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Self-taught engineers often outperform (2024)

• TimByte 1y ago
  There's just something about learning through pain
• xnx 1y ago
  Slightly misleading headline. This article is about programmers not licensed engineers.
• mbastos 1y ago
  [dead]
• anxoo 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • masfuerte 1y ago
    And without js it renders as a blank page. Less really is more.
  • antonvs 1y ago
    Down-arrow to scroll works for me on that blog (using Firefox). But I agree it's a questionable site design.
  • tomhow 1y ago
    Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • looshch 1y ago
    down arrow key scrolls the modal for me
• waldopat 1y ago
  I was actually talking about this with a dev this morning.I might reframe this away from self-taught and more towards on the job experience. Obviously, I think it depends on the domain you're working in, but most comp sci majors really learn math and algorithms. Math is great, of course, but the vast majority of app and web developers never use any of it. So at the end of the day, even with a proper technical background, everyone is really self-taught when it comes to Python or React programming when they get a real job. This is a broad brush, but then you get data scientists with academic background who maybe learn R or Python for analysis, which again is great, but they don't necessarily learn OOP principles or exception handling and so their code quality is bad. Yet, they are often tasked with creating apps or doubling as a dev and so they too end up becoming self-taught to a degree. Just two cents
  • JohnFen 1y ago
    > I might reframe this away from self-taught and more towards on the job experience. At least with the devs I've known over the decades, they were self-taught but didn't learn "on the job". In my view, the difference between self-taught devs and devs who learned it in school is passion. Self-taught devs are self-taught because they're passionate about software. Devs who learn it in school, generally speaking, do so not because of a deep passion for the subject, but rather as a means towards getting a job.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • waldopat 1y ago
      Totally agree. Passion is the key ingredient. For me, as a self-proclaimed self-taught dev, I learned the most on side projects because my main jobs didn't always offered job training or clear paths towards advancement or eventually the product went into maintenance mode and became boring. Maybe it's splitting hairs, but I still consider that on the job experience, even if it wasn't paid many times, and it gave me a deeper understanding of problem solving in addition to programming chops than tutorials or portfolio projects or bootcamps could provide.
• Loudergood 1y ago
  Self-taught is a double edged sword. It generally can't occur without some level of passion for the material. But you also tend to miss the boring details.
  • Tobani 1y ago
    I did full CS / Software Engineering curriculum. There was a lot that I taught myself because I was curious / passionate. I learned a lot about things not covered in classes. But the classes also taught the boring details of things like data structures that you can generally ignore until you hit some level of scale/success. I've seen self-taught software engineers build great looking UIs and during the code review point out things like "data structure X" would work better. I get a response about "Premature Optimization," when in fact the right data structure would be less code and I have to show them. I've also met self-taught engineers who read detailed research papers on topics on and sometimes made things perhaps more complicated than they ever needed to be. passion & formal education definitely play interesting roles in what people produce.
  • ARandomerDude 1y ago
    Self taught dev here, I completely agree you miss the boring details...at first. One day (hopefully early on) you realize algorithms, data structures, data alignment, etc. are actually pretty important when building larger or high performance systems, or when targeting underpowered hardware. At that point the self-teaching resumes and you pick up all these pieces too. When I started tinkering with Ruby on Rails I never thought one day, in a different context, I would need to write a hardware-specific, custom binary (de)serialization protocol. Then it happened.
    • empath75 1y ago
      I basically had a grab bag of shell, python and ruby stuff that I learned how to do over my first 5 or 6 years in the industry and then saw an article about Haskell, tried to learn it and realized, I don't actually know _what programming is_, and then spent 10 years teaching myself all the computer science stuff that I missed from not having a degree. I still don't know Haskell, but it was a valuable learning experience anyway.
• lubujackson 1y ago
  As a mostly self-taught engineer, the reason is simple: after 5 or so years, the language, tools or architecture is going to be dramatically different and you have to learn on the fly. Heck, even how to learn has changed dramatically. When I started, I learned languages from printed books. Then docs and Google, then added StackOverflow, now AI.
• jghn 1y ago
  I think one needs to be careful with statements like this. Is it the case that those who outperform tend to be self taught? Or that those who are self taught tend to outperform? I can easily see why the former is true. The latter seems a lot less likely.
  • lokar 1y ago
    You could pick from many attributes and find that “many” people with that attribute do better. Also, this (and other things I’ve read) always seems to argue against the strawman that “you need a formal education to do well in software “. I’ve never seen anyone say that (including during many years involved in hiring at big tech). The argument is that the pool of CS graduates are more likely to do well (and bigger and simpler to find) , so it makes sense to focus there if you need to hire a lot of people.
  • fshafique 1y ago
    Is your opinion about the latter because the self-taught may not stay on task? As a self-taught person on a lot of different matters, I find myself exploring rabbit holes that expand my knowledge, but don't progress the task I originally started doing.
    • 0xfaded 1y ago
      My reading is that the statement wasn't an opinion either way, rather it was questioning whether survivorship bias needs to be accounted for. To your point though, I think it doesn't matter so long as you've learned to deliver business value. Application of broad and diverse skills may deliver value at a start-up for example, but wouldn't get too far at a ticket shop.
    • jghn 1y ago
      The point I was raising is that I don't think it's the self taught angle itself that is the causal factor. As an example, there's lots of things I'm self taught at but also terrible. However, someone who already has the talent to be really good at something and who has the inner drive and motivation to push themselves is someone who is likely to excel. So if you find someone who is excellent at something and self taught, it's not a surprise. They probably combined natural talent with a strong work ethic, and lots of exploration of the entire search space.
• AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  Think of knowledge as a circle on a board. https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ is a great example. Everyone that goes through university learns within a pretty similar circle initially. That circle is surprisingly narrow in the broader field. Who has time to teach the dmc algorithm (used in all highest ratio data compression software) for example. Instead everyone's taught a pretty common curricula in all comp sci courses despite the field being much much larger than that. Now some who go through university will go well beyond that circle of knowledge. These are the most amazing programmers you'll ever meet. They'll know algorithms that are mentioned in white papers, not taught in courses and they'll kick ass. Those who've been in the industry a while have met a few like this. Likewise self-taught engineers. They may have humbling gaps in knowledge of that big circle of knowledge that everyone that went through a comp sci course was taught. This may be a constant source of imposter syndrome but also humbling motivation for them. What they'll also know is a whole lot of stuff outside any standard curricula. After all they have the same motivation that the super engineers who went through university and continued to self-teach had. Their circle of knowledge was organically created through passion and that passion is actually one of the best signals for performance in not just engineering but anything in life.
• sebstefan 1y ago
  University classes are great. They force you out of your comfort zones. When I was self taught I would never have pushed through learning the socket API in C, doing so many projects in bash, studying the academic side of distributed systems, data structures, common algorithms. Stuff like that. I interview a lot of self taught people, or boot camp graduates, and their issues is often that they pigeonholes themsleves into a comfort zone, or they fall apart when you ask them about academic topics that are relevant for the job. On the other hand, people who never taught themselves anything code related often suck at coding, or they've forgotten a lot of what they learned in college. Hell, for some of them, even while still in college they've forgotten a lot of what they were taught the years prior. It's best to have done some code by yourself before university, so that you have faced the problems that arise naturally, and when the courses present you with clever solutions to them, you retain them. You don't just dismiss them as fancy theoretical stuff you need to know for the exam, then promptly forget. You've footgunned yourself with memory management enough times that it speaks to you when you get explained RAII.
