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My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or t

My social skills aren't exactly world-class, but sure, I could leave if I wanted to. It's easy enough to get another job. But what happens at the next job, or the next? It's not the "technical skills are everything" view that I think was at play here -- it's the "a person must do X, Y, and Z for me to consider them a 'real programmer'/respect them" (where X, Y, and Z vary wildly from person to person). Java developers scoff at PHP developers, and NoSQL evangelists look down on anything with tables. If you don't know how to search a b-tree, computer science majors extol the virtues of a formal education, and if you're self-taught with 10 years in industry, you laugh at the poor CS majors who can't properly manage a Github repo. This creates a dangerous mix when a "culture of constant learning" starts to become a "culture of constant pedantry"

dblohm7 11y ago
Wow, IMO with this comment you nailed it!
kragen 11y ago
I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count, and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local variables. That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they did study, either. I also don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I probably should have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking, spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years, how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things? And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per sentence. So, I think I really need to have more patience.

dblohm7 11y ago

Wow, IMO with this comment you nailed it!

kragen 11y ago

I’m self-taught with 10 or 20 years in industry, depending on how you count, and my problem with the poor CS majors is not the ones who don’t understand source control — although that’s an important skill! — but the ones who can’t write a for loop, or who use global variables when they should be using local variables. That is, my problem is not that certain CS majors don’t know things they’d never studied, but rather that they don’t know the things they did study, either. I also don’t have much patience for self-taught people with 10 years in industry who complain that tech interviews expect them to know that a B-tree lookup takes logarithmic time, or to be able to write correct syntax (of a language they supposedly know) on a whiteboard without an IDE. I probably should have patience for these people, because, objectively speaking, spelling is hard for most people, and complexity theory is rarely used in practice. But, I feel, if you’ve been self-teaching a subject for ten years, how do you manage to not teach yourself such basic things? And yet, I’ve been self-teaching Spanish for ten years, and I constantly come upon words and senses of words that I don’t know, let alone errors of gender and incorrect idiomatic expressions in my speech. Like, maybe one per sentence. So, I think I really need to have more patience.