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Certainly understand and agree:
"However, I wouldn't want to be treated by a physician who didn't have a Medical degree
OTOH, those EMTs coming to pick up you or your loved ones after an auto accident or a stroke or a heart attack or gun shot may have a few hundred hours of state training.
If you're lucky the EMT may have military experience too.
These people are very skill just in a limited field of first aid.
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I have a similar story but I did manage to get a degree.
Kicked out of a dysfunctional family situation at 16 with a 10th grade education, went in the military did 2 tours in Nam (20+ months). After I got home 2 years of homeless, drifting, drugs , alcohol.
Then got married, dysfunctional relationship that lasted 17 years but in that time managed to get a degree in Engineering Physics.
Nasty divorce, quit computing for 13 years and then tried to get back in but too much time had passed and couldn't keep up.
So here I am retired and still hacking, but loving it because I choose when and what I want to learn. No pressure, no deadlines, no politics, no bullshit.
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I was way too ... gender non-conforming and clearly gay to be in the military. I'm pretty sure the recruitment office would have opened fire on me if I got within 300 yards of them. 
Different times.
My brother is military. So was my stepfather. It was never in the cards for me.
I'm glad though. I think if I had gone in I probably would have washed out anyway, but even if I didn't I don't think it would have put me on the career path I had. I never would have worked for Everdev (which I loved) just for example.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Yes different times indeed. Turns out that a couple of guys in my unit were gay, one highly decorated and even wrote a book. I was totally unaware he was gay, it would not have made a difference to me but at the time the military was very anal about such things and he probably would have been ostracized and booted out?
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Mike Hankey wrote: at the time the military was very anal
Um, I think perhaps the opposite.
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Yeah, there was DADT and all that. It just wasn't for me. I'm not the type. 
Real programmers use butterflies
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I just lived through it.
At the time the draft was going on and my number was up so I enlisted. Probably saved my life, I went into communications instead of infantry and in 67 things over there were hot.
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I'm glad it worked out for you in the end. Elephant knows it didn't for so many. 
That war was just.. SMDH
I don't know whether to say sorry or thank you. I have ... feelings about vietnam vets that sets them apart for me from other war vets. I won't get into it for risk of making this thread political, but you (and if not you then or at least many like you - i don't want to speak for you) deserved better.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Thanks...yeah let's just leave it there.
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sorry I get emotional with certain things.
mov ax, [feelings]
xor ax,ax
There.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I think until you do
mov [feelings], ax
you won't get the desired result.
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yeah well, i claim literary license.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I had a great childhood, good school, University, and everything, just never schooled in IT.
Yet here I am! 
I was recently discussing this with someone and I told him any idiot can call himself a programmer, there's no entry barrier to the field.
I also pointed out that around 90% of the programmers I've met are absolute bunglers who couldn't tell good code from bad code.
He was flabbergasted!
If you want to be a doctor, lawyer or accountant, you need expensive degrees*.
However, if you're writing business critical software that enables thousands of people to do their jobs and generate a revenue of millions a day... You need only a computer.
A lot of untrained and often unskilled programmers work for local companies, enterprises, the government, non-profits, they're everywhere.
There are IT companies who gladly hire a rookie fresh from college and sell them as sr. expert consultant for €100+ an hour**
It gives people like you and I an easy chance to start over in a profitable field.
The flipside of the coin is not so great, I'm afraid...
Let's put it this way, failing IT projects really aren't always the manager's fault.
* Which still doesn't mean anything, there are terrible doctors, lawyers and accountants too!
** I have a cousin who is sold as an AWS solution's architect with two to three years of experience and some certificates. When asked what types of databases I could get in AWS I got blank stares... "What do you mean?"
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Hmm. At the risk of being flamed, I'm going to comment here. I ran the traditional route. I majored in computer engineering at Wright State[^], graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1984. While I was a sophomore in early 1980, I started working as a part-time programmer. I also filled slots during that period as a system manager (VAXen) and as a technical writer.
