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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

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.
      - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
        I might have edited something in immediately after posting. I do that often.
- starcraft2wol 3y ago
  I think that's true of a lot of those fields, but a counterexamples is the many electronics tinkers in the first half the 20th century that occupied that same culture that computers do now.
  - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    RadioShack was a pretty good resource for those hobbyists. I was also an electronics hobbyists as a kid, and RadioShack was a critical part of that. Today I don’t think they sell any discrete components. They used to have shelves upon shelves. So with that availability combined with the rapid prototyping ability of breadboards I’m not surprised that plenty of electronics hobbyists could exist.
    - starcraft2wol 3y ago
      Chicken and egg. The store didn't make the hobby, even if it made it more accessible.
xmprt 3y ago
I think self learning is a natural part of CS education. Even if your first experience with a computer was in college, you still probably ended up spending a good amount of time banging your head against the wall and trying out many different things in order to learn the concepts that you were taught. In my opinion, learning to learn (ie, reading documentation, asking questions, collaborating with others, Googling, etc.) is just as if not more important than the actual material that you're learning in CS. This is in contrast with something like chemistry, where going online and learning a different approach to solving problems might help you understand the material better but probably won't get you ahead in class.
- nradov 3y ago
  In retrospect I don't think I learned much of value by banging my head against the wall trying to work around defects in the shitty Sequent Dynix Pascal compiler used in my CS1 course. I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively?
  - Kamq 3y ago
    > I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively? I'm gonna be honest here, if we're talking about the tech industry, learning to deal with "pointless platform and environmental obstacles" without getting so frustrated you quit is probably the chief skill. I know a lot of devs that don't have any idea what the stack or the heap are or why they're important. But being able to track down that one of your dependencies is listening to a magical environment variable that you stepped on and that's why everything is wonkey is an important skill that you have to have.
Karrot_Kream 3y ago
Agree that university -> CS degree is the most common path to tech but I don't think this is a romanticization of Bay Area lore. I also grew up without PCs and grew up poor but was self taught with computers because I had a ton of time on my hands in a shitty school district that wasn't challenging. Most of my peers spent their time drinking, sleeping around, and doing drugs in my bad neighborhood but I also know kids who learned instruments and became athletes with their time. If anything I find most new tech employees were henpecked students from elite families being browbeat to study something lucrative.
KerrAvon 3y ago
For what it's worth, a lot of us CS autodidacts from the 1980's didn't grow up in the Bay Area. Bill Gates is from Seattle, Johns Carmack and Romero from flyover country, etc. You could learn this stuff anywhere. What defines the Bay Area is the VC gold rush fever that took root here. But the VCs at this point want Stanford graduates.
- nradov 3y ago
  The funny thing is that the early VC gold rush investments mostly went to companies founded by older workers who gained their experience working in the military-industrial complex and its suppliers. You can trace a lot of early Silicon Valley history back to military radar and communications research that started during WW2.

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.
    - teaearlgraycold 3y ago
      I might have edited something in immediately after posting. I do that often.
starcraft2wol 3y ago
I think that's true of a lot of those fields, but a counterexamples is the many electronics tinkers in the first half the 20th century that occupied that same culture that computers do now.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  RadioShack was a pretty good resource for those hobbyists. I was also an electronics hobbyists as a kid, and RadioShack was a critical part of that. Today I don’t think they sell any discrete components. They used to have shelves upon shelves. So with that availability combined with the rapid prototyping ability of breadboards I’m not surprised that plenty of electronics hobbyists could exist.
  - starcraft2wol 3y ago
    Chicken and egg. The store didn't make the hobby, even if it made it more accessible.

xmprt 3y ago

I think self learning is a natural part of CS education. Even if your first experience with a computer was in college, you still probably ended up spending a good amount of time banging your head against the wall and trying out many different things in order to learn the concepts that you were taught. In my opinion, learning to learn (ie, reading documentation, asking questions, collaborating with others, Googling, etc.) is just as if not more important than the actual material that you're learning in CS. This is in contrast with something like chemistry, where going online and learning a different approach to solving problems might help you understand the material better but probably won't get you ahead in class.

nradov 3y ago
In retrospect I don't think I learned much of value by banging my head against the wall trying to work around defects in the shitty Sequent Dynix Pascal compiler used in my CS1 course. I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively?
- Kamq 3y ago
  > I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively? I'm gonna be honest here, if we're talking about the tech industry, learning to deal with "pointless platform and environmental obstacles" without getting so frustrated you quit is probably the chief skill. I know a lot of devs that don't have any idea what the stack or the heap are or why they're important. But being able to track down that one of your dependencies is listening to a magical environment variable that you stepped on and that's why everything is wonkey is an important skill that you have to have.

Karrot_Kream 3y ago

Agree that university -> CS degree is the most common path to tech but I don't think this is a romanticization of Bay Area lore. I also grew up without PCs and grew up poor but was self taught with computers because I had a ton of time on my hands in a shitty school district that wasn't challenging. Most of my peers spent their time drinking, sleeping around, and doing drugs in my bad neighborhood but I also know kids who learned instruments and became athletes with their time. If anything I find most new tech employees were henpecked students from elite families being browbeat to study something lucrative.

KerrAvon 3y ago

For what it's worth, a lot of us CS autodidacts from the 1980's didn't grow up in the Bay Area. Bill Gates is from Seattle, Johns Carmack and Romero from flyover country, etc. You could learn this stuff anywhere. What defines the Bay Area is the VC gold rush fever that took root here. But the VCs at this point want Stanford graduates.

nradov 3y ago
The funny thing is that the early VC gold rush investments mostly went to companies founded by older workers who gained their experience working in the military-industrial complex and its suppliers. You can trace a lot of early Silicon Valley history back to military radar and communications research that started during WW2.