  • lapcat 1y ago
    > University classes are great. I don't think anybody denies that, but getting into and paying for a university is very much a financial and social class issue. > When I was self taught I would never have pushed through learning the socket API in C, doing so many projects in bash You speak only for yourself though. I'm largely self-taught and have done these things. > I interview a lot of self taught people, or boot camp graduates These are often two very different types of job candidates. > they fall apart when you ask them about academic topics that are relevant for the job Yes, I do tend to fall apart in audition-style job interviews. But I can solve the same problems when just left on my own, with nobody standing over my shoulder.
    • sebstefan 1y ago
      College being a huge expense is an anglo-centric issue It's important for those concerned, but most people aren't, so I don't like to include it because then the entire "value of college" debate shifts on the economics of it. >You speak only for yourself though. I'm largely self-taught and have done these things. I did say "often fall apart"
• nottorp 1y ago
  How do you define self taught? Linus Torvalds was a CS student when he released the first version of linux... I'd rather say you need both "breaking your teeth" on your own projects and some formal training on top of that.
• freshtake 1y ago
  The reactive ingredient is passion, not the learning modality. Low motivation is really limiting, no matter how you like to learn. Of course, this topic is hard to discuss in a quantitative way because the number of engineers you come across in your career is a minuscule fraction of the total. Hard to draw broad conclusions like this, but here are a few: - Formal education is great for foundational concepts (math, hardware, operating systems, compilers, graphics, etc.). Self-taught approaches tend to be goal oriented (I'm learning X because I want to do Y), which can overlook fundamentals that are important. When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher. - Most engineers I know would consider themselves a mixture of formal and informal/self-taught. Again, if you have passion for engineering then you probably like to learn and build, which means you're complementing any formal training with your own tinkering. I've met and worked closely with amazing engineers and have never found their education style a distinguishing factor. Their passion however, was obvious. Also, the examples given in the post (Linus, Margaret) were incredibly academic :-)
  • bevr1337 1y ago
    > When you don't know what you don't know, having someone to efficiently guide you can save a ton of time, and for some topics, that mentor is a great textbook or teacher. A bit of a self insert, but I think you described the reality so well that I wanted to offer my own anecdote. I'm somewhere between formally educated and self-taught. I did not complete higher level undergrad maths like discrete or linear. Because of this, my vocabulary is lacking. I don't even know what to google, even if I could teach myself! Some subjects really benefit from instruction and direction. It's actually hard to find a math tutor to proof your vector math program in your late 30s. My colleagues either forgot or are using that energy elsewhere.
    • edwardbernays 1y ago
      Have you considered trying to acquire the language by reading a textbook alongside a lecture series?
• ramesh31 1y ago
  Because we have to. It's obviously survivorship bias. I don't have a single chance at interviewing against someone with a degree unless I can undeniably prove that I am head and shoulders above the pack. And so you grind and grind and grind in a way that someone with that piece of paper to rely on doesn't feel the need to, because the bar is that much higher. It wasn't always this way; making it without a degree used to be a badge of pride in this industry. But the glut of CS grads these days has made it something of a handicap to be brushed around at this point.
• winddude 1y ago
  As a self taught engineer who hasn't read the article or done any research I can confirm.
• nazgulsenpai 1y ago
  Anecdote: I grew up in a poor family, that was single parent for my teenage years. I dropped out of high school when my son was born and I was 17. I never went to college. I was, however, a lifelong nerd and by mid-20s was able to get a foot-in-the-door job in IT. I'm 40 now and have been doing my dream job for almost 8 years. My current position was for a job that required a degree on paper. During my interview (all of them actually) I was honest about education, but also work experience and personal interest in the field, and got the position. That was 2.5 years ago and I hope to retire here. I'm sure there was some luck involved, but just having a singular focus on computer adjacent fuckery, I managed to build a pretty successful career being 100% self taught.
  • zepolen 1y ago
    It's not luck, I hire people on the regular, I'll pick a person with no degree but practical experience over a fresh out of college graduate every time.
• ecshafer 1y ago
  > Linus Torvalds built Linux by rewriting MINIX to scratch an itch. Margaret Hamilton debugged Apollo guidance code on-the-fly, inventing modern software reliability. Their very first examples are Engineers with formal training. Formal training gives you the mathematical and engineering maturity TO tinker.
  • hn_acc1 1y ago
    This. We had to write a multi-process 68K assembly OS as part of an undergrad course. This helped immensely in having an idea of what the Linux kernel is doing. Without that - how do you even get started writing a kernel, if you don't know what it is or what it does?
    • mrheosuper 1y ago
      you can "accidentally" write a kernel, at least in my case. I was doing some embedded stuff when i was at school. I needed to run some "functions" in parallel. Obvious choice would be using a RTOS, but i did not know the exist of RTOS, so i spun up some timer interrupt, a "queue" of function to run parallel, an isr that acts like "scheduler", some variables that act like "semaphore", etc. Only few years later i realized i have invented a very simple "RTOS"
  • peterfirefly 1y ago
    Torvalds had very little formal education in computer science when he released the first version of Linux in August 1991.
  • peonicles 1y ago
    Margaret Hamilton (checks wikipedia) studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955. Back in 1955, "computer science" wasn't a thing yet. Computers were the domain of electrical engineering and math, the latter of which was what Margaret studied..
    • ecshafer 1y ago
      Computer Science is just applied math.
• kixiQu 1y ago
  Well, "Case Studies of Tinker-Born Mastery" is a pretty LLM-sounding heading if ever I've encountered one, and that bulleted list of examples... It's interesting to think through which of the LLM-produced texts that I've read recently have delivered value and which haven't. This one doesn't impress me, but there was one about social skills I thought was good – yet the comments there pointed to maybe that being because it was synthesizing some high-level points from a book. Getting the model to go fishing for ideas rarely seems to work out to anything that feels worth my time.
• glitchc 1y ago
  Nah, you need both. A formal foundation in core concepts is the bedrock upon which to do self-study. The smartest engineers are the academics. They're the ones who design new algorithms for the rest of us to use and their achievements are built on deep knowledge-sets, which are mostly formal.
  • zepolen 1y ago
    > The smartest engineers are the academics Citation needed.
    • const_cast 1y ago
      Nobody here has any citations for anything, but he did give his reasoning. If you only you just extended your quote one more sentence! Rats!
• matt3210 1y ago
  Self taught then got the paper degree from the daycare. Best combo. Ok to be fair the college did teach me a lot I didn’t get while self taught.
