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I monitor threads like this one every time they get to the front page, which is once a month or so. Whenever someone says "I am a hiring manager and we 100% hir

I monitor threads like this one every time they get to the front page, which is once a month or so. Whenever someone says "I am a hiring manager and we 100% hire self-taught and inexperienced candidates," I try to reach out to them. And almost every time I get a response, it turns out that the poster is located in a depressed market outside the US (like southern Europe or the Canadian prairies), and also not actively hiring.

moneywoes 4y ago
I imagine they must pay poorly as well?
foobiekr 4y ago
I can attest that I’ve personally hired low experience people as well as a small handful self taught. I will likely be hiring again in a few months. If you’re older your experience was that all really good coders were self-taught coders. They were people who learned by cracking or modifying software or working out how their computer worked the hard way in a very deep way. For awhile most really great coders were either out of a very small number of schools or were entirely self-taught. I think this dynamic died though by 2000 at the latest. I will say that a lot of self taught people that I have interviewed and not hired had this - well, attitude. But that’s the wrong word for it. Let me give an example. Not long ago I interviewed a self-taught python guy who spent part of the interview explaining how hard pointers are. I am a lifetime c programmer. Pointers are maybe hazardous but they are not hard, they are such a simple construct that people effectively reinvent them over and over and pointer-like objects show up over and over. It was just the weirdest interview, he was quite adamant about it, like he was confused that I wasn’t instantly agreeing, almost like visiting a forum for people who only know python. It was very off putting once I realized that most of it was bluster to explain that he knew python and only python and that was a kind of mantra that he’d learned made him sound more thoughtful than he was. I don’t think he knew. Another typical example is “I could learn the CS degree stuff if I wanted to but I don’t need to” aspect by candidates that don’t know basic algorithms or analysis. I’m not opposed to self-taught. I was, myself, a self-taught paid professional coder before I got my CS degree. I did discover a world of stuff I didn’t know doing the CS degree though and the dismissiveness is unfortunately common. A lot of CS has zero to do with industry but unfortunately not all of it. I guess my point here is that, unfortunately, interviewers build mental stereotypes due to experience that you’re unfortunately exposed to. I’m still game to hire self-taught coders but I now aggressively filter that set to avoid the kind of limited mentality I’m trying (and failing) to describe above.

moneywoes 4y ago

I imagine they must pay poorly as well?

foobiekr 4y ago

I can attest that I’ve personally hired low experience people as well as a small handful self taught. I will likely be hiring again in a few months. If you’re older your experience was that all really good coders were self-taught coders. They were people who learned by cracking or modifying software or working out how their computer worked the hard way in a very deep way. For awhile most really great coders were either out of a very small number of schools or were entirely self-taught. I think this dynamic died though by 2000 at the latest. I will say that a lot of self taught people that I have interviewed and not hired had this - well, attitude. But that’s the wrong word for it. Let me give an example. Not long ago I interviewed a self-taught python guy who spent part of the interview explaining how hard pointers are. I am a lifetime c programmer. Pointers are maybe hazardous but they are not hard, they are such a simple construct that people effectively reinvent them over and over and pointer-like objects show up over and over. It was just the weirdest interview, he was quite adamant about it, like he was confused that I wasn’t instantly agreeing, almost like visiting a forum for people who only know python. It was very off putting once I realized that most of it was bluster to explain that he knew python and only python and that was a kind of mantra that he’d learned made him sound more thoughtful than he was. I don’t think he knew. Another typical example is “I could learn the CS degree stuff if I wanted to but I don’t need to” aspect by candidates that don’t know basic algorithms or analysis. I’m not opposed to self-taught. I was, myself, a self-taught paid professional coder before I got my CS degree. I did discover a world of stuff I didn’t know doing the CS degree though and the dismissiveness is unfortunately common. A lot of CS has zero to do with industry but unfortunately not all of it. I guess my point here is that, unfortunately, interviewers build mental stereotypes due to experience that you’re unfortunately exposed to. I’m still game to hire self-taught coders but I now aggressively filter that set to avoid the kind of limited mentality I’m trying (and failing) to describe above.