12 ms·

Build stuff

341 points by bluemooner 7y ago

bluemooner 7y ago
I agree that the role of the university is to prepare students for the industry and most of the universities achieve this quite nicely. Of course that as a new software developer you need to learn something on the job, but that is the case with every other field.
taneq 7y ago
I feel like this is good advice but it creates a false dichotomy. It should be "study stuff... by building stuff."
- bluemooner 7y ago
  Surely there must be a balance.
  - taneq 7y ago
    That's the balance between "study stuff" and "build stuff".
- ExtremisAndy 7y ago
  Could not agree more. A couple of years ago I decided to learn Java (I was already aware of the 'basics' in programming from other languages... variables, loops, functions, classes, etc.) so I spent maybe a week learning the basic syntax of Java. Then I jumped right into building a (very simple) 'virtual study partner' system where you would take notes by 'teaching' your virtual study buddy certain facts about what you were studying, who could then in turn quiz you using your own notes. You could also ask your study buddy about things you had already 'taught' it to see how well you remembered them or if you just needed a quick reminder about something. A bit of a silly project, no doubt, but it really helped me learn Java, and was so much fun!
Waterluvian 7y ago
I was a mentor for a scrappy, underfunded robotics team of about 12 9th-11th grade students until the season was cancelled. One of my favourite parts of the experience was pointing out the "theory" behind the "practical". "What you're dealing with is called X and this is why it's important" was an increasingly common reply I'd give. One of _many_ examples was when the software lead came to me excitedly and said he got basic autonomy working, but the robot wouldn't drive the same distance every time. We talked about open vs. closed loop systems, their wheel encoders, and PID loops. I'm convinced that when he goes to study any of those things in university, because of this real-world exposure to them, they will be far easier to grok.
- AlphaWeaver 7y ago
  In case anyone is curious, this program is called FIRST Robotics Competition [0], and it is life-changing for the students who get to participate. (I'm an alum.) I got my first job through FIRST and was so much better prepared to solve difficult problems through what I learned there. You probably have a local team in your area. If you're interested, you should mentor! The students' excitement is contagious and its a fantastic experience. [0]: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
  - javiramos 7y ago
    I am also an alum -- I started the FIRST robotics team at my high school back in the day. I was part of a community where being a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant (nothing bad with that) was the expected norm. Having exposure through FIRST to technology, engineering and the creative innovation process led me to pursue engineering. Very grateful for FIRST and the amazing people that make it happen. Woody Flowers, one of the icons of the program, and a professor of mine at MIT, recently passed [0]. [0] https://www.firstinspires.org/about/leadership/dr-woodie-flowers https://www.firstinspires.org/about/leadership/dr-woodie-flo...
  - andreyk 7y ago
    Likewise an Alum here. Wound up doing EE + CS in College and gravitating to AI, and now doing a PhD in robotics! (FIRST wasn't the only factor, but probably the earlier to set me on that path)
raxxorrax 7y ago
I created some open source libs that at least some crazy people use. Some mods for games with quite intrinsic scripting I must say. Painted some pictures and dabbled a bit with are partially legal version of Logic. I created animations and models with blender/max. And after all that I got a job.
32bitkid 7y ago
for people who haven’t gone to a top-tier college/university for computer science—especially self-taught developers—I would say that the corollary advice is also true: Don’t just build stuff—study stuff!
- JDiculous 7y ago
  Is the undergrad CS curriculum at a top-tier university really that different from that at a regular university?
  - bluemooner 7y ago
    From talking to my friends it seems like it's not. All of the lecturers just base their teaching on the same material.
  - ZeroCool2u 7y ago
    I would say no, but having taken classes at both, _how_ these courses are taught makes a huge difference. Professors, via their communication abilities, the level of effort put into making a class more interesting, and accessible marks a dramatic difference in what students can get out of a class.
    - raxxorrax 7y ago
      With the modern net, everyone could benefit from the best professors in their respective fields at least for lecture. Doesn't provide the possibility of feedback if you want it to scale ad infinitum, but that sound like it would be worth it.
  - throwaway6734 7y ago
    Having gone to a decent state university (Rutgers) and talking to some people who went to CMU for undergrad CS, yes.
  - jonfw 7y ago
    The average skill level of your peers has a severe impact on the curriculum. I went to a second tier state school, and the majority of my classmates could not write code and struggled through basic data structures and algorithms theory. I ended up learning some data structures and algorithms through ACM and codewars.com, where my peers from better schools learned them in class. I've had multiple classes where professors said they had to remove programming assignments and projects from the course because it was reducing the pass rate below acceptable levels.
rasengan 7y ago
This paper was written by another author and includes a quote from Tim Berners-Lee. The title is slightly misleading. Edit: Thanks for updating!
- hutzlibu 7y ago
  But at least the quote is indeed from himself ..
bluedino 7y ago
We have a nearby state university with a so-so computer science program. 2-3 graduates every year go to FAANG, a handful go to the local fortune 1000 companies, and we (a < 500 employee company) get to pick through the rest. They all list C, C++, .NET, HTML, CSS, and Java on their resumes but haven't done anything except a simple group project in any of them, half the time not even writing any code for the project. Which means a role in documentation, testing, etc. They come with a chip on their shoulder, flaunt their degree, and demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. To make it worse, they don't have any personal projects to show. I tell every single person that I interview to create something, even if it's a failure. At least you can come back and discuss your experience trying to create something, and you'll learn more about development working on that project than you did the whole semester you learned Java.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- zcw100 7y ago
  It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. They're taught the language but none of the tooling. When I was in school, which granted was a while ago now, they didn't teach you subversion, make, how to use an IDE, how to install and use a compiler, linker, etc. I remember having to logon to a VAX machine so we could do some fortran assignment. It was a cruel joke. There was little to no instruction on how to use the damn thing. You just had to make your way through it. I don't think much has changed. The students who are curious seek out and learn to use IDEs, git, maven, npm, jenkins, whatever, but there are others who do what's asked of them and they're not asked to learn these things. As a result they're unable to even start on anything other than the trivial assignments they're given in class. I think they seem entitled because they did what they were told and possibly received good grades as a result and their attitude may be them saying, "I bought an education. I was graded and found to be exceptional. If I had needed it, it would have been a part of my education". Right or wrong you should feel sorry for these kids. They paid a fortune and got ripped off. They just haven't realized it yet.
clarry 7y ago
> If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. That's just bollocks for a number of reasons. Maybe you're too busy doing productive work to build a portfolio. Likewise, employers are often too busy to look at and evaluate your portfolio. And unless you spend a huge amount of time working on your portfolio, chances are it's going to have nothing relevant to your job. Perhaps this junior developer fresh out of university needs to show up with real world experience before blogging about it :P
- bluemooner 7y ago
  > If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. You can still call yourself a Computer Scientist, but there's a difference between the two.
  - clarry 7y ago
    Only if you're doing computer science. What I do is primarily programming.
