kids about finance and money in high school. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13848530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13848530
• gravypod 10y ago
  I don't think most of us want to be "Computer Scientists" as the colleges define it. I think most of us want some kind of Software Engineering degree which is not what a Computer Science degree is. Most colleges want to teach "Computer Science" as they see it which is basically just "Math with Data Structures and other BS thrown in to make people hirable". I think at this point what needs to happen is colleges need to stop branding "Computer Science" as something that will get you a job and stick to what they want to do, the hard algorithms and theory stuff and someone else needs to offer a "Software Engineering" course that teaches all the stuff that colleges threw in to make people hireable. If that happened we'd all be more happy. The only way to make this happen is to stop posting job profiles asking for "Computer Science" unless you acctually need a Computer Scientist (theory-side). You should instead say "Software Engineer or similar" in the posting. Colleges will see this, parents will see this, students will see this and after that all happens we'll all be able to make better choices. Students will find colleges wanting to teach what they are interested, the stuanch theory CS professors will be able to teach at colleges, and employers will actually find programmers who can program after they've graduated from college. Maybe we'd be able to kill off a few major zero days, save a chunk of change in the global economy, or make something cool by making this small change. I also don't think Software Engineering is as much of a "science" as it is a "trade". Programmers program, painters paint, carpenters carpet.... I mean build. We all have a skilled knowladge and tallent and know how to use that to shape the world around us. Most of the information that must be taught is experiance based and can be given in a trade-school enviroment. I think that's also another way forward.
  • shultays 10y ago
    There are some 'buillshit' classes in C.S. which are highly theoretical which and has nearly zero real world applications for an average programmer but data structures is not one of them. The schools don't teach data structure just so a graduate can answer related interview questions. I also don't think Software Engineering is as much of a "science" as it is a "trade" ... Most of the information that must be taught is experiance based and can be given in a trade-school enviroment I disagree. Software Engineering is not just about experience. It is not something that a master can pass to his students. It is also about constantly improving yourself and learning new things.
• lloydde 10y ago
  I enjoyed the article and the determined attitude of the author, but he failed to answer some important questions. What makes this employer worth all the work? And the job? How long is the long time he expects to work there? And what leads him to anticipate that about himself and his employer? Neither are likely to be the same in a few years. I stayed with IBM for 4 years out of university. In hindsight, I wish I left after two years as it was in those first years I learned the most about how the large operate. The next two years was me getting too comfortable. I could have kept my energy and learning higher by seeking new professional experiences that are not available within an org.
• jonkiddy 10y ago
  I believe that the general public does not understand the term computer science. I also don't believe that any CS grad is better off in the job market as a result of the courses taken, but rather is only highly sought after as a job candidate because of the degree's title. I often wonder if HR/hiring-managers will eventual wake up to the fact that a large part of the work that is typically required for such jobs can be accomplished by any dedicated individual willing to put in the time building a portfolio (aka ~10,000 hours) and then learn on the job.
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• synaesthesisx 10y ago
  Oddly enough developers at my last company who were self-taught were consistently better than those that had formal CS education...
  • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Hiring is full of so many biases, in this industry in particular. Maybe your employer is using that to their advantage by hiring good candidates other people turn away for no good reason.
• pfarnsworth 10y ago
  The author appears to be employed as a management consultant. If he's doing programming, is he in breach of his visa, presumably a TN?
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• asitdhal 10y ago
  It's a good story. I know many people who studied life science subjects like Chemistry or Physics and got jobs in top cs companies. Most of them were self taught(physics dudes use some level of programming ) To be a programmer, you need to have a solid problem-solving skill. Pick up a language(invest money in books in any one programming language, DS and Algo, OOPS) and invest time in websites like hackerrank. You can easily build anything on the above skills. No matter how well you studied basic database and os stuffs, you will always need a google search before using in real life.
• eng_monkey 10y ago
  Big revelation: Computer Science has very little to do with 'coding' Web pages using FrontPage.
• gigatexal 10y ago
  My main takeaway: the author was tremendously motivated and with perseverance and skill he succeeded. That perseverance part is something I have to remind myself of when I face setbacks. Props to the author and his journey.
