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"Formal Education Importance Almost 85% of the respondents that are professional developers feel that formal education is at least somewhat important, which is

"Formal Education Importance Almost 85% of the respondents that are professional developers feel that formal education is at least somewhat important, which is contrary to the popular idiom that you don't need formal education to become a developer. However, almost 16% believe that it is not at all important or necessary." Well as someone who doesn't have a formal comp. sci. education, this is a bit alarming for me. Personally didn't think the number was that high.

bbeekley 6y ago
Also as someone without formal CS education: I'm surprised too, though not alarmed. I've very rarely felt like I didn't have the right education to do my job at giantmegacorp w/ CS PhD coworkers. The bigger problem is that I feel a bit of a cultural outsider. There are jokes, stories, language that coworkers use and I'm just not familiar with. That can promote impostor syndrome and definitely affects interviews (eg "cultural fit").
entha_saava 6y ago
It is not about formal education itself though. Mostly 'bootcamp webshit' meme is - about those developers who don't know things like algorithm complexity or memory related stuff, working at a top level of a multi-layer stack leading to inefficient/bad code. The common consensus is it is pretty important for every developer to know some low level programming (C, asm) and algorithms/Data Structures stuff. Not so much about other things covered in standard CS curriculum.
Izkata 6y ago
As someone that was self-taught and then got a formal education (BS in CS), here's my explanation after having worked with new hires who only did bootcamps: Formal education is not necessary to be capable of doing the job, especially if you have some good people to learn from and are willing to learn on your own. However, it is very very good at filling in the things you don't realize you don't know. It provides a huge number of hooks in your mind you can investigate further as necessary on the job, as well as random little factoids you didn't know were important. For example, those bootcampers I worked with? Never encountered deep copy/shallow copy, and had trouble figuring out a bug caused by using shallow when it should have been deep. None of them had issues the moment it was explained to them, but they'd just never experienced it before, so had nothing to work from. Maybe they'd have figured it out and understood it eventually, or maybe they'd make guesses from StackOverflow and find something that works well enough without understanding why it works (so next time it comes up they're starting from scratch) (and yes, I have seen this). It's just lots of small things like this that make up that split (and a sibling comment mentions more of them). The survey was not well-structured to get this nuance.

bbeekley 6y ago

Also as someone without formal CS education: I'm surprised too, though not alarmed. I've very rarely felt like I didn't have the right education to do my job at giantmegacorp w/ CS PhD coworkers. The bigger problem is that I feel a bit of a cultural outsider. There are jokes, stories, language that coworkers use and I'm just not familiar with. That can promote impostor syndrome and definitely affects interviews (eg "cultural fit").

entha_saava 6y ago

It is not about formal education itself though. Mostly 'bootcamp webshit' meme is - about those developers who don't know things like algorithm complexity or memory related stuff, working at a top level of a multi-layer stack leading to inefficient/bad code. The common consensus is it is pretty important for every developer to know some low level programming (C, asm) and algorithms/Data Structures stuff. Not so much about other things covered in standard CS curriculum.

Izkata 6y ago

As someone that was self-taught and then got a formal education (BS in CS), here's my explanation after having worked with new hires who only did bootcamps: Formal education is not necessary to be capable of doing the job, especially if you have some good people to learn from and are willing to learn on your own. However, it is very very good at filling in the things you don't realize you don't know. It provides a huge number of hooks in your mind you can investigate further as necessary on the job, as well as random little factoids you didn't know were important. For example, those bootcampers I worked with? Never encountered deep copy/shallow copy, and had trouble figuring out a bug caused by using shallow when it should have been deep. None of them had issues the moment it was explained to them, but they'd just never experienced it before, so had nothing to work from. Maybe they'd have figured it out and understood it eventually, or maybe they'd make guesses from StackOverflow and find something that works well enough without understanding why it works (so next time it comes up they're starting from scratch) (and yes, I have seen this). It's just lots of small things like this that make up that split (and a sibling comment mentions more of them). The survey was not well-structured to get this nuance.