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You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical educatio

You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. Not to mention the numerous open-source projects you can learn from and contribute to, which are essentially "fully remote" distributed teams that have been working effectively for years. The larger open-source projects can also be great for networking through their forums/chat rooms/online discussions. Those "randos" are building software that is literally the underlying infrastructure of almost all commercial software being built today. And, anecdotally, a lot of software jobs are building generic CRUD apps, and a lot of "senior colleagues" are not necessarily great teachers, or even great developers. In scenarios like those, you can do a lot better teaching yourself online with lessons or learning/contributing to the aforementioned open-source projects. It's not just about in-person vs online, but the quality of the team/project you're learning from.

timr 3y ago
> You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. I am not, but my definition of junior/senior/whatever is likely different than your own. At the risk of a truism: can you learn technical things online? Yes, absolutely. It's the kind of things you can't learn from a web forum that make the difference between junior and senior. Just as a simple example, most stuff you'll read about conflict resolution (people, not code) online is superficial and trite. You can get maybe a bit more from books, but to really learn how to do it, you need to spend time watching someone who is talented at managing interpersonal conflict. I'm not great at it, but I've had the good fortune of spending time with people, in person, who were truly gifted at the task. It completely re-framed my expectations for what is possible. Maybe there's a way to do this by video call -- but it's harder -- and you're definitely not getting the human experience by reading or watching a video.
- ipaddr 3y ago
  If you read Oracle's "Ask Tom" entire comment section history you will pick up more senior tips than you ever would working in person.

timr 3y ago

> You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. I am not, but my definition of junior/senior/whatever is likely different than your own. At the risk of a truism: can you learn technical things online? Yes, absolutely. It's the kind of things you can't learn from a web forum that make the difference between junior and senior. Just as a simple example, most stuff you'll read about conflict resolution (people, not code) online is superficial and trite. You can get maybe a bit more from books, but to really learn how to do it, you need to spend time watching someone who is talented at managing interpersonal conflict. I'm not great at it, but I've had the good fortune of spending time with people, in person, who were truly gifted at the task. It completely re-framed my expectations for what is possible. Maybe there's a way to do this by video call -- but it's harder -- and you're definitely not getting the human experience by reading or watching a video.

ipaddr 3y ago
If you read Oracle's "Ask Tom" entire comment section history you will pick up more senior tips than you ever would working in person.