• breppp 1y ago
  Probably the actual difference is what you are able to retain in your memory. I know that the parts of computer science I learned on my own or while on the job, are far more sticky than anything I studied in university, even back then Also there's a different in what you think you understand and what you actually understand
• kunzhi 1y ago
  Makes me think of this classic from Derek Sivers - There is no speed limit - https://sive.rs/kimo https://sive.rs/kimo
• ryandv 1y ago
  Having been on both sides of the fence I can definitely speak to autodidacticism as having yielded some of the most durable and rewarding lessons of my lifetime spent programming, if only because I was really internally motivated to try my hand at game modding, or writing fun toy websites or mobile apps, or even learning Haskell. There are indeed some practical realities you will learn how to overcome that simply are not (and should not) be covered in a usual computer science curriculum (e.g. git, vim, basic shell fluency, etc.). At the same time I feel that the self-taught dev or bootcamper from the 2010s is really a far cry from the geek culture of yesteryear. As opposed to misfits obsessed with computers, we now have grifters appropriating geek culture to make a buck off the industry. These people lack internal motivation; they are driven only by the external motivation of monetary reward. Consequently it's unlikely that they would delve into more of the esoterica of computing that, while interesting and fascinating to learn about, doesn't yield immediate monetary benefit. In concrete terms what this amounts to is people "self-identifying" as "senior software engineers" who have never heard of the term `xor` in their life, and don't even understand what a truth table is when it's drawn out for them. Even still, those who are highly internally motivated are still likely to have blindspots in their knowledge or not know that a field of study useful to them even exists, which is why having a more systematic and thorough review of the field's basics is useful. Is knowledge of basic boolean logic, "advanced and impractical theoretical computer science," or merely, "table stakes?" When anybody can identify as anything you eliminate the possibility of drawing meaningful distinctions and assessing qualifications.
• GMoromisato 1y ago
  I used to call myself self-taught because I never finished my CS degree, but the truth is I learned a lot of formal methods and techniques in college, and I wouldn't have been able to succeed without it. Formal education is the beginning, not the end, but if you have the opportunity, why not take it?
• hydroxideOH- 1y ago
  Linus Torvalds given as an example of self-taught engineers yet he has a masters degree in CS. Higher education isn’t just about what you learn, it’s about learning how to study and learn.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    > Linus Torvalds given as an example of self-taught engineers yet he has a masters degree in CS. The example was Torvalds building Linux. Linux was written before he attained a CS degree. > Higher education isn’t just about what you learn, it’s about learning how to study and learn. You'd have to have screwed up your life pretty bad to not have already learned to study and learn before reaching the point of going to a place of higher learning. But that wasn't a problem for Torvalds anyway. It is well known that he was writing software since he was around 11 years old. He is unquestionably self-taught, as the term is normally used. Higher education is about gaining access to machinery that mere mortals can't afford on their own. Linus' university story is significant because that was where he was first able to use Unix. It is unlikely that Linux would have come to be without that experience. But that is also the contention around a modern CS degree. What is the "Unix" of our time that you can't reasonably access without going to university?
    • hydroxideOH- 1y ago
      Sure, but with that argument I think you could say most people in software engineering are self taught. If you want to get a job as a SWE you probably need to learn a lot outside of the classes for a typical CS degree. But I don’t think that’s as much of a black mark on formal higher education as the article suggests. Since the reality is, the vast majority of people aren’t organized, driven, and bright enough to learn all of the fundamentals taught in a CS degree on their own. That’s why I don’t think it’s smart advice to recommend spurning a CS degree in favor of being wholly self-taught. To your last point, what can access at a university that you can’t get elsewhere? People. Namely, a community of like-minded peers, and personal relationships to experts in the field. Those relationships and mentorship opportunities are far more valuable than the content of the syllabus. For that, I agree it’s all available online.
• drojas 1y ago
  Learning to learn efficiently is an incredibly useful skill that is required for survival in the self-taught path. Deciding what to learn next while making progress in your project in order to strategically unlock better decision-making at the right time before investing in the wrong path will compound over time and lead to increasingly improving skills like technical design, architecture, and project planning. The only major downside to this path in my experience is the increased probability of impostor syndrome which can be detrimental specially during the early years of your career and when you are trying to grow into the next level.
• Eextra953 1y ago
  The article is specific to software engineers, and perhaps it's accurate within that discipline. The field is incredibly broad—ranging from writing small support scripts to engineering massive distributed systems—so it's plausible that a self-taught engineer could excel in certain areas. However, I don't believe this holds true, or is even feasible, for other engineering disciplines. In those fields, earning an engineering degree is typically a prerequisite. After that, you're free to self-teach and explore further, but without that formal foundation, it's difficult to progress meaningfully. Side note: I think the term self-taught is often misused. Very few people are truly self-taught in the sense of starting from a blank slate and independently mastering a subject without any guidance. What the article refers to as self-taught is really just informal education—learning through blogs, tutorials, bootcamps, or YouTube University.
  • sophacles 1y ago
    the definition of self-taught: having knowledge or skills acquired by one's own efforts without formal instruction I think you're engaging in some weird goal-post moving. The phrase exists to highlight the difference between "i had someone else tell me all the things I should know and let them give me that knowledge" (e.g. college or a boot camp) and "i went out and found resources and did experiments so that I could learn what to do without that guidance". It is not "i discovered everything for myself by first assuming some principles and then rebuilding the whole field for myself".
• mcv 1y ago
  I'm probably easy to mistake me for being self-taught, considering I was programming as a kid, and never finished university, but I didn't really learn to program until I went to university. I wanted to, as a kid, but unlike my brother, I could never figure it out, until I got my hands on something better than Basic, and some good guidance and teaching. I. Recent years I've only been getting more and more passionate about it, but that's probably mostly because I'm finally getting the opportunity to tackle some really hard and interesting problems.
• jcranmer 1y ago
  Recently, I've been trying to teach myself some numerical thing I don't have prior experience on (building a sparse LU solver, if you're curious). What I've found is that the single most useful resource I've found is not trying to build one myself (because where do you begin?) or by ripping apart the internals of existing solvers to see how they work. No, it's stumbling across the lecture notes of a course that covered that material, in no small part because by stepping up a level and looking at the other lectures, I can discover the other relevant things I didn't know were relevant. And this property has held true in my experience for other topics I've had to research on my own: the highest quality materials are invariably university lecture material. If your main thesis is that university instruction isn't worth it, why is all the best material university instruction? Sure, there's an argument that learning how to build something is best done by actually building it... which is why university courses invariably have "build what we're teaching you to build" as a course project that is a significant portion of the grade.
  • XenophileJKO 1y ago
    So I think the answer is, theory is important. However if you build things first, then study theory, you more clearly become aware of what the real insights are.
  • bloomca 1y ago
    I fully agree with you, I have similar insights (deep technical texbooks are also great), but I have to say that the value you extract is not equal depending on how you approach it. If what you are learning is purely theoretical and you see zero application, you likely won't be super invested, might skip a few things and will likely forget a lot of them soon. However, if the problem is relevant for you, or even better if you are working on something related, all of the sudden it quickly moves from pure theory to a very applicable thing. I think that's why people who tinkered for years before university if they keep the passion can build insane things during/shortly after the university.
• deleted 1y ago
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• jjk166 1y ago
  Everyone is self taught. School can lead you to water, but it can't make you drink. Every piece of understanding in your head came from your own learning efforts, whether that be trial and error, reading a book, listening to a lecture, spending too much time on stack overflow, or typically all of the above. School provides structure which helps with discipline, which is a serious obstacle for many people's learning efforts, especially when they are young, as well as exposure to concepts that one may not find easily without both curiosity and good research skills. But ultimately school is never more than a foundation to build off of in one's lifelong pursuit of learning. The difference between high and low performance engineers is often entirely based on how much effort they put into continuing to grow.
