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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 se

• 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.
    • nothercastle 1y ago
      Mega corp doesn’t care about quality of product for the most part. Shareholder value in the right quarter is the name of the game. Often that means predictable and low risk as opposed to better or cheaper
  • boricj 1y ago
    Sometimes, megacorp hits a problem and it doesn't have the right cog in the drawer. Maybe it's because no one in-house has the needed knowledge for it. Maybe because it's a genuinely hard problem. Maybe it's because everything's on fire. I'm a hybrid of self-taught and formally trained developer, with a chaotic twist. Most of the time, I do normal work. Sometimes, the megacorp hits a problem that it cannot solve; when that happens, I'm summoned from high-up, summarily briefed and then air-dropped like a paratrooper into unknown territory. I'm the one called in when there's no one else left to call. There's nothing I can't seem to solve under these conditions, but I tend to deliver Faustian solutions: I'll save the day, but it will cost you. I won't go into details here, but some of my unholy and heretical contraptions I've produced in those situations took years to subsequently defuse.
    • rft 1y ago
      You managed to put some of my previous experiences into far better words than I ever could. Especially the part of my "solutions" that come with tons of "this works for now, but it will break here, here and here". I never worked at a megacorp though, mostly by choice, so it was less getting airdropped from up high and more accidentally being volunteered for a project. Somehow diving deep into an unknown code base and making either surgical changes or nuking good chunks of it, is something I enjoy and have become quite good at. Interestingly enough, I share the same hybrid of self-taught with some formal education. And after checking your blog, we also share interests in some fairly low level, niche fields, even if we choose totally different things to focus on.
  • lotyrin 1y ago
    This is what disconnected corporate people believe (whether they are themselves cogs or are the one operating the drawer), but the truth is that high-performing contributors are never cogs and progress is not measured in man-months or lines of code, etc. Even in "non skilled" positions if you carelessly or too-frequently restructure or lay off, if you create too many silos you're going to damage the situation of unique humans and unique tasks where the contributors seek out tasks or adapt themselves to their work in order to be productive and comfortable. I don't understand (despite being familiar with the propaganda required to create the situation) how it persists that folks can realize the need for product-market fit and differentiation, that the personalities and individual nature and skills of executives are valuable, that we need to foster a mutually-respectful relationship between charismatic B2B sales and purchasing teams but labor? Pshhhh. Just a drawer of cogs.
  • teeray 1y ago
    > you will have the results faster in most cases You will have “results,” sure. The code is merged and deployed, tickets are closed, launch announcements are made, and attaboys are issued in semi-annual reviews. Those “results” were never quite right though. Now as that feature slowly gains adoption it begins to haunt the team, literally keeping them up at night. It’s already entrenched now though, and will be an absolute nightmare to correct. You shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but you also should not let the dubiously okay be the enemy of the good either. “The first draft of anything is shit” — Hemmingway
• kcplate 1y ago
  This mirrors my experience of nearly 40 years in tech as well. In the past when I was in roles where I was hiring SWEs, I would have definitely given an advantage to a self-taught dev over a CS grad provided that they were generally equivalent in all other aspects for the role.
  • wakawaka28 1y ago
    Are you self-taught? The only people I've seen who think self-taught is better are the ones that are themselves self-taught. A degree is like extra experience plus mentorship under your belt... Self-taught individuals don't understand what they're missing, in most cases.
    • trchek 1y ago
      I gotta say I’ve heard this take a lot, and I find it regrettable because I think everyone doesn’t understand what they’re missing, this is a pretty human trait. It’s pretty impossible to just know it all and to not know it so much that you’re just miles from even realizing you aren’t even close. I’ve definitely first hand seen a lot of FAANG engineers (yes even them, some with PHDs) not realize something I had learned from experience during my first year working with computers and I’m certain I was missing things they learned early in university. In the end, together we solved some hard problems in spite of the unknown unknowns that each of us carried.
      • leptons 1y ago
        >I’ve definitely first hand seen a lot of FAANG engineers (yes even them, some with PHDs) not realize something I had learned from experience during my first year working with computers I have a close friend that's the smartest person that anyone who meets him knows, no question about it. He's got a PhD in Physics and has also contributed a huge technical achievement to a FAANG company, that everyone uses every day. He's great at a lot of stuff, but not everything. We work on side-projects sometimes, and I'm the self-taught guy in this scenario. I know that I bring just as much to the table as he does, just in different ways. If either one of us tried to do the things we do together, alone, the result would be less than 1/2 as good. Recognizing this and letting each other shine has served us well. I can only think that teams made up of a mixture of people with different backgrounds would do better than a team of all CS graduates, or a team of all self-taught developers.
