When I tried to stop drinking in college, I used to fill empty beer bottles with water to drink at parties. This helped a lot with social pressure. I reckon one could do the same in a pub if the bartender is understanding and discrete, but I never tried it.
I'm sure there are people out there that are impervious to feedback and believe they have all the answser.
I've also seen countless of young engineers starting to welcome managers' feedback and "showing" their will to improve. Then, gradually,noticing their management incompetence (technical and/or managerial) and start "saying" stuff to avoid confrontation.
Self reexamination and accepting feeback is great to improve but what if the feedback is just plain wrong or contradictory ?
A lot a "sayers" in your team can be a red flag for your management skills.
My experience is exactly the opposite. In the market I've prospected (France) the applicants have leverage because there is more positions than candidates. Even if there is a lot of candidates, there is a lot more positions. There is even more discrepancies beetween available positions and qualified candidates.
Even if there was not, once a company has eliminated 99% of the candidates and put their mind to hiring you there is a good chance you have a little leverage at negotiating your salary.
I don't think the author work the same jobs than I do.
I think it's nonsense to present this as a general truth the way the author does. There are likely plenty of geographical locations, skillsets and business domains where the opposite is true. If he's writing for the US, it's most likely not even generally true for the US.
In Dallas, there are many, many, many more open positions than there are reasonable candidates for those positions.
In any case, the article is foolish, because really good candidates can always negotiate. This isn't fast food, where it barely matter which body you stick in which role.
Since these articles seem to be putting a cash value on the word "success" (or at the very least an instagram buzz value), I would point that IMHO, most of this success comes from people skill.
You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.
Congratulations, you're making money by manipulating someone into giving you their money. Awesome ! Thanks for playing, please leave.
I guess the point of the website is to encourage people without a CS degree to learn programming. That's great. The disctinction beetween CS graduates and non-graduates seems to be very unfruitful IMHO so encouraging people to pick up a computer is cool.
What I would sugget is to stop promoting sensationnal stories like the kid that is making 15k$ a month. This is purely manipulative and dishonest. This kind of journalism is plain wrong. Even if the number are true (which I highly doubt) encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.
More, maybe encouraging good engineering (or craftmanship whatever you want to call it) instead of instagram buzz and money would make tomorrow's software a little less frustrating to use and a little less bloated.
I would love to see a story, just once, with the title "this guy made a beautiful piece of software, and it's awesome"
> Getting a degree is the best chance you have to becoming good at it. You can still be creative this way.
I think you're going to see these kinds of arguments made ('Don't attend University. Learn [x] instead/on your own.') and each day the argument is going to hold more merit. The university industrial complex continues to expand and become ever more out of reach for a large section of the population, or worse: it's becoming more and more fiscally irresponsible for most people to attend higher education, taking on the mountains of debt necessary to make it possible.
So the sensational stories of survivorship bias about the one-off people making exorbitant amounts of money can definitely go... but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical, and I expect it to get much worse.
Maybe is the US the college debt is a problem but they are a lot of countries where education is not as expensive. I attended engineering school for 200€ a year plus help from the government for accommodation.
That degree got me my first job. And the next. I started with zero debt and I do not come from money. I am very grateful for that. I would probably not have attended a 5 year college if I had had to get into debt.
> but a university degree is becoming more and more impractical
In the US*
All that means is that either alternate methods (eg: trade school) will become much more sophisticated, or that the US will fall behind countries that have solid, but much cheaper CS degree programs (helllllllo Waterloo)
This is turning into a "I'm self taught and I can code juste as well as the next CS graduate" debate.
I totally agree with that proposition. The degree is not a sine qua none condition of competence.
My point was that success stories about kids making a lot of cash on a self taught developer skillset are pure and simple lies. They hide the truth to those who really want to get into the IT industry and make a living with it. That truth is : work your engineering skills if you want to build cools things.
I said make a living. Not get crazy rich. Engineers don't get crazy rich. Salesmen (and salewomen) do.