• bestest 10y ago
  I bet there's quite a bit of us here, who could tell a story on "How I got my career in the tech industry without any degree at all". Same for me. And although I could tell a longer story, the TLDR is "love what you do and the rest will come naturally".
• mustafabisic1 10y ago
  I love this quote bro "No one owes you a great career [...] you need to earn it—and the process won’t be easy." And emails were cool as well. Way to show how to get your dream job <3
• markatkinson 10y ago
  I studied finance and logistics despite the fact that I had been programming since grade 6. I have no idea why. So when I started working in finance the ball dropped that I actually wanted to be a programmer. Well trying to become a software developer with no relevant qualifications and only a grade 6 award for programming in Pascal is difficult, especially when you are located in South Africa. Luckily I worked for a fortune 500 company that would do anything to reduce employee turnover except pay a decent wage. So I leveraged off that and got them to move me horizontally into more and more technical roles automating what I could and just getting involved in as many technical things as possible.
  • danielbarla 10y ago
    I'm also in SA, and although I can't comment from a personal level (have degree), I don't think we have it as bad as some other countries in terms of degree snobbery. Sure, it will definitely lock you out of many large corporations at an HR level. But many more are just hungry for developer talent, and wouldn't think twice about hiring those without a degree. If it was up to me, I'd hire anyone who a) shows a lot of interest in programming, and b) can actually back that up in some fashion. Sadly it's often not up to us techies, so it's definitely a disadvantage if you don't have one. (Come to think of it, I've worked with a dev at one of the big 4 banks who didn't even have a matric / grade 12. There may have been some protectionism in the initial hiring, but nobody batted an eyelid after that since he was a very good developer.)
• Tomis02 10y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm glad OP is happy with where he is right now, but his story's ending is underwhelming. > Instead of emailing as many black holes as possible, I would spend a week deeply researching a company and the business problems it faced, then put together a working prototype that I would cold-email to the CEO as a product improvement. ... My strategy was working! Really? Interesting, let's see the outcome. > I made my cold-emails insanely customized: for the language-learning company Duolingo I sent them a video of me speaking four languages. Seems like it's not really working, Bill. > Getting attention is only the first step. The next step is to interview. .... right. So OP wasted a lot of time on something that yielded the same result as spam (applying to every job). > I met Aline in San Francisco and she remains to this day the best recruiter I’ve ever worked with. Ok, so it seems those weeks spent deeply researching companies were a huge waste. Ouch. But at least the recruiter helped you get a job, right? > Not only did she personally introduce me to companies, she helped me recognize that the recruiting practices of top Silicon Valley companies are largely based on superstition. This meant that if I wanted to interview well, I had to put in an unreasonable amount of practice. Oh, so still no job. Tell me you found a way to avoid the bullshit interview preparation and used your time to improve the skills you'd actually be using in your job. > I bought all the popular technical interviewing guidebooks and read them cover-to-cover. Huh, dived head first into that one... might've just gone and gotten yourself a CS degree then. > At the same time, I continued to scour Hacker News and AngelList for companies with open positions, and continued to cold-email CEOs. In for a penny, in for a pound. > I also signed up for Hired which ended up having the best response rate—their platform is where I eventually found my current job. ... so why'd you put all that effort into making personalized emails for companies? Ugh. > In the end, after hundreds of awkward sales calls, hundreds of rejections, and thousands of hours coding, I was able to choose a company that best aligned with my personal values. I’m now working at FutureAdvisor. Ok... never heard of them, but I do like the rose-tinted glasses. Not sure what Bill's secret for being positive is, but it seems to be working for him.
  • totalrobe 10y ago
    These were my exact thoughts almost word for word...also the thoughts below make zero sense back to back. "At the same time, my old clients started referring me to other clients and everything snowballed into a big, unstoppable avalanche of steady consulting work. I took this as a clear sign that I found my calling in life. Now that I was confident with the flow of consulting work, I began looking for a full-time job." What?! Why are you going to look for a job after finding your calling with an overflow of consulting business?
• Quarrelsome 10y ago
  Why did he have to go through hundreds of applications and interviews? I feel like someone should have hired him _much_ sooner. Just on the basis of his words alone. I too managed to get into programming without a degree but for me the path was as simple as convincing an employer (while I was a cold-calling salesman) I could write a better product than the one they were using.