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    You can call yourself a computer scientist if you have at least one serious computer science publication to your name. You seemed to be implying that the bar for calling yourself a computer scientist is lower than the bar for calling yourself a programmer. The opposite is true. Also, not all computer scientists are in the business of writing code.
    - pinkfoot 7y ago
      Nonsense, People call themselves chemists, geologists, etc. without ever publishing anything. Ditto computer scientists.
      - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
userium 7y ago
True, "Go to hackathons, get involved in open source", and build side projects. I just created a free goal board tool for remote teams [1], the best way to keep learning is by building. [1] https://teamsuccess.io/boards/new https://teamsuccess.io/boards/new
LeifCarrotson 7y ago
People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. If they've got a personal budget spreadsheet, and have done a few studies in school following tutorials with sample data in a few software packages, but frequently refer to the docs and don't know the keyboard shortcuts, that's great for an accountant. You teach an accountant the tools your company uses to apply the basic principles they learned in school. They haven't spent a whole semester learning Java, they've spent a semester learning about Java. By writing a group project in each of those tools, they prove not that they are ready to start knocking out your Jira tickets on Day 1 - they're not, as your experience and their resume proves - but that they are capable of working on unfamiliar software projects in a group, which is what they should be doing in your company. Take a student who knows how the fundamental function your software performs can be built, and teach them the unique tools your company uses to do that. It only takes a couple thousand hours for someone who knows how to learn to develop good proficiency in your particular stack, and there are so many stacks out there that you can't expect everyone to have invested that in yours.
- jameshart 7y ago
  That’s a poor analogy. Accountancy isn’t creative (in fact, creative accounting is frowned upon). Accountants don’t need to develop a taste for ‘good accounting’. Coding is writing, and choosing what to write about, and picking language to use to write about it. It is an unending series of creative choices. If someone has no exposure to the process of making those choices, they are not ready to code.
  - shadowfiend 7y ago
    By your definition accounting is budgeting, and choosing what to budget about, and picking the tools to budget with. It operates within constraints, as programming does, and those constraints likely vary from company to company (inverted compared to programming, perhaps---it seems like a larger company may have more scenarios to run, a smaller company fewer, and thus there may be more room for the kind of creativity you describe at a larger company). Even within a tool you can make a million stylistic choices on how to present the information around your budgets and payments to enable the rest of your organization to make decisions. Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding. Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.
adiian 7y ago
Remind me of Elon's point, you don't need a high school diploma to work at Tesla. And he has lots of diplomas.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  The theory behind this mindset is: you're either born smart, or you're born stupid, and there's really not much you can do (i.e. education) to change that. The people born stupid get dull, repetitive jobs, the people born smart get to work at exciting places like Tesla. This sort of eugenicist thinking is frowned upon in most contexts, but somehow seems to have taken a foothold in, of all places, software development.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    You can make smart people less intelligent.
  - anthonypasq 7y ago
    believing there is variation in human intelligence isnt eugenics lol
    - thethethethe 7y ago
      That’s not what parent is saying. Yes there is likely a an innate variance in human intelligence, but we can’t believe this is the sole reason why society considers people to be “intelligent” or “stupid”. Many people with lower IQs and academic performance would perform differently when raised in a different environment. People who are of lower socioeconomic status often times perform worse than wealthier counterparts. People in of lower socioeconomic status are often in that situation because they have been systematically oppressed. So saying that people are either born stupid or smart without acknowledging societal and environmental factors is essentially saying that poor people are poor because they are stupid, which is certainly eugenicist.
      - anthonypasq 7y ago
melling 7y ago
I’ve alway called this the “Producer Consumer problem”, which I obviously reused. You can consume a lot of books, TV, movies, games, etc., however, it’s more valuable to produce something.
- bluemooner 7y ago
  You need to consume a lot in order to be able to produce something. That's why writers, for example, take their inspiration from other writers.
  - snazz 7y ago
    How about this: it's far easier to critique something than to make something better. I find that this is true with photography: my taste is so much more sophisticated than my abilities, so when I make art I am forced to be humble. Consuming others' photography is still crucial to my development.
    - disqard 7y ago
      You will enjoy Jad Abumrad's "Embrace the Gut Churn" https://youtu.be/8OH9p3hnWCY https://youtu.be/8OH9p3hnWCY
  - codr7 7y ago
    That would be true if we were talking about consuming code, not theory.
- Noos 7y ago
  Actually its more valuable to consume something. There's way too many creators chasing too few fan dollars. It's to the point where we have so many creative works people are dumping them for fractions of pennies via subscription programs and humble bundles.
badams2527 7y ago
How many civil engineers are building bridges on the side? Why has it become the "norm" that CS students pay tons of money to attend universities that leave them ill-equipped to find a job in the real world? One of the best parts of college is the ability to learn more about yourself, diversify parts of your life, and experience new things. It's hard to do that when your life is split between school work and personal work. I worked my life away at side projects and a part-time programming job in college and looking back there's so much I would've done differently. CS programs across the country need a wakeup call.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  > Why has it become the "norm" that CS students pay tons of money to attend universities that leave them ill-equipped to find a job in the real world? University industry, unions, and academia more broadly, set the tone that if you want to do anything "for real" you must go to school. Many companies, parents, and ordinary lay people are convinced. My (somewhat limited, I am young) experience tells me that competence is a completely inadequate predictor of whether somebody went to school for computing or software, but self-importance is an excellent one.
  - codr7 7y ago
    A good CS education will give you a wider perspective, a stable foundation to build on. Then you need practice, lots of it, to become anything close to competent. But being able to orient yourself and having been exposed to several different kinds of problems and languages, and learned an algorithm or two, definitely helps. One of my university teachers told us that to become a real programmer, you have to design and build at least one language of your own. I wouldn't choose the same words; but having done several, I sort of agree. You need practical experience before it makes any sense though.
- bluemooner 7y ago
  > CS programs across the country need a wakeup call. I assume you mean the United States. I'd say this is actually across the world.
- 7y ago
otras 7y ago
Building things is a great way to learn. That being said, the way this is presented leaves a bad taste in my mouth. > If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. Additionally, from one of their recent tweets: > I wonder how many people that call themselves programmers know that there is more to coding than just JavaScript This is unnecessary gatekeeping from anyone, but it's especially unwarranted from a "junior software developer, fresh out of university." I'd encourage the author to be less prescriptive when there's so much gray area and so much variation between experiences.
- XCSme 7y ago