• brettgriffin 1y ago
  I'll concede that most CS curricula are so far removed from practical development (intentionally) that it is not an immediate indicator of performance, but to suggest that 85% of CS grads can't figure out a problem in unfamiliar territory seems ridiculous. If there is a virtue to CS degrees, it's that most engineering tracks require an immense amount of coursework in hard sciences that require a high intellectual aptitude to complete. I'm really struggling to believe that a majority of people can work through that material and then can't do the type of work that most developers do. And in the most difficult realms of development, I think you'd find a majority of the developers have advanced degrees in CS. I think having a deep interest in software is more likely to yield traits you're describing (and described in the article). Some people who have that didn't study CS. A lot did.
  • tesrx 1y ago
    I'm just curious: if you swap the arbitrary 85% out for a more generalized statement, would you agree or disagree with the OP's comment?
    • hirvi74 1y ago
      I am not certain having a degree vs. being self-taught is the deciding factor in what is likely attributable to personality and motivational differences.
  • austin-cheney 1y ago
    Most of my big corporate world experience comprises CRUD apps like these tasks: * query a database * run a web server, typically spring boot or a C# equivalent * run some ridiculously large browser framework like Angular or React Typically the end goal was just put text on screen and you need an entire army of developers to do it. Any suggestions that deviate from common patterns were met with hostility by other developers and ignored by product owners. The name of the game was hiring and firing. Almost no corporate developers were doing anything that could be called engineering. Most of the people that were interested in actual engineering were writing open source outside of work.
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• Quarrelsome 1y ago
  I want to ask just to ensure I'm not getting an unrepresentive sample; is it just me or are college educated developers often complete walkovers? I've been in quite a few orgs now (and always the only self-taught) where business run roughshod over dev and people are seemingly unwilling to stand up for the big picture even just stand up for basic best practice. The absolute insanity of code I've seen, all maintained by degree educated engineers who don't seem to care that much about the long-term future of what they work on. I'm starting to wonder if academia also teaches compliance to hierarchy as part of the process. I worked in a department of a fortune 500 org with a unsecured server where everyone was told to log in over http using basic with their org creds (i.e. the creds that give you access to everything in the org and are effectively your corporate identity) everyone merrily did this without question, except me. Granted, it was on the internal network but they had that setup for YEARS, with a privilege escalation just out there waiting to be discovered. I had a workaround but that expired due to some network changes, so it came to a head, they refused to allow me to install a cert myself and then I was the only one putting my foot down about it. I got put on disciplinery and was then forced to reach out to the Corpo HQ security team (who did side with me) and then got shit-canned internally by my department as a result. I still cannot fathom how people in more senior positions than me, with apparently better educations than me, square that one in their head, like I was the problem. To me, its like the technological equivalent of not wearing pants, and it just baffles me that my demand to wear pants was framed as the problem.
  • IceDane 1y ago
    I think all this focus on degrees in your response as well as the others is misguided. I think the real problem is just that they don't give a shit. Giving a shit is the first step towards becoming competent. This isn't really surprising and can hardly be unique to our industry. I think you can ask anyone in any industry if they have to deal with chronically incompetent colleagues who, despite of all external indicators (degree, education, background, etc) saying they shouldn't, still just suck at their job. They will all reply that of course they have to deal with such people. For a lot of people, this industry is just a job like any other. They and their brain clock out at 5 immediately and do not think about programming or software engineering at all until the moment they are forced to. And obviously, that's fine. I can't rewire their brain. I just wish I didn't have to work with them.
• wakawaka28 1y ago
  >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. Generally, self-taught programmers make shit like this up to feel good about themselves. What are the odds that the article is also written by a self-taught programmer? The truth is, most self-taught programmers don't actually learn enough to make it in industry. The ones that do make it pass at least some threshold of knowledge at some point to be able to stick with it. There may be occasional gaps in "practical skills" like using particular tools and libraries among college grads. But these skills are easy to pick up on the job. The advanced stuff that really benefits from a bit of handholding is taught in school, which self-taught programmers skip entirely.
