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I am completely self taught and have had no problem finding employment as a developer. I have noticed a social phenomenon that I call the developer factory. Un

I am completely self taught and have had no problem finding employment as a developer. I have noticed a social phenomenon that I call the developer factory. University CS programs, at the bachelor level, appear designed to mass produce developers who aren’t really competent. The goal is employability not competence. They are really good at writing way too much OOP decoration to solve an otherwise trivial problem and really good at doing some whiteboard interview algorithm they will never use on the job. Unfortunately any deviation from those results excuses and failure. Everything must explicitly conform to the patterns they were taught in school. Many large employers look for this because they know what to expect and it’s a single paradigm form of thinking that easily conforms to their other university-factory minded developers.

culopatin 5y ago
What was your route into your first job? I am in IT and I've been around coding since 2007 but never for work. I've gotten myself out of tutorial hell and I'm building a Java/Spring app to help some biology friends, but my resume is all IT. I can't seem to even get an interview. I think I need a portfolio but seems to take ages.
- austincheney 5y ago
  I taught myself HTML and CSS as a youngster for a personal hobby to build things. I joined Travelocity as a designer. Competent front end developers were hard to find before frameworks and JQuery did your job for you, so they involuntarily reclassified me to a developer shortly after I joined. I taught myself programming to avoid unemployment. My recommendation is to build something marvelous to solve a personal problem. My observations of the self taught path is that it’s harder to get a job but you will become a superior developer. That frustration continues well past you achieving employment. CS school seems to teach programming in a very OOP Java kind of way. The results are extremely predictable and not open to much deviation. Big companies want that because it’s highly predictable. As a self taught developer you might learn to write code with a bit of nuance that learns towards less code and higher execution performance because you aren’t wasting time with the ceremonial bullshit that CS graduates cannot live without. This is deeply frustrating because when you go to work you have to knowingly write highly inefficient bloated code far more slowly in order to achieve compatibility.
potta_coffee 5y ago
There are certain universities that are particularly guilty of this approach. I worked with a slew of devs from the same school and they all had the same really weird attitude and approach to software that just doesn't work. Other than that, I've met great devs who both had formal CS education / no formal education at all.

culopatin 5y ago

What was your route into your first job? I am in IT and I've been around coding since 2007 but never for work. I've gotten myself out of tutorial hell and I'm building a Java/Spring app to help some biology friends, but my resume is all IT. I can't seem to even get an interview. I think I need a portfolio but seems to take ages.

austincheney 5y ago
I taught myself HTML and CSS as a youngster for a personal hobby to build things. I joined Travelocity as a designer. Competent front end developers were hard to find before frameworks and JQuery did your job for you, so they involuntarily reclassified me to a developer shortly after I joined. I taught myself programming to avoid unemployment. My recommendation is to build something marvelous to solve a personal problem. My observations of the self taught path is that it’s harder to get a job but you will become a superior developer. That frustration continues well past you achieving employment. CS school seems to teach programming in a very OOP Java kind of way. The results are extremely predictable and not open to much deviation. Big companies want that because it’s highly predictable. As a self taught developer you might learn to write code with a bit of nuance that learns towards less code and higher execution performance because you aren’t wasting time with the ceremonial bullshit that CS graduates cannot live without. This is deeply frustrating because when you go to work you have to knowingly write highly inefficient bloated code far more slowly in order to achieve compatibility.

potta_coffee 5y ago

There are certain universities that are particularly guilty of this approach. I worked with a slew of devs from the same school and they all had the same really weird attitude and approach to software that just doesn't work. Other than that, I've met great devs who both had formal CS education / no formal education at all.