  > I wonder how many people that call themselves programmers know that there is more to coding than just JavaScript I have a BSc in Computer Science, participated in informatic/algorithm contents/olympiads, created appliactions/games in C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript and other languages, yet in the last 5 years I programmed mostly in JavaScript. From my point of view, if you know JavaScript (TypeScript) in those days you can implement a solution to almost any real-world problem or application you might have. Yes, there might be better choices in some cases, but for most of the world what a product does is more important than how it's made. I also prefer to know a programming language and its ecosystem really well instead of having some vague knowledge of 10 different languages. If I implement something I want to implement it well and to know as soon as I write a line of code what it does and all its implications, edge cases and possible performance issues. I am not saying that you shouldn't adapt your toolset based on the project you are working on, but that it's better to have a tool that you can always rely on and whose ins and outs don't surprise you anymore. I am talking from the point of view of someone who builds stuff, creates products. Just learn a good-enough tool very well and then focus on the product itself instead of focusing on the tools.
  - snazz 7y ago
    Agreed. It's probably a good idea to gain some good depth in one particular language ecosystem, and JavaScript is a widely applicable choice. That said, playing with more "mind expanding" paradigms (logic programming, functional programming, Smalltalk-style OOP) is also good for your skills in any language.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sbmthakur 7y ago
Reminded me of Consume less, create more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463
N1H1L 7y ago
A few years back I was chatting with a faculty in my field at a conference. His lab almost invariably produces outstanding graduates who are really apart from the rest of the field. I asked him how did he do that, and his point was when hiring postdocs in his lab he never was really bothered about the publication counts, but he asked only one question, "What did you build in your PhD?" And if a graduate student could not answer that they were not graduating.
dejawu 7y ago
I despised the academic parts of school. The work was hilariously irrelevant, the requirements totally arbitrary, and the expectations set so ridiculously high that even though I've been in the workforce for a few years now, I still have anxieties and insecurities about my engineering ability that trace back to school being set up such that you're expected to fail all the time yet still somehow graduate. Often, it felt like school was actively working against me in my drive to become a better engineer. I quickly learned to give my engineering side-projects a higher priority than schoolwork. Schoolwork could always expand infinitely to fill as much time as it wanted, and school was a hideous monster that would swallow every ounce of effort I put into it, take it for all for granted, and only greedily demand more of me. If I'd played along with that, I would've had to give up the drive to build things that made me want to pursue engineering as a career in the first place. I had an industry internship every summer while I was in college, and I found an industry job - which paid more than my program's average undergrad starting salary - the afternoon after my last final exam. I say this because I want to emphasize that even by the standards of my school's career department I have """succeeded""" - yet every single one of those positions made absolutely no use of the things I was forced to do or learn to get my degree, and extensive use of the skills I learned by ignoring schoolwork and focusing on personal projects. I can't say with certainty that school did absolutely nothing for me: my current manager says that even though he didn't look at my academics at all, he likely never would've seen my resume if it didn't have a degree on it. But while I can count on one hand the number of times something at work has been remotely relevant to my schoolwork, the number of panic attacks and depressive spirals caused by anxieties rooted in my experience in the academic environment is beyond countless.
vibrolax 7y ago
I graduated with a CSE degree 41 years ago. My tremendous good fortune was obtaining student employment at the University computing center during my second year. While my fellow students queued for keypunch machines in the CS labs, I had my own terminal in the office, documentation for everything, and maybe best of all, was treated as a full colleague by the regular staff. They gave us real work to do. The university's budgets were severely reduced during the mid to late 70's, and the student labs were pathetically underequipped and overcrowded. All of the students working at the computing center realized how lucky we were, and received multiple good offers despite graduating in the middle of a recession.
Beaver117 7y ago
I'll give my perspective as well. I've hated school ever since middle school, but I recognized I wasn't dedicated enough to get a job without a degree. While going through the motions of academics, I noticed most of the classes were, basically, a joke. Not at all relevant to industry. I went to a fairly well known school as well, but didn't feel like any of it was worth it. However, starting my second year I was working on side projects in full force, and applying for internships. Sure, my GPA dropped a bit, but I got relevant experience. Then a black swan event, through a connection I was offered a full time position at a very large company, solely on my experience from projects and internships, no degree required. It paid well too (or so I thought). I very much considered dropping out, but several people in my life (including my new boss) strongly suggested I get my degree. I ended up finishing the degree and almost doubling my pay, so I'd say it was very worth it. However, a degree is not necessary (nor sufficient) for employment.
Datenstrom 7y ago
> The group projects organised by the uni have always been a joke, thus it is time to work on a serious project by yourself. This always bothered me until a teacher told me they are less about the project and more about working together as a team which most of the time is where these projects failed. With this perspective I led my senior design group project to develop a proof of concept IMSI Catcher[1] detector that ran on a Raspberry Pi with a software defined radio in one semester. None of the other students had any prior experience with python, GNU Radio, low-level networking, or software defined radios. A good team can accomplish so much more than an individual and you can learn a lot more with one too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher
eloff 7y ago
I focused on building stuff, and I've never stopped. I've worked weekends and evenings doing that throughout my career. I dropped out of college because I wasn't gaining anything from the degree, it would have just been a credential for me. It made it harder to get that first job, but since then it hasn't held me back. I have gone further in my career than the very best students in my classes who stayed and finished their degree with honors, and in some cases continued on to their masters in computer science. Now at 35 nobody even asks about the degree anymore. So a degree is not worth that much in this industry compared to practical skills. However, I think many people might struggle to learn on their own and might lack the self-discipline or initiative to guide their own learning - in which case get that degree! But keep in mind those same skills are required on an ongoing basis to keep up with this fast moving industry, and you won't get as far without them. I was home-schooled so for me it's just business as usual - that's actually been the biggest thing I got out of my schooling.
- hota_mazi 7y ago
  > Now at 35 nobody even asks about the degree anymore. So a degree is not worth that much in this industry compared to practical skills. At 35, maybe. Before that, a degree is worth a lot.
  - eloff 7y ago
    It mattered a lot to my first job, after that almost not at all. I didn't get callbacks from some very conservative companies, and that may be the reason - but those weren't great places to work anyway - so I can't say that it hurt me at all. Sample size of 1 mind you.
    - Groxx 7y ago
      Very much the same here. First job is harder, but demonstrate ability and no recruiter has ever asked since. School is essentially trash for demonstrating "can program in a business environment". If you're aiming for a research-heavy position it may help, but that's an extreme minority of jobs. And after a couple years it's useless again anyway - you're either continuing your self-education and improving, or you're stagnant, and your prior education doesn't play all that much of a role.
mrkeen 7y ago
Agreed. What separates own-projects from previous job experience is the ownership. Anyone can be a "valued member of a team", go to meetings, collaborate, open and close lots of Jira tickets, be super helpful, check in code which "should fix the problem", etc. But it's not the same as if you have your own project, which fails or succeeds based on how much effort and debugging you put in.
