5 ms·

I think self-directed solo learning on a computer is how a lot of us ended up in the tech industry. I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in th

I think self-directed solo learning on a computer is how a lot of us ended up in the tech industry. I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in the late 90's, teaching myself how to make websites, than I was learning inside of school.

jgavris 3y ago
It’s practically a requirement…let’s say there was no iOS class when I was in school, but there was an App Store.
- kalupa 3y ago
  half the iOS developers I've known were making software before the App Store existed ... but to your point about "iOS class", wasn't there any more general "this is how you use C/C++" classes? Objective-C was already 24 years old when the App Store came to exist ...
  - adamsb6 3y ago
    Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs
    - tsumnia 3y ago
      Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.
  - fzzzy 3y ago
    An objective c class is a very different class than a UiKit class.
Simulacra 3y ago
Is hacking America Online and AT&T considered self-directed solo learning ?
- noman-land 3y ago
  Yes.
Barrin92 3y ago
Not my experience. I went to a university, got a CS degree, got a job. Just looking at my coworkers that seems to be by far the most common path. We didn't even have a PC at home for the longest time when I was a kid. The self directed autodidact thing is the stereotypical Bay Area, romanticized narrative and all the 'education disruptors' seem to come out of the exact same circle. It's not surprising to me at all that Zuckerberg had to write the 100 million off, most professionals just come out of decent schools with a good social learning environment.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I think it's overblown, but consider most other fields, even most other STEM fields, and how often people working in them come from a hobbyist background. How many hobby chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. are there? Those are more expensive, dangerous, or involved to get into as children. Today's future software engineers already have everything they need to do pretty much anything that a full time professional would do at work. It's not that computer people are better, smarter, or more passionate than other professionals. It's just that the barrier to entry (in the 1st world) is just based on your interest level.
  - throwaway5959 3y ago
    To be fair to other industries, the barrier to entry of being a hobbiest chemical or mechanical engineer before going to school is a bit higher. Unless I’m underestimating the number of folks with laboratories in their parents basements. ;)
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      That's my point.
      - throwaway5959 3y ago
        Hmmm, I didn’t see some text before that I see now, maybe I missed it.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
Signal to noise ratio was a lot better back then I think. Nowadays you're more likely to find the likes of ThePrimagen than Beej, if you even make it past the sea of content farm tutorials.
- bawolff 3y ago
  I think the overall increase in resources more than compensates for the noise. When i was growing up (medium sized town early 2000s) i read all the computer books in my library. There was like 4, i remember one was a redhat for dummies, another was on vrml 1.0 (this was a bit outdated at the time), i dont remember the others. Sure there was some info on the internet, but it was few and far between. Random home pages by and large weren't even remotely on the level of a wikipedia article let alone a text book. Now a days, if i want to learn about computer things, there are like a billion resources. Text based tutorials, youtube videos, almost anything you can imagine. And that is just the googlable ones. If i am willing to do something a tiny bit illegal, i can get basically any book ever published from libgen. The available resources the modern person has is just staggering.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    So much of what's available is unstructured and disjointed, answering questions without any sort of method or system, not to mention frequently harmful in being both written with certainty and incorrectness. While there were certainly fewer books in the late 90s and early 00s, they were well put together and comprehensive, often reference-style works. You could learn an entire programming language from having access to a single book.
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
P(enter tech industry | self-taught with computers) is high but the inverse P(self-taught with computers | enter tech industry) isn't. That distinction is important.
sema4hacker 3y ago
When I entered my brand-new junior high school in 1965, they had expensive metal shops and wood shops, but they should have offered an electronics lab (which could have been stocked for far less than a metal/wood shop). When I entered high school in 1968, all the girls went to home economics classes and the guys took drafting and/or auto shop. Still no electronics. In 1969 I stumbled upon free self-guided programming access to a 360/67 (punched cards, WATFOR) at the local military base and spent the next two years teaching myself as much programming as I could, while my high school remained oblivious to the computer revolution. When I got to college in 1971 they only offered graduate degrees in computer science; undergraduates interested in CS were expected to take "math sciences". Apparently it takes a while for education systems to realize where the future is headed.
- qnleigh 3y ago
  Perhaps also because it takes a generation or two to raise future teachers for these new disciplines ;)
nine_k 3y ago
I received some woodworking and metalworking lessons at school. These were helpful but not super helpful. These are still skills that find use in my everyday life. I got my electronic skills from a technical club where we had soldering equipment, stuff to make PCBs, a lot of salvaged electronic components to not be afraid to accidentally fry one, and some adult guidance. I learned most from older kids who I could watch working on their stuff. This is something a school keeps missing. Real human societies do not consist of thin slices of people of the same age, and kids are wired to learn by watching and imitating, not just by listening and following instructions. Schools keep ignoring this, sadly.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  Mixed aged classrooms are kind of a pilar in Montessori like schools. the idea is that, as you mature, it is also part of your development to teach and guide others, you have mastered something when you can teach it. Equally younger kids learn not only from the teacher but by example and mentoring from older students. From my experience it really teaches older kids to act responsibly, forces more emotional maturity and just not be dicks to younger kids, and for younger kids it really accelerates their learning.

jgavris 3y ago

It’s practically a requirement…let’s say there was no iOS class when I was in school, but there was an App Store.

kalupa 3y ago
half the iOS developers I've known were making software before the App Store existed ... but to your point about "iOS class", wasn't there any more general "this is how you use C/C++" classes? Objective-C was already 24 years old when the App Store came to exist ...
- adamsb6 3y ago
  Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs
  - tsumnia 3y ago
    Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  An objective c class is a very different class than a UiKit class.