  • tesrx 1y ago
    I guess it's entirely dependent on the type of programmer. Low-level work with a huge emphasis on data structures and algos, absolutely.
    • sfn42 1y ago
      There is no programming without emphasis on algorithms and data structures. All code is algorithms, and works on data stored in, you guessed it - structures. Every single person who writes code frequently will be better with a solid understanding of DSA, doesn't matter if you work with mainframe systems written in cobol or SPAs written in react.
  • Quarrelsome 1y ago
    depends on the dev I guess, probably on both sides of this coin. It ain't like data structures can't be learned without the hand holding. In some cases having the bitter experience aids in realising the benefits of the data structure at the time of learning, making the subject less abstract.
• misswaterfairy 1y ago
  This has been my experience as well, though I was somewhat self-taught before seeking the 'paper' qualifications other developers had. Best of both worlds in a way. I scare the living shit out of consultants, because a lot of them made the mistake of assuming I'm just a dumb firie - the uniform means I don't look like my corporate IT peers at all - but quickly recoil and backtrack when I ask direct technical questions they don't expect and should know the answer to, or call them out on their misleading (if not outright false) statements. My supervisor loves me, even though he doesn't love the disruption as much, because it leads to better outcomes for the organisation.
  • conductr 1y ago
    I have a similar effect on consultant. It’s usually more on the “this isn’t that complicated guys”. I’ll riff off a high level list of things that need to be done, tell them I could do it in a day/week/month and then tell them I want a daily audit of their hours billed and progress made (I’m actually a finance guy but a self taught dev). They usually don’t want the micromanagement so instead they’ll take day to rethink it and come back with a “yes actually i think we were over engineering things a bit” but really we both know they were just planning to pad their hours. It’s a silly dance but usually makes a good working relationship that GSD at an acceptable pace. I hire consultants from a big corporate and I think they’re used to clients having no idea how to ascertain their projects in terms of reasonable effort to accomplish the set goals.
    • JackMorgan 1y ago
      Fascinating, because as a consultant almost always my clients are either the sort to build a vast mess of microservices with eventually consistent enterprise service buses for an internal tool with two dozen users OR they are trying to figure out how to update their one windows server 2016 instance without taking down production. I'm usually trying to rein in the chaos of an over-engineered mess or explain docker containers and CI servers. Definitely makes for an interesting day switching between the two types of clients! That being said, I prefer to work with smaller companies. I'm usually the only consultant, and I'm a freelancer not part of a larger consultancy. This probably significantly changes the types of teams I meet.
• jchonphoenix 1y ago
  This entire post smells like someone who's salty and trying not to face reality. I might not even disagree entirely with what's being stated here but the framing is just clearly wrong
• interstice 1y ago
  Also as a self taught developer, I think this is less about academics and more about unsilo'd thinking. My personal conclusion is that I will hire anyone that has at least tried freelance or running a business. The ability to care about relationships to other peoples courts is key to being able to communicate with other people and contextualise the business as a whole.
• protocolture 1y ago
  In my experience: Self taught people are naturally filtered. The ones that arent able to come up with a solution in unfamiliar territory arent employed. People who come up through regular education channels arent bad but arent great either. People who worked everything out themselves, and then undertook tertiary study to ensure that not only are they doing things well, but are doing them correctly, are absolute power houses and cannot be stopped.
  • specproc 1y ago
    The other way of looking at it is that some love for the craft is pretty much a prerequisite for the self-taught, whilst many graduates are there for the career. N=1. I remember showing an incredibly competent CS colleague something I'd knocked-up one evening for fun. They were super-impressed that I did _any_ coding out of hours, and suggested I try and sell it. Totally different worlds.
    • protocolture 1y ago
      I have maybe N=5 of these people, but the one that comes to mind is the gent who was in my game programming classes who had already written his own direct x based game engine and was there to just expand on that knowledge.
• drgiggles 1y ago
  Anyone that’s worth anything at all in this field is “self taught”, some of them just went to school first.
  • teaearlgraycold 1y ago
    I have a CS degree myself but most of the code I wrote/read during college wasn’t a part of any class. I treated GLSL how others treat Civilization VI. “Just one more shader” - “Oh no it’s 4am”.