znpy 7y ago
there's an abundance of this kind of webpages. there's so many of them that it's easy get in the doubt of "should I follow page X recomendations or page Y recomendation?". The sad thing is that there is pretty much no equivalent page for other industries (law, medicine, computer-unrelated-engineering to name a few).
mekoka 7y ago
The advice given to people who just build stuff would be "don't just build stuff, also study the theory behind". You need the former to become a useful craftsman, but supplemented with the latter you will become a master craftsman. You'll be able to quickly recognize patterns when reasoning about problems. It will allow you to quickly and almost instinctively orient yourself toward optimal solutions.
wy35 7y ago
I'm having a bit of trouble building stuff to learn in my free time (undergrad w/ cancelled classes due to COVID-19). I find it very difficult to come up with an idea that I'm excited about enough to actually keep me motivated. And I would love to contribute to OSS but the codebases seem so dense and inaccessible, especially to a non-veteran. Any advice?
- machiaweliczny 7y ago
  Build me Reddit clone (if you do please make it scale to 100M users - that will keep you busy) or modify public source to be deployable with 1 click. EDIT: more ideas Try to build better Firebase. Try to build OS that's truly secure and convinient and hackable that allows me to write integration scipts based on app events and allows me to rewrite any app UI. Design App UI building toolkit that puts current solutions to shame. Build MMO game that will make Blizzard sad. Build simple and configurable personal assistant. Build relevant adds solution. Design better search engine than Google. Design publishing system that will get rid od ads and will allow to fairly compensate content creators and make it sustainable. Design simpler HTML, so anyone can write browser. Try to build/design language that is both expressive and minimal, with performance close to C or better, has great errors, no quirks and predictable memory use. Write it so it's easy for beginners to contribute ;p
sarora27 7y ago
I personally struggled alot in college with the academic stuff. It got so bad that I was kicked out of the engineering department and ended up signing up for a degree in economics. After having gone through 2 years of engineering courses, the econ curriculum seemed like a piece of cake. However, I had a feeling that that would not be enough to land a job post-college (my GPA was also very poor). Instead, I dove head first into trying to work with other people to build products that people would use. While none of those products ended up going anywhere in terms of financial success, the experience itself really helped me in articulating what sort of value I could provide to a prospective employer. In fact, I would give all credit in getting my first job to the fact that I was able to talk about the challenges I experienced with an on-campus recruiter who signed me up for an interview on the spot. I really think the learning you gain by doing, building, etc really helps you grok the underlying academic principle. For me, I found that I have to do first and then go back and read up to learn what I've experienced.
forkexec 7y ago
So the EE/CS undergrad program I did was heavily-analytical: - It included the entire advanced level chem, physics and stats series for scientists and engineers. - It was two elective courses shy of a math degree, including abstract math, concrete math, and tensor math. - Only a few courses shy of a physics degree as well. - The entire EE track and entire CS track of course. - Writing lots of code for multiplatform portable code including Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, SGI, and some MINIX 2. I think they should make it a mandatory combined undergrad /Masters' or /PhD program to be of sufficient depth into research achievement and breadth of knowledge to be useful in industry that cannot be achieved in the absence of an advanced degree. I think most of the undergrad CS knowledge can be acquired by osmosis in industry or self-study without a degree.
adamrezich 7y ago
Personal anecdote but doing over a decade of personal projects in game and web development, starting in middle school, did nearly jack shit for me as far as eventually getting a job was concerned. If I were to go back and do it all over again I would definitely spend my time doing literally anything else. I was so convinced that if I just followed my fancy, worked hard and made cool stuff, learning anything and everything I could along the way, then eventually I would find work doing things I liked, formal degree be damned. It did not work out that way, at all. After years of searching for work in the Redmond area and failing to do so (because, no professional experience, no degree), I randomly happened to find work by randomly logging onto a forum I hadn't visited in years and randomly happened to find a thread where a guy was looking to hire for remote webdev contract work. After that contract was complete, I spent another couple years looking for further work, and had to eventually move back home away from Redmond because the cost of living was too high while I was unemployed. After plural years of searching again, I finally managed to get a second remote webdev job. I don't like modern webdev and would much rather do almost anything else but now I've had two jobs doing it and I feel despair—am I locked into this for the rest of my career? With no degree and only these two jobs' worth of "Professional Work Experience" under my belt, it sure seems that way. Recruiters and hiring departments seem to care about little else. They sure don't give a shit about any personal projects, in my experience. And this is even in spite of the fact that I more or less picked a new language and/or framework for each project, which, in my mind, shows an aptitude for learning new things, being adaptable, and having an above-average "general programming aptitude" than someone who's made fourteen React projects in the past couple of years or whatever. But apparently companies don't see things this way, or maybe I'm just not good at finding the ones that do, or maybe there's something else to my approach that has been All Wrong. But as my twenties draw to a close and I find myself no closer to finding a career than I was a decade ago, at this point I'm kind of at a loss for what to do about it. And, almost more importantly, I'm extremely burned out on making stuff just for the fun and intrigue of doing so.
djhworld 7y ago
People in this thread (and the original article) emphasise building stuff to help you get job interviews and do better in your job. I'd argue that's the wrong way of looking at it, yes having something to show might be a signal booster on your resume, but it should be a side effect. Building stuff is only fun if you want to do it, the motivation and passion has to be there, otherwise you'll just be building something for the sake of it. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely useful to gain knowledge from building, even if it's just a toy project, but you'll get so much more out of it if you're building something you're passionate about.
battery_cowboy 7y ago
Why is computer science the only career, that I can think of, where I have to spend my free time doing "personal projects" to improve my skills? What if I just want to go to work, knock out tickets, and go home? With the emphasis on spending all our waking hours coding, no wonder we all burnt out.
- Chyzwar 7y ago
  You do not have to!. It is choice, where for many of us side projects are the pursuit of perfection that help balance shitty codebases of our day jobs, chance to create something other will use and be grateful, build a startup idea that can free us from corporate masters or just tire our restless minds.
  - battery_cowboy 7y ago
    I really have no choice, if everyone else wants to do it, I can't very well avoid it.
    - Chyzwar 7y ago
      I worked so far with around 80 developers. I could count on my hand number of people that did any side projects. HN is biased towards people doing side projects.
kirstenbirgit 7y ago
I've always been of the opinion that since the world of (web) programming moves so fast, a degree is largely pointless. As long as you have a natural interest in solving problems, learning new technologies and staying up to date, you should do well. You'll have a natural inclination to create some personal projects just because you can't stop yourself, and you'll find yourself having a couple projects that's worth showing off to potential employers–a portfolio.
mraza007 7y ago
I love this page
ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
create stuff, on a more general level.

