9 ms·

> Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from? Strictly speaking, you don't even need university courses to get experienced devs. There wil

by ffsm8 2y ago

> Yes, and where do you suppose experienced developers come from? Strictly speaking, you don't even need university courses to get experienced devs. There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed, simply because they'll have just that much more experience from trying various stuff. Not to discredit University degrees of course - the best devs will have gotten formal teaching and code in their free time.

erikerikson 2y ago
GP didn't mention university degrees. You get experienced devs from inexperienced devs that get experience. [edit: added "degrees" as intended. University was mentioned as the context of their observation]
- ffsm8 2y ago
  The first sentence contextualized the comment to university degrees as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how you could interpret it any other way, but maybe you can enlighten me.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    I read it as this is the context from which I make the following observation. It's not excluding degrees but certainly not requiring them.
bluefirebrand 2y ago
> People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed This is honestly not my experience with self taught programmers. They can produce excellent code in a vacuum but they often lack a ton of foundational stuff In a past job, I had to untangle a massive nested loop structure written by a self taught dev, which did work but ran extremely slowly He was very confused and asked me to explain why my code ran fast, his ran slow, because "it was the same number of loops" I tried to explain Big O, linear versus exponential complexity, etc, but he really didn't get it But the company was very impressed by him and considered him our "rockstar" because he produced high volumes of code very quickly
- taosx 2y ago
  I was self taught before I studied, most of the "foundational" knowledge is very easy to acquire. I've mentored some self-taught juniors and they surprised me at how fast they picked up concepts like big O just by looking at a few examples.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    Big O was just an anecdote for example My point is you don't know what you don't know. There is really only so far you can get by just noodling around on your own, at some point we have to learn from more experienced people to get to the next level School is a much more consistent path to gain that knowledge than just diving in It's not the only path, but it turns out that people like consistency
    - abbadadda 2y ago
      I would like a book recommendation for the things I don’t know please (Sarcasm but seriously)… A senior dev mentioned a “class invariant” the other day And I just had no idea what that was because I’ve never been exposed to it… So I suppose the question I have is what should I be exposed to in order to know that? What else is there that I need to learn about software engineering that I don’t know that is similarly going to be embarrassing on the job if I don’t know it? I’ve got books like cracking the coding interview and software engineering at Google… But I am missing a huge gap because I was unable to finish my masters and computer science :-(
      - i_am_proteus 2y ago
        CLRS (Serious comment! It's "the" algorithms book).
        abbadadda 2y ago
        Tyvm for the serious comment, i_am_proteus! :-) The algorithms book By Steve S. (The Algorithm Design Manual)? I've read that one, not an expert by any means, and I've got a 'decent' handle on data structues, but what about the software engineering basics one needs like OOP vs. Functional, SOLID, interfaces, class invariants, class design, etc.? Should I just pick up any CS 101 textbook? Or any good MIT open courseware classes that cover this type of stuff (preferably with video lectures... intro to algorithms is _amazing_ they have Eric's classes uploaded to YouTube, but finding good resources to level-up as a SWE has proved somewhat challenging) ^ serious comment as well... I find myself "swimming" when I hear certain terms used in the field and I am trying to catch up a bit (esp. as an SRE with self-taught SRE skills that is supposed to know this stuff)
philistine 2y ago
> There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. We're talking about the industry responsible for ALL the growth of the largest economy in the history of the world. It's not the 1970s anymore. You can't just count on weirdos in basements to build an industry.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  I'm so glad I learned to program so I could either be called a basement dweller or a tech bro
  - philistine 2y ago
    I mean, a garage dweller works just as well.
65839747 2y ago
> There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. That's not the kind of experience companies look for though. Do you have a degree? How much time have you spent working for other companies? That's all that matters to them.

by ffsm8 2y ago

erikerikson 2y ago

GP didn't mention university degrees. You get experienced devs from inexperienced devs that get experience. [edit: added "degrees" as intended. University was mentioned as the context of their observation]

ffsm8 2y ago
The first sentence contextualized the comment to university degrees as far as I'm concerned. I'm not sure how you could interpret it any other way, but maybe you can enlighten me.
- erikerikson 2y ago
  I read it as this is the context from which I make the following observation. It's not excluding degrees but certainly not requiring them.

bluefirebrand 2y ago

> People like that will always be more effective at their job once employed This is honestly not my experience with self taught programmers. They can produce excellent code in a vacuum but they often lack a ton of foundational stuff In a past job, I had to untangle a massive nested loop structure written by a self taught dev, which did work but ran extremely slowly He was very confused and asked me to explain why my code ran fast, his ran slow, because "it was the same number of loops" I tried to explain Big O, linear versus exponential complexity, etc, but he really didn't get it But the company was very impressed by him and considered him our "rockstar" because he produced high volumes of code very quickly

taosx 2y ago
I was self taught before I studied, most of the "foundational" knowledge is very easy to acquire. I've mentored some self-taught juniors and they surprised me at how fast they picked up concepts like big O just by looking at a few examples.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  Big O was just an anecdote for example My point is you don't know what you don't know. There is really only so far you can get by just noodling around on your own, at some point we have to learn from more experienced people to get to the next level School is a much more consistent path to gain that knowledge than just diving in It's not the only path, but it turns out that people like consistency
  - abbadadda 2y ago
    I would like a book recommendation for the things I don’t know please (Sarcasm but seriously)… A senior dev mentioned a “class invariant” the other day And I just had no idea what that was because I’ve never been exposed to it… So I suppose the question I have is what should I be exposed to in order to know that? What else is there that I need to learn about software engineering that I don’t know that is similarly going to be embarrassing on the job if I don’t know it? I’ve got books like cracking the coding interview and software engineering at Google… But I am missing a huge gap because I was unable to finish my masters and computer science :-(
    - i_am_proteus 2y ago
      CLRS (Serious comment! It's "the" algorithms book).
      - abbadadda 2y ago
        Tyvm for the serious comment, i_am_proteus! :-) The algorithms book By Steve S. (The Algorithm Design Manual)? I've read that one, not an expert by any means, and I've got a 'decent' handle on data structues, but what about the software engineering basics one needs like OOP vs. Functional, SOLID, interfaces, class invariants, class design, etc.? Should I just pick up any CS 101 textbook? Or any good MIT open courseware classes that cover this type of stuff (preferably with video lectures... intro to algorithms is _amazing_ they have Eric's classes uploaded to YouTube, but finding good resources to level-up as a SWE has proved somewhat challenging) ^ serious comment as well... I find myself "swimming" when I hear certain terms used in the field and I am trying to catch up a bit (esp. as an SRE with self-taught SRE skills that is supposed to know this stuff)

philistine 2y ago

> There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. We're talking about the industry responsible for ALL the growth of the largest economy in the history of the world. It's not the 1970s anymore. You can't just count on weirdos in basements to build an industry.

dingnuts 2y ago
I'm so glad I learned to program so I could either be called a basement dweller or a tech bro
- philistine 2y ago
  I mean, a garage dweller works just as well.

65839747 2y ago

> There will always be individuals that enjoy coding and do so without any formal teaching. That's not the kind of experience companies look for though. Do you have a degree? How much time have you spent working for other companies? That's all that matters to them.