    • peterfirefly 1y ago
      I haven't dared even looking at any other Civilization game after the first one. I kept deleting it and it somehow found a way to sneak back when I wasn't looking through some sort of sentient magic undelete function.
  • p1necone 1y ago
    Agreed - my CS degree exposed me to a bunch of low level 'algorithms & data structures' type stuff + a bit of assembly, prolog etc + some math stuff all of which I likely wouldn't have gone out of my way to learn on my own unless it came up in a very obvious way in a problem I was trying to solve. But like 95% of the actual large scale software engineering type work (read: actually building useful software) I learned on my own by building unnecessarily over engineered side projects, or by building stuff while working. (as an aside: "don't overengineer things" is great advice when your goal is to actually finish creating something useful, but imo if you're coding to learn then horrendously overengineering everything is super valuable to the learning process - you should totally set up a full custom CI pipeline, design your own networking protocol, write a parser for a DSL etc etc in service of your dumb little tic tac toe game or whatever you're making - you will learn things)
  • hgomersall 1y ago
    Even a degree is self taught. The assessment is typically pretty decoupled from the content. You could say "people that have taught themselves a degree course have a better understanding than those that learnt just enough to pass the assessment".
• JackMorgan 1y ago
  Having taken all the college level CS coursework for CS degree (I skipped the math and got minors in education and English), I think a lot of folks vastly overestimate how much they learned in a CS degree. Assuming 50 CS credits required for a degree, 1 hour a week of class time per credit, 3 hours of homework per credit, for 15 weeks, that's only 3000 hours total. So about 18 months putting in 40 hours a week. Granted, you can learn a lot in 18 months full time. But this weird obsession that a person could only learn this material if lectured by a bored and overworked TA is silly. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that most professors have absolutely no clue how modern software engineering is done. The courses are planned by even more out of touch heads of departments. And the quality of most of these student's projects is atrocious. How could they know better? They've just got a tiny micro assignment to do, and maybe 50-100 lines of code per assignment. I'm not trying to be too pessimistic, but let's be real here and say a modern CS degree is a terrible way to be trained to be a modern software engineer. You'd be just as likely to succeed with a degree in mech engineering, biology, chemistry, physics, math, philosophy, or accounting. Or spending a year or two working on an open source with some mentors. Granted there's also a huge range of quality of degree programs. I regularly hire Drexel students who shock me with how good they are, but that's a 5 year degree with 18 months of on job required training. That's a degree made for turning out quality software engineers. My coursework to finish all my classes had me write a grand total of under 4k lines of code. And I finished those courses with high marks. That's such a small amount of code, I remember graduating and still being confused what a function was. It's unbelievable I paid almost 6 figures and spent 4 years to not even learn what a function was. I think that I'm not alone in this.
  • northhnbesthn 1y ago
    I’m self taught from a single digit age and yet I went and got a degree and it was eye opening. It was mostly a vocational thing with an absolute assgrind of a program that drops most of the students in the first 2 years, and just beats down into a pulp the remaining ones for the next 1-2. 16 hour days of nothing but projects, individual and team. By the time I landed my first job I think i worked harder on personal projects than I ever have at work. I also ended up tutoring proper CS nerds in things like graph theory and functional programming concepts. So, YMMV.
• jonstewart 1y ago
  There’s also a huge difference between CS grads from 15+ years ago and newer CS grads. Older CS grads had computer labs, insane old profs who’d cut their teeth on the first computers, and negative stereotypes of computer geeks were still in play. So there was selection bias, most (or at least many) CS majors loved computers and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. These days—with CS the most popular major, which is mind-blowing—most CS majors are kids who would have been business majors 20 years ago. It’s not to say those that love computers don’t still major in CS, but I interview many many many CS college kids who “don’t want to program” and expect to get well-paying computer-related jobs. One thing I have learned is that it’s not enough for a junior/intermediate programmer to practice practice practice. They also must read. I respect self-taught devs (I am one), but self-taught devs who don’t read books plateau quickly.