• deleted 1y ago
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• austin-cheney 1y ago
  As a self taught developer who has spent most of their career in the big corporate world surrounded by computer science graduates my experience is this: The self taught developer will eventually figure it out, if they are intelligent enough to approach the given problem. The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory. Of course this varies by personality, so this is probably only true for about 85% of the computer science graduates. They cannot proceed in the face of high uncertainty. What that ultimately means is that the computer science graduate is way more compatible in the big corporate world where they are an interchangeable cog that can be replaced at any moment. They operate in a world on known patterns just like their peers. The self taught developer, however, is constantly innovating and doing things in somewhat original ways because they have learned to not waste their personal time on unnecessary repetition, and that cavalier lone gunman attitude scares the shit out of people. Yet, those self-taught people tend to deliver vastly superior results. Most developers don’t seem to care about superior code. They care about retaining employment and lowering anxiety in the manner that emphasizes least disruption.
  • gghffguhvc 1y ago
    From my experience, the high performance developers can’t be identified from how they learnt to build software. But I do feel there is some correlation with how much they enjoy solving problems.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • nothercastle 1y ago
    Eventually figuring it out is not optimal in mega corp. If you are in eventually figure it out territory than you are using the wrong cog for the job. Find the right cog in the drawer and you will have the results faster in most cases
    • austin-cheney 1y ago
      That depends entirely on the business and the experience of the given developer. There is a false perception that inventing an original solution is high risk. Risk is accounted for by the prior practice of the person doing the work and the degree of testing upon that work. This common false perception is Invented Here Syndrome. In some cases it makes more sense to the business to approach an original solution as determined by external constraints in the project, such as eliminating dependencies, achieving a superior performance target, or unique security constraints. Usually the primary concern in the big corporate world is hiring and firing, everything else be damned.
• croes 1y ago
  Isn’t that cherry picking? Do self-taught outperform others or are outperformers often self taught? Seems the same logic like looking at Bill Gates or Zuckerberg and claiming college dropouts get rich.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    > Seems the same logic like looking at Bill Gates or Zuckerberg and claiming college dropouts get rich. Gallup's report on the "top 1%" kind of backs up the idea, to be fair. Sort of. It shows that having a degree is significant when it is an advanced degree that offers exclusive access to a market (think medical doctors, lawyers, etc.), enabling monopolistic capitalization. But dropouts are more likely to be in the top 1% than those with only a bachelor or other insignificant degree.
    • croes 1y ago
      You look at it the wrong way. Not how many of top 1% are dropouts but how many dropouts are in the 1%. Being a dropout isn’t the reason their are in the top 1% but the consequence of being successful before the graduation.
      • 9rx 1y ago
        > You look at it the wrong way. I didn't choose any particular direction. Your assertion that "college dropouts get rich" carries a lot of truth, though. However, buying access to a monopoly is hard to beat. > but the consequence of being successful before the graduation. It is unlikely they were all successful beforehand. Financial success typically comes later in life. More likely it suggests that those who chase degrees that aren't backed by monopoly are not prioritizing (financial) success. The hard truth in life is that it is hard to do well in something when you are distracted with something else! The ruse when talking about financial success and college is that: 1. We typically lump "college degree or higher" into a single group, not differentiating between those who are buying access to a monopoly and those who are taking a vacation. 2. We don't like to recognize the spectrum of people. Someone with, say, severe autism, that limits their participation in the economy, isn't going to find an autism cure in graduating from college, but they are treated as if that is the case. Which can lead some to think that college itself is somehow magically a key to success. Ask them to explain the magic and you'll get all kinds of bizarre, handwavvy explanations, but once someone believes in magic...
• reactordev 1y ago
  While true, we often have a harder time getting in the door. So take that as you will. Orgs want paper degrees.
• bsoles 1y ago
  As a professional software developer who also teaches CS at a university, my experience with successful engineers all comes down to interest and passion. Self-taught engineers are obviously interested in the subject, but among engineers with a degree, you have a mixed bag. Some of them have no interest whatsoever in the field other than a diploma, but they are familiar with the terms of the art, which makes it difficult to separate the good ones from the bad.
  • howdyhowdy123 1y ago
    That's exactly what it is. Somebody who is self taught is _by design_ somebody who's extremely motivated and interested in the subject.
    • 9rx 1y ago
      > Somebody who is self taught is _by design_ somebody who's extremely motivated and interested in the subject. How so? I've self-taught myself plenty of things that I don't have an interest in. I dare say I even despised some of it. It seems fair to say that motivation is necessary, however often the only motivation is a means to an end, not the endeavour into the subject itself. But motivation is always necessary. That is not limited to self-teaching. I am not sure that bit is actually additive.
  • bicepjai 1y ago
    I agree that passion and interest are key, but they don't always line up with what people studied or do for work and sometimes people outgrow what initially excited them on the job. Switching paths is tough once you've invested years. But I think when someone puts serious effort into their PAssion-INterest outside work and endures the PA-IN of self-study, they're more likely to succeed long-term because that extra drive really matters.
• deleted 1y ago
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• howdyhowdy123 1y ago
  Oops, Margaret Hamilton is a terrible example and immediately makes me lose respect for the rest of the article. She was famously mostly a manager who received the credit for the work of others. Read the book by Don Eyles and read between the lines. (uh oh here come the downvotes)
  • renox 1y ago
    Linus Torvalds as an example of a self taught engineer is quite funny too as he wrote Linux while following a CS degree.
• princeb 1y ago
  i really quite like the quality of vba code you can find in excel sheets in non-tech corporate environments, well, at least, the range of quality you find in there. there can be some incredible ones. code quality of matlab scripts and scientific code written by mathematicians and engineers can also be pretty eye opening. when the only goal is a product that works, you get a lot of innovation and a lot of speed. when you don't have to worry about review, testing, and deployment, you strip out 80% of the overhead. i heard the hedge fund renaissance technologies does not target hiring people with finance backgrounds. i wonder if you can build a tech company out of people who are just going to figure out javascript for the first time on their first day of work. when the performance hurdle is "learn something new on your own with minimal guidance", you immediately filter for a group of innovative people with initiative and drive.
• random3 1y ago
  They likely outperform for the same reason they are self-thought— i.e. it's most likely a confounder. If you have enough curiosity/pull, motivation, discipline to do it, you'll outperform in general, self-thought or not. There's also a survivor bias at play, in the sense that the self-teaching attempts results that you see in professional environments are those that made it. So, the true question is, for those that tried this path and failed, would have they been better off with proper teachers. Sometimes it may just be a matter of time - taking longer to learn because of various reasons, that wouldn't be the case in normal educational environment. With this said, I went through CS and math school and enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’m compatible with the format and prefer self learning.
  • jayd16 1y ago
    Seeing as no statistics were even presented, I don't think you need to worry about statistical fallacies. Often is just used as a weasel word in this case.
• sadcodemonkey 1y ago
  I've found that there's greater range among CS graduate software engineers. Of course there are some truly excellent thinkers who know how to bring their training to bear on all kinds of problems. But some of them, well, you wonder how they even graduated college. Among the self-taught, there's less variation. If they've managed to land a first job, they're usually at a pretty decent level of knowing how to learn new skills and apply them to solving problems. They were born in the "real world" instead of in the classroom, and it usually shows up in their sensibilities. Just what I've observed from my own experience. (I'm self-taught myself.)
