It seems like the skill in question isn't necessarily about becoming a programmer as it is about becoming a hacker. It's a fine line, but I think the skills you

It seems like the skill in question isn't necessarily about becoming a programmer as it is about becoming a hacker. It's a fine line, but I think the skills you learn at Google will be much more programmer-esque, like code review, unit testing, and doodling on whiteboards :). Whereas I see deploying APIs in weekends to get things off Craigslist to be in the domain of hacker-ish things, what someone else already called "hobbyist". I think that's an important and subtle flag for career prospects, so the line isn't that clear, though. Another point I get from this is both a critique and praise for CS learned in a liberal arts college. You felt unqualified for getting a software engineering job, which is something that really needs to be addressed in small LACs. On the other hand, academic rigor probably prepared you well for cutting through bullshit that surrounds fashionable technologies. For example, you may not have heard of Heroku, but you may have learned about networking protocols and virtualization, which I think is the harder part to learn. I think you struck a good community by choosing web development (a bit biased), but I'd like to amend that with a word for the road not taken, which is that back-end programming is becoming really, really accessible as well. Tutorials for Flask, Node, and Rails are just as prevalent (and potentially misleading) as HTML tutorials of yore. Now anyone with a mac (and even windows! would you believe that!) can set up a server and push "hello world" to heroku. Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing "How to become a Googler, or the art of ????? well". I don't know what ???? is but I imagine it involves a lot of frustrated inability to Google things :)