Simulacra 3y ago

Is hacking America Online and AT&T considered self-directed solo learning ?

noman-land 3y ago
Yes.

Barrin92 3y ago

Not my experience. I went to a university, got a CS degree, got a job. Just looking at my coworkers that seems to be by far the most common path. We didn't even have a PC at home for the longest time when I was a kid. The self directed autodidact thing is the stereotypical Bay Area, romanticized narrative and all the 'education disruptors' seem to come out of the exact same circle. It's not surprising to me at all that Zuckerberg had to write the 100 million off, most professionals just come out of decent schools with a good social learning environment.

teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I think it's overblown, but consider most other fields, even most other STEM fields, and how often people working in them come from a hobbyist background. How many hobby chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. are there? Those are more expensive, dangerous, or involved to get into as children. Today's future software engineers already have everything they need to do pretty much anything that a full time professional would do at work. It's not that computer people are better, smarter, or more passionate than other professionals. It's just that the barrier to entry (in the 1st world) is just based on your interest level.
- throwaway5959 3y ago
  To be fair to other industries, the barrier to entry of being a hobbiest chemical or mechanical engineer before going to school is a bit higher. Unless I’m underestimating the number of folks with laboratories in their parents basements. ;)
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    That's my point.
    - throwaway5959 3y ago
      Hmmm, I didn’t see some text before that I see now, maybe I missed it.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

Signal to noise ratio was a lot better back then I think. Nowadays you're more likely to find the likes of ThePrimagen than Beej, if you even make it past the sea of content farm tutorials.

bawolff 3y ago
I think the overall increase in resources more than compensates for the noise. When i was growing up (medium sized town early 2000s) i read all the computer books in my library. There was like 4, i remember one was a redhat for dummies, another was on vrml 1.0 (this was a bit outdated at the time), i dont remember the others. Sure there was some info on the internet, but it was few and far between. Random home pages by and large weren't even remotely on the level of a wikipedia article let alone a text book. Now a days, if i want to learn about computer things, there are like a billion resources. Text based tutorials, youtube videos, almost anything you can imagine. And that is just the googlable ones. If i am willing to do something a tiny bit illegal, i can get basically any book ever published from libgen. The available resources the modern person has is just staggering.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  So much of what's available is unstructured and disjointed, answering questions without any sort of method or system, not to mention frequently harmful in being both written with certainty and incorrectness. While there were certainly fewer books in the late 90s and early 00s, they were well put together and comprehensive, often reference-style works. You could learn an entire programming language from having access to a single book.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago

P(enter tech industry | self-taught with computers) is high but the inverse P(self-taught with computers | enter tech industry) isn't. That distinction is important.

sema4hacker 3y ago

When I entered my brand-new junior high school in 1965, they had expensive metal shops and wood shops, but they should have offered an electronics lab (which could have been stocked for far less than a metal/wood shop). When I entered high school in 1968, all the girls went to home economics classes and the guys took drafting and/or auto shop. Still no electronics. In 1969 I stumbled upon free self-guided programming access to a 360/67 (punched cards, WATFOR) at the local military base and spent the next two years teaching myself as much programming as I could, while my high school remained oblivious to the computer revolution. When I got to college in 1971 they only offered graduate degrees in computer science; undergraduates interested in CS were expected to take "math sciences". Apparently it takes a while for education systems to realize where the future is headed.

qnleigh 3y ago
Perhaps also because it takes a generation or two to raise future teachers for these new disciplines ;)

nine_k 3y ago

I received some woodworking and metalworking lessons at school. These were helpful but not super helpful. These are still skills that find use in my everyday life. I got my electronic skills from a technical club where we had soldering equipment, stuff to make PCBs, a lot of salvaged electronic components to not be afraid to accidentally fry one, and some adult guidance. I learned most from older kids who I could watch working on their stuff. This is something a school keeps missing. Real human societies do not consist of thin slices of people of the same age, and kids are wired to learn by watching and imitating, not just by listening and following instructions. Schools keep ignoring this, sadly.

DoingIsLearning 3y ago
Mixed aged classrooms are kind of a pilar in Montessori like schools. the idea is that, as you mature, it is also part of your development to teach and guide others, you have mastered something when you can teach it. Equally younger kids learn not only from the teacher but by example and mentoring from older students. From my experience it really teaches older kids to act responsibly, forces more emotional maturity and just not be dicks to younger kids, and for younger kids it really accelerates their learning.