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Comment by jarcane | Hacker News Reader

I was disappointed after the title. I was hoping to see something about the actual benefits and end outcomes of MOOC students, not just more "I come not to bury Caesar" level rhetoric.

My programming "education" such as it is, has all been through online courses, and let me tell you it's not the life-changing experience in the real world that its proponents are so desperate to sell. I'm curious as to whether anyone has actually managed to become employed this way, because from where I'm sitting I'd be better off sticking to good old fashion usury in the form of student loans.

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I took the Intro to Programming and Web Development MOOCs at Udacity back when they first launched. Combined with the knowledge I learned from the free books "How to Design Programs" and "Learn Python the Hard Way," I was successfully able to gain employment as a developer (previously I was a Windows sysadmin with no real knowledge of programming).

However, I didn't show off any MOOC certificates or anything like that. I think what mattered was that I had a combination of a real world project (Django site for a paying client) and a diversity of other "non-school" projects. Even though those projects were mostly exploratory, they demonstrated that I actually enjoyed programming and was capable of learning a variety of things, which was important to my employer. I tried to present myself in terms of a portfolio, and not my MOOC education / lack of a CS degree.

Without those courses and materials, though, I really don't think I could have become a programmer.

As a matter of fact I became a programmer by only doing online courses and as far as I know many other people have done it. I did have a BSc in Economics and Finance though, so I have some formal education that definitely helped me do further studies.

Also, the transition wasn't easy at first and I had to work/study/code quite hard, but now after some 3 years in the industry since I first started I feel quite comfortable with my skills. :)

Gonna chime in here with a similar story. I was working at a call center a few years ago. Mostly sales stuff, but it was for a web company. I was taking moocs on the side, Udacity first, then coursera. I was always studying and that was noted by my superiors (in my spare time between calls for example) and eventually an internal opening was offered to me. I got luck there, chance to get off the phones and become an excel monkey. But not as lucky as what happened next, at the same time I’d finished the Stanford Databases class, a number of internal reports tied to a database broke. I had exactly the right about of experience to fix the issues and gain a little credit internally. I moved from a temporary role into a perminate one and started coding vba/sql stuff for the office.

From there I continued to learn and was eventually poached to another company. It could have gone faster if I’d been more visible, and I got lucky, but my degree is in Sociology, I learned to code in books and moocs. It can happen if you’re diligent and hard working.

I'm not sure I follow. So you have programming "education" through online courses, but you are essentially not sure whether you have made any professional gains from it?

I think I am hearing that you are disillusioned by the rather unstructured and disorderly state in which online "MOOC" type education is. There is no quality or accuracy assurance due to a lack of common standards and practices, and there is essentially no means for replicating a curriculum across systems and content.

Is that about right? Or is there some other issue I am missing why you would rather load yourself up with tens of thousands dollars for a brick-and-mortar education?

I'm by not means a fan of this subject approach, but I'm more generally curious about the issues.

In a market where even people who have actual degrees struggle to overcome the experience demands, someone without even that is pretty much fucked, especially in a country like I live in where higher education is free.

I have managed to be, briefly, employed on an internship basis, but that was short-lived, and once I started asking for and looking to more permanent positions suddenly the opportunities started looking more than a bit scarce.

It seems like in an age of massive degree inflation, the self-taught basement hacker doesn't really have a place anymore, while a lot of those same basement hackers who actually made it and have been in the industry ten or twenty years keep giving the same bad "you don't need a degree" type advice.

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