• kstenerud 1y ago
  I started programming at age 8, and finally went to college for it at age 22 (although not an actual computer science degree). That was almost 30 years ago. Yes, there is something to learning in your own way, in the "play" explorative style that humans are so very well adapted to. However, there is definitely something to be said for proper training by a professional. A big part of my early career involved unlearning bad habits, learning the compsci tools that my peers already had, and learning to think holistically. It's a lot like learning guitar. You can learn it yourself, and some people can even really excel that way. But maaaaaan, when you've been trained by a professional, the effort required to play well goes WAY down thanks to the centuries of knowledge, skills, and techniques you're taught. All the bad habits you DON'T pick up are so worth it. There will be talented, creative people coming from both paths; professional instruction isn't going to diminish that. All it does is amplify what you already have.
• freetinker 1y ago
  Could you share a little bit about your journey - how you got started, your motivations? (I’m trying to teach myself programming/development, hence the curiosity.)
  • austin-cheney 1y ago
    [dead]
• dehrmann 1y ago
  > The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory. In my computer architecture class, there was a lab/test where you were expected to implement strlen() in SPARC assembly. It was open-doc, but they intentionally hadn't taught some of the opcodes you'd need to inspect a single byte. Maybe 25% of the class poked around the docs and found something, but the rest floundered and were quite angry at how "unfair" it was.
• noduerme 1y ago
  There is a definitely a phenomenon visible to anyone who has hired self-taught gunslingers versus companies stocked with highly educated CS grads. Part of it, I think, comes down to motivation and [needing to prove] self-worth when solving problems. This isn't just a phenomenon in code. My grandfather was a solo contractor, my dad was a solo lawyer (the first to graduate college in my family), I'm a solo and self-taught coder, 25 years in the industry (and the only of 4 brothers not to graduate college). There's a personality type that needs to prove something to themselves, has trouble with authority, isn't much of a team player, and never throws their hands up in defeat when faced with a challenge. But I'd like to add that that's not really why I do this job. I do it because I find it vastly entertaining. Maybe you're right that CS grads are averse to unknown areas, and work better as team players ("cogs" is a bit harsh), and it's true that autodidacts try to save ourselves time instead of doing things twice. Sure, I hate boilerplate and drudgery. But for me the thing is, I love when I get a fresh problem to solve, that causes me to learn new techniques along the way. That's what makes my work feel like a joy, like a hobby, something I'm excited to wake up and do, and spend all night teasing out. And because of that, I self-select for the jobs that will give me that feeling, and I turn down the jobs that feel repetitious. After all, I should get something out of it more than money, and I can't sleep on improving my skills, right? So in those tasks, I'm doubly motivated and I'm probably far more productive for that reason than even needing to prove something, or because I'm aware that I'm being relied on as an irreplaceable part. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that once you decide to drop out, go independent, and live a certain way, the stakes are a lot higher, and the people who make it in that arena are people who will always put in a lot more effort. Giving up the 9-5 didn't mean I started choosing my own hours. It meant I became on-call 24/7 to my clients, for decades. And yet I wouldn't give up the freedom of being able to do that from any country in the world, or being able to choose my own projects and choose how I'd implement new ones. Dirty secret: A lot of times with a new project, I know how to do it with an existing technology, but I use it as an excuse to learn something completely new and implement it in a way I never would have. I don't charge extra time for my learning or trial and error, but I consider it a gift that I have the freedom to do that while I work.
• rcbdev 1y ago
  Sadly, I've made the different observation that (in my country, where university is free and academic degrees are worth their weight in gold) most developers who never went to university think of themselves as the lone gunman while lacking basics after 7+ years of experience. Bonus points if most of their experience is in nebulous freelancing. One of them admitted once that they didn't earn anything in his 2 years of "freelancing" on his CV. Of course, your mileage may vary. Good engineers are exceedingly hard to find in my country, much more so than in California.
• epolanski 1y ago
  This does not match my experience. I believe that graduating or not does not matter compared to whether you really care and like the field. You're gonna find lots of crap devs in both camps, and 100x devs in both, in fact some of the worst I know where all graduates who only went into CS or SE for the job prospects, but never gave two damns and suck hard at coding or problem solving. But I don't think that it's true what you say, maybe you simply haven't met the exceptional graduates because they went in companies different than yours.
• NL807 1y ago
  I consider myself being self-taught, but I'm also a graduate. I was teaching myself to do a lot of things before I even went to university, and continue to do so after graduating. The most significant difference before and after university is that now I'm more resourceful and more efficient in searching information that keeps me learning new things outside of academia. Put simply, university gave me better skills to learn, and opened new doors to resource materials i didn't know existed before.