• charlie0 1y ago
  Being self-taught self-selects for those who enjoy it and those who enjoy it are way more likely to keep expanding their skill set.
• _benj 1y ago
  I think there’s an element of fear in the self-taught engineer? I am self taught and even after over a decade of experience impostor syndrome is still going strong! At the same time I’ve been surprised by graduates when they come across something and say “I didn’t see that in school”, like, what!? I thought the job was mostly learning on the go!
• bravesoul2 1y ago
  Where is this non-self-taught engineer you speak of :) Sure you can do Java 101 at uni and more Java on a course. But 90%+ knowledge is hard won. Even before you get a job. There might be a flying analogy. The best pilots are the ones who have flown a real aeroplane!
• rsyring 1y ago
  The issue here is not one of self-taught vs formal education. Nor is it one of motivation/passion, although that plays a bigger part. It's rather a matter of gifting. Some people "get it" when it comes to programming in ways that make them profoundly more competent than others. This is regardless of education. The other big factor is whether or not they enjoy the frustration and successes of programming. The best developers are those who are gifted and enjoy the fundamental challenges involved in programming. Formal education is at best tangential.
• kazinator 1y ago
  I've not met anyone in the industry who wasn't self-taught. Nobody gets by in this line of work on just what they learned in computer science classes. You simply will not sit next to someone who was lectured by someone else in detail on every aspect of the whole tech stack you are using. To get through those CS classes themselves takes a lot of self-teaching. The lecturers are often terrible, and you have to rely on your own research to "get" the stuff enough to do the assignments and pass tests.
  • 65 1y ago
    Yeah, this industry is by definition self-taught. Unless you're getting your boss to read you documentation and Google answers for you. There are a lot of people who do a CS degree purely for money reasons, but I've found those people turn into PMs while the engineers have an actual interest in engineering. It's torturous to do a very mentally difficult job that you don't even want to do, and those people pivot to other adjacent careers.
• yoz-y 1y ago
  As for the tinkering advice in TFA: While I wholeheartedly agree, as I grow older I find it progressively harder to force myself to start a new (and novel) project just because. I still have personal projects, but they are very purpose driven and thus I mostly use what I know rather than exploring new tech.
• yoz-y 1y ago
  In my experience it’s a huge “it depends on the person”. Younger self taught engineers with a huge ego can be a real PITA. Some have tendency to question everything that has already been written, wasting time.
• nsoonhui 1y ago
  But why is this surprising at all? Self-taught engineers most likely than not have the intrinsic motivation that CS graduates lack, who got into the field because of peer pressure or money. And the raw talent too, that someone can master multiple disciplines is a sign of intellectual dexterity. Not too say CS graduates are not talented but self taught ones master more cognitive fields, which aid in their programming tasks because programming is a cognitively demanding job.
  • burnt-resistor 1y ago
    I was self taught from around age 12 with legit coding pre-ubiquitous internet and have a EE/CS degree. I was coding Mode X assembly demos in C, Pascal, and Assembly by 17. Most lower division courses were cake. I took 4 CS courses one time under a quarter system which is faster than a semester schedule. Many all-nighters, but got it done. The most important value of it is challenging your abilities and a common knowledge foundation. This is something self-taught only rarely or never receive. There are also too many people in STEM jobs to collect a paycheck while lacking passion.
• twosdai 1y ago
  There's no real proof in this article that anyone out proforms anyone else. The author lists a few notable cases with a few notable people, but I have to ask. Didn't those people get an education? Didn't they go through school? I did a quick search and linus has a masters in computer science. What is a self taught engineer then? I would expect that an article with this kind of claim in the title, would have some data about code quality, qualitative reivews from coworkers and managers, with different cohorts of devs, over some time frame. This piece right now, just seems like an opinion without substance. Additionally for what it's worth, I personally think of myself as a self taught engineer, so I'm biased to actually agree with the author. However I feel like this claim lacks substance.
  • TimByte 1y ago
    Would've been way stronger if it included actual studies
  • Jackson__ 1y ago
    Yeah, I find myself disagreeing as well. I think the whole thing also boils down to: If you're self taught and have no achievements, you have no job. So you're not comparing self-taught to academic, but the cream of the crop to the average.
• jampa 1y ago
  As someone who was self-taught and then changed my degree to CS, I think one thing that shows that someone learned by themselves is that they thrive without formal deadlines. I see some fresh grads struggling when going to a professional environment where no professor is saying "I want <product> done by <deadline date>". I think this is why some undergrads also struggled a lot when our role became remote. Suddenly, no one went to their desks for check-ins to see how their work was doing. The code was rushed at the end of the sprint to make it to the "professor's deadline." At the same time, self-taught people generally succeeded because they are more oriented towards a "delivering when possible" and "pushing myself to learn" mentality. After 3 years of experience, I think this equals out, unless you talk about lower-level CS concepts like mutexes, big O, or something they generally don't need to know for their daily job.
• pedalpete 1y ago
  As a self-taught engineer who made it pretty far as a career, getting to work at CSIRO (Australia's Science and Technology Research Centre), I can say I definitely did not outperform my peers there. However, engineers at CSIRO felt I outperformed the average engineer. I was occasionally brought in to interview new potential hires, and I don't think there was a significant difference between the self-taught or the classically trained (either software engineering or computer science). I think the difference was first of all, did they just love building, and secondly, did they ask the right questions as they went through the development process. I think I struggled in the 2nd half of that, and I could run off on some far-flung direction not because I didn't know what needed to be done, or the "right-way", but sometimes because I wanted to try to prove that I was as capable as my peers. But the plain fact is, I just wasn't, and I'm ok with that. It's kinda how I ended up as a CEO, I can understand and direct the product/technology from a high level, and particularly now that we're in neurotech, I'm not the right person to be writing C. So if you want to be self-taught, you can go far. But when you get to the top, you're probably going to want a great mentor who won't necessarily be teaching details about coding, but more about the approaches to engineering.
• smckk 1y ago
  The main reason for this is because self-taught programmers FOCUS ON ONE LANGUAGE. I realized that I went through all the courses I needed to learn from university in different programming languages for some strange reason, and that just left me all over the place as a developer. It is an easy fix, teach only one language for the 6 core areas of programming, namely: 1) Intro to programming (variables, loops, conditions etc. up to functions) 2) Complexity management, usually OOP 3) Building a GUI (it is not trivial and needs to be a course on its own) 4) Connecting to a database (also not trivial) 5) Data Structures and Algorithms 6) Compilers and programming languages (basically popping the hood of programming) In school, after learning OOP in Java we switched to web dev and learned javascript and php. We completely abandoned learning GUI and DB for java. Algorithms was taught by a visiting lecturer in C++ and after mid-sem we switched to Data Structures in java?? The universities are doing a fine job, but please just stick to one programming language for these core areas and everything will be great. I came to this conclusion before AI took over. It will be interesting to see how AI changes the Computer Science curriculum in the years to come.
• tayo42 1y ago
  Thanks for rare ego boost hn haha I think the most interesting and cutting edge work in the corporate world is reserved for school graduates There are alot of specialties that just feel out of reach for me. becasue I don't have credentials or a way in.