People that did not have the ressources or desire to go to uni would get a lot more encouragement and from real developer tales : stories about smart engineering, beautiful UIs, dedication to a craft and passion, or even sly hacking.
Instead they read stories about skilled salesmen. The stories are not even that good. Glengary glen ross and the wolf of wall street are much better.
"encouraging kids to drop out of high school to study CS on their own is wrong. "
What about encouraging people to learn CS on their own, who have no way, to go to the university?
(lack of formal education, money, time ...)
And for those people usually what matters are not academic high valued software, but to make a living. And many people dream about making a living with IT, so they want to read such success stories, so thats why you see such success stories much more ..
Of course encouraging people to try and get in the IT industry even without a degree is good too. I thought I said so in my comment. I am in no way a college elitist. I know not everyone can go to uni.
My whole point was that the truth of what it is to code for a living is hidden by those kind of sensationnal articles. Those who want to get into the industry are not encouraged to work on what matters (ie engineering skills instead of fancy frameworks) and end up disappointed with their opportunities or their skill set. CS universities tend to push students toward developping an engineering skill set.
I would really like to see people without a degree that want to improve to be encouraged to do the same instead of being encouraged to read 3 wordpress tutos and start selling their skills by manipulating small business owners into spending money they don't have.
I trained developers with and without a CS degree and I always nudge them into improving engineering skills.
You see success stories of people becoming actors, musicians, or popular YouTubers but not once in a million years would I encourage a kid to pursue that path full time without them knowing what they're getting into. I feel like there are too many success stories in programming without enough stories of failure or hard work.
At some point the saturation for (entry-level) programmers with degrees will be enough that (entry-level) programmers who are self-taught will be in zero demand.
This assumes that a) the number of CS graduates keeps growing at a steady rate, and b) that the market puts a significant amount of value on a degree. Personally, I don't think either of those is true, especially the latter. With the cost of education continuing to rise in the US, I actually believe the value of a CS degree is trending towards zero, considering that the cost of the alternatives (code school and self-teaching) is much lower in terms of both money and time. And anecdotally, I've noticed that software engineers are in such demand right now that even companies that officially require a CS degree are easing that requirement, opting to instead focus on the potential of the candidates at face value.
Doubtful, you're ignoring the fact that self-taught (entry-level) programmers cannot simply be replaced by (entry-level) programmers with degrees (or vice versa).
Both have their up- and downsides, and treating them like equals is ignoring that which makes them each of them unique.
There will always be a market for self-taughts, if you don't understand this, you don't understand what makes a self-taught special.
As an employer, I want the best. All other things held equal, someone trained from some kind of institution will give me more confidence for employment than someone self-taught. Self-taught shows initiative, but institutional learning applies a baseline training employers can trust.
Agree 100%. Not to mention, having a degree opens up a lot of opportunities in case you ever want to leave the field. Many people get sick of coding after doing it a while due to its highly repetitive nature. Having a degree essentially gives you a pass to enter a myriad of fields that still require one.
I'm not sure that makes complete sense. I don't have a degree in CS as I was self taught and actually bothered to follow online courses and read documentation. If I get sick of coding and want to move elsewhere I still have the option to go to university.
I don't see why you would want to get a degree on the off chance you wont end up liking the job and want to go into a different field.
In my situation I learned how to code at a young age, I wanted to go to university to fill in the blanks. The first semester of my computer science Ba was a course on facebook and the internet which costed 3400GBP just for that few months. Then and there I decided I wanted nothing more from this course.
In my situation I thought I learned to code at a young age. That's a great way to phrase it too. If one (cough, OP's article) is using phrases like "learned coding [in x months]" then they have the same misunderstanding that I did when I packed up and went off to college thinking I was hot shit at 16 with 4 years of BASIC and PHP web dev under my belt. In my case it took college to expose me to a whole universe of new ideas and really get the point across that "coding" isn't a thing you can "learn" in some number of months. Given that nerdy teenagers are notoriously both cocky and stupid, I suspect that this is a common experience.