341 points by bluemooner 7y ago

I agree that the role of the university is to prepare students for the industry and most of the universities achieve this quite nicely. Of course that as a new software developer you need to learn something on the job, but that is the case with every other field.

taneq 7y ago

I feel like this is good advice but it creates a false dichotomy. It should be "study stuff... by building stuff."

bluemooner 7y ago
Surely there must be a balance.
- taneq 7y ago
  That's the balance between "study stuff" and "build stuff".
ExtremisAndy 7y ago
Could not agree more. A couple of years ago I decided to learn Java (I was already aware of the 'basics' in programming from other languages... variables, loops, functions, classes, etc.) so I spent maybe a week learning the basic syntax of Java. Then I jumped right into building a (very simple) 'virtual study partner' system where you would take notes by 'teaching' your virtual study buddy certain facts about what you were studying, who could then in turn quiz you using your own notes. You could also ask your study buddy about things you had already 'taught' it to see how well you remembered them or if you just needed a quick reminder about something. A bit of a silly project, no doubt, but it really helped me learn Java, and was so much fun!

Waterluvian 7y ago

I was a mentor for a scrappy, underfunded robotics team of about 12 9th-11th grade students until the season was cancelled. One of my favourite parts of the experience was pointing out the "theory" behind the "practical". "What you're dealing with is called X and this is why it's important" was an increasingly common reply I'd give. One of _many_ examples was when the software lead came to me excitedly and said he got basic autonomy working, but the robot wouldn't drive the same distance every time. We talked about open vs. closed loop systems, their wheel encoders, and PID loops. I'm convinced that when he goes to study any of those things in university, because of this real-world exposure to them, they will be far easier to grok.

AlphaWeaver 7y ago
In case anyone is curious, this program is called FIRST Robotics Competition [0], and it is life-changing for the students who get to participate. (I'm an alum.) I got my first job through FIRST and was so much better prepared to solve difficult problems through what I learned there. You probably have a local team in your area. If you're interested, you should mentor! The students' excitement is contagious and its a fantastic experience. [0]: https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
- javiramos 7y ago
  I am also an alum -- I started the FIRST robotics team at my high school back in the day. I was part of a community where being a doctor, a lawyer or an accountant (nothing bad with that) was the expected norm. Having exposure through FIRST to technology, engineering and the creative innovation process led me to pursue engineering. Very grateful for FIRST and the amazing people that make it happen. Woody Flowers, one of the icons of the program, and a professor of mine at MIT, recently passed [0]. [0] https://www.firstinspires.org/about/leadership/dr-woodie-flowers https://www.firstinspires.org/about/leadership/dr-woodie-flo...
- andreyk 7y ago
  Likewise an Alum here. Wound up doing EE + CS in College and gravitating to AI, and now doing a PhD in robotics! (FIRST wasn't the only factor, but probably the earlier to set me on that path)

raxxorrax 7y ago

I created some open source libs that at least some crazy people use. Some mods for games with quite intrinsic scripting I must say. Painted some pictures and dabbled a bit with are partially legal version of Logic. I created animations and models with blender/max. And after all that I got a job.

32bitkid 7y ago

for people who haven’t gone to a top-tier college/university for computer science—especially self-taught developers—I would say that the corollary advice is also true: Don’t just build stuff—study stuff!

JDiculous 7y ago
Is the undergrad CS curriculum at a top-tier university really that different from that at a regular university?
- bluemooner 7y ago
  From talking to my friends it seems like it's not. All of the lecturers just base their teaching on the same material.
- ZeroCool2u 7y ago
  I would say no, but having taken classes at both, _how_ these courses are taught makes a huge difference. Professors, via their communication abilities, the level of effort put into making a class more interesting, and accessible marks a dramatic difference in what students can get out of a class.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    With the modern net, everyone could benefit from the best professors in their respective fields at least for lecture. Doesn't provide the possibility of feedback if you want it to scale ad infinitum, but that sound like it would be worth it.
- throwaway6734 7y ago
  Having gone to a decent state university (Rutgers) and talking to some people who went to CMU for undergrad CS, yes.
- jonfw 7y ago
  The average skill level of your peers has a severe impact on the curriculum. I went to a second tier state school, and the majority of my classmates could not write code and struggled through basic data structures and algorithms theory. I ended up learning some data structures and algorithms through ACM and codewars.com, where my peers from better schools learned them in class. I've had multiple classes where professors said they had to remove programming assignments and projects from the course because it was reducing the pass rate below acceptable levels.

rasengan 7y ago

This paper was written by another author and includes a quote from Tim Berners-Lee. The title is slightly misleading. Edit: Thanks for updating!

hutzlibu 7y ago
But at least the quote is indeed from himself ..

bluedino 7y ago

We have a nearby state university with a so-so computer science program. 2-3 graduates every year go to FAANG, a handful go to the local fortune 1000 companies, and we (a < 500 employee company) get to pick through the rest. They all list C, C++, .NET, HTML, CSS, and Java on their resumes but haven't done anything except a simple group project in any of them, half the time not even writing any code for the project. Which means a role in documentation, testing, etc. They come with a chip on their shoulder, flaunt their degree, and demand a salary close to what they think they should be getting, according to their advisers or statistics or whatever. To make it worse, they don't have any personal projects to show. I tell every single person that I interview to create something, even if it's a failure. At least you can come back and discuss your experience trying to create something, and you'll learn more about development working on that project than you did the whole semester you learned Java.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zcw100 7y ago
It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side. They're taught the language but none of the tooling. When I was in school, which granted was a while ago now, they didn't teach you subversion, make, how to use an IDE, how to install and use a compiler, linker, etc. I remember having to logon to a VAX machine so we could do some fortran assignment. It was a cruel joke. There was little to no instruction on how to use the damn thing. You just had to make your way through it. I don't think much has changed. The students who are curious seek out and learn to use IDEs, git, maven, npm, jenkins, whatever, but there are others who do what's asked of them and they're not asked to learn these things. As a result they're unable to even start on anything other than the trivial assignments they're given in class. I think they seem entitled because they did what they were told and possibly received good grades as a result and their attitude may be them saying, "I bought an education. I was graded and found to be exceptional. If I had needed it, it would have been a part of my education". Right or wrong you should feel sorry for these kids. They paid a fortune and got ripped off. They just haven't realized it yet.

clarry 7y ago

> If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. That's just bollocks for a number of reasons. Maybe you're too busy doing productive work to build a portfolio. Likewise, employers are often too busy to look at and evaluate your portfolio. And unless you spend a huge amount of time working on your portfolio, chances are it's going to have nothing relevant to your job. Perhaps this junior developer fresh out of university needs to show up with real world experience before blogging about it :P

bluemooner 7y ago
> If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. You can still call yourself a Computer Scientist, but there's a difference between the two.
- clarry 7y ago
  Only if you're doing computer science. What I do is primarily programming.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  You can call yourself a computer scientist if you have at least one serious computer science publication to your name. You seemed to be implying that the bar for calling yourself a computer scientist is lower than the bar for calling yourself a programmer. The opposite is true. Also, not all computer scientists are in the business of writing code.
  - pinkfoot 7y ago
    Nonsense, People call themselves chemists, geologists, etc. without ever publishing anything. Ditto computer scientists.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago

userium 7y ago

True, "Go to hackathons, get involved in open source", and build side projects. I just created a free goal board tool for remote teams [1], the best way to keep learning is by building. [1] https://teamsuccess.io/boards/new https://teamsuccess.io/boards/new