• overfeed 1y ago
  > The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory Hard disagree, as someone who had a stint as self taught before getting a CS degree. Once, I wasted a whole afternoon figuring out graph-traversal & loop detection from first principles[0] -if had I taken DS&A class, it'd have taken me all of 2 seconds to choose between BFS and DFS. Attentive CS graduates have a structured pool of information to draw from, as well as the language to describe the issue when they have to dig deeper. > The computer science graduate will generally not even try to figure out a problem in completely unfamiliar territory Do your colleagues actually do this? I'm curious about the mechanics- they just say "Sorry, that can't be done" and everyone moves on? Passing the buck feels to me more of a junior/mid-level/senior concern, rather than self-taught vs graduates. Juniors have the latitude to make challenges someone else's problem, and ownership grows with seniority. 0. For a C-program stack analyzer, it has to parse C code, generate a call-graph, and spit out worst-case stack-memory usage.
  • FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >if had I taken DS&A class, it'd have taken me all of 2 seconds to choose between BFS and DFS "Hey ChatGPT, explain me how BFS and DFS work, their differences, pros and cons, and which one fits my use case better." A bit more than 2 seconds, but not an afternoon.
    • Garlef 1y ago
      The real issue is not making the choice itself but rather bringing the knowledge about what the decision space is in the first place. (But sometimes the "knowledge" is also a limiting form of preconception)
    • MonkeyClub 1y ago
      I believe GP's implicit point was that you also need to know even to ask the right question. Granted, an autodidact programmer might have encountered the concepts, but a CS graduate must have. In my case, I was an autodidact well before I went in for Electronics Engineering. Because of personal interest, I put in a lot of time into these things, and did get to know them, but didn't really hear once about them in EE. I guess if one engages long and deeply enough, they'll get to a high enough level - they'll acquire "sufficient expertise", per PG's turn of phrase. Conversely, no amount of CS courses will get one any wiser if they don't pay attention. Everything always depends.
• TimByte 1y ago
  It's less about pedigree and more about mindset: curiosity, resilience, and a tolerance for discomfort
• kovac 1y ago
  > The self taught developer will eventually figure it out, if they are intelligent enough to approach the given problem. As would someone with a CS degree and "are intelligent" in the sense you describe. Early hackers who gave us fine software were computer scientists.
• the_precipitate 1y ago
  Self taught means you are self-motivated. You are not just looking at it as a job. That's why code quality is better. Interest is the most strong driving force for one to improve.
• SecretDreams 1y ago
  Plenty of formally educated engineers will try to solve new and unfamiliar problems. What you're describing isn't self-taught vs. formally educated. It is curious vs complacent w/ a heavy sprinkle of hard work, creativity, and intelligence. Both groups can have those traits. Self-taught can ONLY work well if you have those traits, so maybe you more obviously see it in that group since it's a requirement to succeed when self taught, whereas a classically trained engineer without those traits will probably still "make it". An engineer with those traits and the formal education will do better than either category most of the time.
  • cyanydeez 1y ago
    It sounds more like corporate culture selects for people who are rarely self taught because they will fall outside the "meritocracy" parade.
    • jrvieira 1y ago
      "We want you to be good, not better than us"
  • FrustratedMonky 1y ago
    Maybe the perception is because of the larger percentage in each group. Self Taught -> Already is curious, be default, so 99%-100% are curious. Just by the nature of going out of the way to learn something. Educated -> Also has a curious % in the group, but also has the large group of complacent "i heard software makes money so i'm hear to learn it, but i don't know what i'm doing". So when you do find complacent, they mostly came from the educated path.
    • bayindirh 1y ago
      That's my experience as well. People came to CS because they love computers and want to learn how they work were so different than "I just want a job which makes money" people in every way even in the university years. Curious people got high on the caffeine and code, and the other group just got high.