Of course there are the Peter Deutsch wunderkinds and the people who get a really good secondary education and can jump into CLRS on their own without hand holding from college, but I don't think there are very many of them out there.
And adult learners are a whole different matter for whom the decision to go to college for CS is radically different.
It's also called burn out. Often times you will spend years slaving over one program, making improvements and changes for different cases while simultaneously maintaining it, installing it, documenting it.
After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.
You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.
There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.
> You can have a degree or not, even bad developpers can hop from one job to another, making more and more money in the process, given they're good enough to manipulate the recruiters/clients into hiring them. Making money does not mean your product is good,useful or well-designed. It means you're a good salesman.
Good developers can also hop from one job to another and make more and more money in the process.
Job security is a thing of the past, whether you went to school or not.
The "ideal" developer isn't some kind of monk who dedicates his entire life to one firm.
Making money doesn't mean your product is bad, useless or badly designed. It also doesn't necessarily mean you're the best salesman.
Sometimes experienced developers without a CS degree and without sales skills still get paid a lot because:
A) the requirement doesn't call for advanced computer science knowledge
B) the requirement does call for a significant amount of practical experience and business knowledge
C) it's a highly profitable industry and the specific work being done will generate the company profit and/or cut costs
It can be perfectly legitimate to perform jobs like this without having a CS degree or ever intending to get one.
It can be perfectly legitimate to work your way up the ladder of such jobs and jump from job to job in the process.
Some of us want to raise a family and/or be able to retire one day. Why should we put our careers on hold to pursue a degree?
The difference between manipulation and influencing is whether or not something underhanded has occurred. You can sell yourself while being totally honest.
So many things in business are sales transactions, and it's better to come to peace with that early on. Sure, we're engineers but if you want your value to be recognized you have to learn to be a businessperson too.
Indeed, and the fact that unskilled engineers with good business skills can and always climb to the top proves my point : those success stories happen because the kid is a good salesman not because he taught himself software engineering.
This does not prove you can make money by learning some wordpress overnight but still the article pretends exactly that. The average worker with average sales talent will have to present real skills to an employer to get hired. Those real skills take time to develop. It's evidently possible to get them outside of Uni but it takes times and effort. Guidance by experienced people reduce time and effort to learn a skill. That's the whole point of schooling btw.
Those article say "I taught myself how to code and became rich by offering the world an awesome product". They should be "I'm a very good salesman and I became rich by getting people into buying my software".
That software is maybe good, maybe not. Mostly not. Second law of thermodynamics teaches us that you can't beat a 30 year old experience with an overnight schooling, except if your father is zeus or someone like that.
>OOP is considered by many to be the crown jewel of computer science. The ultimate solution to code organization. The end to all our problems. The only true way to write our programs. Bestowed upon us by the one true God of programming himself…
I've litteraly never met any one praising OOP like this. Even if the intent of this introduction is to overly to make a point, I find it flawed.
> OOP attempts to model everything as a hierarchy of objects
I never heard of anyone trying to use a hierarchy where it wasn't adapted
> The real world has no methods
The real world needs to be modeled into something that can be computed by our human Mathematics. That's the whole point of modeling.
I'm waiting for the 'Functionnal Programming is wrong, let's go back to coding everyting in asm' post in 10 to 20 years
I feel hn experience is awesome. Everything is accessible with one or two clicks. I never wait for something to load, never pest against it because of some obscure behavior. It's simple and efficient. The content is perfectly served. No frills. Even on mobile I don't really feel the buttons so hard to click, even if they are tiny. Maybe we don't use it the same way.
To clarify, with "human evolution" I mean paleoanthropology and such. A study of human species from a very long time ago to a not so long time a ago. A study of both their biological and social relationship.
Above security concerns, I'm worried about installing a custom theme made by someone who would choose such difficult to read color pairing for their own website.
