5 ms·
> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish. Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-tau
by cameronbrown 6y ago
> It's hard and expensive to turn somebody into a programmer, and you can't scale it up as you wish.
Is it? We work in one of the few industries where self-taught may actually be the norm (or at least, a significant minority).
- luckylion 6y agoI believe the self-taught (which is hard to define, as most are still learning by reading and imitating, it's not like people are completely removed from the world and suddenly walk out of the woods as a software developer) are pretty much here because it's so hard. If it was easier to scale the number of developers up, the people who took up programming as a hobby and then (often accidentally) transitioned into doing it for money would still be hobbyists. They're being recruited because we can't fill the seats with formally trained people. I am an autodidact, and I'm clearly worse than actual CS people in the CS stuff, but that's not a problem for me, because we're in an industry where we lump together people who work on hard problems and people who basically translate requirements into business logic code. The CS people could do my job, I couldn't do theirs (there are some autodidacts that could, but they are a tiny minority imho), and for most intents and purposes, it doesn't matter, because most requirements don't require high level computer science, they require python, php, javascript and css etc.