In the ensuing 40 years I have worked with all kinds of folks with different backgrounds. One of the best programmers I ever worked for had a degree in physics. Another guy didn't have a degree but was a phenomenal embedded developer with a meticulous style that, ten years after he retired, makes his code still some of the easiest to maintain I've ever seen. I worked with a college-trained programmer who had enviable credentials, but wrote the sloppiest, most bug-ridden sh!t code I've ever seen. After he left, I spent over a year rewriting everything he wrote on my product, as I got tired and pissed off over the constant bug reports. Another college grad wrote decent code but was an elitist and couldn't be bothered to document it or make it easy to use.
Based on my experiences, I can make the following observations:
A college education does not guarantee that you'll be a great developer. What is does is give you a broader and deeper skill set than you're likely to have if you're self-trained. As an example, the fantastic embedded guy I mentioned? His only data structure was an array. He knew about linked lists, trees, and all sorts of other things, but they weren't tools he could use comfortably. College educated folks think that grants them a certain level of expertise, often over the self-trained developer, that may or may not be warranted.
Practical experience obtained through self-training is great, because you don't have preconceived notions about how something's going to go while you're learning it. Since you're self-motivated you tend to work harder when learning something new, and pay more attention to the nitty-gritty details. That said, it also means that there can be potholes in the road that you might know intuitively from the education that you'll miss entirely if your experience hasn't included it. Many self-trained folks also have a chip on their shoulder about it, and disparage the education as needless academic fluff.
My point is that both paths to expertise have value. Choosing one over the other is a mistake.
Software Zen: delete this;
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What makes you think your post could get flamed? It was interesting to read about your experiences, and your observations make sense.
I would say that programming is always mostly self-taught. University can inform you of techniques (data structures, parsing, state machines...), but it's mostly a case of the more code you write, the better you get, so long as you strive to make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
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Greg Utas wrote: What makes you think your post could get flamed?
My experience has been that some college-educated folks can be a little dismissive of the self-taught, and the self-taught are sometimes defensive as a result. Taking the middle ground means you disagree with most. Greg Utas wrote: the more code you write, the better you get
Very true. You learn the "why" of writing code in a particular fashion, as expressed in the mental scar tissue from excruciating debug sessions.Greg Utas wrote: make your code easy to maintain and evolve instead of just dropping it once it works.
That's been one of the great things about switching from defense contracting to commercial development. With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done. I have commercial applications now that I've been developing, maintaining, and enhancing for 20 years. Going back to code you wrote 20 years ago can be a humbling experience .
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: With defense contracting you wrote an application, delivered it, and you were done.
I've never worked on defense contracts, but this still comes as a total shock. What customer who's happy with software never asks for another release with more features?! If these folks just issue an RFP to build the same thing again, with more features added, it would explain a lot about their budgets. Tell me I'm missing something here.
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Greg Utas wrote: I've never worked on defense contracts, but this still comes as a total shock
The last three years I worked as a contractor would appall you. One project, two years worth, developed a simulation that at completion was run for two weeks to accumulate some data and then shelved. A second project which took 18 months never ran at all, but delivery was accepted anyway. A third project I wrote a final report which was disseminated to interested parties and that ended it.
While commercial development has its downsides, at least my stuff now gets used.Greg Utas wrote: Tell me I'm missing something here.
This was back in the 1980's so things may be different now. At the time though I read a report that claimed less than 2% of software created for the DoD (based on dollars spent for development) was still in active use 12 months later. Most of that was in deployed weapons systems and avionics. The rest of it was spent on hopeless MIS projects that tried to automate processes in a 'business' (e.g. defense) that deliberately let experienced employees leave, either at the 4 or 20 year mark.
My running joke at the time was "I may be a whore, but at least I ain't cheap."
Software Zen: delete this;
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Nope, still the same. I worked in government contracting (DoD) on may projects. Most were to develop simulations and research software. Once the contract ended, the check cleared, the development was over and the software shelved. I got back into commercial, because I know that the software I write will evolve, or at least, dismantled and re-used in some other projects.
"When you are dead, you won't even know that you are dead. It's a pain only felt by others; same thing when you are stupid."
Ignorant - An individual without knowledge, but is willing to learn.
Stupid - An individual without knowledge and is incapable of learning.
Idiot - An individual without knowledge and allows social media to do the thinking for them.
modified 19-Nov-21 21:01pm.
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The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview.