• coderenegade 1y ago
  I'm going to go against the grain here and say that in my experience, self-taught engineers typically deliver worse products, and I say that as someone who is mostly self-taught, albeit lucky enough to have benefited from good mentoring. The best programmers I ever met all did software engineering or computer science, or were themselves mentored by others with a lot more experience. I think the difference comes down to how you view programming. The self-taught programmers I've met typically see programming as a means to an end, and take "it runs on my machine" as the measure of success. Someone with more discipline will understand that that's the lowest bar and mostly a given for someone whose job is to write code. The real measure is can you come back to it in 6 months and know what you did? Can you easily expand on it to add new functionality? There's a craft there that isn't obvious unless you've done enough coding for long enough to run into the problems that software engineering is designed to solve. And if you're built like that, mentoring helps bridge that gap, because you understand why certain techniques exist. They're not just arbitrary patterns. So I don't think it's being self-taught that makes the difference, but rather, being the kind of person who writes code that gets revisited. Even if you make a hash of it, it'll give you context so that when someone better than you comes along and points out a better strategy, you understand why it's an improvement. And I think that's true regardless of whether you're self taught, or you have a degree, it's just that having a degree in software gives you those strategies from the get-go, even if you don't necessarily have the context.
  • YZF 1y ago
    Those best programmers you ever met; Was their first introduction to programming in university? The single very best programmer I've ever known was self taught. He went part way through a CS program and dropped out but that was after he was already the best I've ever met. Incredible skills. Software that worked. Incredible productivity. Across different languages and technologies. Rarely have I met someone who didn't have interest in software and computers before university (e.g. as a kid or teenager) be a really great software engineer. I've met many who took CS or Engineering because it's a good profession, they can make money, and have no passion or particular aptitude. In my opinion the best mix is a combination of self taught and some formal schooling. Passion, aptitude and education. You can learn the formal stuff on your own but it's harder to do. All of us software engineers are self taught. The stuff we do is generally not taught in university. I have a CS degree but 99% of what I do is not that. That's not to say formal education in CS and various related areas is not useful. In some specific software engineering jobs perhaps more so than others.
• jandrewrogers 1y ago
  All software engineers are essentially self-taught. Building non-trivial complex software requires the acquisition of enormous amounts of knowledge you didn’t learn at school. If you can’t teach yourself, you aren’t going to go very far. I’ve never noticed much difference between the people with CS degrees and the ones that don’t. It is always people with relentless curiosity and stamina that have the elite skills. The only thing I might attribute to people without CS degrees is they seem more likely, in my experience, to come up with interesting ideas that actually work by taking unorthodox approaches to classic CS problems.
• deadbabe 1y ago
  If you pair a self taught engineer with a classically trained engineer, the self taught will dramatically reap benefits from the collaboration but the reverse isn’t true. A true 4 year CS curriculum is so theoretical you basically have to self teach to do anything practical once you leave the university. But due to the intuition you gain in university, your teaching process happens much faster and can hone in on specific correct paths, which contrasts with the pure self taught engineer who maybe stumble around longer or get trapped in local minimums. Some self taught engineers may never truly grasp certain high theoretical concepts because they never occur often enough in the wild, but the CS degree holder will at least know these concepts exist and where they might apply. This is what can make the difference in a business’s competitive edge. Nowadays though, I’m growing cynical of a lot of people trying to enter the industry as self taught, as many are simply chasing the high salary and easy lifestyle of the typical software engineer. You need to figure out quickly if you’re dealing with a true enthusiast or just someone chasing a good job. It’s safer to just go with the CS degree, but even there you have the same problem, the people entering the industry just aren’t built like they used to be. Sorry if this is a little rambly, it’s late.
• djabatt 1y ago
  I started hacking web projects and messing with Slackware in the mid90s as a self taught dev. Before that I was always building things on my computer it felt more like creative exploration or entreatment than academic discipline which is why I never pursued a CS degree. Whats fascinating is how differently CS trained and self taught developers approach problems CS grads often bring systematic thinking and solid theoretical foundations they'll architect elegant solutions and consider edge cases upfront Self taught folks myself included tend to be more experimental willing to hack together quick prototypes and iterate rapidly Ive found the magic happens in small teams that blend both approaches The CS trained developers provide structure while the self taught crowd brings creative problem-solving and isn't afraid to break conventional rules... sometimes there are no rules. Has anyone else noticed this dynamic Im curious if others see different complementary strengths between these backgrounds or if this varies by company culture domain
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• epolanski 1y ago
  All of the best engineers I know but one did not graduate in software engineering nor computer science. None. They are all people that were coding in their teens and had a massive interest for computers, technology and programming since very young. Conversely some of the worst engineers I know were graduates who only went into SE or CS because of job opportunities. I am not saying ST good, graduate bad, I have also examples of terrific developers with a proper formal education. I think all in all what really matters is whether you really care or not, whether you want to learn and expand your knowledge or not. Other than that sky is the limit. I would still suggest people to graduate if they are young and it won't cost them too much, it's good to meet fellow students, do networking, study stuff you wouldn't otherwise etc.
• ta20240528 1y ago
  The analysis is wrong. The problem is most software development tasks are to software engineering as building a driveway is to building a bridge. As in the civil engineering example, both involve concrete, labour, levels, project management, but the jobs are just too simple to require or reveal the knowledge held by the graduate civil engineer.
• tom_m 1y ago
  Yea, true of many things. Anyone who has the drive and motivation to teach themself anything, usually do a good job. Doesn't mean you'll always get everything right or that you'll be good at first or even as good as someone taught to do the thing, at first. But practice makes perfect and over time you can be as good or better than someone with training. There's absolutely no reason you can't train yourself on just about anything.
• arduanika 1y ago
  ...and self-taught statisticians often know about Berkson's paradox
• usgroup 1y ago
  This is a strange dichotomy. N years post CS undergraduate the majority of what you know will be self-taught, but how you've put it together in your head will be different with a theoretical background than without. A theoretical background is valuable. It distills hundreds of years of other people's learnings. Ceteris paribus, if you do not have it, you are at a disadvantage.
• estsauver 1y ago
  I came from a Chemical Engineering and Math degree, but ended up teaching myself programming while I was in university. I saw my freshman year roommate getting offered more for an internship than chemical engineers were making after they graduated and put 2 and 2 together. I think there is a huge benefit to having had some sort of extremely rigorous quantitative background. When I talk with people who are self taught who haven't come from a hard (where that is an extremely hand wavey concept) can get started in engineering and often can be productive, but really struggle when things break or get difficult. There's a sharpening of the mind that comes with extreme analytic rigour, and I think that's more important than whether you get it in a real analysis class or in a CS class.
• wolvesechoes 1y ago
  The amount of effort that people go to cope with the fact they lack education. There are brilliant self-taughts and educated morons, that's obvious. Personally, I am mechanical engineer that got interested in simulations, then in writing simulation code, then in gritty details of implementing numerical methods on a real computers, and ended up writing a compiler and simulation runtime. But I am not trying to convince myself that having CS degree in addition to my ME degree would not help me in any way. Not only because CS in the end is not about coding. This is a similar situation to car mechanics taking pride in often outperforming mechanical engineers in fixing oil leakages or punctured tires. That's probably true, but we don't teach mechanical engineers so they can fix our cars (though my first job was supervising some huge water chillers and compressors in a manufacturing plant, where I often did a dirty work because our technicians didn't know how, but it is a matter of personal traits and interests. I like to get dirty).