LeifCarrotson 7y ago

People don't expect aspiring accountants to spend their weekends managing their personal finances or imaginary companies in QuickBooks or (shudder) Oracle. If they've got a personal budget spreadsheet, and have done a few studies in school following tutorials with sample data in a few software packages, but frequently refer to the docs and don't know the keyboard shortcuts, that's great for an accountant. You teach an accountant the tools your company uses to apply the basic principles they learned in school. They haven't spent a whole semester learning Java, they've spent a semester learning about Java. By writing a group project in each of those tools, they prove not that they are ready to start knocking out your Jira tickets on Day 1 - they're not, as your experience and their resume proves - but that they are capable of working on unfamiliar software projects in a group, which is what they should be doing in your company. Take a student who knows how the fundamental function your software performs can be built, and teach them the unique tools your company uses to do that. It only takes a couple thousand hours for someone who knows how to learn to develop good proficiency in your particular stack, and there are so many stacks out there that you can't expect everyone to have invested that in yours.

jameshart 7y ago
That’s a poor analogy. Accountancy isn’t creative (in fact, creative accounting is frowned upon). Accountants don’t need to develop a taste for ‘good accounting’. Coding is writing, and choosing what to write about, and picking language to use to write about it. It is an unending series of creative choices. If someone has no exposure to the process of making those choices, they are not ready to code.
- shadowfiend 7y ago
  By your definition accounting is budgeting, and choosing what to budget about, and picking the tools to budget with. It operates within constraints, as programming does, and those constraints likely vary from company to company (inverted compared to programming, perhaps---it seems like a larger company may have more scenarios to run, a smaller company fewer, and thus there may be more room for the kind of creativity you describe at a larger company). Even within a tool you can make a million stylistic choices on how to present the information around your budgets and payments to enable the rest of your organization to make decisions. Programming itself is also not limited to developers. That should be self-evident in that spreadsheets are the go-to tool for so many non programmers, and they are at heart accessible programs. In that sense, it is programming that is a creative endeavor, not development or coding. Last but not least, the most creative (and valuable) part of programming is arguably problem definition and problem solving. I would argue these two things are shared, in one way or another, across most jobs and careers.

adiian 7y ago

Remind me of Elon's point, you don't need a high school diploma to work at Tesla. And he has lots of diplomas.

commandlinefan 7y ago
The theory behind this mindset is: you're either born smart, or you're born stupid, and there's really not much you can do (i.e. education) to change that. The people born stupid get dull, repetitive jobs, the people born smart get to work at exciting places like Tesla. This sort of eugenicist thinking is frowned upon in most contexts, but somehow seems to have taken a foothold in, of all places, software development.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  You can make smart people less intelligent.
- anthonypasq 7y ago
  believing there is variation in human intelligence isnt eugenics lol
  - thethethethe 7y ago
    That’s not what parent is saying. Yes there is likely a an innate variance in human intelligence, but we can’t believe this is the sole reason why society considers people to be “intelligent” or “stupid”. Many people with lower IQs and academic performance would perform differently when raised in a different environment. People who are of lower socioeconomic status often times perform worse than wealthier counterparts. People in of lower socioeconomic status are often in that situation because they have been systematically oppressed. So saying that people are either born stupid or smart without acknowledging societal and environmental factors is essentially saying that poor people are poor because they are stupid, which is certainly eugenicist.
    - anthonypasq 7y ago

melling 7y ago

I’ve alway called this the “Producer Consumer problem”, which I obviously reused. You can consume a lot of books, TV, movies, games, etc., however, it’s more valuable to produce something.

bluemooner 7y ago
You need to consume a lot in order to be able to produce something. That's why writers, for example, take their inspiration from other writers.
- snazz 7y ago
  How about this: it's far easier to critique something than to make something better. I find that this is true with photography: my taste is so much more sophisticated than my abilities, so when I make art I am forced to be humble. Consuming others' photography is still crucial to my development.
  - disqard 7y ago
    You will enjoy Jad Abumrad's "Embrace the Gut Churn" https://youtu.be/8OH9p3hnWCY https://youtu.be/8OH9p3hnWCY
- codr7 7y ago
  That would be true if we were talking about consuming code, not theory.
Noos 7y ago
Actually its more valuable to consume something. There's way too many creators chasing too few fan dollars. It's to the point where we have so many creative works people are dumping them for fractions of pennies via subscription programs and humble bundles.

badams2527 7y ago

How many civil engineers are building bridges on the side? Why has it become the "norm" that CS students pay tons of money to attend universities that leave them ill-equipped to find a job in the real world? One of the best parts of college is the ability to learn more about yourself, diversify parts of your life, and experience new things. It's hard to do that when your life is split between school work and personal work. I worked my life away at side projects and a part-time programming job in college and looking back there's so much I would've done differently. CS programs across the country need a wakeup call.

microcolonel 7y ago
> Why has it become the "norm" that CS students pay tons of money to attend universities that leave them ill-equipped to find a job in the real world? University industry, unions, and academia more broadly, set the tone that if you want to do anything "for real" you must go to school. Many companies, parents, and ordinary lay people are convinced. My (somewhat limited, I am young) experience tells me that competence is a completely inadequate predictor of whether somebody went to school for computing or software, but self-importance is an excellent one.
- codr7 7y ago
  A good CS education will give you a wider perspective, a stable foundation to build on. Then you need practice, lots of it, to become anything close to competent. But being able to orient yourself and having been exposed to several different kinds of problems and languages, and learned an algorithm or two, definitely helps. One of my university teachers told us that to become a real programmer, you have to design and build at least one language of your own. I wouldn't choose the same words; but having done several, I sort of agree. You need practical experience before it makes any sense though.
bluemooner 7y ago
> CS programs across the country need a wakeup call. I assume you mean the United States. I'd say this is actually across the world.
7y ago

otras 7y ago

Building things is a great way to learn. That being said, the way this is presented leaves a bad taste in my mouth. > If you want to be a software engineer and you do not have any code to present in an interview, you can not call yourself a programmer. Additionally, from one of their recent tweets: > I wonder how many people that call themselves programmers know that there is more to coding than just JavaScript This is unnecessary gatekeeping from anyone, but it's especially unwarranted from a "junior software developer, fresh out of university." I'd encourage the author to be less prescriptive when there's so much gray area and so much variation between experiences.