• m23khan 10y ago
  This is the main reason I love being in IT - I myself have a MSc in Computer Science but whenever I come across folks in IT who don't have CS or IT-related degree (most of whom are as-smart-as or smarter then me), I look at them as motivating and inspirational individuals. This is the beauty of IT and the core of our industry's success - the experience and thought processes of all the individuals from diverse academic and work experiences combine to make IT a truly multi-dimensional job field.
• porter 10y ago
  Back in 2010 I quit my banking job and took all of the undergrad computer science courses at a state college. This was still at the bottom of the recession, before all these coding bootcamps got started. I learned a ton and taught myself python/django on the side. Then I built a saas product and have been doing that full time ever since. I'm not a great programmer, but I'm good enough to work with developers I now hire. Back when I did this everyone thought I was crazy and most finance people still thought programming was lame. Now that seems to have totally switched and everyone wants to be a programmer. It's a bit surreal looking back, but if I could do it again I'd probably consider one of the programming bootcamps. Of course now you're probably better off doing the uncool thing, like becoming a banker.
• navinsylvester 10y ago
  Really heart warming to see this kid. Hope he achieves the success he deserves. But he has to understand what skill sets him apart. The things that stood out were all the non technical part. He looks like a solid entrepreneur material. Hope he realizes and quit working for others soon.
• vlucas 10y ago
  > " I eventually found what I was looking for: by changing a few lines of CSS, I could hack the layout of the page to push all the ads off the screen" I remember doing stuff like this. I had a Geocities account back in the day as well as one on a number of other providers like Angelfire, etc. One of the simplest hacks was to just leave an opening <noscript> tag at the bottom of your markup. Since the ad code and scripts were appended to the bottom of the page markup, they would never execute or show up. One of the free hosting providers started fighting back by putting a bunch of </noscript></noscript></noscript> tags in a row right before their ad code started. Savvy developers of course responded by placing even more opening <noscript><noscript><noscript> tags. I forget which provider it was, but those were some good times to be a rebellious teenage coder. :)
• sauronlord 10y ago
  "Dream JOB" There is no such thing my friends. Unless you consider getting laid off or resigning within a few years your dream. You will never be long-term wealthy or happy with a job. You might get rich, but not wealthy. Mind your own business.
  • seattle_spring 10y ago
    > Mind your own business. Speak for yourself, champ. Not everyone's dream is to become rich, or wealthy, or anything of the sort. Some people just want to work on cool problems, be around interesting people, and be paid relatively well to do so.
    • sauronlord 10y ago
      You're missing the point. "Mind your own business" means structuring things simply and in such a way that you get paid more (ie: minimize tax expense... which IS your biggest expense). Wealth = Time * Health You basically proved my point with: "Some people just want to work on cool problems, be around interesting people, and be paid relatively well to do so." Those things are possible due to time and health. A job takes the best, sunniest part of the day away from you (usually) and your autonomy (freedom to work on cool problems of Your choosing, being around interesting people of your choosing and when you want to) and then your biggest expense is your taxes. Wealth as defined by time and health is something we all want. Health is our most precious asset (ie: puts money in our pockets due to intelligence, ability to work) and time is our most valuable resource (can never get more, once it is spent you cannot earn more). Anyone that does not place Wealth as one of their highest aims is either a complete idiot at worst or grossly misinformed about what Wealth actually means at best.
      • ashark 10y ago
        > "Mind your own business" means structuring things simply and in such a way that you get paid more (ie: minimize tax expense... which IS your biggest expense). I'm having trouble figuring out what you could mean by this that isn't some variety of "you know how to make money? Already have a lot of money." What do you mean?
• HoppedUpMenace 10y ago
  What I got from this was that you got your job because you learned to say the right things and show off the right stuff to the person(s) interviewing you, after 100's of failed attempts. I guess statistically, you were bound to get a hit eventually. "Do a huge volume of work. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions." - Ira Glass Yeah well... That doesn't necessarily translate into quality work in the real world now does it? I'll even go as far as saying that that quote in particular is the TLDR of this story.