• JKCalhoun 1y ago
  It may be personality, but this self-taught developer focused on work ethic — that is, while I lacked seeing the "Big Picture" in technical terms (understanding how all the pieces fit together) I strove nonetheless to make up for it by being the most prolific engineer on the team. I'm not saying it's the better approach but I would often prototype two or three designs (in a few days) to a point where we could evaluate their shortcomings, test performance, etc. Engineers with a CS degree were more likely to spend that time white-boarding and write the code once. Since I cannot remember a time when the two approaches were taken on the same task, I cannot say whether the final product was better in one case vs. the other. To my (pragmatic) mind though, my approach was already battle-tested to some degree. (Or rather it was battle-tested against other approaches that ultimately lost out — the CS approach was simple understood to be the ideal approach.) But let me also be clear: I benefited and learned a great deal by working with CS majors. Fortunately there were a few engineers I worked with that were happy to mentor me (starting with you, David). I think though, perhaps after ten years in the field, experience ends up erasing any real differences in how any engineer might have begun their career. In time I was more likely to take the Right Approach on the first go and the CS major too would give the whiteboard only a passing thought as they too might go straight to the approach that they now "intuitively" knew was the Right One. I'm likely generalizing though — and perhaps my impressions are also colored by what I want to believe is true (so romanticizing a bit as well). Perhaps others will chime in to refute or echo my sentiments.
  • b_t 1y ago
    Self-taught and agree that everyone’s opinion and anecdotal evidence won’t answer whether CS degree/classes, code camp, or self-taught is better, because everyone is different and has different experience.
• bob1029 1y ago
  I found the computer engineering paths to be more engaging from a mechanical sympathy perspective. Starting from pure abstractions and then maybe dipping into hardware level concerns in later courses seems completely backward to me. Certainly, you can become a very useful employee without any hardware background, but there is a particular spider sense you will not have when presented with scenarios that a hardware person will feel in their bones. The most common manifestation of this is disrespect for memory heirarchy and latency of computational elements relative to each other. The CS course material became deeply interesting to me only after I encountered specific problems where digging into the theoretical min/max of different algorithms started to produce value in actual projects. When looking at things from the perspective of upper bounds, you will typically find that N is small enough to not matter. Only when it becomes large do the fancy abstractions make any difference at all on actual machines. If your working set fits in L1, O(N^2) scaling probably won't be something you notice in your profiler.
  • __turbobrew__ 1y ago
    Computer engineering will teach you that algorithmic complexity doesn’t mean squat if you can keep your data in CPU caches. The classic is any sort of connected node algorithm (linked list, graphs) which are stored sparsely in memory and therefore do not effectively utilize CPU caches. I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but computer engineering here is regulated by the local engineering board — as the graduate can continue to become a professional engineer — and has much higher standards than the CS programs. I still don’t think computer engineering programs teach anything that you cannot learn yourself, but the base bar of what is required to get a degree is higher than cs where I am.
• biztos 1y ago
  While I broadly agree with you, and am a self-taught (and occasionally mentored) software engineer, I have often thought that to “care about retaining employment and lowering anxiety” is by far the more rational approach in the corporate-dominated software world of today. Over a long enough career I think we all see that a high percentage of interchangeable cogs at the BigCos end up with a lot of wealth and very little job-induced stress. Whereas among those who chafe at cogdom and “care about the code,” a tiny fraction make it big while most carry more stress than they should, shoulder more day-to-day responsibility for making things work, and do it for less reward. I don’t regret being wired for creativity, but the boring people are doing great in this business. Maybe AI changes all that soon, but I wouldn’t dare to bet on which direction it splits.
• ThrowawayR2 1y ago
  I consider myself a self-taught software person; I merely used a university to assist me in my self-teaching, dohohoho.
• benreesman 1y ago
  It seems to me that the self-taught vs. CS degree distinction is missing the point: a point Peter Siebel made very clear in his chapter ordering for Coders at Work. The people who outperform are people who love computers and hacking on them. Some such meet programming at University, more and more anyone who loves it will already know that before starting classes. The range on skill and experience in this field is too big to be near the top if it's just a job. It's fine to have it be a job, but that's a different persuit than aspiring to be a top hacker.
• michaelcampbell 1y ago
  > 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. This is interesting because I have seen the exact opposite. It could be different circles we run in, but I've seen a lot of self-taught people who are in it for the money and couldn't care less about doing anything novel. Where a lot of my college colleagues (mind you, this is from the 1980's) were in it because they loved it, and look for new stuff to learn. I suspect the distinction here is not self-taught vs. college, but rather do it at least partially for passion vs. the job benefits. I'd bet we both have confirmation bias to our own backgrounds here.