I asked him to defend him getting one, given the way IT is taught in uni.
Because it was at that point that I decided I really didn't want to work at Expedia.
Gee, glad I didn't. They don't exist anymore. And I'm okay with that.
When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience if I'm in charge of putting together a team, because I've had a lot problems with people coming straight out of college totally unprepared for working on a professional software team. They might know algorithms, but they don't necessarily understand all the coding techniques that you just pick up organically.
With the self taught ones, after a few questions, the only thing I had to worry about was if they could work on a team. Problem is, they usually couldn't, so it became a matter of how quickly they could learn.
Experience at the end of the day is what it all comes down to. Each path has its downsides, and I have my biases. I'm a black sheep developer. I'm creative, but not methodical. I'm not a math whiz, but I love language. I'm kinda a weirdo in any given dev house in terms of the sort of code I am good at and what sort of direction a project will take if I'm leading it. I like other black sheep. But there needs to be very few of them on a team for the team to be successful. The black sheep may or may not have went to school, but in terms of programming, they learned most of it themselves, and they don't do it like other people do.
I value the "white sheep" professionally, especially when I'm putting a team together because they work well on teams and their work is reliable and consistent. Their creations are more easily understood by others as well, but my heart is not with them, if I'm being honest. More of them I've found, have come up in CS through academia.
Now, those are just broadly general observations. People are complicated, and any attempt to boil them down is going to be silly on some level, but the above way of looking at things has served me professionally, so I stick with it.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: The last time someone asked me to defend my lack of a degree was in an interview.
An interviewer who asked me to defend anything about my professional background would get to watch my ass sashay out the door. That's unprofessional in the least and possibly illegal depending upon how the question is phrased.honey the codewitch wrote: When people have degrees, I am that much more careful about screening them for experience
We've had something of a hiring boom lately. After almost ten years of our team shrinking from 17 down to 5, we're finally starting to build back up. Our first hire was a graduate from 2018 with two years experience at a couple of jobs. We ignored it. Our interview was centered around the questions "was he teachable?" and "could we work with him?". The answer was yes to both. We've thrown him into the pool, and he's been given responsibility for a couple parts of the product, one simple, one fairly critical. The critical part he's taking over from a guy who's retiring in June, so there's some time for knowledge transfer. The youngster may be useful in six months or so.
We're also looking to hire someone as a backup for me, largely they can take some of my workload. I tend to be an easy choice for a lot of the oddball jobs, because everyone else is on a critical path item. While this makes me look oh so valuable  it annoys the sh<nobr>it out of me because, like Harry Callahan, I get every dirty job that comes along. This person we'll look especially hard at the experience because we're looking for a skill set. Academic background for this is almost immaterial.
For the entry-level guy, the experience wasn't important because we assumed he wouldn't have any that was relevant. The academic background gave us a certain assurance that he/she was familiar with important concepts, but that was all. My backup guy on the other hand it's all experience. We're looking for certain skills, and those are only acquired by doing the job.
Technical hiring's a PITA. In my case we write job requirements, they get sent to an agency, they filter and send us resumes that match, we pick the ones that are interesting (if any), round and round we go. There's something of an art to specifying the requirements so that you're specific enough to get those that might be useful, but not so particular that there are never any matches. There's a company anecdote that one of our principle research folks, a guy with a PhD in engineering was laid off. They wrote the requirements for his replacement. His resume was the only one returned by the agency. After he was rehired, I asked Randy about the negotiation process. He asked me in turn "Did you ever see the movie Deliverance?" I said "Yeah..." He replied "I made the piggy squeal." 
Software Zen: delete this;
modified 17-May-21 8:47am.
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Wow the formatting on your message is broken. I had to read it through email.
I'm laughing at the last sentence though.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Oops. Fixed. When I want to use a bad word, one that Chris' filter edits, I put a <nobr></nobr> in the middle. I forgot the closing tag.
It's tough being a salty old salt in these modern times .
Software Zen: delete this;
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Yeah I'm not even trying to say my route was ideal. Hell, I don't even know if I could reproduce it if I had to do it over again.
It's just what I had in front of me. That's not to say that it's better than going to school.
Real programmers use butterflies
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