XCSme 7y ago
> I wonder how many people that call themselves programmers know that there is more to coding than just JavaScript I have a BSc in Computer Science, participated in informatic/algorithm contents/olympiads, created appliactions/games in C++, Java, PHP, JavaScript and other languages, yet in the last 5 years I programmed mostly in JavaScript. From my point of view, if you know JavaScript (TypeScript) in those days you can implement a solution to almost any real-world problem or application you might have. Yes, there might be better choices in some cases, but for most of the world what a product does is more important than how it's made. I also prefer to know a programming language and its ecosystem really well instead of having some vague knowledge of 10 different languages. If I implement something I want to implement it well and to know as soon as I write a line of code what it does and all its implications, edge cases and possible performance issues. I am not saying that you shouldn't adapt your toolset based on the project you are working on, but that it's better to have a tool that you can always rely on and whose ins and outs don't surprise you anymore. I am talking from the point of view of someone who builds stuff, creates products. Just learn a good-enough tool very well and then focus on the product itself instead of focusing on the tools.
- snazz 7y ago
  Agreed. It's probably a good idea to gain some good depth in one particular language ecosystem, and JavaScript is a widely applicable choice. That said, playing with more "mind expanding" paradigms (logic programming, functional programming, Smalltalk-style OOP) is also good for your skills in any language.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sbmthakur 7y ago

Reminded me of Consume less, create more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463

N1H1L 7y ago

A few years back I was chatting with a faculty in my field at a conference. His lab almost invariably produces outstanding graduates who are really apart from the rest of the field. I asked him how did he do that, and his point was when hiring postdocs in his lab he never was really bothered about the publication counts, but he asked only one question, "What did you build in your PhD?" And if a graduate student could not answer that they were not graduating.

dejawu 7y ago

I despised the academic parts of school. The work was hilariously irrelevant, the requirements totally arbitrary, and the expectations set so ridiculously high that even though I've been in the workforce for a few years now, I still have anxieties and insecurities about my engineering ability that trace back to school being set up such that you're expected to fail all the time yet still somehow graduate. Often, it felt like school was actively working against me in my drive to become a better engineer. I quickly learned to give my engineering side-projects a higher priority than schoolwork. Schoolwork could always expand infinitely to fill as much time as it wanted, and school was a hideous monster that would swallow every ounce of effort I put into it, take it for all for granted, and only greedily demand more of me. If I'd played along with that, I would've had to give up the drive to build things that made me want to pursue engineering as a career in the first place. I had an industry internship every summer while I was in college, and I found an industry job - which paid more than my program's average undergrad starting salary - the afternoon after my last final exam. I say this because I want to emphasize that even by the standards of my school's career department I have """succeeded""" - yet every single one of those positions made absolutely no use of the things I was forced to do or learn to get my degree, and extensive use of the skills I learned by ignoring schoolwork and focusing on personal projects. I can't say with certainty that school did absolutely nothing for me: my current manager says that even though he didn't look at my academics at all, he likely never would've seen my resume if it didn't have a degree on it. But while I can count on one hand the number of times something at work has been remotely relevant to my schoolwork, the number of panic attacks and depressive spirals caused by anxieties rooted in my experience in the academic environment is beyond countless.

vibrolax 7y ago

I graduated with a CSE degree 41 years ago. My tremendous good fortune was obtaining student employment at the University computing center during my second year. While my fellow students queued for keypunch machines in the CS labs, I had my own terminal in the office, documentation for everything, and maybe best of all, was treated as a full colleague by the regular staff. They gave us real work to do. The university's budgets were severely reduced during the mid to late 70's, and the student labs were pathetically underequipped and overcrowded. All of the students working at the computing center realized how lucky we were, and received multiple good offers despite graduating in the middle of a recession.

Beaver117 7y ago

I'll give my perspective as well. I've hated school ever since middle school, but I recognized I wasn't dedicated enough to get a job without a degree. While going through the motions of academics, I noticed most of the classes were, basically, a joke. Not at all relevant to industry. I went to a fairly well known school as well, but didn't feel like any of it was worth it. However, starting my second year I was working on side projects in full force, and applying for internships. Sure, my GPA dropped a bit, but I got relevant experience. Then a black swan event, through a connection I was offered a full time position at a very large company, solely on my experience from projects and internships, no degree required. It paid well too (or so I thought). I very much considered dropping out, but several people in my life (including my new boss) strongly suggested I get my degree. I ended up finishing the degree and almost doubling my pay, so I'd say it was very worth it. However, a degree is not necessary (nor sufficient) for employment.

Datenstrom 7y ago

> The group projects organised by the uni have always been a joke, thus it is time to work on a serious project by yourself. This always bothered me until a teacher told me they are less about the project and more about working together as a team which most of the time is where these projects failed. With this perspective I led my senior design group project to develop a proof of concept IMSI Catcher[1] detector that ran on a Raspberry Pi with a software defined radio in one semester. None of the other students had any prior experience with python, GNU Radio, low-level networking, or software defined radios. A good team can accomplish so much more than an individual and you can learn a lot more with one too. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher

eloff 7y ago

I focused on building stuff, and I've never stopped. I've worked weekends and evenings doing that throughout my career. I dropped out of college because I wasn't gaining anything from the degree, it would have just been a credential for me. It made it harder to get that first job, but since then it hasn't held me back. I have gone further in my career than the very best students in my classes who stayed and finished their degree with honors, and in some cases continued on to their masters in computer science. Now at 35 nobody even asks about the degree anymore. So a degree is not worth that much in this industry compared to practical skills. However, I think many people might struggle to learn on their own and might lack the self-discipline or initiative to guide their own learning - in which case get that degree! But keep in mind those same skills are required on an ongoing basis to keep up with this fast moving industry, and you won't get as far without them. I was home-schooled so for me it's just business as usual - that's actually been the biggest thing I got out of my schooling.

hota_mazi 7y ago
> Now at 35 nobody even asks about the degree anymore. So a degree is not worth that much in this industry compared to practical skills. At 35, maybe. Before that, a degree is worth a lot.
- eloff 7y ago
  It mattered a lot to my first job, after that almost not at all. I didn't get callbacks from some very conservative companies, and that may be the reason - but those weren't great places to work anyway - so I can't say that it hurt me at all. Sample size of 1 mind you.
  - Groxx 7y ago
    Very much the same here. First job is harder, but demonstrate ability and no recruiter has ever asked since. School is essentially trash for demonstrating "can program in a business environment". If you're aiming for a research-heavy position it may help, but that's an extreme minority of jobs. And after a couple years it's useless again anyway - you're either continuing your self-education and improving, or you're stagnant, and your prior education doesn't play all that much of a role.

mrkeen 7y ago

Agreed. What separates own-projects from previous job experience is the ownership. Anyone can be a "valued member of a team", go to meetings, collaborate, open and close lots of Jira tickets, be super helpful, check in code which "should fix the problem", etc. But it's not the same as if you have your own project, which fails or succeeds based on how much effort and debugging you put in.

