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Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Most people going into software jobs aren't doing a lot of actual development. I've seen people who aren't techy at all and know nothing about code do a 1 year masters and go into a well paid software dev job at very large companies on a decent salary. The only experience they have is maybe 6 months doing a bit of Java. But at the end of the day they're dealing more with bureaucracy than code and bug fixing of already established systems meaning they don't really need knowledge on good architecture and practices.

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Having to maintain an older system for a while teaches you more about good architecture and practices then all the theory you can read. People who never had to maintain the thing tend to have very theoretical ideas about what is important and what not.

You don't know whether your code is maintainable until you had to maintain it for a while.

That's very hard to believe. What companies have you seen that at?

Many guys I know had very little experience beyond few classes in school. Everyone in our year found a job eventually including weakest students.

Plenty even studied physics or something similar instead of computer science and then got job in company desperate for people on the basis of "you are smart so we guess you will be able to learn". Actually turned out that if you have brain for physics or math, you can learn programming reasonably fast too. (And ended up being better then weak cs students.)

They would not be suitable for all companies and positions obviously, but grasping enough of basics so you can be useful enough to create part of frontend pages/load data from db/whatever with a bit of supervision is not that hard.

Very common in large businesses like Citi, AllState etc. I know several people who have followed this path. They usually turn out to be people who code very little for a couple of years and then move on to product management roles and things like that.

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