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> During my internship, I have gotten to know other developers at The Times and discovered that many of them didn’t start coding at five years old — some starte

> During my internship, I have gotten to know other developers at The Times and discovered that many of them didn’t start coding at five years old — some started as English majors, while others worked as chefs — proving it’s not what you know coming in that matters the most, but instead how well you can learn on the job. Coming into this industry it can seem like everyone has a CS degree. I have yet to work with another dev from a non-traditional background. It is encouraging to be reminded that they are out there.

jlarocco 11y ago
No offense, but I'm glad coders without CS degrees are a minority. I've worked on two large C++ projects where non-CS, non-SE people were dominant and originally wrote most of the code, and they were a mess compared to the projects written by people with CS or software engineering degrees. I'm not saying it's impossible for people to code without a CS degree or anything like that (hell, even CS/SE grads screw it up all the time), but I'd be extremely hesitant to work on another project started by or even mostly written by non-traditional software engineers.
- collyw 11y ago
  I work with a lot of bioinformaticians (many of whom come from the biology side, and are self taught programmers) and sadly I see a similar pattern. Not all of them are bad, but a large number of them don't seem to give a shit about code quality, even when its production related work that has to be run day after day.
- cblock811 11y ago
  Not offended at all. It's something that I've encountered and understand. There are certain fundamentals that can be hard to pickup without someone teaching them. I definitely feel the difference between myself and people who have CS degrees. I do, however, try my best to keep my code clean and organized (and am always open to advice from others). I find that I end up in an intermediary role at times in meetings, translating between engineering and business. It's pretty fun.

jlarocco 11y ago

No offense, but I'm glad coders without CS degrees are a minority. I've worked on two large C++ projects where non-CS, non-SE people were dominant and originally wrote most of the code, and they were a mess compared to the projects written by people with CS or software engineering degrees. I'm not saying it's impossible for people to code without a CS degree or anything like that (hell, even CS/SE grads screw it up all the time), but I'd be extremely hesitant to work on another project started by or even mostly written by non-traditional software engineers.

collyw 11y ago
I work with a lot of bioinformaticians (many of whom come from the biology side, and are self taught programmers) and sadly I see a similar pattern. Not all of them are bad, but a large number of them don't seem to give a shit about code quality, even when its production related work that has to be run day after day.
cblock811 11y ago
Not offended at all. It's something that I've encountered and understand. There are certain fundamentals that can be hard to pickup without someone teaching them. I definitely feel the difference between myself and people who have CS degrees. I do, however, try my best to keep my code clean and organized (and am always open to advice from others). I find that I end up in an intermediary role at times in meetings, translating between engineering and business. It's pretty fun.