znpy 7y ago

there's an abundance of this kind of webpages. there's so many of them that it's easy get in the doubt of "should I follow page X recomendations or page Y recomendation?". The sad thing is that there is pretty much no equivalent page for other industries (law, medicine, computer-unrelated-engineering to name a few).

mekoka 7y ago

The advice given to people who just build stuff would be "don't just build stuff, also study the theory behind". You need the former to become a useful craftsman, but supplemented with the latter you will become a master craftsman. You'll be able to quickly recognize patterns when reasoning about problems. It will allow you to quickly and almost instinctively orient yourself toward optimal solutions.

wy35 7y ago

I'm having a bit of trouble building stuff to learn in my free time (undergrad w/ cancelled classes due to COVID-19). I find it very difficult to come up with an idea that I'm excited about enough to actually keep me motivated. And I would love to contribute to OSS but the codebases seem so dense and inaccessible, especially to a non-veteran. Any advice?

machiaweliczny 7y ago
Build me Reddit clone (if you do please make it scale to 100M users - that will keep you busy) or modify public source to be deployable with 1 click. EDIT: more ideas Try to build better Firebase. Try to build OS that's truly secure and convinient and hackable that allows me to write integration scipts based on app events and allows me to rewrite any app UI. Design App UI building toolkit that puts current solutions to shame. Build MMO game that will make Blizzard sad. Build simple and configurable personal assistant. Build relevant adds solution. Design better search engine than Google. Design publishing system that will get rid od ads and will allow to fairly compensate content creators and make it sustainable. Design simpler HTML, so anyone can write browser. Try to build/design language that is both expressive and minimal, with performance close to C or better, has great errors, no quirks and predictable memory use. Write it so it's easy for beginners to contribute ;p

sarora27 7y ago

I personally struggled alot in college with the academic stuff. It got so bad that I was kicked out of the engineering department and ended up signing up for a degree in economics. After having gone through 2 years of engineering courses, the econ curriculum seemed like a piece of cake. However, I had a feeling that that would not be enough to land a job post-college (my GPA was also very poor). Instead, I dove head first into trying to work with other people to build products that people would use. While none of those products ended up going anywhere in terms of financial success, the experience itself really helped me in articulating what sort of value I could provide to a prospective employer. In fact, I would give all credit in getting my first job to the fact that I was able to talk about the challenges I experienced with an on-campus recruiter who signed me up for an interview on the spot. I really think the learning you gain by doing, building, etc really helps you grok the underlying academic principle. For me, I found that I have to do first and then go back and read up to learn what I've experienced.

forkexec 7y ago

So the EE/CS undergrad program I did was heavily-analytical: - It included the entire advanced level chem, physics and stats series for scientists and engineers. - It was two elective courses shy of a math degree, including abstract math, concrete math, and tensor math. - Only a few courses shy of a physics degree as well. - The entire EE track and entire CS track of course. - Writing lots of code for multiplatform portable code including Linux, HP-UX, Solaris, SGI, and some MINIX 2. I think they should make it a mandatory combined undergrad /Masters' or /PhD program to be of sufficient depth into research achievement and breadth of knowledge to be useful in industry that cannot be achieved in the absence of an advanced degree. I think most of the undergrad CS knowledge can be acquired by osmosis in industry or self-study without a degree.

adamrezich 7y ago

Personal anecdote but doing over a decade of personal projects in game and web development, starting in middle school, did nearly jack shit for me as far as eventually getting a job was concerned. If I were to go back and do it all over again I would definitely spend my time doing literally anything else. I was so convinced that if I just followed my fancy, worked hard and made cool stuff, learning anything and everything I could along the way, then eventually I would find work doing things I liked, formal degree be damned. It did not work out that way, at all. After years of searching for work in the Redmond area and failing to do so (because, no professional experience, no degree), I randomly happened to find work by randomly logging onto a forum I hadn't visited in years and randomly happened to find a thread where a guy was looking to hire for remote webdev contract work. After that contract was complete, I spent another couple years looking for further work, and had to eventually move back home away from Redmond because the cost of living was too high while I was unemployed. After plural years of searching again, I finally managed to get a second remote webdev job. I don't like modern webdev and would much rather do almost anything else but now I've had two jobs doing it and I feel despair—am I locked into this for the rest of my career? With no degree and only these two jobs' worth of "Professional Work Experience" under my belt, it sure seems that way. Recruiters and hiring departments seem to care about little else. They sure don't give a shit about any personal projects, in my experience. And this is even in spite of the fact that I more or less picked a new language and/or framework for each project, which, in my mind, shows an aptitude for learning new things, being adaptable, and having an above-average "general programming aptitude" than someone who's made fourteen React projects in the past couple of years or whatever. But apparently companies don't see things this way, or maybe I'm just not good at finding the ones that do, or maybe there's something else to my approach that has been All Wrong. But as my twenties draw to a close and I find myself no closer to finding a career than I was a decade ago, at this point I'm kind of at a loss for what to do about it. And, almost more importantly, I'm extremely burned out on making stuff just for the fun and intrigue of doing so.

djhworld 7y ago

People in this thread (and the original article) emphasise building stuff to help you get job interviews and do better in your job. I'd argue that's the wrong way of looking at it, yes having something to show might be a signal booster on your resume, but it should be a side effect. Building stuff is only fun if you want to do it, the motivation and passion has to be there, otherwise you'll just be building something for the sake of it. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely useful to gain knowledge from building, even if it's just a toy project, but you'll get so much more out of it if you're building something you're passionate about.

battery_cowboy 7y ago

Why is computer science the only career, that I can think of, where I have to spend my free time doing "personal projects" to improve my skills? What if I just want to go to work, knock out tickets, and go home? With the emphasis on spending all our waking hours coding, no wonder we all burnt out.

Chyzwar 7y ago
You do not have to!. It is choice, where for many of us side projects are the pursuit of perfection that help balance shitty codebases of our day jobs, chance to create something other will use and be grateful, build a startup idea that can free us from corporate masters or just tire our restless minds.
- battery_cowboy 7y ago
  I really have no choice, if everyone else wants to do it, I can't very well avoid it.
  - Chyzwar 7y ago
    I worked so far with around 80 developers. I could count on my hand number of people that did any side projects. HN is biased towards people doing side projects.

kirstenbirgit 7y ago

I've always been of the opinion that since the world of (web) programming moves so fast, a degree is largely pointless. As long as you have a natural interest in solving problems, learning new technologies and staying up to date, you should do well. You'll have a natural inclination to create some personal projects just because you can't stop yourself, and you'll find yourself having a couple projects that's worth showing off to potential employers–a portfolio.

mraza007 7y ago

I love this page

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago

create stuff, on a more general level.