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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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Gary R. Wheeler wrote: wrote the sloppiest, most bug-ridden sh!t code I've ever seen.
I once worked with a guy like that. He was otherwise brilliant. Fortunately, he knew his code was crap and would turn his proofs-of-concept-algorithms over to others to rewrite.
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This guy was easy to get along with. Unfortunately, he really wanted to be doing Apple development, and we are a Windows house. I think he just didn't care.
Software Zen: delete this;
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I have a similar background but not wired like you. What I mean by that is I understand that people who fancy writing compilers (parsers) are a special breed. I'm pin level hardware savvy and have done some assembly early on but when I read your tech posts my head just spins I have no idea where you've been.
That's a compliment.
I was the last of 5, punk ass lead guitarist that had electronics in high school but wanted to build flangers and delays more than motors and study diode drops.
My parents gave me 3 choices on day in my junior year A: Get your grades up.
B: Join the military or C: drop out of school and we'll set you up in an apartment and you an get a job and a roomie to pay for it all.
Duh.
So I got a job soldering for a waterbed heater company in So. Cal where we lived, then an data acquisition company where I started as a line inspector but once they got wind of my electronics knowledge (resistor color code memorization mostly) the put me in the test tech group. You job hopped for advancement then then the last stint was sr. engineering tech at Emulex when DEC roamed the earth.
All the while I was fascinated with coding but have never done it professionally. After Emulex my wife and I bugged out to Summit County Colorado to ski a lot but there is no real jobs to be had in the tech sector in a resort town at 9800 feet in the sky. So we opened a pc shop that went great guns but now just gets along. I do some personal life enhancing code that helps my wife with her new gig as a business consultant. She was a 4.0 student and is the real brains of the two of us but detests the idea of herself coding even though she can unravel the snarliest ms exchange issues, has had enough.
I'm doing an MVC AspNet POS program right now for a side job I fell into selling retail products. That keeps me entertained.
The tech sector is a great equalizer. Nerds arise! 
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Ron Anders wrote: when I read your tech posts my head just spins I have no idea where you've been
I take that as a challenge to become a better writer. I don't want my stuff to be arcane. I'd like to bring a little witchcraft to everyone.
So I'll keep trying, and maybe one of these days I'll figure out how to make my stuff accessible to most people.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Praise You. Keep up the good work !
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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What's GED ?
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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It's a high school equivalency "diploma" you can get via exam in lieu of finishing school.
Part of the problem with me staying in school is there was a truancy law on the books which would have landed me in juvenile detention a lot because I wasn't able to show up for all of my classes every day because I had to worry food and a place to sleep. So to avoid jail, I dropped out.
Basically it's a way to test out of high school so you're not quite as bad off as if you had just stopped going.
Real programmers use butterflies
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Sounds like you had a tough time.
"I didn't mention the bats - he'd see them soon enough" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Thank you for your post! It brought up such an interesting discussion and I feel truly humbled by the diversity of experiences that developers come from.
Compared to what some of you guys have been through, my life seems the pinnacle of boredom: saw a book about a new thing called "programming" when I was 15 and, for some strange reason, decided that's what I do in my life. Luckily I found some guys who would pay me a decent wage for doing that. Many years later I still don't know to do anything else. Talk about being monomaniacal .
Mircea
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That's not that far off from how I picked it up, except i was a bit younger.
My parents bought an Apple ][gs in 1986 and it came with a programming manual for Applesoft BASIC.
I read it because I read while eating otherwise the act is boring. Not very mindful of me, but then I'm not a buddhist so it's fine.
It converged with my problem of circuit building. I took things apart and made things with them but to do anything serious in terms of building gadgets required money i didn't have at 6 and 7 so software allowed me to build things without continually shoveling more money at Radio Shack.
Real programmers use butterflies
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I don't think you can go that route today, there is too much focus on qualifications and too many get rich quick brats.
I had a similar route except I am mentally eminently stable and grounded despite running away from a dysfunctional family at 15, working approx 20 different jobs till I discovered software in my 30s (in the late 80s). Worked as a consultant (quote, build and chase the invoices) till I worked out that contracting you did not have to do the f***ing paperwork involved in running your own business.
Ended my career as a highly paid and valued developer at one of Asia's top banks. Today that path is not possible.
Have not coded in 2 years, it turns out I was a tart (please forgive the gender reference), only into it for the money.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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hah it's fine.
I'm not sure. The last four clients I've had didn't even ask for a resume.
One of them scouted me from my articles here.
Maybe I'm just being optimistic, but I think if you have talent and a little luck you can maybe still pull it off, even if the culture has changed. You may not be able to work at Microsoft anymore without a serious CV but I don't know - i'd like to think they'd still hire anyone that had the endurance for a 4 hour panel interview with whiteboarding. I've done that.
Real programmers use butterflies
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honey the codewitch wrote: i'd like to think they'd still hire anyone that had the endurance for a 4 hour panel interview with whiteboarding. I've done that.
The first time I read that I thought it said "waterboarding". Actually, having been through it, that's not too bad a comparison, especially if you are in an antihistamine fog during the interview.
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My first software job was 40 years ago. Curiously, my take is that it's easier to get a job without "qualifications" these days, though there's a lot of "certification" horseshite. But in 1981, everyone expected a degree. It might not be in computer science, because there weren't enough of us. But engineering, mathematics, or physics would do, especially if you'd done a bit of programming. I used to say that the problem with our software was that we had too many straight engineers, and it was comparable to someone landing a job designing circuits because they'd played around building speaker systems in their garage.
modified 16-May-21 19:57pm.
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It makes me sad for the rest of the world...
We developer have it easy, but the rest of the world is struggling. And here, in Australia, most good job is government related...
I wish the world were better for everyone!
Nay, sometimes I wonder why it is not already... We are a long way from 1600 BC! 
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honey the codewitch wrote: But I had hacked around on computers, programming since I was 8 years old.
"You find that that fire is passion
and there's a door up ahead not a wall"
-- Lou Reed - Magic and Loss
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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+1 for the Lou Reed reference.
Real programmers use butterflies
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That was an easy shot!
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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I grew up in a home (family, not foster), but I surely do have a heap lot of emotional baggage (including having spent a couple weeks of my life in a psychosomatic clinic and a couple years more with regular counseling to get to gripes with life).
I managed to finish school & university, but I've studied physics, not informatics. I work as a programmer now and one of the dudes at the company once told me that they didn't really want to hire me (for not having the right field they're looking for), but they were really desperate.
On the other hand, some educated-in-informatics co-workers of mine are way worse learners, than I am. That kind of guy who say "I've learned to do it like that half a century ago", utterly ignoring all the progress made in said half century.
I love programming for, among other reasons, similar to yours: you can do that stuff self-taught. I never needed a single cent to get into it, IDEs are free, learning resources are free, all that's left is the own will to learn and to think.
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honey the codewitch wrote: and got rich
Consider this beyond wealth, but to include family/friends/vocation/recreation/everything, you may wish to consider something I read off of one of the front wall in a house-of-worship I attended many years ago.
"Who is rich? He who is satisfied with his portion."
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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