  • ActionHank 1y ago
    "cope with the fact they lack education" Not everyone can afford the education. This isn't about cope, it is about hunger, drive, and passion. The article echoes what I've seen working in big corp with grads who were stellar at varsity and hopeless for any actual problem solving that wasn't first explained to them. The tragic reality is that most companies filter out candidates who didn't go to a handful of universities, or worse anyone who doesn't have a CS degree.
• cycomanic 1y ago
  This is such a weird article, the two examples it gives, Linus Torvalds and Margaret Hamilton did in fact study at University. Linus created Linux while studying for a Masters in CS and Margaret had a graduate degree in Mathematics, probably as close as you could come to CS in the 60s. So it seems if anything those two are counter examples?
• aa-jv 1y ago
  I have been programming since I was 8 years old. In 1978 I touched my first computer, a Commodore Pet which had been added to the office of a friend of my family, who had no idea what to do with it. I was immediately drawn into this world and that moment changed my life definitively. I've since been around the world twice, have written software in a diverse array of markets, including realtime/embedded/safety-critical, professional audio, and scientific instrumentation fields. I'm a highschool dropout, became a competent POSIX developer in the 80's, a competent cross-platform developer in the 90's, an embedded and safety critical developer in the 2000's, and for the past decade have been shipping products in the professional audio realm. I've also been involved in multiple startups - some huge and impactful, but most small and irrelevant. I dropped out of high school in 1987. Throughout this era I've been constantly challenged by academic-trained developers who say things are impossible/can't be done/etc., only to have my work demonstrate otherwise. The key to this is, I am full of self-doubt, and double-check myself, repeatedly, in order to not wreck myself. Whereas, academically-oriented devs have had to eat humble pie, time and again. This is not to toot my own horn - just an observation that over-confidence (or indeed, radical under-confidence) is often the product of a huge investment in ones' education, especially if there are large debts involved (I have no student debt, but I do have 40 years of computer history sitting in my living room, having kept every single platform for which I've done some form of development ...) For many years, I saw computer programmers graduate who could not program their way out of a sealed/wrapped box, and many, many times have had to teach them, myself, to get things done. That said, I've also been humbled by the brilliance of the DSP and machine learning engineers I've worked with, who could not have established their competencies without having had the time to study. I've done software dev projects in Japan, the USA, Australia, Germany, Serbia, Kosovo, Italy, the Netherlands .. with many of my projects still in use on a global scale. I think with software development there is a self-study discipline which must be maintained in order to stay relevant - I was lucky to learn that skill at an early age and to use that discipline to gain more skills. I don't think this discipline is taught well enough in the various markets in which I've worked: It's not what you know. Its that you know you don't know and know how to know. Project workflow, debugging techniques, separation of concerns, and most important of all: proper analysis (identifying similarities/identities/differences in ontology). All generations of software developers have issues with this, and all of us can improve.
• culebron21 1y ago
  Yes, but it's a problem in hiring. A degree is still a good proxy for good worker, because it guarantees that: 1. The employee was able to work on the boring matter he was assigned, and often disliked 2. The employee internalized some social norms, unlikely to be a weirdo 3. The employee knows what he doesn't know, and what things exist in the industry Once I made a lecture on higher education, showing that it has many functions besides the core skills that everybody talks about. And that there's no replacement to it on the horizon. After my talk, a guy comes up: "such great lecture, just my thoughts. Why do they need a degree for bank clerks? A technikum* would be enough." (I spoke of exactly the opposite. And the test to his idea would be: come to the bank manager, tell them they should hire people without a degree, listen where he tells you to go.) * technikum in post-soviet countries is 1-2 year vocational education, lower kind of degree than college or university.
• endymion-light 1y ago
  Hmm - i'd like to see the proportion of self-taught engineers that quit before they became self-taught engineers. This feels like a classic WW2 bomber problem. More computer science grads end up graduating while despising computer science ( I knew many) because it's just a potential career track. I think there's a bit of a survival bias within this, you aren't going to get data from self-taught people who now work in accounting because they tried to be self-taught but didn't really find passion.
• alphazard 1y ago
  Phrased differently: "people who have already displayed an aptitude for independently determining what is worth learning and learning it excel at tasks that require determining what is worth learning and learning it."
• 1970-01-01 1y ago
  This is really obvious but good to see it validated. If you don't have firsthand experience discovering and playing with fundamentals, you are at a disadvantage.
• fny 1y ago
  I'm self=taught, and I think this is nonsense. 1. There's heavy survivorship bias. Many, many self-taught folks are ineffective. The only ones you see in the wild are also talented--talented enough for management to ignore their lack of a credentials which is a little more talented than most. 2. There's even more selection bias: people who self-teach may have more self-confidence and drive. I will say, however, that today salaries seem to be a larger motivating factor. Do you really think the finance bros who switch careers care about the craft? 3. Self-taught != experience. Having "the intuition needed when the recipe breaks at 3 a.m. on prod", is not imparted until you actually deploy something to prod. 99% of self-taught folks haven't deployed anything to give them that exposure. 4. Self-taught does not often give exposure to "hard problems." Most self-taught folks can't do fundamental work on databases, operating systems, file systems, machine learning, or compilers: you know the hard math and CS they teach in schools. Most get trapped doing easy things, and in turn, most get trapped in full-stack roles. 5. Is self-taught really even self-taught anymore? Does Coursera count?
• kaaaate 1y ago
  As a self-taught software developer, yeah, it's kinda true. I've encountered developers that are older than me, have more experience as me, has multiple degrees, yet they're dumb as bricks when it comes to anything remotely related to problem solving (or not using genai to do all the work for them, which I think is absolutely disgusting). I learnt everything I know about programming from buggering around, and just making cool stuff. Then you'll get annoyed how past-you wrote it, and then you'll rewrite it and you'll learn how to make better code & better projects. Most engineers/devs I know that was taught at a university or college can't really do that, and most I know take ages to make anything that can be used (or even shown off as a demo to your boss). Some of this could also just be that there's usually a higher chance for self-taught engineers/devs to be neurodivergent of some sort (adhd/autism), because I am myself and I know that my different perspective does give people a breath of fresh air when working on projects.
• travelalberta 1y ago
  I have a CS undergrad and a MSc in Computing, did either really prepare me for industry? Not really. But I made a lot of friends, drank a million beers, and overall had a good time. They look good on a resume too. Even when I was in school I knew that CS as a field wasn't one where you could just get a degree and get a job (well outside of 2021 maybe). After one internship I realized there was a great divide between school and work, and this was at a work place with pretty low code quality. 'Self-taught' engineers is a bit of a funny term for me because while I technically have a CS degree, everything applicable I had to learn myself. Especially for a DE job where outside of some basic SQL and the general idea of a relational database a post-secondary degree doesn't exactly prepare you for such a role.
• donbox 1y ago
  Self taught or otherwise, Life is lived in the Arena
• ajuc 1y ago
  That's an artificial division. Many of us computer science graduates were selft-taught developers before we went to university :)
• analog31 1y ago
  An interesting confounding variable might be that self taught programmers are likely to be influenced by a background in some other field. For instance, my degree is in physics, so I'm likely to "think like a physicist," if that's a thing. And I've chosen my battles well. My job is in an industry where understanding the workings of a product often starts with physics. Another variable may be that the training process and the people who go through it are perceptive of what matters to their careers. When I'm tempted to think that engineers "like" to do certain things, and not other things, it could be due to personal ability and preference, but it could also be an economic preference not to waste their time on things that I happen to "like."
• GuB-42 1y ago
  Two people are cited as example. Linus Torvalds has a master degree in computer science Margaret Hamilton studied mathematics than proceeded to work at MIT, computer science wasn't really a thing back then, but she had a close enough education. Most of the big names in computing have some formal education in addition to being tinkerers. Purely self-taught yet outstanding engineers are the exception rather than the rule. College teaches you things you probably won't see elsewhere, theoretical foundations, lesser known systems, etc... You won't see that elsewhere because it is hard work and you won't get immediate results. It is not particularly fun and employers won't pay you for this. But if opens up your skills and complements tinkering well, for example by recognizing that the problem you are trying to solve is a classic problem that many people have studied before you and there is a whole lot of information on it that you can miss if you don't have the right keywords.
  • 9rx 1y ago
    > Two people are cited as example. [...] Linus Torvalds has a master degree in computer science Technically it was accomplishments that were cited. And in the case of the accomplishment of building Linux, that was done so prior to Linus receiving his CS degree. That said, university was noteworthy in his case as that is where he gained access to Unix systems — something a regular person at the time wouldn't normally have access to otherwise — which ultimately developed his interest in creating Linux. Access to machinery regular people don't normally have access to is the value-add. Which is the contention around modern CS degrees. What machinery, as it pertains to CS, can't you reasonably access today without going to university? Even state of the art GPU/TPUs, which might be the closet thing analog to Unix boxes of Linus' time, can be rented at home for a tiny fraction of the cost of attending a university. > Purely self-taught yet outstanding engineers are the exception rather than the rule. There is probably no such thing as a purely self-taught engineer, at least not alive today. Formal educational resources have been so easy to access over the past many decades that there is no advantage to being purely self-taught. Before the advent of the printing press, you probably had little choice but to be purely self-taught. Access to formal resources was reserved for the lucky few. But those days are long, long, long behind us. I don't suppose the distinction between "self-taught" and "not self-taught" is even real anymore.
• lonelyasacloud 1y ago
  If the basic capabilities are present the thing that matters is motivation. Self-taught naturally correlates with motivation (as well as a few other mixed traits). It's neither a cause or guarantee of performance, but it can be very useful information to know about candidates when recruiting. (as someone who is largely self-taught and done a bit of the recruiting and management thing)
  • oldenlessons 1y ago
    Being self taught also selects for the ability to learn autonomously. Which is very important in software.
• hk1337 1y ago
  meh. There's a lot of really good self-taught engineers but this seems like a weird thing to bring up. I worked with someone that was self-taught, them vs 2 of use with more formal education, we had a difference of opinion on how something should be be handled so our boss at the time basically posed a contest that whoever could get it done first would be what was implemented. Of course they outperformed and got it out faster. 1. That's a horrible way of deciding what gets pushed, pitting developers against each other. 2. The resulting code was awful to read and very procedural. Written by the same developer that made a god awful hero function.
• agentultra 1y ago
  I wonder how much this is personal bias. I'm self-taught but I have absolutely no idea how I perform on the bell-curve against formally trained software developers. From personal experience I've had to spend time learning concepts that I "ran into" that others already knew about. I probably spent a lot of time thinking I was good and clever enough to solve challenging problems... but then realize that I had used inappropriate data structures and made things more complicated than they needed to be because... I hacked my way through the problem rather than think through it from solid principles. While I personally think experimentation is great... I've come to the conclusion that a mix of the theoretical and the practical is best. Being able to go back and forth between the two extremes has been valuable to me.
• cultureswitch 1y ago
  The article did in fact not make an attempt to demonstrate the claim in its title.
• pmg101 1y ago
  I think what my computer science degree taught me more than anything is historical context and good taste. Of course you can develop those on the job. But it was a good shortcut I think.
• game_the0ry 1y ago
  Not to belittle folks with a comp sci degree, but is it not obvious that self taught folks would be worthy of more serious consideration instead of making them do leetcode puzzle that have no real-world value? Bc I am self taught, and having the discipline just get competent at writing code takes a ton of discipline and genuine interest. Think of all the open source projects that have been created and/or maintained by self taught programmers - ruby on rails, vuejs, nextjs, nuxt django, laravel, nodejs, express, etc. My experience lately has been the opposite. Now that the job market is tight, I get a cold reception when hiring managers find out I am self taught. Could just be my anecdotal experience, but I would not be surprised if a person with a comp sci degree would look down on person who does not have one, especially if they are making a hiring decision.
• comfysocks 1y ago
  If I think of self-taught engineers who are my peers, they look great. But that’s selection bias. If I think of every self-taught engineer that I’ve ever crossed paths with, there are some that engaged in unscientific magical thinking. Also (solely) self-teaching seems to achieve good results in software more frequently than in other fields of engineering.
• m463 1y ago
  I kind of wonder if these kinds of arguments are really: "I didn't go to college, and I turned out fine". I personally think: #1 college pushes you to learn theory in a sort of "code coverage" for your brain. The tech doesn't really matter (outdated or soon so) #2 industry is practice, practice, practice. many sufficiently motivated folks can start off with #2 and fill in the #1 stuff, but I don't know if they bother. Also, people who do #1 require #2 or face becoming almost worthlessly outdated. "self-taught" from the start or not, lifelong learning is required by everyone to be decent.
• constantcrying 1y ago
  Clearly selection plays an enormous part here. The average engineering graduate is average, obviously. He did what was expected of him and he had enough drive and curiosity to carry himself through university. To self teach an entire field takes enormous drive and curiosity. It takes struggling against adversity and ingenuity. The idea that the latter path is generally superior is delusional. In all likelihood it involved far more effort, frustration and time. Comparing a self taught engineer and a graduate of the same skill level it will be clear that the graduate had a much easier time. He had the opportunity to build upon a solid theoretical foundation, when being forced to engage with practical problems, which every engineering program does. Engineering is also a profession, not a competition. Average engineers aren't a problem, they are absolutely necessary and represent success,not failure.
• Dmitropher 1y ago
  Exceptionally smart people are more likely to effectively "self-teach", though exceptionally smart people often still use the same sorts of resources that classroom learners do (books, manuals, spec, consulting mentors, deliberate practice. People who aren't smart and hardworking just don't effectively self-teach.
• michaelcampbell 1y ago
  > Self-taught engineers often outperform They also often underperform, especially when given a novel task. One thing that Uni/College provides (hopefully; it did when I was there in the 80's) was a broad base upon which to build the specialty you're interested in. I don't do assembly, but I have done some. I don't do Ada, but I have done some. I don't do microcode kernel code, but I have done some. I don't do O(n) proofs, but I have done some. I know a lot of bootcamp and self-taught developers "know a lot about things", which is good and we need those people. I pride myself on "knowing about a lot of things", which is also (IMO) good and we (hopefully) need these people too.
• FunnyBadger 1y ago
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